hold the wheel



Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

I saw you and looked down. I changed the subject of conversation. You walked past like silver, as if I could touch the air you had just walked through and feel solid flesh.

I counted my lovers the other day, using myself as one unit. My body, my bended bones and muscles, an abacus bead. Click, like this, and he slipped in here and my back arched taut, hips drawing the strings of shiva’s bow. She bit me once, hard, at the bus-stop, one of the first times we kissed. I’m at twelve consensual, my friend at thirty-four. I thought about water falling, how many times I’ve held hands in rain. The contrast of skin colours, how I loved to see my white against the wood colours of tanned skin, how I loved the white of my skin matching the belly that I kissed. I would like to meet a boy this time who wants things I’ve never thought of, tells me the secret names of roses, tells me that he likes touching me in public. I would like to not be shot through with sacrifice.

There’s a girl sitting alone in a room, her music is as lonely as she is and she can’t find anything else. Her clothes are piled on the floor among too many books and papers. She’s scared.

Newly minted life, that’s another thing coming. Bill and I were talking about technology the other day after fireworks, and I felt for the first time in a long time that I was aware, like I’d been roughly shaken from a trance. He argued that new things weren’t that, only the newest illustration of an age-old idea. I pointed out that new species only come from previous iterations of animal, that everything comes from somewhere. The system self-propagating. The New finding you because you’ve put the settings that way. I know enough for two of us. The trick is in the procedure, the knowing how to act with it, the finding out what to do next. I feel distinctly unintelligent because I have so many tools, so many pieces of information, yet no ideas.

I like the hydrocarbons


Lisa 459
Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

if you mix an acid and a base, you get salt

Life lately has been slightly less than hectic and at best a distraction. War has raged back and forth over the hours of every day I’ve been awake. Ryan put me to sleep earlier today, a blessing, one hand on my head like an affectionate priest. Half an hour to clear my head. Fireworks and fireworks, it’s been a western world meets east things-are-eyes-averted two weeks. I look in the mirror and I see a face that looks like it’s been minutely sewn to a skull. I was fired on Friday You’re a creative person, and I’m sure elsewhere you will go far. It was a little speech, she walked up to my desk, said, “this is close enough” then control room said LAUNCH. Her black hair is pretty, but her smile is not as frequent as mine. My reading outpaces, a personality conflict, multi-tasking apparently a sign of inattention. As I walked away I thought, “This has been just as long as a theatre run, this has been a show.”

the core of the earth is a molten ball of lead

Saturday before last, I went similarly to the fireworks site. No change in confidence, but with a settled step, accepting the ground I was pacing. I arrived smiling. A steady walk in unfamiliar boots, all of this looked familiar, I knew what I could do and how much I needed to learn. Jay looked me over, we hadn’t seen each other in a while, our interactions being defined by fire and firewater and neither being a matter of course anymore, and his eyes checked for boots, but stuck at my throat. “I can’t believe you’re wearing jewelry.”

core of my earth is molten : my thyroid gland is a fire-engine : my earth is molten

There was a hawk that circled the site for hours, it snapped open its great wings against the bright gray sky and looked down at us and our trestles as if considering prey. Later the sun burned off the clouds, banishing both the prospect of rain or a decent temperature. The reflected sun off the water and sand was dreadful, a burning reminder that the bright thing in the sky is made of fusion. We stripped off our shirts by mid-day and danced with conversation, touching upon everything internet terrible. Linda Lee, ostensibly one of the more experienced pyrotechs, wasn’t as internet literate as the rest of us and it left her laughing in shock as we continued to up the edgy. She had a wonderful guessed definition of slashfic that went beyond irony somewhere into painfully appropriate.

I love you

No one took pictures of my miniature inferno.