Author: foxtongue

there are more hours than 24

Together we are drama. We are cartoon hearts tainting the air with palest skin-flush pink, bloodiest warlike red and starless tarry black, that are born to swell unto bursting. -Pop- We are star-crossed, brave, and idiots. We are in love. It happens.

Complete with balcony scene, wherefore in the garden of my heart, my love, you are a flower I carry with me, I missed the last bus of the night, go, you, sleep, it calls you. No matter, I was feral. A cat predatory that stepped into Numbers and scanned for possible recognition. Eventually I danced, last call ushering my feet to the floor. I was the only female in the entire five level club, the lean boys looking at me as if I were an unexpected creature. They tried to pick me up anyway, wrong move, bad times. No word spoken but for stiff arm, flat hand pushing away, the exhaustion pouring off me in sticky waves backed by something much harder and far more frightening. When the lights went out, I didn’t know my name.

Skully works at the sex shop now, has for five months. A nice discovery. We talked for an hour plus, playing catch-up and handing out tokens to the 25c movie booth people. His night shift looks to match up to the days I might be caught downtown in future. I lost a lot of people when I vanished into my accident and my last relationship. Testament fact, the bus strike, my life caught in the middle. I walked with a cane, I said, and his eyebrows rose. You? No fire spinning anymore? That’s like saying “Well, I’m a writer but my right hand’s been cut off”. It’s a reminder to run into older friends, the ones who have a gap in our time seeing.

The rest of the night was spent in the Davie Street Blenz. The barista and I talking about education and russian history until watery light seeped into the sky. I’m glad I’ve found a friend. He lives by Tyler and works most night. Eleven to seven, time to drop by.

I woke this evening to find that my friend Bobbi might be losing custody to his son Tempest. I’m needed. I must go.

I still can’t help her keeping twisted hate in my heart

I didn’t see Nic and Sandi until they were dancing. Then it was impossible for my eyes to wander elsewhere or to keep from smiling. They dance as if they were music, hands together and apart, swaying and flowing. They dance together and it’s like I can see how I have always wanted to move with someone in a perfect world.

Lexxi, I found you. Tag, you’re it.

I killed my shoulder on the floor last night. I forgot that I was wounded and dropped backward onto my hand. My legs gave out with the spike it tore through my joint. It used to be so effortless. Down, then up, spring off the fingers and up and around. It’s the little things that remind me. No more high shelves, no more reach, no more winning fights. Days like this even my mouse is a problem. I’m tempted almost to toss my arm in a sling, but not quite. It’s merely irritating, I tell myself, because I’m an idiot. I’m trusting a burning water shower will ease some of the pain.

Jenn and I will be spending time together today. I suspect it will never occur to me to call her Mrs. Brown. It was impossible, her wedding, spitting delightful eccentricities left and center. There was family there that hadn’t spoken to eachother for seven years minus a week. She brought it all together. I felt that she should have had wings, white feathers to scrape the sides of the hall. Her heart was glowing, practically visible through the rippling silk of her dress. I wanted the skill for decent photography then, so as to capture her with some sort of grace. The other girls cried when it came time, but I stood on stage and felt laughter bubbling upward, trying to pop in my throat to spill my delight into the air. There was no mercy.

magical adventures: the worst thing an astronaut can say, “there is somebody else out here”

Jessie and I have been discussing the odd things we wrote when we were younger. I’ve been finding old journals and papers as I unpack. She’s telling me of a journal she kept when she was a depressed teenager. In return I’ve unearthed my carefully hand written copy of a Philip Larkin poem I used to have pinned to my wall. However, I’ve had a bit of a realization. It’s a bit odd that I used to have it up, that I wrote it out at all, because I wasn’t an angsty sixteen when I agonized over the loops and curls of the letters, no. It’s from when I first learned cursive. It’s from grade two.

Beyond all this, the wish to be alone:
However the sky grows dark with invitation-cards
However we follow the printed directions of sex
However the family is photographed under the flagstaff-
Beyond all this, the wish to be alone.

Tyler‘s asked me to join him at Sanctuary tonight, the vancouver goth night. I’m considering it, though there are other options I’m weighing. There’s a sort of odd balance at work; do I lazily wander out close to home to dance hard for hours or do I force my extra mile and drag myself up Main St. to sit quietly for some brilliant poetry? It’s all about the when of the effort, of tossing the body beauty around in gravity. Katie is proving a brilliant distraction conversation and perhaps winning the war for me. (You should all go look at her pretty pictures). If she keeps me on-line long enough, Tyler will simply arrive at my door.

trying to look again

So as a more then random question, if I were to be a fool and kill myself throwing myself around the world as much as possible visiting people, who would like to have a plum girl on their couch for a week or two at a time?

I’m starting to consider just vaulting off the airport for a month. I’m dreaming with my eyes open of the sound of the plane tires and vanishing points. I can’t wake up, even in the burning harsh light of my bank account. I have a motivation for coming back, so this would be more of a scout out than anything permanent. If nothing else, the ferret needs travel shots and I require another passport.

two words which come to mind when I think of david byrne: phospheressence effervescent.

unrelated news: happy birthday to the better woman

The window is cold against my forehead and I think Well, this is it. I have called out the name of this intersection and got it right without even opening my eyes. I know all the streets, I know all the people. I need to get out of here or die. Rock music from the nineties is playing on the radio up between the front seats and we’re all moving to the music in small subtle ways. We went up the mountain to look at the Japanese totem poles then came back down. Youth in car in a minor way, {choir} piano [violins]. We read out loud the public announcement rocks by the light of their cell phones, moving the instruments line by line across the carved rock like poorly written film characters. We ran as if the camera was not a steady cam behind us and one-eighty-ed out of the parking lot. We were heroes on the hunt for the worst doughnuts a human bring being could consume. It’s always a shorter trip on the way back. The mind has collected the data and knows the length of the words, the notes to the verse. I wonder how many places I’ll have to live before I’ll begin to drop this place like crumbs for the birds to eat behind me; how long do I have to grow my hair until the prince climbs up and I blind him on the thorns of my castle, the short curls that spike gold in the shower that I refuse so far to cut.

I should be asleep now, spreading my hands and naked but for a whimper in the darkness waiting for the sun to rise but it doesn’t seem to be happening. I’m wondering instead the etiquette of sending someone flowers and when on earth is england going to wake up already. Daylight savings, savings and penny-less moments, false hood fake button up oxford, I’m not cut out for this. I want to shout from a rooftop but I never was any good at that. Yes I could get the volume, but never the right kind of witness. There’s something fey in my bitterness, there’s something wild in my mind. I can’t let it out, I don’t know how. I want to tear its tongue out, and pour out the collected spectre telling me that I’m not good enough. That no way will I ever find a life to hold to my heart as something I treasure and want to keep. Never will I get out of this place. This city is so small to me, I bat against the edges like a moth. The lunar ghost glittering reflected against the rim of her mountain basin world. The curve of my back is the curve of a bow, my joy used to be an arrow.

when the sky opens and unfurls my plans

We are The Last Fridays, a group of friends who do a silly project or performance art piece on the last friday of every month, beginning with April 2005. Most exhibits/activitites will take place in Downtown Vancouver, though occasionally we may have them elsewhere in the Vancouver area.

thelastfridays

While the core group is composed of friends who knew each other previously, membership is not closed to simply those people. If you’re interested in being a part of our monthly StrangeThing, then put in a request to join and you’ll be considered.

see if you’re already involved

the backseat is a good place to pretend to be a stripper


beachfire
Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

I can taste you in the rain. It’s a clean sad feeling, looking up into endless gray and seeing no future. I’d like to think that I’m calm about this, but I’m hesitant. I can’t keep my eyes from lying when I’m not successfully hiding behind my inhibitions.

We had a fire on the beach last night. Andrew and Ian and Matthew and I. We wrote secrets down on slips of paper and bartered them back and forth before burning them. Name a price? An everyday night, eyes scanning the horizon for ships when the water slapped too hard against the shore. My shirt kept slipping down, it didn’t fit me. I’d bought it new earlier. Andrew and I were in the line-up at the bank and I declared that it was time for a new shirt. We cut through the mall on our way to meet people and I picked one off the wall as we walked by. How about that one? Bright pink halter top, not really my kind of thing at all. When I plucked it from the hook, I knew I wasn’t wrong though. Sale down to five bucks from forty, we were pushing an odd boundary, but the world approved. We were at the counter in under a minute. I paid the girl and walked away without a receipt. I handed my coat to Andrew as we stepped out of the shop, my courier bag a few feet later. We stalked to the other end of the mall while I stripped down to my bra. Not one broken stride, though I waited a crucial moment to get past some children before revealing lace to the public. The shirt was on in barely three paces. I fixed my breasts in a mirror quickly and I swung my coat on at the escalator. By the time we hit the outer doors, we were done. It was a triumph somehow, getting past security. Andrew couldn’t stop saying, “That was awesome dude!“

happy 62nd birthday christopher walken


Yes, I can play french horn… And?.

Signals of history now:
Pope receives Last Rites.
Biometric Lock foiled when thieves steal finger.

Wet again. Rain and rain and rain and rain. No hat now to keep the water from my eyes and alone I’m not an umbrella girl. Syncopation, footsteps, walking. The trees are heavy with the water in this anti-nature preserve pathway lined with hookers in puffy jackets. This place straddles the sell-your-sex industrial and this cities only culture of neighborhood. I am solicited once a week. Patterns pattering, would anyone like to go to IKEA with me next week? I want a bracket shelf and a lamp where the light-bulb does not explode. Once is an accident, two is a hazard.

SinCity, true to form, is here with another mention on the f-list. We group are going for the 4pm show at Capital 6 on Granville street. Some are meeting beforehand at Taf’s at 3 for food across the street.

I talked to Brian today about time in motion, the endless stream of observation and extrapolation. How today I’ve been immersed in the splendour of what happens next. Control and decency, the power play of the common form. I have something in my head today. I can’t see it, as it’s inside my skull and has a firm grip on the back of my eyes, but it’s taking up space. It was good to babble blather to someone who doesn’t expect me to speak in a linear fashion. I had to firmly school myself, however, against Tyler‘s insinuations from a week ago. There are some ideas that I don’t appreciate having planted in my head. I hope he gets the job he’s applying for, however. When Matthew and I took Robin to Constantine, we went for burgers and strawberry lemonade first and were served by perhaps the best waitress ever to take an order. Her name is Texas, go give her money. She gave us a pitcher. The thought of both her and Tyler working in the same place is a guarantee that we’ll be regulars.

He’s filming tonight and last night. A body double running from an alien in muddy fields. My image of him doing this is dada enough for me to want to be there, standing on the sidelines with cups of hot chocolate. It’s called Slither. It can’t be good, but I’ll go opening night with him and we’ll cheer and throw popcorn.

it’s going to be two days in a row

At least I’ve found my wright brothers kite.

I opened another set of boxes today. One seems almost exclusively filled with small cement cats. As well there was an illuminated medieval letters colouring book from when I was four, a purple glass pyramid, and a dinosaur tooth. At the bottom, under the cats, I found a pocket size journal filled with someone else’s handwriting. None of these items are likely to be particularly odd on their own but taken as a whole, they’re making me laugh at myself. There were letters in another box, to myself from when I was in grade ten. “Are you even there to read this?” This is getting to be too interesting. I’m stalling trying to read all the papers I’m finding. At this rate I’m never going to get to inspecting the plastic champagne flute full of rare earth magnets and pieces of twisted silver solder or the instruction pamphlet for the pyramid, let alone drag another box into the room from under the livingroom table.

The second box I chose was entirely filled with fragiles secured in plastic bubble wrap. One bulky parcel unwrapped to reveal a clear glass christmas jar with a decorated tree enameled on. Inside it was half full of marbles and half full of ribbons with a few amethysts I’d carved with runes filled in with gold tossed in for safe keeping. It brought to mind Sunday, when Matthew had told me stories to keep me awake to combat my possible concussion. I looked at him through dangerously drowsy eyes and asked him to tell me about his childhood, tell me something I didn’t know. He replied by he recounting his most epic battle of marbles. It ended in a three way defeat, all contestants with bruised and broken fingers. He promised to teach me how to play. When he came over this evening, I had already hidden the jar aside behind a musical wind up clock and underneath a silk scarf patterned with the heavens that I found in the graveyard when I was fifteen. Other people had arrived and were arriving, filling up the livingroom in preparation for movies, but I took him into my room and closed the door. “Sit on the bed, darling, close your eyes and cup both of your hands in front of you. No, wait, we should put something in your lap to catch anything that falls.” He said I was making him nervous and I replied by telling him to leave enough room for me to sit with him as I draped a black skirt over his lap. “Close your eyes, no peeking.” I can’t imagine what the glass jar behind my back might have sounded like. Something clattering and hollow sharp. When the cold globules of glass began to rattle from the jar, pouring into his hands, I told him to open his eyes. It was a look of wonder. “These are oilies,” he exclaimed, and began joyfully rattling off the names of the different sorts that I had spilled into his hands to overflowing. Galaxies and speckles, cat’s eyes and champagne.

They were forgotten on my bedside table, wrapped in pale grey silk, but I know I made him happy.

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