Tag: loveletters

the mystery continues in love


1541albumcover
Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

Lovely Jhayne:

Once upon a yesterday, after the
beginning and shortly before the end,
an old man stood fishing by the
sea. To each fish he caught, he would
say, “Grant me a boon, for I have
trapped you fairly.” Each fish he would
throw back when it did not reply.
A little girl came along the shore
and asked why he sought boons of
fishes. “One yesterday a snared fish
offered me a wish if I would release
him,” the old man said. “I wished my wife
away, and now I want her back.”
“You must love her then, to do this so long,”
said the little girl.
“Love and devotion
are not the same
thing,” said the
fish as he
swam away.

x

Love

Another letter, as unsigned as the first two, as anonymous and comforting. This one, however, is quoting me more evidently than the last two. Perhaps it is a clue?

This will not happen again until 2106.

alone in my room but for you

In retrospect, the resonant frequency between my voice and yours, (between 300 Hz to 3400 Hz), is too many decibels for the tongue to remember. Instead I want to offer you a hand-woven microcircuit, a dark map of my hair from when your fingers were caught in the grain, pulling just enough to make me catch my breath. I want to give you a pattern of wires that precisely describes the dark streets that shudder in the corner of my mind as a memory in minature of when we were lovers. Because it’s enough to shut out the world, that hand-span recollection caught behind my eyes, trapped fluttering and warm. You mean Prometheus, a back-seat wedding of mythology and fact. It’s enough to separate me from my actions, from my current behaviour, and set my record function to pause, rewind, play back, play.

On Wednesday, tomorrow at two minutes and three seconds after 1:00 in the morning, the time and date will be 01:02:03 04/05/06.

I catch myself dwelling on your skin, a shade pale like porcelain, on the colour of your absent eyes, how they crack my indifferent sky. The sparks of impressions you left, I wrap them around me to keep warm in the rain. They are blurring, becoming one thing. A cloak of constellations to quietly change my point of view into something fierce and gentle and forgiving. I feel honoured and privileged, a mirror lens of potential, young and unshaped. Lacking focus, but learning.

for though my eyes read, they do not need to plead anymore

Darling Jhayne,

Once upon a yesterday, when wishes
were fishes and fishes came true,
a young man saw the moon drowning
in a pond and fished her out with
a bucket. “Thank you,” said the moon,
“How may I repay you?” The young man,
taken by her beauty, begged her to
stay with him always. She hesitated
and hedged, for the moon is more
someways then always, but finally she
said said, “I promise, I will stay.” She was
gone the next day. The young man
waited by the pond and one day caught
her again with his bucket. This time he
said, “Let me teach you
always.” Every month
the moon drowns,
and she says,
“I will stay.”
Always.

x

Love.

Dearest Jhayne;

Once upon a yesterday, when
promises were promises & lies
were promises too, there was
a little girl without wings. Which
is not so unusual, as little girls go.
Perhaps the unusual bit is that
she felt she should have them
at all. The little girl would pick
up feathers in the park, and ask
the pigeons, “Have you seen my
wings?” One day a little boy heard
her query and laughed. “Don’t be
stupid,” he said. “Little girls
don’t have wings!”
“Neither do little
boys,” she said,
and he fell
out of the
sky.

x

Love.

I recieved an enchanting gift today. Two small envelopes with my name and address beautifully printed on them were in my mail-box. They carry canadian stamps and no return address, though the postal office tracking number tells me they were sent from a mailbox downtown by W. Georgia Street.

Thank you, my unknown Polyhymnia, for reminding me to wonder. Your letters bring the poetry my life has been lacking, the mythology I have been strangling without. Thank you for catching me as I fall, for knowing me so desperately well or guessing so grandly. You have given me a gift I cannot measure without vivisection, without the sudden demonstration of spontaneous conflageration. Thank you.

I’m looking forward now.

he says I’m trouble exactly like you did. I’m trouble and too good. It’s eerie.

In my dreams I’m climbing. My hands grip wooden railings and the edges of bricks. I pull myself over balconies and stand on the knobs of doors. I brush flakes of paint from my hands onto my pants and look over a small inlet to apartments across the water. There is a light there, blocked by a friend I only know when I’m asleep. I think routes, maps that mean escape and freedom and eluding pursuit. Up, I dream, up and over and that way. I am rescuing myself from the ground.

The graffiti in the washroom reads DO IT BECAUSE IT’S FASHIONABLE? VOMIT! WHY NOT? in thin black permanent marker on the door. Later, for a split second, I think I recognize the hand-writing as I walk by a man sitting fetal on the street, rocking back and forth, holding a sign in the air with an empty paper coffee cup. HIV POSITIVE & HUNGRY, PLEASE GIVE CHANGE. I am wrong, of course, it is merely that they are both messy block letters, both made in staining black marker. I am walking too fast, not fast enough. We miss the light and have to wait. My wallet is thick with coins, but there are none spare. I am poor. The quarters are for laundry, the dimes are for carefully counting out at the check-out counter one by one by one as I try to pay for a bag of oranges. I don’t feel guilty, but I turn my head from him as we stop and talk. I want to block my brother from his line of sight. He is eighteen, but he is still too young.

It’s official now that I’m tangled with a hotel ghost, brass numbers drifting through my blood. There was A Talk last night that mostly involved Kyle apologizing. “Where will you be tonight?” “Vanishing.” It was a portrait of everything dysfunctional between us. Ourselves as hungry children who deny that we’re stealing. He said, “like” and “you know what I mean?” a lot. I nodded into his shoulder and repeatedly asked him “why?”

We’re a gordian knot on the bed. “I’ve got too much to figure out right now.” A train-wreck year. “Let me explain mine.” Every five sentences, we’re laughing a little, he’s unconsciously kissing the top of my head. We tell the right kind of stories. “See, this I can live with. This is really nice.” I say yes. “More is too much. You scare me.” “See me twice a week,” I say. He says he’s not sure.

I believe him implicitly when he says I’m scary. Everyone worth knowing says I’m scary.

The summary is a red flag warning that he’s unreliable company, that he’s not ready for four letter words. I can live with that. “Come back to bed with your dumped non-girlfriend.” He says, “See, you’re scaring me again.” and stops his mouth with mine. My gold lipstick dusts his cheeks and the tip of his nose.

After, he spreads his hands with an expression on his face that I can’t identify. “Where did you come from?” I can’t see him, is he kidding? My glasses are off, I’m too blind. I lean down, spreading wool across his shoulders, my weight on my hands. “What do you mean?” “It’s a good thing, believe me.” I’m grinning. This is the same man I had a water fight with in the bed an hour earlier. The sheets are still damp with beer. He found out where I’m ticklish. “Well, where did you come from?” “Here,” his hands point out, “planet Earth.” I tell him I fell from the moon. It feels true.

With apologies to Max Ehrmann as initially I was only trying to remember the Desiderata

I don’t know you, but we refuse to go placidly amid the noise, which is good. For once, the haste is ours. I warn you, however, this is familiar; how I bring joy. You’ve crawled into my life smiling with a whimper and the promise of bang, both unexpected, and I find myself bound to your responsibilities because I like you in spite of them. Unexpected is understatement. You steal what I steal and replace it with truth spoken quietly with affection. We avoid the loud and the aggressive, and violence escapes us, vexations to the spirit, except in our hands clutching at each others hair. That knowledge is comforting to me. If you don’t look to force your religious opinions or your political surfeits upon others, than I will keep respect in my heart warm and welcoming and stand with you as far as possible without surrender. As long as those traps remain empty, it is not my business how you continue your life apart from me. As long as there is love there, I need not concern myself. If you choose to adopt a child and raise it, you have my utmost respect. My concerns will remain with myself and I will offer as placid a pool as possible and attempt to rinse myself of my frustrations. If you choose to raise that child into a specific lifestyle, that’s fine, as long as religion is not an excuse for intolerance. You are already braver than I. (When half a million people led by their religious leaders gather in a 21st century city to protest a law that gives opportunity for two people who love each other to raise a child, it gives me pause as to whether this is a world that I would ever want to introduce a child to.)

I am usually complicit in the world, not comparing myself to others, for there are always be greater persons than myself in my estimation, and I make every effort to know as diverse a group of people as I possibly can. Diversity brings the new, insights and experiences that I would never have discovered had I remained wrapped in my own existence. But fundamentally, I don’t know why you like me. My mien’s been trampled, there are only a fistful of similarities left; we are on good terms with most people, we find good humour in the world, we listen to others, even the dull and the ignorant; they too have their story. My skeleton is not made of such fine stuff as yours, it was spun messily and without comfort. I feel outdistanced.

My employment leaves much to be desired, but I do my best when I am present, however much I would wish to be elsewhere. When I leave, I wish to leave a positive impression and a place where I remain accepted. The world is a frequently hostile place, I want to have as little negative impact as possible. If I am to raise my voice, it should be to combat intolerance and promote distinctiveness. It is my own blindness to virtue that gives me discomfort where I’m positioned, not a lack in the striving industry of local friends. I want that as clear as the happiness in your eyes when you see me smiling back at you, granting without cynicism that you are not enough for me to stay as much as I am not enough for you to leave. In my adoration is hard knowledge sharpened on ‘I should have known better’ that states with great clarity that there can always be another human being to capture me, that there are enough souls alive to capture you as well, that we can’t find ourselves alone unless we choose to be, for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment, it is as perennial as the grass. I was not raised to be a child, though I had a right to be, instead I was raised to be strong in spirit. It may yet save me, but not from you. You are a piece of the universe unfolding the same way I am. It would be a gift to let go of everything I hold so tightly, but I don’t know how.

With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams,
it is still a beautiful world.
Be cheerful.
Strive to be happy.

priorities suffering (this is a repeat)

I’m worn.

I lost a job today. One I needed for well being more than anything fiscal. They were kind there, and laughed. Instead I will be setting the sky on fire. Taking wires and powders and alchemy. One night crying with chemicals in the dark where no will see me but they’ll see what I make.. Part of me knows I’ll think of you when I press the silver button. I’ll blame it on your pictures and where you live. If I’m lucky, I won’t say your name. It’s been a hard year and I can’t forget your eyes. Every time someone puts their hand to mine, I remember yours, fresh in my mind. How the tips only just overlapped yours, how my fingers were slightly longer in relation to my palm. Then I remember kisses and I have to close my eyes. I tried to put together something for you tonight, I needed a distraction, something to bring myself out of how hurt I’m living, but weariness took over, and now I’m writing this letter instead.

I’m not sure why. I think it’s a survival reflex, hoping to break the silence.

you can see the changes


jhayne silver curve
Originally uploaded by Foxtongue.

My house is divided. One night, two evenings, three days, four fingers, five. A hand without you, counted every time the sun goes down and terrified of my heart. Another night, another day, that’s two more. Arithmetic on my body. My shadow on fire, blazing something tired and nameless whenever I close my eyes and don’t hear your voice. Haunted by more words than I can encompass without looking into your eyes, by letters unwritten in every pore of my skin that remember your lips. I’m not sleeping so well. Instead I dream of stars, painful pointillist versions of a city I’ve never been to, haven’t seen pictures of. Fire on top of pillars. It’s all under the same moon, I tell myself, the words like a broken bridge tumbling into a river in slow motion. Instead my eyes sting with the splinters of roses and I imagine a painful sprouting of wings from my back. Dark feathers to take me away from here.

My fingernails are long again, white crescents I could place in the sky. I would offer to prostitute my soul if it meant that I would be able to create exquisitely as Alessandro Bavari does. His art is enchanting, captivating my eyes to the exclusion of time. I look outside and the warm air’s been pulled out over the ocean, taking the light with it like a blanket to tuck in the other side of the world.

edit: a re-write for lj user inktea

at two minutes before I go home

The man I love these days he’s gone so far away that I can’t look outside and point the way, it’s around the curvature of the earth. I want to describe what velvet words I remember, what clawfoot tub memories I have to offer, but I have no music here and am too hurt for silence. Instead I’m caught in lines that I wrote for a poet friend that he’s never heard. ‘you stand, and you look at me, and poems pour out. They slip under my skin and try to take me, licking like letters in envelopes closed.‘ Maybe because there are no letters except in reply to those I send. Maybe because I want to touch him again, feel his breath in his sleep and let him wake up to me, willing and waking, soft and inviting. ‘because when you stand and berate me, when you orate and confiscate the words of a thousand angels, I consider and weight the worth.‘ There’s so many complexities involved, simple ones, which is irritating. Neglect and side swiping kernels of something so close to lying that they’re on more than a first name basis, they kiss. They press lips together and gasp and their hands catch like rough farm hands on the silk of our love letters. Not that I get any, but still. Cliche are cliche for a reason.

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