the wall I’m waiting for

580587lo

Four Years

The smell of him went soon
from all his shirts.
I sent them for jumble,
and the sweaters and suits.
The shoes
held more of him; he was printed
into his shoes. I did not burn
or throw or give them away.
Time has denatured them now.

Nothing left.
There will never be
a hair of his in a comb.
But I want to believe
that in the shifting housedust
minute presences still drift:
an eyelash,
a hard crescent cut from a fingernail,
that sometimes
between the folds of a curtain
or the covers of a book
I touch
a flake of his skin.

-Pamela Gillilan.

“…Give me half the chance and I swear I will ride you like my own personal bedside carousel.”

Villagers who protested that a new housing estate would “harm the fairies” living in their midst have forced a property company to scrap its building plans and start again.

I spent my sundown on the seawall, emphatically sad that my friend is staying in his unhappy relationship simply on the power of inertia. He makes me question everything about every charming couple I see walk by. Are they really happy, are they ringing out joy like cathedral bells when they’re alone as well or are they really sleeping through life because it feels safer than dropping away from security into the chance that I think needs to be taken?

Sometimes we speak on messenger, when he is at work, when I am away. He typed once, “I do not love her anymore” and I sighed, a sound like mourning, and wondered when he would be brave enough to shape those words out loud. To her, to the world. Either motion would be a step forward. I am helping. I know I am helping, though we no longer kiss. There were issues with trust. I was not allowed to take his picture.

If we spend time together and speak of these things, I begin to watch smiles and look for loneliness instead of happiness, frustration instead of joy. My eyes search for that vulnerable feeling of being alone. People who are staying for the children, people who are staying because they’ve been there too long. Broken couples obsessed with a fear of the future.

It’s so many people. I’m distressed. I want to reach out and take them away to a new standing in the world, place them in soft arms that only want to offer a warm place away from the hurt. Reach out to press into their faces an impression of control, remind them that there are many, not just one. I want to take their bodies and strip them, take words as knives to carve away the initial impression of despair and etch instead enough confidence that they remember that they are beautiful.

I find it unsettling how many marriages I know are crumbling quietly into infidelity. Trying to believe in the ideals of marriage in my world feels like trying to climb barbed wire. My relationships used to be stones, solid things that would last forever that I could hold in my mind as pale and sharp and true as my own flesh. They used to be referred to as marriages. Now they read to me like stories, tiny encapsulated things written on my heart in fading inks, not made to last but to be washed away with bloody time.

I swear, Bill’s babe must have been born by now, though no letter has come to say.

trying to remember the worth of birth control when all I can think of are his unfair hands

Someone has rewritten the words to Gibert and Sullivan’s “I am the Very Model of a Modern Major General” as “I am the very model of a Singularitarian,” with lyrics celebrating the drive to transcend the flesh.

I am the very model of a Singularitarian
I’m combination Transhuman, Immortalist, Extropian,
Aggressively I’m changing all my body’s biochemistry
Because my body’s heritage is obsolete genetically,
Replacing all the cells each month it’s here just temporarily
The pattern of my brain and body’s where there’s continuity,
I’ll try to improve these patterns with optimal biology,
(“But how will I do that? I need to be smarter. Ah, yes…”)
I’ll expand my mental faculties by merging with technology,
Expand his mental faculties by merging with technology,
Expand his mental faculties by merging with technology
Expand his mental faculties by merging with technology.

There’s an MP3 link too.

Today was spent re-arranging the shop I work in, hauling large heavy awkward pieces of pale laminated wood around into hopefully better positions. We need a curtain now. A curtain, a ladder, some screws, and some paint. It’s nice to have carte blanche. I’ve been told that I’m to treat the store as my own, all my decisions will be supported. It’s interesting, like an experiment in culpability. How responsible am I? How capable?

“I’ve listened to your music, seen the way you dress. I trust you.”

I’ve had relationships based on less.

Remember the water? It sprayed like insane rain, kamikaze airborne water trying to reclaim the shore from the sky and bring it back into the ocean. I was so glad you ran through it after me, it felt like a victory. Breakfast, then sitting on damp moss, so British Columbia, so everything about this place that’s sometimes nice. Secrets, so many secrets. I miss you. You’re around and then not, all at once. I remember kissing you, lying with my body pressed against yours on a volcanic outcropping of rock, all soft cliffs and too much ocean view. All those trees. I saw you watching me trip down the path like a child, I watched you smile. How much that meant to me, I’m not sure I can say. It had been so long since I’d felt like anyone wanted me, like I could make someone happy. Therapy for both of us, I suppose. A furtive thing we could call our own. An epoch passed as we climbed the earth.

Evenings like this I wish you were here, free to sleep in my bed, be warm for me in the chill.

My lovers last year, all of them left silver hair on my clothes. Spiderwebs that tied joy down, transmuting me into an alchemist of golden moments, but my last year was longer ago than that. I think of new years in terms of fall. Leaves and seasons changing, halting, freezing. Anything after Hallowe’en is this year, anything before is last. It might be in November this year, my annual transfer from them into now. We met in August, we began in August. The year before last, something new, a man, a burning furnace hanging in the ether, changing my perception of time. Everything counted from the day I took a worried picture that my friend has hung on his wall in Montreal.

This year it might be somewhere in November where it shifts. Before there was my first love returned to me, too poetically pleasing to last or be real. My theater painter, my silly Gavool fool. “Have you met my underage girlfriend?” A genius clown that handed me so gracefully to California (Uber Alles). Flash: tied with ribbons, merry christmas, the light from the window before we moved the bed, a thin string glittering from one thing to another, my decision. LAX = empty regret. Last winter spent in Orange County, adrift in rain and lost without direction. My lovers, before they didn’t trust me, they didn’t tell me until it’s too late.

Next year. New Year, December. My hanged moon, strung up on charming wire, so full before it waned so suddenly. He fell from the sky and destroyed all the tides. I fell down and drowned and my morning star, my most precious thing, my evening dream who surrounded me with words, abandoned me after burning me with a small handful of flame. Hours counted like suicidal moths. Hating how easy I must be. Fifteen people dying in six months. All the ways to count a year. Two jobs gone, three, a night of fire where I finally died. There was no vessel to carry me. When the apple fell, there was no one to capture it, no hand to interrupt its crash to the ground. Everything all at once, so dreadful.

I’m older now, I can feel it for the first time in my life. I see lines inside my face, miniature scars, a map of where I used to live. Pictures from last year, they look too happy to be me, too young and yet, here I am, feeling alright with life again. It took me eight months. It took me a year, a failed one night stand, and a married conductor. It took music and getting away from here, a refreshing life out of the small town. It took the sky and blood and tears and feeling too alone. It was Ryan, it was walking into the water on the night of fireworks and resisting the urge to let my head go under. It was so many things, saving a life on New years, never seeing that girl again. Slapping Matthew, dancing alone, dancing with Kyle. It was myself, finally, and the memories of starry skies that brought me back to me.

Though mostly it was the conductor.
&nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp the good ones are just like that
“No, my lord, unless I might have another for working-days: your grace is too costly to wear every day.
But, I beseech your grace, pardon me: I was born to speak all mirth and no matter.”

never get that anymore


01 – yes
Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

A few years of violence and now I flinch in my sleep when the maid comes to collect towels in the hall. Waking comes slowly, but comfortably. In spite of the lingering memories of being six, hotels almost always feel like home. An acoustic Life on Mars is blending seamlessly in my head with the police car siren dopplering past as I open my eyes and look at the alarm clock with serious doubt. It’s begun blaring terrible R&B hip-hop rip-offs of uninspired 90’s music. Terrible. Unforgivable. It’s nine o’clock. I slide out of the blood messy sheets and get up to turn it off, knocking a pack of cigarettes off the bed. It’s a good place to be, I think, picking it up and putting it back. I understand how to fit here.

My clothes are over the back of a little chair, except for my bra, which has somehow found it’s way into a plastic milk crate of three-quarters full of funk records. I look in the mirror as I pull my shirt over my head and ridiculous hair. It’s lined with photographs of Kyle with his baby son. They look happy together, the smiles almost match. It’s obvious that his child is paramount. He wears dog-tags around his neck with both their names engraved. I like them, how they chime musically when he moves. I like almost all of him, how he laughs easily and sincerely, the way our hands wind affectionately together when we’re talking. His body feels like candles. That warm glow particular to wick’d fire, as if I can taste a pool of light on his tongue. His body is that way too, though not his movement. There’s a smooth weight to it reminiscent of heavy bronze sculpting wax. I like how he purrs and teases me for my taxidermy, makes silly jokes about carrying around giant skinned mink to terrorize the front desk clerks with. It’s refreshingly supportive. Exactly the kind of pleasing mockery I require. It makes me bury my head in his neck with unfeigned delight.

The night before, we’re lying in bed and he asks me if I’ve seen his tattoo. I sit up a little, “Where is it?” I’ve never seen it. “It’s a little scorpion, really intricate. I did it when I was in jail.” I start to ask why he was in jail, but he brings his left hand close to my face and I see a small dot of ink and start laughing. “See? It’s really detailed.” “Incredibly.”

His smile tells me he’s almost kidding as he explains that he was in for aiding and abetting a felon. Seems years ago some cops had shown up at a party and started rounding kids up in a rather typical Vancouver fashion. Kyle sneaked around them and pulled an arrested friend out of a cop car. They ran, banging open gates, running across yards, but eventually they hit a locked gate in a chain link fence that his friend couldn’t climb with the cuffs on. Kyle was caught two blocks later. They were held an extra half day because the cops thought they were jerks – they were put in separate cells, but as they could hear each other, they stayed up all night drumming on the black metal bed-frames loudly singing DAY-O, DA-AY-O, DAYLIGHT COME AN’ I WANNA GO HOME.

understand me, I’m not going to wire you shut

My invisible relationship continues. His son spent the weekend in the hospital. Last night I expected him to be home at seven and he wasn’t there by eight. I suspect there may have been a relapse. Either way, I’m worried. I feel now that I should have accepted the proffered key to his bedroom. Then I could at least sleep in his bed, play goldilocks and the sweet-hearted amateur DJ. It’s only a block away and our work schedules strangely match. He starts at five in the morning, I have to leave for work at ten to start at eleven. There’s enough time for sleep in there. In the evening he wakes up at five:thirty, I lock up at six. I could have set the alarm, rescued it from where he threw it if he hasn’t already. Red glowing lights made up by little bars in rows. It’s enough to make me smile. My clock is for the blind almost specifically. The dial is huge, blue, and exceedingly bright if I want it to be. I can read it from the head of my bed if I squint a little. A miracle clock, granting me time without eyes.

A week after NASA’s top climate scientist complained that the agency’s public-affairs office was trying to silence statements on global warming, the administrator, Michael D. Griffin, issued a statement yesterday calling for “scientific openness” throughout.
&nbsp &nbsp &nbsp “Remember there is no such thing as global warming. Use only space words. Don’t mention the big bang. NASA needs to teach more religion.”

We met again at the bus-stop yesterday. He bashfully idled out of the hotel as I was on my way to work and explained what his day was going to be. Last night I padded over at midnight in my barefeet and almost wasn’t let in by the nervous front desk clerk. (This morning, of course, he was incredibly friendly. I suspect my “position” logically asserted itself). It is refreshing to finally have a relationship not be that delightful and frustrating thing, a secret, (those were too many), but standing the confidence of being coupled on the strength of only a few encounters feels odd, as if I shouldn’t assume so much, though I know I am a fool to think so. Established is established, with no reason to justify calling or arriving at the door. In my long absence from these things, my natural inclinations have been eroded. I’ve forgotten that my partners also tend to think in marriages.

old news: MIAMI – An agitated passenger who claimed to have a bomb in his backpack was shot and killed by a federal air marshal after he bolted from a jetliner that was boarding for take off.
&nbsp &nbsp &nbsp No bomb was found. “Go back to bed, America, your government is in control. You are free to do what we tell you.”

Aiden and I made headway on one of the mink last night. We sliced off about a pound of flesh from the female. Once beheaded, it looked less sad and depressed and more anatomically interesting. We filleted her until she was almost skeletal, then we packed what remained in salt and put her in the fridge. Aiden wants to name her Anne Rand so that he’s had the satisfaction of tearing out her intestines and slitting her throat. I am refusing, however, on the grounds that my mink will be pretty when they’re finished and not fascist.

He also made the incredibly unfortunate comment that claimed that he was feeling better about it as the corpse cooled. When pressed as to why, he very haltingly admitted that he was finding too much similarities between the feeling of the dead mink and plunging fingers into female genitalia. I think that disqualifies any of his more poetic suggestions. There was also a comment about killing me if I posted that, so I suppose I’m lucky he never reads this thing. *teases*

he wants to run his fingers through my hair but he doesn’t call

Ice-skating’s at 8pm this evening at the 6-Rinks in Burnaby.

I’m cleaning my room. Ryan‘s things are unprotected, the consequence is boxes. There’s the idea floating about that we’ll see him more once he’s officially moved out, but no matter that, we’ll see far more of my floor. The perpetual pile of fabric that’s been living in front of my closet will have evaporated into the now empty drawers. This tightrope act of practically living tidily will collapse out of illusion and into reality. When the lady is sawed in half, this time there will be screaming. Think gore, think the horrible wail of a vacuum cleaner.

E3 conference banned “booth bunnies” at upcoming shows
Man trips, destroys ming dynasty.
UK phone company has Tom Baker read text messages sent to landline messages.

Part of my week in pictures:

IMG_0582hard at work

tough like candy nailsyes, and?

she's so very tim burtoncuddlewhat I imagine babies look like in the womb

  • In a glaring contradiction of new federal policy, the new face of Homeland Security seem to be animal-human hybrids.
  • a tab closer post

  • HUNGRY? CUP-A-NOODLE!
  • Tron remixed as a Depeche Mode music video from Justin Alt. does anyone else agree that tron refuses to look dated?
  • Scariest film in years, Mac Cosmetics Ad ft. Amanda Lepoore.
  • Polysics, who seem like a Japanses Devo.
  • Naked taiko drumming. ( a longer cut of the same performance.)
  • the eerie game of quarters
  • LSD being tested on Britsh Troops. “he himself then lapsed into laughter.”
  • Brokeback to the Future
  • Not a Stupid Girl, by Pink

  • dear holy mother death, my music is wierd

    I have wrapped myself in pixels and lost myself in who I used to be a little more. This means my feet are returning to stone. I haven’t been writing as much, which felt awkward, but perhaps it only reminded me what was gone. In the abandonment I’ve made a new friend, an else person, someone sweet to talk to me out of sleep. The free long distance option has been illuminating. The light’s been blinding me until I fall down smiling, cradling my joy within my body through incredible acts of will. Sparse news, but breaking important to me.

    The people I love, I paint them as half a myth, partially a ghost, and as clear as faulty memory can make. I think of one in particular, so vulnerable without their glasses. I wondered at the time if that’s how different my face looked as they smiled into me through an expression clear as the sky. Here, take my hand, take me upstairs again. My acceptance an open letter, addressed to nothing. Made of laughter, the ink of my hand wiping my mouth. Shining laughter, the word rill. Teeth like the trigger to procreate. Such a gentleman, all euphemisms and too much poetry, enough and more to fill me. Hit with words, I entertained what I could keep, the bare minimum of what I could stand. Such a denial of the closest thing I have to a fetish. The cream of my curiosity, oh. It was thick, it was all I could do. The idea at the time was to not miss him the way I wanted to, the way my blood was telling me to, so that like now, I could wonder. I could question and write these invisible love letters, trying to pour my problematic methods into explaining why I was impossibly putting everything off so I didn’t have to carry him with me, so that I could have his weight to look forward to instead of around my neck.

    Time, of course, bends wills better than wind does trees, and curiosity will find pleasurable answers in the unlikeliest of places. In the same day, I was given him to freely write to, but never to anything else, as well as a repository for my starving affection. It’s like free insurance, that wedding ring, a name for the noose to hang my weakness from until it quits kicking. That word could is no longer directionless. I don’t think, how long since last year, since the year before that. How long until I see them again. Instead, I think how every perfect vision blinds itself with time, how unsteady all my life has been, how my rocks threw me into the water to drown, so how damned nice to have new ones. And only a block away.

    On my off days, I feel like my emotions displayed here are a compilation tape with a relationship theme. The first song says that every time I see you, I understand the meaning of “swept off my feet”. The second song considers the effort of movement as I forget to breathe. The third tries to breathe as it tries to remember the last thing you said to me as I tried to resist the urge to kiss you until you know what I mean, sugar sweetness segue into all the days I spend alone that don’t armor me, but pretend, but really break me down. Middle of the tape and I’m skinned. Minute by minute, the music watches where your eyes trace, as if by some resident understanding of your gaze, I’ll be able to train it to stick on mine, to watch it shake and take me in for the finale, the poignant fuck moment of eyes meeting until they can’t and close instead.

    It’s like I should take up a hobby, but I’m already beginning to fill up my days as my schedule calcifies. Korean Movies take up Mondays, Gamelan will be every Tuesday, and the drop in ballroom dancing is on Wednesdays. Kendo is looking to end up on Thursdays for lack of anywhere else. I have a suspicion that Kyle has weekends more free than other days, though at this point, I could be entirely wrong. All my tricks of gleaning information don’t work well without a modicum of input.

    Speaking of hobbies, I’m finally picking up my mink corpses tomorrow! Waiting for me in Terri‘s freezer are two skinless mink, a male and a female, Dahmer style, she says. Bloodily packed, so fresh off the floor that the corpses steamed as they were placed in the clear plastic bags, they should be an adventure in kitchen misappropriation. I’m glad there’s two, as I’m certain that I’ll botch the first skeleton somehow. I’m considering attempting to boil the fledgling crow corpse tomorrow too, if I have time before ice-skating, or at least dip it quickly into boiling water and plucking the straggling feathers out to start. Eventually the finished product will be a flying mink skeleton to put in my window next to my angel mouse. I need to get some silver jewelers wire with my next paycheque and maybe a pair of tiny pliers, if no one has a pair I might borrow, and try to find out how to bore very tiny holes. Glass eyes are always tempting as well, though I don’t want to spoil the pure effect of wax polished bones.

    Once I find how mink are to work with, I’m likely to make more. Bliss suggested dropping by various pet stores for dead birds, which is a far more reliable than my method simply finding them on the street. Slightly more sanitary as well, probably, as so far I’ve been carrying them home bare-handed and relying on my ridiculous immune system to take care of whatever germs I might have touched. They might have other dead pets as well, she said. Things like hamsters and guinea pigs tend to expire at the stores, creatures much more size-suited to budgie wings or cockatoos. Aside from being beautiful, I want my flying creatures to be improbable, not impossible.

    Bringing me back to life to(o).

    Walking across bridges at night used to be one of the more dangerous things I could do. All the hollow butterflies cut out of my tummy silenced when I finally stood on the rail. All the water catching the lights. Why does the ocean never reflect the stars?

    A man found dead on a NYC subway car may have been dead for hours before anyone noticed.

    It could have happened like this, I could have lay on my back in the middle of an intersection.

    Instead, I picked up the phone. I dialed. I said, “hello”.

    It’s a heavy on the saxophone moment, an understanding of grace with a long hard breath of sound. “Hello” Yeah, I know that one. Emphasis on the beginning of the word, low on the aich, more air than vibration. “Is this?!” There’s someone in town who knows how to conjure your name, your careful explanation of the hazards of cussing out christians in french. You know the game. It’s like a quick agile dance, how we speak. Soft insinuation this way, a little that way. All of it encapsulated in the way I shape your name. Those eyes, watching mine watch your hands. I remember that ring, but I didn’t think of it at the time. I almost offered to trade. Now I know that would have been meaning for meaning. We’re lunatics.

    “Jhayne, can I ask you something?”

    “Anything you want.”
    “Are you crazy?”

    The children were delightful, small tiny voices that didn’t know english. A catastrophe of insane grinning.

    Sleepless in Seattle re-mixed as a horror movie.

    Mike was upstairs when I wrote part of that, but all I heard was the soft susurration of cars passing by in rain. A very vancouver thing. The room I was in is full of polished steel appliances and red hardwood shelves clumsily full of yellowing books, a modern room cleverly awash in english antiques. The lamp at the foot of the stairs, (which has on the landing a half-size grandfather clock), is a bronze victorian woman, hands upraised like victory, a torch in each hand where the lightbulbs fit. Explosions In The Sky playing quietly, making the moment feel as if it was cut out of a novel about a lonely young professional who is questioning life enough to make an interesting book. It would have the kind of ending where you feel incomplete for having run out of pages.

    That was before going to Afrikaa Bombata on Thursday, while waiting for Andrew. My day had been splendid, full of fierce joy. My smile felt like it would crack, I was so happy. Friday was different. Friday was still, flying in a comfortable holding pattern as my absent keys looked for a way to land at the shop, where I needed them to open with. (Raphaella came bringing the succor of sweet responsibility, no worries.) Friday was a dopamine calm. Friday I woke naked after an hour’s sleep in an unfamiliar bed. Friday the door opened at nine:thirty as I was about to tie my shoes and Kyle came in with a metal pail of tea and juice and bottled water.

    Turkish court dropped the case against renowned writer Orhan Pamuk

    My hero, my clumsily found grace. He lives only a block away from my home. The worst part is that this is perfect timing.

    just a slice of life in general, I had something more to say but it got lost behind the couch

    My mother writes a splendid explanation of her time at the University of British Columbia.

    Earlier this week, Jenn came down for breakfast and gave me a packet of glow-in-the-dark fridge letters. I just opened them tonight. Sliding one nail under the plastic and attempting to pry it free of the thin cardboard backing launched every little letter violently airborne and straight into all the stove elements. I was impressed. After fishing them all out with a twist of wire, I’ve written GOD IS VENEREAL on the freezer and left the rest of the letters to the other occupants on the apartment. (Of which there is going to be one less as of March, as Ryan is officially moving in with Eva instead of continuing the sham of living with me and Graham.) It seemed the easiest thing to write, but now I’m vaguely concerned at my frame of mind. I seem to remember that the most common message in the english language is HELLO.

    Neried rants a good shot at explaining her being a mother.

    Nothing lingers like the realization that almost my every reference lately to interesting conversations has begun with “We were in bed and..” It’s like a bad habit, it brings to mind all the wrong connotations, like I prefaced with “and we were taking off each other’s clothes..” instead. I stop. My sentence echoes in the air as I halt midbreath and wish I could reverse what I just said. Thankfully, my friends understand. It’s possible they’re used to me. I’ve forgotten. This week I had the treat of a late night outing with someone who knows all my older friends, the clan of theatre folk who are a generation ahead of people like Antonio and Mimi. It was like a rewind on a few years. It was a gift. The nicest thing he said to me, “You were like you are now.”

    My dear friend Joseph is about to be laid off, so if anyone knows of any work in Montreal for aerospace engineers…?

    It’s a wedding. They are dressed in their best clothes, lying on a hill. They look like a carefully staged moment for a documentary on the history of stock photography. Her lips are painted pink. From his hang a flower picked from the grass beside his hand. Posed on the brink of conversation, they are skirmishing with words, throwing a miniature fit in avoidance. “Congress is preparing an investigation, and I will work with members of both parties to make sure this effort is thorough.” she said. “I don’t believe you,” he replied. “Look, that cloud’s shaped like a stork.”

    Nicholas has been spending slightly too much time on-line.

    One of the perks of my job is free long distance phone calls to anywhere in Canada and the U.S. As I have a few stretches of hours wherein all I’m doing is upping my freecell score to ridiculous levels or reading a book, I’ve been encouraged to try it out. This offer sounds like cool water in the scorching sun to me. I like this opportunity to get some of you a little better, to get to finally greet my family in a different medium. If you want to hear from me, simply fill out my little poll. Store hours of operation are 11 – 6 PST.