There are some things I can’t deal with.
Day: July 6, 2005
I am so impressed by these people.
“Right, so there are a colony of nerdy D&D-playing medievalists who gather in Mount Royal Park every Sunday to run around screaming and slapping each with swords made of duct-taped iron bars and shields made out of the lids of recycling bins. Shit, there are even dudes with nerf arrows, flails, battle axes and big fuckin’ hammers. One guy had on an entire suit of chain mail armor.
Anyway, a cabal of local hipsters decided that this Sunday was going to be different. This Sunday, the hipsters were going to dress up like zombies and come marching out of the woods to engage the nerds in glorious battle. We were there to witness and record the hilarity that ensued.”
let me remember how to leave
Pale stones doesn’t cover it. I already can’t deal with this. My instinct reaction is to ball into a child and waste myself in stupid crying. Some idiotic display of hurt, as if it would accomplish something, as if it would help. It takes too long for water to erode rock for me to bother, and it will never wear away enough to let me forget that he loves her.
dry skill
Draw a line. Draw another. Connect the two with a side swipe of the pencil. Eventually a picture will form, I am told, like shapes in clouds. After hideous amounts of dreary practice, I have come to the conclusion that I lack the skill. My lines become crawling scribbles which if they are animals should receive a final benediction. When I was younger, my inflicted punishment was art classes. My mother wanted to raise me to be an artist, (actually, no, an Artist, can’t forget the capital A.), and so put me into a program of anything that might take me. I kneaded my way through sculpture, spun my way through pottery, orated Antigone, stained my clothing painting and incessantly got my hands in the frame in an animation class.
My mother, of course, loved everything I made.
Now I’m left wondering how much of it has survived, tucked away in file folders, hidden in her papers like squirreled away nuts of a particularly bitter flavour. The only attribute found shining in the dust has been my practically useless ability to create three dimensional structures without reference. The classic example being lanterns. I can make practically anything you like. (Once a tesseract construct was almost accomplished, but the material wouldn’t stand up to it). But, the inevitable, you have to tell me what to create. I don’t have the creativity to think of more than basic tattoo shapes, little figures of people or winged hearts.
I wonder sometimes if I’m a disappointment to anyone else. Bred a gypsy, I’m supposed to be creative and imaginative and bright, and yet I don’t find any of it within me. Instead I apparently wander around being different. I’m serious, lacking a basic understanding of being silly, and there’s no spark to light a precious grin of recognition from people who carry that enviable madness my homeless life tried so hard to sink into me. I want to start meeting people whose parents wanted them to be doctors and lawyers and accountants. I want to see if the feeling matches up, the mean aura of self-annoyance.
Somebody give me something to riff off of? Please, somebody implant some ideas. I am a waiting garden.
time field happen on
Running in the night,
Afraid of what might be
Hiding in the dark,
Hiding in the street,
And of what was following me…
Now hounds of love are hunting.
I’ve always been a coward,
And I don’t know what’s good for me.
Here I go.
It’s coming for me through the trees.
Help me, someone,
Help me, please.
Take my shoes off,
And throw them in the lake,
And I’ll be
Two steps on the water.
I found a fox
Caught by dogs.
He let me take him in my hands.
His little heart,
It beats so fast,
And I’m ashamed of running away
From nothing real–
I just can’t deal with this,
But I’m still afraid to be there,
Among your hounds of love,
And feel your arms surround me.
I’ve always been a coward,
And never know what’s good for me.
Oh, here I go!
Don’t let me go!
Hold me down!
It’s coming for me through the trees.
Help me, darling,
Help me, please!
Take my shoes off
And throw them in the lake,
And I’ll be
Two steps on the water.
I don’t know what’s good for me.
I don’t know what’s good for me.
I need your love love love love love, yeah!
Your love!
Take your shoes off
And throw them in the lake!
Do you know what I really need?
Do you know what I really need?
I need love love love love love, yeah
My Lover’s leaving this week and I’m a little bit scared that my heart won’t be as stable as I need it to be. There’s been so much waiting to even find myself where I am, a place where I feel like I can finally love this man without endeavoring to make myself small. The noun turning into verb, the cards laid levelly on the table. I’m so good at keeping everything contained, what will happen when I don’t have a constant reminder that I need? My job is a welcome distraction, something new, but not anything that can go home with me. That might be what I require. Something to keep me from sitting alone, counting inhalation after exhalation, the number of times I blink in a minute.
I don’t know what anyone reading this must think this is, what all the waiting has been about. I can only say that it should be worth it, if even only for a year. I’ve been careful without thinking, my respect paramount, and I have no idea if anyone knows the situation who does not directly know me. My regions of thinking aren’t apparently clear in these words that spill from my fingers to warm this moniter lit field. People like it that way, when they’re mentioned, when I’m writing this to them, but sometimes I would dearly like to break. Toss in names and situations that have been eating me away. Explain why I carry this ridiculous sadness, why I pretend not to be secretive about cradling pain within myself.
Sometimes a melody will draw from me something deep, a line of sunlight that cores in my arteries and forces me to go search for open air. Find some friends and explore where we’ve never been. It’s harder to do here, we have to go so much farther afield to simply find a direction that we haven’t memorized. The exercise, when successful, leaves you lost and discovering, trying to find the nearest village name in the hopes of something to eat that isn’t highway sign fast food. With temerity, we may even leave the country, switch the colour of our money for a monochrome green printed with less interesting faces. When I see a plane fly overhead, I think that the people captive inside that little machine know freedom more than I do.
Princesses dancing beneath the castle, shoes worn out every night. I was always a little jealous of those seven girls, seven nights. I am invisible, stuck in the middle, a strange drag on the boat. Again, the feel of pale stones against my teeth. I could spit them like teeth, pearly and scraped by a thousand words but instead I leave them in, swallow them clicking down my throat to rest in my belly. They can whisper there, abrading my tensions with a heavy dusk weight, grinding them down into poison that’s easier to digest into fury. Noise isn’t what I’m asking for. I want meaning to flower into splendour here, analyzed into fractal machines and the percentages of smiles versus tears, wet cheeks in rain on a sunny day.
Blood thudding in my veins. I’m going to feel so empty at the airport, just like last time and the time after that. They’re always the same, escalators and railings. Potted plants that are carefully fake, not even silk and ruined when they get wet. Signs that have been bleached blue by daily wear, left over from the seventies, when all these places were made. The big travel boom, when suddenly the globe was seen as that. When Paris was still romantic and no one here had been to Prague. I always watch until it’s time to walk away, the realization dawning that I never know where to go from there. The day should be different, something incalculable has just changed, but it’s always the same. The day spins, weaving a night and fraying into a new morning, never minding that I am without a set figure of “you”. Past participle sleeping, past and passed and the day is exactly like yesterday. No one notices.
Distraction is about to become more precious. Black leather pants and he’s not my type at all. He’s thickly built and lacks grace in his language, it’s unnerving. He doesn’t dance with me but it doesn’t seem to matter. He carries my deepest sleep in his washed hands, cupped palms full of sand that keep me mercifully above water. My skin doesn’t care that he doesn’t wait, that he doesn’t speak what it asks for. My energy can’t crackle until that happens, but somewhere there’s a key. It fits into the lock and turns stage left. I’ve seen it happen with closed eyes and an arched back. Lightning caught in a gasped breath and my hands trapped in hair. Artists will tell you that it’s all in the wrists.