Claw me to you, keep me dry in this little piece of solid rain.

There’s something in me which still needs figuring out, the sums don’t add up completely. I know too many things without reason why. I know that I like the fierceness of belief, that I want to burn with something hotter than the space between stars. The rotation of the earth is secondary. Tell me stories, my loves, my lovers, my people who hold me and fall into step when I dream. Breath out of your hearts a song for me, something to remember you by when I’m leaving. I don’t need to think in braille to see you in spite of my eyes, because I can see you. Your eyes are lined in silver and your hands dipped in gold.

The time of year is marked down again, the sky blue and heat rolling off the street in ocean waves. My birthday’s coming up, my personal time of reckoning. This will be interesting as it never meant anything before. Grace is ending, grace and one more shot to find in myself the patience to come second. Right this minute, I’m in the middle of a petal burst like a storm of pink broke right where I’m sitting. They flooded down from his fingers to bury my eyes in wonder. I expect this, I expect this for always like old easy listening rock on scratchy old radios on every single stretch of highway in middle american movies late at night, flat tones and single star rising, early career and never gave a thought to past history. You always wanted to be James Dean moments aren’t the ones that I know how to connect with. These are, these disappearing I can close my eyes and taste you on my tongue without thinking. I know what you look like on the inside of my soul’s skin. You feel integral. You talk to me in poetry, with meaning. You hold me to you as if I am air and you are drowning. I feel calm in the face of the fear, in the face of you and your needs and this moment, this makes it right. Metaphor as teeth, metaphor as chromed pieces of bone from your fingertips to make myself a necklace. There is no way to repay this debt.

Once upon a time, there
were fairytales
princes and
strange iron shoes
what meant honour
Once upon a time, there
were childhoods
we believed
in gold and
thought being good
was winning

Tell me a story, they said
explain to us why we crave
towers
why we crave pastel dresses and
happy endings

Tell me what matters
when everything is beautiful

unexpected

World help me, Katie has me almost convinced to drop my life for a weekend and fly to Toronto. I am not entirely sure how she is accomplishing this, but sexy girl pictures are certainly involved. Also, the promise of strawberries and vanilla. Somebody tell me why this is a bad idea?

edit: and a good place to get cheap air-fare.

suicide doesn’t fit my style

I’m confused as to what you make of me, you the reader, you who watch my words scroll past your screen. People have been writing about me lately, people have been accusing me of fire and I sit here in sunlight with the scent of faux coconut drifting off my sunscreened skin and I think, “You’re all crazy. I love you and you’re crazy.” My words accumulate, it’s true, they build upon what comes before until the most recent spill might look like something, might seem to have meaning, but to me they’re just letters. I don’t understand.

He coughs and I die a little inside. There’s tension across his chest and suddenly he can’t breathe. I know what this means.

I wore the soles of me feet through with walking today. Skin thinning to nothing in particular, blood flecked with little white shreds. My feet left me to catch the bus. Too much wearing thin lately, too many days between here and now and then today, too many hours that I don’t get to have. I’m beginning to remember the barest hints of being angry. If I horde it, I can use it. Build up unleash and no apologies, he’ll leave. It’s not so much about the beginning of remembering to choose, it’s preparing for the war inside me. I’m going to lose this one, I’m going to lose it and there’s no gracefully. My eyes will want to leak from my head, there will be vessels broken, fractaled heartbeats sending me back to being broken, back to opposition and being too afraid silent to leave the house. It’s not even that I’m always walking in thinking silence, there are people who love me, who want to see me cry some day. My past reminds me that five years is reaching for me, that I want to leave this blasted place and remember how to live with culture. Walking myself to ruin is just what I’m used to. Red souled footsteps are simply the mean.

gee honey, how was your day at work?

I’m thinking of opening my skin for you. Starting at the back of my neck, under my hair, taking my fingers to the one hundred little buttons that run down my spine. Held together by childhood fears, they only look like shadow.

Morning broke with shattered glass, a thousand shards humming happily into my skin. It’s a gift to not wake with the familiar cold solace of not feeling. There’s something comforting in sharp edges. We’re making pancakes, or rather, Chris is making pancakes while I type and he talks on the phone to his brother. From the conversation it sounds like his brother lives in Calgary, it’s all bull riding and hitting police officers.

Continuity began yesterday, people coming over one by one until I had my own Sunday tea begun. Chris brought groceries, then Tyler, and Mike came home. He left, soon to be replaced by Andrew. I have a hat now, a top-hat, on permanent loan. (I look like Death, the whimsical female death of the Sandman mythos. Something in me likes it. It’s the first time I’ve accepted that maybe I can be cute). We brought the ferret outside after work and hacky-sacked until it became too dark to see. We were waiting for Mike to come back, I have keys for him, but we had to leave before he returned. I wonder how he and James got along, but not really. I’m sure that no matter the how, things worked out. Andrew needed home, we could not have waited longer than we did.

couch install, long hair check

Mike Kozak is coming to stay with me for a few days. I was expecting him for the first of the month but he’s only just called now, at one o’clock in the morning. My policy of “you can always call” kicking in. I haven’t properly known the boy for years so, no matter the result, this will turn out interesting. I’ve not any clue what we might have in common still, who we might know in contact.

I was the Goddess Canabasita once to our group of friends, there would always be a pipe, papers, a light in the darkness, the third feedback member, the Technocratic Concubine. This is House of Slack memories and living with Grady and the flaky painter Chris in the worst back alley of Canada’s only slum. Rabbit would spin decks in the renovated bank safe and Merlin and I would dance, throwing our heads back until we sat exhausted on the chroma key green of our studio floor. I grew into godliness on that rooftop my first night, watching fireworks with half a stranger and half myself. We would cook with peanut butter, we would make clothing out of silver tape, we would create something better than the two dollar blow-job with a heroin kick in the street outside our window.

I don’t know if Grady succeeded, I only know that I’m not sure I did. We split ways when he got lonely, when he peeked when I used the shower. I’ve heard since Trypped On is still going, that Merlin had a depressive crash but is now recovering, (recovered?). I’ve heard that Grady and Roz have been together for a few years now and that he doesn’t come to our god-childrens birthdays anymore. Our relatives together see him barely more than I do, and I see him never past chance meeting where we don’t know what to say to each other. I know too much again. The phone number changed, the famous one, 805.trip. When I called it last, the girl who picked up cried with frustration. I imagine she must have received twelve a day for a year after the switch.

Mike is older now and I suppose so am I. A few inches taller, the both of us, he’s got longer hair and spikes in his hat. I remember him as a child genius inventor, always fiddling, making new things. Skully says he lost something along the line, that he lost impetus. They lived in the same building fairly recently, before Mike and his ex broke up. He never contributed apparently, which is why the girlfriend left him to fend on his own. Tomorrow or the next day I’ll comb some truth from the wool of rumour, I hope, though I don’t know exactly how reliable he is these days. So many years apart has left a bit of a gap.

there is a second guess lately

It fit yesterday as a second skin that just when I arrange to wander out of doors with Patti is when I remember that I was to call Shane. Futility squared, that thought. I imagine that it’s likely better that I see him later, after this tainted bloody thinking drains from my body. He would have too much fun running with it. He used to call me the Ice-Queen, now he introduces me as the heart-breaker, the lost love. A girl took it seriously a few months ago and stopped me on the street later, “I couldn’t help overhearing…” Earnest in a denim hipster skirt kind of way, her questions trimmed in pretty little girl lace. The joke is spreading, I’ve been spending time with a completely other group of people lately who as well decided I must be told that I’m attractive whenever they write anything down.

Tonight Ian and Andrew and I are taking Robin to Kung-Fu Hustle. (Andrew – this link is for you.) Granville 7 at 9:35 for anyone who’d like to tag along. We’ll have a vehicle and can give rides home after as if to flick the finger at our newly discovered summer weather as unexpected as whale fossils in desert Egypt.

Silk and fathers, go to bed, love. No I’m not, it’s time for me to go, but not now, no, not now but yesterday, last night, I’m putting on my coat and realize his eyes are open when his voice darts from the darkness to ask what I’m doing. “I’m going out.” “Where?” I don’t know, there’s no reason to know, it doesn’t particularly matter. I’ve cut off my places to drop by partially for you and part for me. Across the street is a park to sit in with damp green grass and messy playground love waiting without swings to let me cry on the plastic slide’s knees. Farther up is a house I used to throw rocks at, farther up is an apartment I grew up in. My father hung me out the window once, it was hot out, the sun blinded me from my ankles down. He and I would look so sweet together, still now I’m sure there’s a resemblance. The body and blood, they scream to each other. I want this, but it’s bringing me flames. My flesh is crackling, skin black and splitting at the merest mention of everything I’m trying to keep away. I’m not as strong as I could have been, my resistance goes down when I like you. There’s prior damage, neglect and poisonous accusations every night for dinner over books we’d both read. This is the History Of A.I.D.S., the biography of WWII, this is paper pages too thick to throw anymore. I didn’t go walking. I didn’t find a cold moon staring at me through gaps in the darkness. I didn’t pause halfway through a gravel field and look out over the city and decide to never come back. There is a chance still for a waltz to save me. There’s a hand reaching to sweep me into skirts and out of them. Now I have to remember your name.

Thank you for the picture. This is a listing of every MP3 that Amazon.com has for download and this is a stunningly stylish animated Ramayana, one of my favourite books.

I can’t help being meaningless. There’s nothing yet that catches me like a fishhook to the heart.

Waking, I wonder why I’m bothering. I feel like my bones were sketched in, and my skin, but nothing in between. Like the center of a birds bone, I am hollow. Voices over the line mean everything to me and nothing. Paradox machina, it’s my mind, it’s my frame. Hanging up, cutting off words, sentences, I don’t know because instead of listening I bring my knees to my chest and perch, trying to remember what it felt like to have wings, what it felt like to fly. Is this peace of mind? I wasn’t aware that my eyes were liquid, that the world had blurred, until I heard a drop of clear water tap into my leg. Every finger on the keys is dreaming of a piano, every letter a little note of melancholy, of something that I don’t think I can name. How can I suspect myself of being so fragile? I tried for something beautiful. I used to know how to be angry, but now I know how to hurt. Sometimes it’s better, everything inward. What is the use of broken pieces to collect and toss in the bin? Inside me is a place where every moment of irritation, every interaction that leaves me wanting to rage has instead been moved into shining pain. It claws up from the top of my belly into my throat, leaving me useless in words, leaving me as nothing more than a doll without voice. I tell myself I don’t mind as I tell myself I love them. There’s nothing else I can do if I’m going to stay except say please. This is not for me to change. This was an anomaly, this wasn’t me in the scheme of things. This was being swept up by left behind promises of trying to combat an everyday existence with nothing in it.