lilted Paolo Musagedes

“I think, as far as openings go, that’ll do,” lilted Paolo Musagedes, a language long dormant under his tongue warping vowels with the acetylene heat of its eastern origins; English was his language now, or perhaps had always been, owing to some bucking and rampant Anglophonic imperialism, he belonged to it, and it belonged to him. The accent was thick, but qualified speech of grammatical, syntactical perfection penetrated the equally thick mustache with reedy, meticulous musicality.

Ivorrs searched for something more than approval in this, but none revealed itself and anyway this wasn’t about fishing for compliments. He shuffled the ragged pages from the tabletop and into the beaten notebook, to a folder behind its front cover, the stray gangling spiraltorn edges peeling up and reaching through one another. Vines of ironed pulp still climbing toward sunlight. He lost this notebook not too long afterward; one night, drunk, in a parking lot maybe, behind a girlfriend’s apartment building, but as he was not yet through a significant number of its pages, and he’d already copied out the most pertinent notes, Sam Ivorrs would try not to think about the secrets he had confessed to it, or that they may be floating out there now, untethered in the reading, folded malignantly in some finder-keeper’s hollow stewardship. He hoped the girl had not somehow found it…

Musagedes proceeded in his achieved English: “My suggestion to you would be not to labor over the minutia, the things you might edit out at some point; typos, clichés, even characters, those things can be excised later. What is important is that you progress through this narrative….” They poked at theory for some time, fanning it out and probing its dimensions until either the one or the other had no more to say, and Ivorrs was ready to indulge his growing compulsion for loneliness in exterior regions, paved, cool, and away from what was becoming a fetid gloam in the noiseful coffee shop. Ivorrs wondered if he had at all concealed the nature of his farewell or his handshake: the one foreshortened, the other contracted. He decided no, he did not, but the air was like warm leaden paint and he let his socially transmitted awkwardness bother him only until he chose a direction on the sidewalk, grinding suddenly now underfoot.

Where to? What to follow? I will go where you send me... north/south? The perfect solar ecliptic of the Parkway? the Department of Works' graffitic sidewalk neon scrawl, this way gas, that electric? But never the twain shall meet...he smiled at the thought of a pleasant blossom of fire. Perhaps God would deign to speak to him from between the wavy petals.

resolves

last bit of schoolwork from this doomsday scenario of a semester: late homeworks under the office door of a professor who is not showing signs of returning to campus before the year's out.

at any rate, i'm too finished with this semester to be looking back. clapping its dust off my sleeves, i'm ready to feel burdened with the things i want to be burdened with. real priorities are allowed to breathe now, and have their due. in the particular order that they occur to me, they are as follows:

- begin writing, again. that is, continue to work on the opus (for which i've found a title), but also be writing. be working with language. set aside regular time during the week for it. once the spring semester starts, i will have three classes at most, though hopefully less, to worry about. it will feel unbelievably light, i imagine. and i have a lust to kick out a draft of this book; it's wrapped around my brain like fierce ivy. i hope to write experimentally and aimlessly as well, as i will have the mental squarefootage for things to begin occuring to me again...

- get this house in order. that equals: the necessities of furniture and belongings to begin appearing in this new apartment of mine. a box spring. curtains. places to sit. things to eat off of. but also, even just as important: a desk or writing station. i am in this apartment because i didn't want to have to carve my own space out of someone else's home any longer, where i would hope, but not actually get around to, sitting down and doing some creative work. its a small place i have, but what little extra room there was ever going to be in whatever place i landed was always already devoted to this...which leads me to...

- the studio. finally unhindered by others, significant or otherwise, i have freedom of space, freedom of motion, freedom of quiet, freedom of late hours, freedom of mess. it takes more than ability to do something creative, unfortunately, but i no longer have to let anything stand in my way, or excuse my inaction. i need some more tools for course, but those can and will be gotten. nothing but myself and the level of my own dedication will be responsible for my productivity...

- the joe kubert school of comics and cartooning correspondence courses. i love comic books. they make up more of my being than the water content found inside every human, and i think that's at something like 90%. i'm so full of superheroes that the first and only very clear career desire i've ever had was to draw comic books. it's an extremely difficult business to break into nowadays; comics are at a peak like they've never been before, and were on the rise even before all these superhero movies came out. few publishers accept submissions anymore. but there are ways to get noticed and i feel an obligation to my eight year old self to take a crack at it, before i shuffle off to gradschool and become a stuffy ol' academic. i will need all the practice i can get, and the correspondence courses offer a perfect opportunity to brush up, as well as a good reason to get my ass in the studio and log some hours doing artwork....


these are the plans i've been developing while my life has been on hold since september. it is coincidental that i am able to voice them and focus on them at year's end. they are not resolutions, they are my resolves. it means the world and all my future to see them through.

sundered, scattered, fleeting

someday i'm going to write a book about all the people i've known -- i mean really known, in the way that two people share something wonderful and inexplicable with each other. those rare connections people fall into that are closer and more tender than anything produced by similar backrounds or comparable stations in life. those connections that arise spontaneously, almost psychically. natural as square pegs in square holes. filling in for you in spaces you didn't know were negative. missing pieces of identity. kindred.

i'd like to write a book about all of those people i've felt that connection with. it would be an interesting book, full of quirky, funny, sweet, intelligent, for-one-reason-or-another-remarkable people.

i would meticulously reconstruct all the laughter, conversations important and trivial, points we agreed or diverged upon; recount all the places we'd gone together, the trouble we'd gotten into, the quiet moments or the movies we'd seen; i would recall the members of their family that i had met, had dinner with, drank with.

i would do this for no other reason other than to simply remember; who they were, what we had; confirm its incidence.

because i don't know any of them anymore...

at a pace that could best be described as 'at a dog paddle'

...i am still working out my hatreds and my loves...

i will write whatsoever i goddamnwell please

1/24/07

In, from the front porch, and the cold follows me through the door. I am thinking: somewhere, in the sky, there is a new moon floating by that I can’t see. The shadow of my soul, going by; your face, turned away from me. Hot chocolate is not as good as coffee with a cigarette. Through them both I can taste my dinner; mostly the red wine marinade I made. It sticks, distinct, lingering on my palate. Like a crown of blood around my tongue. You know those stories of people that die of heartbreak? That will never be me. I think of you, when I think of the moon – your face is like it, beyond touching. Whatever beautiful light it casts down at me, though I might chase it through its own thrown shadows, I won’t catch it. It tingles on my skin, like aloe on a sunburn. I want to eat it, the peppermint moon, but…that is absurd. You’ve heard the stories of those people…the elderly, the aged, living full, married, childed lives of umbilical devotion to each other with silver anniversaries to look forward to. And then, one of them dies, and the other doesn’t know how to live or what else to do but to follow. That will not be me. I will have driven all the miles around the moon and back, listened to as much music as one could stack, know every distant inch between here and the moon before that is me.
When I die, it won’t be of old age and because of emphysema. Whatever chance I will leave behind a well worn corpse, it will be because of some great grace, but God knows I’ve lead a less than graceful life. When I die, it will not be because her spirit beckons me, no. that passes me every night. I am well acquainted with her leaving, I know her only by her going. I will not die because of some spirit I’ve lost. It will be because of a spirit I’ve finally found. When you die, you find yourself truly, and once you’ve found yourself, you are truly ready to die. It happens like that. You may not get the chance to say goodbye. It happens in pre-mortem comas, or in the eternity it takes for one to breathe his last, the exhale into infinity. You do not get a chance to bear the secret out into the fleshly life; it is not a secret the fleshly life can discover. When I go, I will have struck the gold of my soul, finally. A life’s work…completed in death. By dying. The loadbearing cornerstone of life. I will give my life to complete my life. I will die because of the soul I’ve found. I will follow because its truth beckons me. I think: she will continue marching black across the night shining light on far shores, and I cannot follow her with my death. I’ve only got one death to die. The task of my life awaits me, here, on this veined, life-glazed ground. To her I cannot cleave and die. Perhaps I do not love her enough for that. I do love her some; I love her still. But to die, it will not be to follow her leaving; it will be to finally meet my becoming.

...darker with the day

listening the end of the Nick Cave album "No More Shall We Part" as i start this...its mostly a winter album, or an album for sad days. today is close enough to both, and so it fits in the right places where you need to hear it; if you listen closely, you can hear lines like incisors, backed by rows and rows of thunderous and passionately delivered performance...it is sad, yet somehow bouyant. not hopeful, necessarily -- or at all, even; that certainly wouldn't do. i wouldn't enjoy listening to it half so much if that were true. there is no resolve to its sadnesses; rather, it just pushes through them, it continues. coincidentally, the line that plays as write this: "i was lookin for an end to this for some kind of closure, time moves so rapidly i had trouble keepin track of it."

perhaps there isn't much closure; perhaps there is no end as long as time keeps moving so rapidly.

i was in love with a girl for about ten years who grew to hate me so much that she has nothing but malice for me now in her crooked and abusive heart. i'm not sure what to do with that, and i wonder: how could i have misjudged somebody so completely? how did i ever think i wanted a family with someone so thoroughly disappointing? what was it that i saw in her in the first place? i guess even love at first sight is not beyond making an occasional joke. one of the last things i said to her was that i was afraid to lose her because i couldn't see how i had anything good to look forward to after her. she told me that it wasn't fair to put that kind of responsibility on her. it wasn't. but it was what i've felt for so long, i suppose the 10 years of hope and expectation were too much pressure as well. yet there was no one else with whom i wanted to share good things with more than her; the let down was almost too much to handle. now, i only wish her all the emptiness and misery she has wrapped herself up in.

now, she is taking me to court, for being mean to her; ironies abound. i find it almost funny that she was the one to cross lines of appropriateness when it came to what we said to one another. the hateful, evil things i've heard come out of her mouth were nothing short of astounding. i tried to call her out on it several times, but she either apparently thought she was justified in telling me she hoped i fucked around, caught aids and died, or she just didn't think it was an awful thing to say. more surprising was when she couldn't understand how furious it made me when she said she may be pregnant but that i would never know my child. how someone so psychologically and verbally abusive has the stones to take me to court for harrassment is just another pearl of shit on this string of reprehensable, conscienceless behavior. the other irony? just as i start waking up without the sickening, laser focused hatred for her blazing through my brain every morning, she slaps me with this legal bullshit, which will only now draw out the process of letting go that much longer. it is nothing but sheer malice on her part. she has no qualms about the serious harm she does towards other people as long as it serves her own ends. i want to be done with her as much as she wants to be done with me...there are other, new, and better people to love....for God's sakes, there are better people to hate; she is just vacuum and void.


so. maybe there is no resolve to this sadness; that i haven't been able to tidily package up and store the old hurts doesn't take away from the necessity of starting new and beautiful things, nor does it detract from their sweetness. their may be no resolve to the sad realities that grip me now other than that time passes quickly, and it may fade into the background behind what is next, what is new, what is more deserving of my attention and talents....where i put the past isn't nearly so important as where i put my feet, and what i point them toward...

seized today

i am incapacitated.

i can transcend time.

i am existentially incapable of perfect attendence, or anything resembling the phrase.

there are a number of reasons why i didn't make it to my first two classes today; a number of reasons why i haven't been able to get to my art history class at all other than on the first day.

sometimes i don't wake up on time; sometimes, when i do, i take too long to get ready. sometimes bus schedules are lies. the worst is when i need only an extra minute, two minutes, five minutes to be able to make it somewhere on time. my day could be all well oiled gears, if i hadn't just missed a bus that came early; if i had not laid in bed for so long; if i would have just, and if only and etc., etc. the list is long, and only partially legitimate. its true that i do have bad luck; i have buffalo luck -- that kind that keeps you from falling completely on your face, but refuses to extend itself for your success.

sometimes i wonder if i had been born on time, rather than five days late, whether or not i would be in a different place right now -- i am working on a time deficit that has not allowed me to be anywhere i should have been my whole life. would i have made it to class? would i have made it to art school? would i be successful doing something i love, instead of a 30 year old boy with no money, prospects, or anything to show for all the time i've been here?

of course, that points the finger at just about everything else i can point the finger at other than myself. the problem is i tend to genuinely more than jokingly believe all of that. but even if i am right and it is all true, it doesn't excuse this fact: i am capable of taking responsibility for my own life and making it do what i want it to do. cabs may not show up when i call for them, and i might miss buses, and the entire world may be revolving against me and unwinding all the slapdash itineraries i've come up with...but with some more astute planning, with an earlier jump on the day, there is no reason i have to miss the mid morning delight of art history or afternoon charms of introduction to fashion merchandising.

even if things are not inclined to go my way, that is all the more reason to put an effort into them.

luckily, i've still got three more classes i can attend today; two of them are the good ones; one of them is "romantic movement in america," (read: transcendentalism). Emerson, Thoreau and Whitman have never been my "go to" guys when i think of what i like to read -- truthfully i've read very little of any of them -- but there is something exciting about the concepts they deal in. man is a "locus of infinite possibility" for them; ingenuity, creativity and the imagination are paramount above all other human qualities. these ideas are classified as romantic, but for people living the dream, they are the basic tenets of reality. doing what i know i am meant to do is within my grasp -- living well is within my grasp. even getting to class on time is within my grasp. these are contingent upon me.

re: blogging.

...as in a phenomenon.

i no longer do it.

i will no longer do it...but i have decided to continue writing here.

there are a number of reasons i haven't been writing -- on this here website and more generally -- but i don't feel like getting into them at the moment, because my point is not to bitch or complain or blame.

there were a number of reasons i used to write on this here website, and as genuine as i was intending to be, there was often just as much exhibitionism involved.

i guess i mean to say this: all the reasons for which i have written, and all the ones which have muted me are beyond me now in the same way in which sometimes the past seems episodic and irrelevent to the present...that is...i peck at this keyboard in hopes of finding something to stand on...in hopes of discovering "whys" and "hows" that are otherwise shapeless unless the right vessel of a phrase is chanced upon to contain it. i want this to be a constructive effort, rather than a starry eyed or theoretical expression.

i am sick of not knowing what i am doing; sick of not examining what i am doing, or attempting to answer the questions about my life that i all to often ignore. i am free to be honest. i want things to stand on, i want to discover the ground i tread and whether or not there is a path there.

i am not tired of the pursuit of beauty or truth or all of those grand ideas, but they mean nothing if they cannot be supported by common life, intimate interests, and earthly concerns; or, rather, beauty and truth cannot be supported unless they are also drawn into those things. they cannot be considered compartmentally, or as separate. its not in human nature to exist unalloyed.....neither is it the nature of the world we live in.

i've had a rough week.
i am tired. i am afraid. i am hungry. i have bills to pay. i have to go to work. i have wet feet. i take the bus. i go to school. i am alone. i am lazy. i am guilty. i am in desperate need of a shower, and the immediate application of deodorant. and i want to cut open the sky, and shake mountains, and shout down the naysayers, reach into the thunder, rattle tombs and pierce souls, and change a thing so that it is never the same again.

these are all things i have to confront, question, resolve, learn how to do; and they are all things i need to make an effort at every day. the one set of priorities does not supercede the other; i have missed out on too much of both already.

today i stop blogging

the case of the desperately interesting job hunt

i keep wondering for how long i will have nothing to say; the fun and creative parts of my brain feel dormant or even comatose, while the boring parts deal with boring matters that are, of course, unavoidable and pressing.

right now i am sitting at a computer in the bedroom of the girl whom i love; she is away at work, and i am resting the pads of my fingers in the divids of the keys in the keyboard. it is the same tired, slightly warm lure of complacency i feel in my body -- like i've been gently pressed into a featherbed and kindly asked not to move very much. but maybe that's just the midday, post-late-lunch nap talking.

as of sunday i have been new york state certified in a responsible alcohol service program which means if i happen to get a job bartending in buffalo, drinking capital of the world, i will know when to cut you off, and how, but will in all likelihood leave you to fend for yourself against the combined forces of erie county sherriffs and their charges of DWI. hey, i was there once too.

as a matter of fact, it was two years and about 18 hours ago that i had my run in with the law, from which i am happy to say i have nearly made a full financial recovery. i still owe the DMV two hundred and fitty dolla.

speaking of financial recovery, i have decided that i need to turn over a new leaf, that being one of fiscal responsibility. i plan on doing this as soon as, or perhaps just a little bit after i have a job. i thought that maybe, after having taken this bartender training course and broadening my skillset, that i'd be a more marketable candidate in the service industry. unfortunately, this is the time of year when nobody quits their jobs and nobody goes out to eat, so however qualified i may be for any given position, there's no telling when it will be available. i am scanning the classifieds for jobs, and the obituaries for dead servers and bartenders, hoping Death has been kind to my employment debacle.

i did have a near miss though, this morning. on friday i was called by the co-owner of Shango, and asked to come in on saturday for an interview. it only took my three separate trips into the place to get them to call me. the lady, whose name is either unpronouncable, or made up of secret letters that only the initiated are able to hear, sat me down with two other people with some other names, and conducted one of the most pleasant interviews i had ever had in my life. it was nothing special, it was just fun; a laidback, conversational, tangent riddled interview. if i'd ever kept track of those things, i'm sure it would land inside the top five best interviews i've given. i won't get into a major set-up for a story that you already know will end anti-climactically and in disappointment, but we chatted it up, and connected over bravo's "top chef," and laughed at corporate restaurants and miserable albany folk, and covered a good chunk of my resume all inside of fifteen minutes. another fifteen and bottle of wine later i'm sure we'd have solved whatever global problem is en vogue to solve during hyperboles these days. they said they'd get back to me today, which they did; to thank me for my resume, which they would keep on hand in case whomever they hired "didn't work out," and also to tell me that i left a "very strong impression." the prompt "thank-you-bye-bye-click" from me stifled the "how do i pay bills with 'very strong impressions?'" that was sure to be followed by the gently worded, sincere hope that their new server ties them up in the night, empties their buisness account, and flies off to vegas to spend it all on slot machines and repeat viewings of the Celine Dion show.

i should've had that job all tied up.

tomorrow i'm going to the Saturn Club on Delaware to make someone talk to me about a banquet server and/or bartending position they may have there; the best part is i've got to literally race somebody else who pretty much outqualifies me for the job...
sigh.

somebody please hire me.

i'd love to turn over that new leaf soon...

why the sudden obsession with new leaves? because life could be better. because a certain level of domesticity -- the comfortable level -- can only come if you work toward it as a goal. i have been too used to visiting it on the weekends when i'd come to have dinner at my parent's house. carving out a little nook in the world takes some sponsorship; inside a nook, there might be opportunity to wake up a little and find things in life that are both more important, and more interesting than the boring problems that plague and stupefy a boring brain...

i'd like to take my girl and go live in a nook.

for shame

i am so sorely out of practice when it comes to this, i don't even know why i've tried to start blogging again. its been a little over a half a year since i'd shut down this blog, and i'm not certain that i have anything interesting to say now that i've reopened for buisness; re-reading the bulk of my earlier posts, i'm not sure i had anything interesting to say then either. yet lately i've been feeling a desire to post, that if neglected long enough might have graduated into a need. perhaps something worth the effort of words will fall out in the process. in addition, i can imagine that i've lost any readership i might have had due to my hiatus, but that isn't enough to discourage me now either. i'm compelled to blather.

i quit this thang seven months ago because i couldn't read what i was writing without rolling my eyes. who wants to hear someone take their sad excuse for a life and make it sound even sadder? its embarassing. it is the writing equivalent of a half-hearted suicide attempt; you could practically hear the Cure playing in the next room as it whined "i took all the green ones because you wouldn't love me," between fits of shallow breathing.

ugh. ugly. in fact, this blog is festooned with ugly, and the worst part is its all me, in an unavoidable, non-fictional way. and so bloggy, with its bloggyness. when i shut it down it was out of shame. it didn't feel worthy to be read. i didn't want you to know how pathetic i was anymore. i didn't want to wear it on my sleeve so much, like some sloppy emo panzy. i didn't want to give anyone the opportunity to judge me over what i'd written as harshly as i was judging myself. long story short: i wasn't ready to own the fact that i am the poor sap who's signing his name on those pathetic posts.

sigh.
can't escape it now.
i could hide the posts, tuck them away in a drafts folder, or just plain delete them. but there is something manipulative and shady about that. i shouldn't need to hide. honest writing fosters discovery, and i am just hear to learn. there are parts of this blog, just as there are parts of me, that are tough to look at, or sad, or ridiculous, or just plain wrong. so here is a blog full of my failures; what does running from them do? they don't get better until i recognize them for what they are.

albany confession

i've done well with the things i've set out to do.

when i left buffalo with the objective to minimize the distractions of my life, to run from temptations, and toward simplicity, i never really thought it would work as well as i believed that i wanted it to. i imagined that i'd have the loads of extra time to finish at least a half a draft of a novel that had been fermenting in my brain for the last few years, and get to carve a place in the huge family i barely knew.

life with my sisters in schenectady was an epiphany, in a practical, bold-faced sort of way. and as far as writing went, i did about as well as i can realistically expect of myself, which is to say i made inches of headway towards a mark i fell horribly short of.

the other goals? simpicity? the marathon run away from distraction and temptation? i did amazingly well with. when i moved out to the fairytale kingdom of Albany, NY, i got exactly what i wanted. i wanted to leave behind what i was relying on in buffalo to get me through, and strip everything away to find out what i really am and what i'm made of. i was very much afraid of what i had become in buffalo, but i didn't even really have a true sense of what that was until i'd spent some time away.

yet, as the ancients used to say, when the gods wish to punish us, they answer our prayers.

i have to include the caveat that there was one noble goal that i did acheive in the course of the move. i left buffalo a physical wreck, because smoking cigarettes is not as good for you as it looks and binge drinking will swallow you up and puke you out. those are bad habits i seem to have wrestled under control, now. and thank God, because it catches up to you.

now, on to answered prayer:

the reasons i give for wanting to leave are at most only half as noble as they sound: in a nutshell, i abandoned buffalo, and everyone in it, because i didn't want to need anyone, and i didn't want anyone to need me. i didn't want people to get in my way, or hold me back, or let me down. and if that meant not having friends, then so be it. and with a violently selfish shove, i landed myself in Albany, where i even ducked out of responsibility to my family there to remain isolated. i might as well have had an off button. i walk around describing Albany as a bad fit for me, but i think in retrospect, i was a bad fit for it -- i never gave it a fair chance. i arrived only half believing that the party, and the fun, and the good times i had in buffalo somehow wouldn't follow me. but in so often i went out of my way to not make friends or connections. i thought i was trying, but it was really only for the purpose of fending off boredom and loneliness.

in albany i had the anonymity and social disconnectedness i thought i'd craved. and then, somehow, what people thought of me became suddenly important. how's that for a big ball of irony? -- i didn't give a fuck what the people who loved me thought, and now i was grovelling for any kind of validation from new peers who didn't give a fuck about me. well served, poetic justice, well served.

and when Bill died this summer, i know it didn't just happen to me, or for me, but damned if it didn't teach me a timely lesson. i deserted my friends in buffalo in pieces before i actually left, and Bill was probably one of the first victims of my ego. i can't think of anyone who deserved it less; Bill began and ended with the love he had for his friends. i hacked him out of my life with animosity i realized was misplaced only with his sudden death. death is so polarizing and stark. everything jumps into relief, everything is black and white. whatever little things i wanted to take as liberties to end our friendship, i realized were shields for my own guilty part in the matter. it was a really shitty thing to do.

i ran off into the world all empowered and invincible, on my own power, at the cost of what brings actual meaning to life. i've come home now, a little broken by it. it turns out i had no idea what i was doing. i find myself at times looking for this ideal life, and i keep trampling over the real life that i should be living that is right under my nose.


i've discovered a few things, about myself, when the rest is stripped away, and i've had excess time to think about it. i'm a selfish bastard. i still am, and i know it, and its a slow and supercomplicated feat of engineering to rewire all the shitty behavioral circuits. i am a work in retarded progress.

along the rollercoaster ride of self discovery over the past few years, i've uncovered all of these drastically differing parts of myself. the adventures of my colossal ego showed me things i wouldn't normally have seen, but i put more faith in that ego than it could ever handle. what was there to topple it but lightning, or to do away with it but some act of God? leave it to my ego to demand that kind of end; God yawned and i simply choked myself out. i am nobody special. my own pride prepared my downfall. it was self contained, an un-event, and i'm really the only that thinks it was important enough to give a damn.

i enabled myself, and i disabled myself.

i'm not sure where that leaves me. i have weird, unmatching pieces. i guess the next question is what can i make out of that? and how do i do it? i don't know if its a matter of taking the good, and tossing the bad, or just gathering it all and adding a grain of salt.

it probably doesn't matter so much as it does that i learn to value the things i've come to know are more important. i've trapsed off to fulfill some ideal life that may or may not exist, trampling over a real life, the fulfillment of which i've neglected for too long.

for as long as i've been someone who's thought for himself, i've always been concerned with determining what was "important" and pursuing it. at different stages, what is important has been different things; when i was young, it was spirituality, and at other times it has been matters of heart, or virtue, or quality. good enough things i suppose, but i wonder if i hadn't gotten it all wrong from the beginning. did i even know what was important? are those things even close? and if i started from some faulty impression of what was important, and since i've landed so far from that even, how far off am i now?

it makes me wonder if i haven't failed at everything i've set out to do...

happy june 22

i can't even go to the bar alone -- i've already established my self as the pathetic lonely drinker in both the bars within walking distance from here.

it occurs to me for the first time ever that today is the approximate date of my conception. the bed i was conceived on is in the next room, currently in use by my sister (not for the purpose of conceiving). they say it belonged to my mum at one point, but since i don't know precisely when, the best i can say is that it is the approximate bed i was made on.

ah, lucky for me i stashed some high priced bourbon a lost friend bought for me in a pretty little flask some other lost friend gave me as a birthday present.

conceived for what?
not for this pathetic existence, i hope.
i reach new lows.

time to sip.

from the mouth of the Horse's Ass

how are you going to get home? she said

i have two legs, i told her.

i walk home and there is two of every star in the night, and two of every streetlight. two of every star, two of every planet. even this one. i have two eyes. why shouldn't i see two of everything?
i walk home, and round corners, and get to my apartment. it is two apartments.
i live in the upper.
it has its own number; i get my mail at a different address from the landlords, below. but it is the same house. i hear them all the time, the landlords, and all the noise that they make. they hear me. we pay our rent to the two sisters, and their boyfriends.
i live with my sisters. they are twins.

at any different moment, my heart is stretched between two different girls; a blonde one, and a brunette. a brown eyed or a green eyed. this end of the bar, or that.
i have two feet. i walk home alone.
my father never stuck around to make any more like me; my mother dies before she gets the chance to meet me.
my father has green eyes. they go yellow when he angers.
mother was a brunette.
i am sure they would have went well together, if not for all the childhood trauma and the dying.
rafe is a bull. she, some earthly saint.
i live in the dazzling labyrinth of this world
i gallop home, around corners, to the lovely little center of my life, where i use everything until it curling dries up and falls away.
home, all in one piece.
one piece of what? one that is a piece has to be part of something else.
home, all in one, alone, galloping like some beast of two natures.
there are not yet any swords to fall on or skeins of red yarn to choke with. i am home. i wish i could be anywhere else that wasn't a place with just me in it.
send me elsewhere, sword.
send me elsewhere, yarn.
in a parcel, between those two stars, there.
is there such a thing as destiny? and does it clamp me here in the trash town and on the trash sidewalks, walking circuits between trash bars and trash apartments. will it begin and end here, and am i condemned to live a life secreted away from all of the things i want to touch, and see, and taste, and scrape against, and love at, and pray for?
i arrive home, all in one piece. alone.

but, i have two legs...

its easy for me to get to zen

i am up late
late enough for me to be listening to the Fountain soundtrack
and be all f ull of tears and love


ah. God.


?


with apologies to buddhists...

our bones will live a life after we die

fret not that to the grave we are betrothed
our bones will live a life after we die
and peacefully in desert tombs alcoved
we'll honeymoon forever, you and i
no reason will we have to leave our bed
each day we spend together, we'll be smiling
though everyone above us thinks us dead
we pass away the pleasant hours, whiling
our skeletons will make love in the earth
they'll go out drinking, they'll go dancing, dining
and gestate in a womb of pangless birth
our stillborn babies never waking, whining
and then, one day perhaps someone will find us
and some foolish poet's pen will mind us.

the music made of our remains

the grave will not yet mute our bodies' bones
though death may fret the body's muscle-cords
stretch'd over cryptic hollows and Unknowns
and strum away the flesh that we adored
and pluck away our life in quarter-tones,
our sinew clamped to spinal fingerboard
to mocking make a ballad of our moans
at least our love goes not untroubadoured:
here lies the lay of Tristan and Yseult
of married Monatague and Capulet;
Pyramus and Thisbes underscore us
and songs and lays and poems, plays result
arpeggiating lovers down Death's fret
adding measures to our lovesong for us
as if adding verses to our chorus,
epithalamiums to epitaphs
travelling from upper to lower staffs
singing lullabies to their better halves
and other lovers descending in refrains
join in the music made of our remains

strange dream

strange dream that gives a dead man leave to think
strange death that gives him leave to love past life
strange dram that did dispatch him quick as drink
that lately gives him leave to love his wife
and there, where flesh was tanned and lips were pink
since have been flayed off by his happy knife;
where eyes might miss some sight because they blink,
are now unburdened with that lidded strife...
and with the help of power passion-lent
and drugs, such dreams will guide us out from under
the curse of crossing stars and their intent
to short the hours that we came and went,
the turning earth that's turned you a white wonder,
and gives us leave for new love to invent.

strings

we close, like scissors, one though another
so, loosed of limb and our worldly tether
our ligaments under earthly cover
then might bind us closer there together
our bones suffer not to be forgotten
connecting tissues, 'round the world it brings
to life star-cross'd lovers, misbegotten
as at the end of marionette strings
they died with knives in desert Araby,
a pride of midnight lions standing near
and with help from an apothecary,
that exile who lived not too far from here.
we cut one cord together so to find
ourselves well-spliced, new-wrought and better twined.

let us not dare not

darling, we had beautiful bodies once.
remember? how quickly you forget it
and quicker still death resolutely blunts
everlasting love-vows if you let it.
its true that love has led us here to death
in to the arms of each other, dying
cruelly cutting loose our cords of breath
and our knotted bodies limbs untieing
but love and death and life and limb are one
and only are they in our bodies known
let us not end without having begun
or not dare not, do not, and die, alone
darling we are young and beautiful yet
oh, but still how quickly you do forget