any random saturday.

        

        

        

grandparents' apartment in manhattan

mmmm.

"He always felt naked, seen."

"She had felt the shame of a child who sees a grown-up suddenly caught in the act of chasing a butterfly over fields and roads."

"She felt weak, exhilaratingly weak, before the man."

"The first reaction was a vision of peace regained. Soon, however, she was restless, like a person who misses something without knowing, in particular, what he has lost. She started growing flowers with a new vigour."

"Margery inclined her head on his shoulder as if she wished he would carry her with him to those lands he talked about. He did."

"Suddenly I felt my life was coming to a cul-de-sac."

"A man was born to die continually and start afresh."

"Those were words from no ordinary heart."

"The train became an obsession: if you missed it, sorrow seized your heart for the rest of the week; you longed for the next train. Then Sunday came, you went there on time, and immediately you were healed."

"The rattling train always thrilled her. At times she longed to be the train itself... Her dark eyes had a dreamy look that longed for something the village could not give. She lay in the sun and ardently yearned for a life in which love and heroism, suffering, and martyrdom were possible. She was young... In the Old Testament she often saw herself as Esther: so she revelled in that moment when Esther finally answers King Ahasuerus' question and dramatically points at Haman, saying: The adversary and enemy is the wicked Haman."

"Nights followed days with a severe regularity."

"The crowd made a harmony: there's something beautiful and moving in the spectacle of a large mass of people seated in an orderly disorder."

--A Grain of Wheat, Ngugi Wa Thiong'o

visions of my mother, four in the morning.

you sit unresponsive in a dense bed
as your lovers coaxe you into nothingness.
his arm, a heavy house, pulsing over your heart.
he will breathe for you.
because you suddenly want to escape that house.
you suddenly want to be something very small and very dark.
you apologize for your complexity
and escape to your quill pen
because hearing him love you
makes you remember you have to be real again.
so you let him drift away to the dreamy place he goes.
and you suddenly feel your neck against
your mother's warm calf.
and she brushes away your furies with her
breezy fingers in your curling hair.
you don't know where you are but
his song takes you back to the womb
where your mother told you it would
be okay, it is okay.
And he reminds you.

You will be a pretty girl
who breathes quickly at night,
under coarse light,
spaces air tight
between your lungs and the stars.

the only reason the bed is breaking, he says,
is because we have been sitting too long in it.

dancing in a heavy cloud.

it's something only i can know.
i have someone to love me who is a part of this world.
i have someone beside me who is a part of this world.
but i still feel as if i'm being pulled along into it,
as if i were a child
wanting what i want -- to feel.
wanting something completely inexplicable--
beyond this.

i wish that time could come and go like a whim.

i want to be the inventor of your dreams.

there's a volcano on my chest
and i've just watched it erupt.
silently it takes its victims
from a clean, bright room
at the forefront of consciousness
and drives them away
into the palms of the living
into the palms of those who
learned how to speak correctly,
to those who do not need
an anthem when they want to form words.

i want life to be as thick as my glasses and
to taste like the coldness of
lemon melting into sour cream.
i want to write down with my
eyes everything in the pockets of
the legs of a cold, real city.
Humans were born that way.
with the capacity.
and when there are blue eyes
set against my own, i want
to hear them sparkle.
i want something more than
feeling, something more than
what is arbitrary.
i want the thought of palm
trees and thick novels without
the anxiety of the sensation.
I want to write a poem.
i want to write a poem with my life.
i want to become everyone in my life.
i want to stick my plastic
orange fingers into my ears
and become a soup.
the most beautiful images are the
ones that are settled in the backs
of our minds like a vanishing memory.
Everything in the world should
be covered in little squares.

fantastique.

zack's old apartment in brooklyn. last holiday season.

grounds for sculpture.

erina and joe.

just text me, already.

Have the freckled lights of this squat land driven you to something greater?
The rivers have resisted convergence for you.
Have the papers, squirming under your emasculated palms, been concealing my name?
The days have been good to you.
Have the angry hours begun to rope your eyes away from each other?
There is a demon under my bed waiting for you.
How long will you continue to tickle this clock, to excite it forward into time?
How long will he have to wait?

still breathing.

I want to crush pale pills into your teeth and bathe in the bits of stars that shatter out of them.
I want to take the gun out of your hand and plant green flowers there.
I want to feel something more than an illusion, an allusion.
I want the celestial sphere to break and to rid my clothing of these holographic stains.

to a young french boy.

my heart burns from all the cigarettes that have been dropped into my stomach. i've been staring too hard at my conscience, which sits in front of me, behind a hard, wooden desk. it wears red vans sneakers so that when it puts its feet together they make a canvas heart. not the kind of canvas on which to paint but rather at which to regard with confusion, asking the soul, "is this what art should be?" better not to know. better to reach down, so deeply inside, pull out some stale tobacco, and light the fire. then when it burns cover it with all your city scarves and watch the frayed edges tremble with heartbeat. is it there, or is it the foreground of some bigger picture? plaid with conflicting desires. cold mint wind blows my hair back and i know it's time to change my seasons, to put my sun up higher this time. maybe the moon won't see. if i could write a whole novel of things i don't refuse to see, of slices of my hues that i am ready to know, i should.

wow.

things kind of just explode into being.

view from a window, allison ave.

as they extend their decaying hands down to the Earth they are suspended there forever until the birds grow on their fingertips and their lives float away like rescue boats.
as their starved limbs bend down in submission to this dull Earth their eyes seem to rot so as to blind themselves from their own majesty.
and the snow grows up their skeleton arms like prickling hairs that keep all the mammals warm.
but they bend their breaking backs and snapping arms down to an icy ground for us to take their fingers in ours and melt away what we've done to them. for us to climb up top and see our world as it would look to one who created it.
and we sit in our kitchens and laugh.

what would Freud say?

The stone heads of horses follow me
wherever I go.
They were born of the dust that rises in empty ships
halfway out into the ocean,
halfway out into a sea that has no home for them.
I've regarded their strong human bodies,
full of restless bones that suck in the skin,
as if trying to secede from the body.

I walked away from something indistinct you said
when we boarded this vessel
and found myself pulled
into its labyrinthine veins
like the flow of something deadly
to the body's system.

And the faces of the people,
they become heavy and gray.
All the faces of the naked people,
with their fashioned heads
lead me into a spacious dream.
No rooms here, no place to thrive,
no sheltered island outside.

What matters is here.

They pull me forward into a dream
that becomes more absurd the farther I go.
The aging smoke investigates my body;
it is suspended in this gray cement hollow.
And the windows, six aching palms
carved into the tops of these infinite walls
barred back, left to pray, fingers pointed to the sky,
not to some indiscernable sea below.

And the faces of these sullen people,
these lace-mouthed damsels with holes in their eyes;
these broken horses seem to dance--

the scenery always evolves to the possessed.

current inspiration (i should do this more often).

(sorry for the appalling spacing issues)

"Ulysses" by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

It little profits that an idle king,
By this still hearth, among these barren crags,
Matched with an agèd wife, I mete and dole
Unequal laws unto a savage race,
That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.

I cannot rest from travel: I will drink
Life to the lees: all times I have enjoyed
Greatly, have suffered greatly, both with those
That loved me, and alone; on shore, and when
Through scudding drifts the rainy Hyades
Vexed the dim sea: I am become a name;
For always roaming with a hungry heart
Much have I seen and known; cities of men
And manners, climates, councils, governments,
Myself not least, but honoured of them all;
And drunk delight of battle with my peers,
Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.
I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough
Gleams that untravelled world, whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnished, not to shine in use!
As though to breathe were life. Life piled on life
Were all too little, and of one to me
Little remains: but every hour is saved
From that eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new things; and vile it were
For some three suns to store and hoard myself,
And this grey spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

 This my son, mine own Telemachus,
To whom I leave the sceptre and the isle—
Well-loved of me, discerning to fulfil
This labour, by slow prudence to make mild
A rugged people, and through soft degrees
Subdue them to the useful and the good.
Most blameless is he, centred in the sphere
Of common duties, decent not to fail
In offices of tenderness, and pay
Meet adoration to my household gods,
When I am gone. He works his work, I mine.

 There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail:
There gloom the dark broad seas. My mariners,
Souls that have toiled, and wrought, and thought
 with me—
That ever with a frolic welcome took
The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed
Free hearts, free foreheads—you and I are old;
Old age hath yet his honour and his toil;
Death closes all: but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.
The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:
The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew
Though much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

inspiration from jane.

"Night was come, and her planets were risen: a safe, still night; too serene for the companionship of fear. We know that God is everywhere; but certainly we feel His presence most when His works are on the grandest scale spread before us: and it is in the unclouded night-sky, where His worlds wheel their silent course, that we read clearest His infinitude, His omnipotence, His omnipresence."

"I know poetry is not dead, nor genius lost... they will both assert their existence, their presence, their liberty, and strength again one day. Powerful angels, safe in heaven! they smile when sordid souls triumph, and feeble ones weep over their destruction. Poetry destroyed? Genius banished? No! Mediocrity, no: do not let envy prompt you to the thought. No; they not only live, but reign, and redeem: and without their divine influence spread everywhere, you would be in hell -- the hell of your own meanness."

--Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte

oy, astronomy.

i actually hate seeing you because it always means i have to leave.

***

there weren't enough stars in the sky that night so i had to resort to wishing on worlds.

***

[last night's dream] - i went up to the attic for the surprise and my brothers were there, in hiding. i was overjoyed to see the first and he held me in his arms in the pale brown room. the second i knew was there, i knew they had brought him. but i knew he was not the brother i once knew; he had died forever ago. seeing that new man's face in my head i knew he was a monster, a rapist. i had seen his face on a television screen, knew his face from the last novel i had read. i had no idea it would come true.

***

the sky is always so quiet.

***

i could fill many pages with one philosophy.

***

florida was a bowl of oranges and their seeds.

***

the doctor has a beautiful sense of humor.

***

her face was pointed downward. he had the soft, clean smell of powder.

an hypothesis to prove that God lives.

i'd like to say that belief is my hypothesis to prove the existence of God. He may have given up and made us to force out nonsense in our speech, though. define God as the little hairs on the back of your hand and death as your power over them. can you break them or understand them? and they will continue to appear on the backs of the hands of your people for lives to come. think of God as the ability to know the exact number of hairs on your head at all times. and death is to cut off all those hairs and deny that they ever have been.

yesterday.

she became a demon because no one said "God bless you."

lifesaver.

this taste is dreadful in my mouth. i was in the tropics when the dust melted into my mouth and gnawed at my teeth. i'm a child again and i taste it in the sour dew. the warmest taste blooms and i am shipwrecked. floating in the ocean of this mouth i am rescued. now i float in circles running on a string held by you. by you, i hear you crunch down. my mouth trembles and i wake up and know i am alive. now i know what blindness is for i couldn't tell you what flavor this was if i tried.

movement meets confinement.

sometimes i think i wouldn't mind getting stuck in an elevator by myself. with a notepad and a black pen.