Oh world, I can’t get back into my own heart. I used to think in high-hat hits and long pulls across strings, lines of hasty love letters and joyful peeks into a wonderful immediate future of visits and living with me. Now I’m dragged down into a strange bitter sea of praying recrimination and I don’t know how to write a ladder out. What I need is practice and enough trust that I can begin to give some to other people, but though I’m watching, I’m not finding. A half-price muse is no muse at all.
Page 10 of Jesus Monkey Pants in Space is up, wherein I am a righteously angry school-teacher.
“What colour are your eyes?” he mused aloud. Granite, flakes of shale, sea shaded amber, petrified tiny stones, glazed over, delicate, pale, green. An acoustic colour, reminiscent of charm bracelets, her chrome charming laugh. Her head bows, dropping hair into her face. She doesn’t want to contradict him. He’s too kind, this place too bright. She has had gray eyes, she has had soft blue. When they are green, it is easier. When they are green, they understand the subtlety of what she needs. She doesn’t have to ask.
To look at him, he is mild. Slight of build and quiet spoken. To look at him, he is quiet. A smile like beads dropped across the strings of an open piano. His posture is peaceful, his gestures gentle. It’s amazing how little he displays. Don’t judge him until you’ve looked into the eyes of his conversation or the swan necked lullabye of his teeth on your skin. There is nothing weak in his heart, he is calm not complacent.
Together home is nothing. Only this moment, no more than that. Myth is where they meet, inside urban hosannas of grace and memory. Brickwork songs of sly desire patterned underneath the footsteps of dragons and young princes. Fate is banter, destiny a debate of flushing skin and wondering about regret ahead of time. Home is before morning. Darkness is not so much a refuge as a place, an insidious time characterized by a mutually seductive skill with words, the gratuitous prancing display of modern day courting.
She’s not that kind of girl, but oh, she is. Shhh. Don’t tell. She’d die of shame.
I didn’t mean to write about this. It’s too soon to be so blatant about missing you, not that you read this, not that you held my hand the next day when there were witnesses. I’m in the wrong place, but you’re not. You’re so bloody far away from here and I feel like you’ve stolen something from me that I can’t identify in lonely text, only in kisses. Your name, I put it into the internet to learn more about you, and I feel a certain kind of shame. We had a story, a tale of wizards and date rape, of girls drugged and left for dead, of bodies upstairs instead of a cellar. You taught me to swear. It should have been enough, that’s the way of these things. I’m being selfish, wanting to see you again, needing to know that you know what I left you.
Let me explain, give myself a way out of this self-effacing maze. This being a female, it kind of sucks sometimes. Some of us, we bleed and our hormones drag us toward the people our bodies want to breed with, no matter how in control of ourselves we usually live. Me, I bleed and my body wants to fly into the sky, reach up and touch the elusive clouds, hands buried in the hair of your head. You used my words, my yearning vocabulary. I wanted to say yes, but you scared me. I’ve been alone too long. My showers are shaded like I’m killing children by swinging their heads against the tiled walls and with every drop I want to touch you. I stand in the morning and feel warmth on my thighs. I stare at the ceiling and roll my eyes back into my mind, telling it that I’m unavailable, stop complaining. At night I roll on my side, unable to sleep for the hope flooding my body. It’s annoying.
So this is me nakedly trying to rid myself of romance, trying to rid myself of your voice when I close me eyes. I’m awake until morning, over and over. A recitative avoidance of dreaming, it’s what I’m singing into the pillow. I’ve been filling my late hours with people, they keep everything away. There are no delicate urges to lay my hands upon them and watch feathers sprout from their skin. Just yours.
Here the houses look like they were built for a farm or like wild west shacks, wooden two stories with peaked roofs mixed in with California specials, pink stucco’ed things with pebbled glass over the doors decorated with ghostly Japanese fish, as banal as the soap opera digests found for sale at check-out counters. The skyscrapers are uniform glass towers with outward differences that only involve variations in ghastly shades of feeble green. There are no hidden treasures left, even our natural beauties are rip-offs, watered down with tourist-only totem poles and highly priced smoked salmon in little wooden boxes marked with red and black.
It seems like an aside, but it’s not. I’m attracted to character and here it is such a rare commodity that whenever I find it, I flare out protective, like it should be put on some endangered species list. There are houses here that I used to visit when I felt alone. It was comforting. There’s one out by the University of British Columbia that looks like it was built of lego and glass. I used to have a hole in the hedge that I would creep through at night and sit inside. I would watch the people inside and instead of trying to make up conversations between the people inside or imagine what their lives were like, I went blank. I could feel my general dissatisfaction drain away, because what was in front of my was beautiful. For then, it was enough. I was fourteen and too small to leave.
Now it’s only a matter of raising bail.
You’re my attraction, my moth light in a darkness.You are an architecture that let me in. The night was our plaything and we were cats.
