buckwheat hair, I hide it well

Oxygen gasps, skin taut. That’s what I’m thinking of. I landed on the surface homeless and running. Check your balance, I thought, check your stride. It was a pun. Before this hundred pace book begins, I need to smile hard and develop a quick will. It might take an entire month to write this all out in human paper. Thirty days and a trip around the moon. A hot air example of summertime blues.

My stylus is scratching sound from a round disc of specially pressed memory, those old black things, before your time, I’m sure, but brought back into being by the trendy Ibiza boys, those Edinburgh saints of groove. Voice replies, back and forth. I wonder if I’ll ever get a telephone call, a crunched machine echo of a warm lovely taste synthesized as pleasure. Sixty cycles deep electric, an instrument of more than torture.

There’s an ease to this I missed. A glitter burst of putting words down. They don’t have to mean anything except to me. I fill my time with love letters, tiny particles of bits and bytes dreaming of a future where I can touch the sky and the stars are known to have planets it’s possible to visit. Recording everything would be impossible, but it doesn’t mean I don’t want to try. Stand on the lip of a seascape breeze and teach you all the meaning of that particular colour blue to the first people to have ever told a story about it. Photographs and moving pictures, add sound and protect the world by showing it off. Explaining why Barrakka beauty should be seen by more than art degrees. Spell out the memes of historical creation and cultural division.

Imagine a downloadable scrap of earth. A television history-scape of depth and vision with an insertable tactile interface. Install the ability to blink and hear the local traffic, the crowd sounds of a multitude of conversation. Even this little office would be of interest to somebody. A man in a net cafe somewhere over a tiny street, it’s late at night and he misses the lights that streetlights used to bring before someone went through with a gun and shot them all down, he might want to see me typing this. He might like to look out the window to my right and see an entirely new kind of tree or to my left and examine a production facility. The lack of pollution erosion is fascinating. The pink of the ice-cream shop is too garish, however, and so he flips to a woman making dinner in an outdoor market, somewhere arabic where he doesn’t speak the language. It could be a spelled end to destruction. In a optimistic view, the phrases in language would change. The media would drop it’s fear propaganda, unable to explain anymore that difference means danger. We would all be press students, members in an underground club that might even have it’s own secret handshake.

we speak of


poison oak
Originally uploaded by lightpainter.

Art-O-Mat, perhaps one of the most worthwhile ideas I’ve come across in a long time. Pimp it out, please. It deserves to pay the rent.

Never is a word you can outlive, in spite of it being so decidedly forever. It tastes like feathers, a black shimmer coating the tongue as oil covers puddles with wondering rainbows. I’ve been weak lately, drained of all confident measure I kept as true. The sky is no longer anything to look at, instead my head hangs, my eyes drop down to carefully look for the next step as my feet swing forward. It used to be that I trusted them, propelled by gravity and momentum, to step securely and find land, that solid ground from which I could move the world.

As I’ve been tagging all my entries in spare moments at work, from the first post onward, I’ve been discovering that reading my archives is strange. I spoke of certainty, of sanguine waters that I swam in, and I think, “There is such a difference in me now.” My teeth have been pulled. Since last fall I have lost so many core attributes that I feel like I must now be dying. I let myself be sublimated. I recognize it, because I’ve done it before. The easiest symptom to identify is doubt, for me it’s an echo of a ghost limb from where I’ve lost the hands I would reach with. It’s both easy to remember and hard because the evidence is behind me now, my love is no longer fierce. Only my sadness continues to be profound, and that has been dangerously mixed with frustration and hate. I need a cure and again, it’s not up to me. I carry the sickness, not the inoculation.

Okay – this just hurts my brain so badly I want to destroy things.

Marissa has sent me e-mail today, the first in almost a year.

A summary:

SHE IS IN GERMANY STOP THE CHURCHES ARE PRETTY STOP

IT’S PRETTY NEAT HERE STOP IT’S LIKE YOU SHOULD LIVE HERE STOP

FRANKFURT PRAGUE VIENNA SALZBURG THEN MUNICH STOP

HAPPY BELATED BIRTHDAY STOP WILL BRING YOU A PRESENT STOP

Do you ever want to kill someone for something they have nothing to do with? Yeah.

I don’t think she understands.

give up your summer dress, pull it over your head and take it off for me now

I thought I was given a present. A moment of communication to bring me up from the crazy house stairs, picking me up like a chemical reaction. Pressed keys tearing little holes in my mis-apprehension, killing time a joke again. This is worth it. This is a present, this is the present. This will start becoming better. Phase three, the reunion. The players beat the boards with simple feet, twisted motives playing out a dance with knives and their simple tongues. Equilibrium lost in the toss and roar of the audience painted on the inside of my head. It’s a gambling house, Vienna, fourteenth century. The spell of gilt and seawater. It’s the closest thing to blood a human can have. I thought I was handed a high, a card with a face value. There was to be no more standing in cold.

I flipped the thing over.

Swallowed bitterness. This tastes like oak, like philosophers.

Now it’s the next day and I’m waiting to be let out. There’s two hours left. I feel like when we were children and we would huddle in the cloakroom with our coats and bags, waiting for the bell to ring. We, meaning you and I, you who is bothering to read this. I am assuming that there are common denominators, that you too had a jacket, not a coat, when it was spring, that your eraser in class was a peculiar dry gummy pink and you drew on it in pen. Last night Sophie, Andrew, Michael and I were talking about this sort of thing. I brought up Bloody Mary and I was surprised to hear that she apparently doesn’t exist on the east coast. We live on an incredibly homogenized continent, not having enough time yet to build much culture, how is it that she didn’t travel from east to west in her haunting of the fur trappers children?

For those not in the know, Bloody Mary is a Bravery/Fear Game for children ages five to fifteen influenced strongly by that classic fascination with reflections and ghosts. Bloody Mary is a killer of children and her ghost may be summoned easily by the vulnerable young. Players, for lack of a better term, stand in front of a mirror in the dark, usually a bathroom with the door shut and the lights off, and say her name three times. The maiden, the mother, the crone – it’s incredibly European. Sometimes the players are to spin around three times as well, adding to the disorienting affect of being in the dark. (As if mirrors glimmering in the dark aren’t bad enough). Summoning her successfully is said to have turned people’s hair white and all reports tell of something terrible appearing.

I’ve never looked into it, but I assume the ghost is based somehow off of Queen Mary I of England who was named Bloody Mary for her violent executionary attitude toward Protestants. The child killer aspect may stem from either her many miscarriages or her predilection for burning people at the stake. If I recall correctly, she burned more people in her five year time on the throne than had been torched on the preceding century. I can well imagine small children being told “be good else Bloody Mary will get you.” and they passing it on to their younger siblings. Eventually divination likely got strung in, the embellishment with the mirror. If you dare look into this glass at midnight, you’ll see the face of either your true love or death.

So now I’m curious. Where are you and have you Bloody Mary? Is this a Canadian thing only or is it international?

do not listen to what anybody tells you

Say a division runs at four tenths of a second, the time it requires for you to close your eyes and hear your lover exhale. Let’s say that this division represents dimensions, the round average of the sound of a drop of rain hitting a lake as smooth as a licked ice-cream cone, the impact circle in the centre reminiscent of old fashioned glass. On the other hand is a ring, now removed. Let it represent how you feel about betrayal, about your teacher wrongly calling you a liar. Press the two together as strongly as spermatozoa sing love songs to a cell and divide the result with the pared down cliche pieces of what you once thought was innocence but really turned out to be ignorance. Discuss.

Take for example a train of thought, the smoke trailing behind as old scarves when they were in style, and count the number of passengers in every wooden car. Remove the conductor and their morning coffee poisoned with almond cream, instead replacing them with an empty suit as hollow as teenage aspirations. Insert as well the book heavy idea that you are neither cool nor hot. How fast are you leaving tracks toward honour and away from privilege? Show your work. Your numbers should be as fluid as the panic underneath the first time you burned yourself operating a stove or oven.

Bonus: To accurately gauge the desperation found when your parents die, plan a method of seduction to press upon all of the children found in a ten mile radius from your last french kiss. You are not allowed to use candy or calculators. These are the rules. Abide.

the price of bread and plane tickets


control yourself
Originally uploaded by sucitta barlow.

We ask how atoms exist, how they create the water that washes our ports of call and hither, how we can split them to see what’s inside, how we can re-arrange them to discontinue the latest brand of sickness, but how often do we consider the tiniest grain of sand as perhaps a piece of emotion? Do we think of the volatile structure when a drop of salt water drops from the eye?

I ask for travel, a pair of stamps added to the inner passport pages. I remind myself that I am standing on the edge of a bridge that I am building myself, shaking dust from my fur to cement the rocks I’ve placed floating upon the waves, and that there is an opposite shore with enough wonder to make this worth it no matter I cannot see it yet, no matter how arduous this seems, this continual collecting of government minted grains in my hair and hands. The results that came back don’t tell me that I will have blisters, instead they say “Your friends will stand by you.”

lafinjack found something enchanting today, beautiful portraits by Andrzej Dragan that look like meticulous paintings.

In return, the flickr this post is a tiny pane that looks into an example of the delightful works of Atticus Wolrab.

as well, odd music: macha loves bedhead – believe

Woe-Tse-Tsi-Lee-G’Huetzhi-Lee-Mien.

I have a weakness for pretty. I wanted to dance tonight, move myself in ways I’d forgotten how to, grind my hips in some suggestive way and take my time remembering the swing or rather the knack to flying. My toes curl at certain media, little snippets of lonely sandscape and all of the sudden I want someone, I need someone, and it feels like I could find a little death. In my eyes are the reflection of a fictional world where people when they cry remain beautiful, obviously not anywhere I’ve ever lived. The luxurious cruise liner launches from the great shipbuilding asteroid and takes my hormones with it, a surge of warmth engulfing my heartbeat in palm sticky ways.

Korean movie night hit the little button tonight. That language switch I have, it wanted badly to be flicked. I’ll be set once I figure out how to make repeats a reliable thing. As is it’s hit and miss, more likely to miss, like everything else in bed. A very great pleasure until it isn’t, just the same as the other way around. To console me, however, from almost falling off my seat in public, I have discovered a song which rapes the seventies like it well deserves to be. It’s erasing the gorgeous fleet of ships from my head and should let me sleep without difficulties. Otherwise that sort of thing tends to be a noise slightly overpowering, an exercise in writing later and wishing I knew the right kind of self to Berlin my spray-painted mental walls.

Less out the window, my head. I turned around, knew you didn’t see me. More does a whisper like feet on a bland carpet. Nowhere again. It’s a hallway, ten steps long. I need ten such steps, strong as a dream. It was an acreage, the land I found you. A square of honesty. Wish fufillment, has it ever happened before? One a year, like a circle, I expect somehow. I will bring roses next time. Next minute, this minute, the colour of what’s under my skirt. The apple a surprise to us both. Bite, the sky will erase it. We don’t wear bands, we wear music. Tense, tenses, the letters, the words on glowing thighs. Red stains, where are you? Appearing miracles. So low this quickly, but it doesn’t apply. Gave your rules the board, the west too far away to care.

edit: as well, I have been sucked into MySpace. Add me at your inclination.

My ghodmother was over today with her Girl. They look beautiful together like the sun and air.


pirate

1. His hair has been as long since the day I met him, a dark sweep of night shot through with starlight. I think of Samson as he hangs up the phone to pick up his plane tickets. Paper printed like money drinking miles like the liquid of lover’s kisses I’m rummaging for answers in my little head attic, colour topped but still blonde on the inside, a box of coffee creamers full to the top. How will I ever forgive myself for subsisting on so little for so long? Drips of milk, pull back the paper, there’s only so much laughter left in the reservoir. I don’t have words to fill it with, I don’t have interaction that isn’t taking me for granted. My den of thieves I kiss at night, opening my lips against those that stay closed on the matters of names and meaning. I don’t have to be chased, but the proportion of need is becoming inverse to my reasons for staying. I swore I wouldn’t do this again.

pirate

2. My life is an in-joke. If you stare at my picture long enough, I will crawl out of the screen and try to find where you hid the chocolate. I can’t help it. I like meeting people. I like taking my way in for granted. I tickle hearts and make them laugh. If I could market this, I might have a more interesting job, though mine’s plenty good enough for right now. At last I finally exist. I’ve been awhile without it. This reaction is new and my skin is too tight. Your monitor settings are wrong, they make me twitch. Got to deguass, take a shower, de-recontextualize my prescience with my passions. These shoes are made for walking, but more so are my feet. I don’t have any damned boots, they ran in the water.

pirate

3. Growing up strange, I believed that everyone had dreams of telephone poles, of the crackling pop of black wires. The piercing sound that went with them would wrap itself deep within my heart, a thin wire cry that tightened around my ankles and wrists every time my father hit my mother. Dusk a method of being, it helped me dispense with personality. Volatile lately, because I don’t know how to tell someone how to be a support beam, a stationary wall moving in love with me. Childhood never prepared me for faith, that was the story of the monster under the bed, something told only to children on the television machine. Recently, my body has changed, liquefying into a spikier shape. Last week or the week before, I broke a bottle at someone in a bar. There was a chance meeting, his suit ill-fitting. He asked me how I was, and newly holding the jagged mouth of the bottle in my right hand, I told them in a dead voice to ask me again.

pirate

questions that could save my life


josef astor
Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

I am not a swan, to beat your body into a prone position
I am not disguised in feathers
white, downy, strong
by default a god

I fell and skinned my knees
a long time ago
someone picked me up
then hated me
it was a long long time ago

this program
wasn’t asked for
but created out of flesh

Tell me preacher,
explain and denigrate
tease forth the reasonings
of why I’m not allowed to like laughter
Show my holy things, your gasp
blasts apart the doors of the chapel
a thousand hymns that make and pray
to illustrate
my sins and stay
in spite of your eyes

hold silence to me
house these twisted skies
the laces in my skin are becoming tight
I fear my soul is leaping
no matter your hands
twisted together
or your knees
which sleep in a crowded cloth

You are not a swan
your wings are wax