anywhere i can find to put words

southern tier creme brulee

Sat, 11 Jul 2009 04:14:29 GMT

i just noticed the room was swimming. and i thought so that's what it's like, when the room is swimming. and swimming with the room, i got up and walked to the door. and the floor was under me, and the floor was under me, the floor was under me more often than it was not. the floor was under me, except when it was not. then the floor was not under me, but the room was swimming, so i swam with the room, and all was still, that kind of still where everything is moving very fast and all at the exact same speed: so that motion is merely a rumor, an idea tossed on the lips of bored school girls.

oh, she said, seeming to understand, i see.

crash and turn

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 17:22:36 GMT

shriek: half turn in the back room, tugging off my red velvet slippers, my metaphor for dancing shoes. fell off the couch, crashed into the coffee table. wrenched my neck, blackened my knee.

howl: pulling on my nightshirt, slammed my elbow on the ceramic toilet tank. that's a little purpled, too.

chip once told me for a little girl, you sure make some big noise.

my middle name means "grace."

the book i'm reading brings me ever closer to the snapping point. what did we do to her, what did we do to her, god what did we do. but mercy, it wasn't like that, and i can't think about it that way, anyhow.

"firm realty" came up on the caller ID. i glanced "firm reality" and felt a burning need to answer.

last night it rained and rained.

i am so tired of everything there is to be tired of.

type cast

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 18:19:41 GMT

i dreamt this morning i was hemorrhaging blood in a bathroom in a part of the house that doesn't exist. miscarriage, rupture, i don't know. in the dream i fell down on the floor and crawled for the door. in our room i woke up with a cramp: thursday morning, placebo week. all falls back in line with the normal sequence of events.

i press to hard when i type. i press too hard when i write, too; pages i've written curl up and rustle. there's no denying i've just had contact with that page or the four indented behind it. a beloved art instructor in high school told me once i had "that kind of left handed hand." new age handwriting analysis throws around words like 'passion' and 'conviction.'

i doubt that i can lighten the pressure with regard to pens and pencils. modern mechanical pencils are a joke in my hand; the slippery grip of that awkward barrel is all that keeps me from bending my needle tipped pilot pens into a permanent sway. i've made my peace with that, but i'd like to work on the keyboarding issue. my fingers are long and thin, size four rings drop to the knuckle on my ring finger. as hard as i've pressed all these years, all the nights i've stirred family members and roommates with 3AM clacking, muscle tissue does not seem to thrive along my fingers' shaft.

simple logic suggests this isn't something that can go on forever without repercussions: i mean, for me personally, for my non-replaceable inventory--not the more mundane property damage, that which can be repurchased, the countless letter "e" decals i've sent to decal heaven, those space bars i've eroded clean through. coyote recently discovered a stress fracture in her left foot and now, jamming away at the keys, i've started to imagine my fingers cracking and crumbling away beneath the merciless weight of my hand.

how does one begin to retrain such a habit, unconscious as breathing?

static

Tue, 16 Jun 2009 04:00:06 GMT

the lesser static noise removal filters, the ones included to push a cheap sound design program as opposed to being the entire point of the program you put out a grand for, they typically work by taking a five second or less sample of the noise you are trying to clean out of the file--just the undesired noise itself. line hum, tape hiss, buzzing from the computer fan.

it creates a filter that will block those frequencies where the static noise exists: it does not eradicate the sound itself. after creating the filter, you apply it to the whole file and are left, presumably, with any sound not in those frequencies. except not every aspect of the static noise keeps the same frequencies throughout the whole file, and at times the blocked frequency coincides with the range of desirable sound. especially when cleaning a spoken word piece, you are left with a noise like crumpling tin. the rustling of metallic wings. charged wires loose inside of your mouth, small shocks clustered around every part of speech. corroding away at the simplicity of one person speaking in what they'd believed to be an otherwise silent room.

last night i experienced my first migraine aura. experienced, at least, in conscious awareness, as some of the sensations involved were very familiar, have been a part of my life since i was very young. my left eye was riddled with zigzags in half circles that distorted my vision, in spite of the fact that i could not actually see them. the edges of things came into focus with nearly obscene clarity. i didn't want anything to do with direct light. it felt, though it never appeared, that i was a half mile gone from everything in my immediate vicinity. i felt like a creature trapped outside of itself, void roaring in every direction.

ben recognized the structure of things, had me take two naproxen, had me take a decongestant, had me lie down and turned out the lights. we sorted out my chaotic panic points:

- is it a stroke?
- it's not a stroke.
- is it what nate had on six feet?
- it's not what nate had on six feet.
- ...is it eye strain?
- it might be eye strain.

i did not experience pain. i have not experienced pain--but it doesn't feel quite like there's not pain to be had--it simply feels like those frequencies have been blocked from my range. they hover around me, empty and intolerable. my perception weaves around the absence, clucking and rustling, an insidious omen of things to come.

deep space seven

Wed, 10 Jun 2009 02:12:38 GMT

this is what's on our coffee table right now.

don't you wish you could visit us?

everybody's waiting

Tue, 09 Jun 2009 17:23:37 GMT

lurid with nightmares.

by the way

Thu, 28 May 2009 20:13:47 GMT

holy residency, batman, i'm a marylander!

we need microphones and manifolds

Wed, 20 May 2009 17:50:14 GMT

blessings and sweetest incense. the trappings of sacred ceremony. "trappings" because they are ideas i become trapped in: smoke and mirrors, what i'm seeing is not really there. smoke and mirrors. ash and dust. the yellow-brown memories smoke stains up the corners with. ash at the ridge of the rim in the incense dish.

i want rows and rows of candles, flickering, flame obscured by the black singe of previous burnings. i want flames leaping behind smoked glass. the torch singer moans. the seats are velvet or a velvet red. mahogany and austere. it's raining, outside, or it should be raining. we bow our heads. here on the marble, we write professions in the water our glasses leave behind: love, lost, diminishing.

the faces that swim up in the not of nothing.

from altar to nightclub, the glass wears the same color. the song's the thing, either way. i am not in the subterranean cool, listening with my eyes closed, either way.

the ends of my fingers are cold and numb, an ice water consideration trailing to silence. i am jumpy and there is tightness in my shoulders. nothing is sure. i am antsy. i don't know what to do with myself: not in the small ways, but in the large ones. in the small ways and the large ones. what do i do? probably, not this.

who can one rebel against if not oneself i ask

Fri, 01 May 2009 19:36:39 GMT

i didn't want to burn
the joss stick in my own dish.

forgive me,
i just cleaned the sand.

torn leaf prayer

Tue, 28 Apr 2009 18:40:51 GMT

i could not tolerate the second floor swelter yesterday afternoon and so made camp in the first floor front room. in the chair, in the corner, sigg bottle and tea cup flanking my infinitely civilized parlor upholstery. the high up sun illuminating my page through the stained glass window.

When we are young, he thought, the first necessary rule is to stop invasions of ourselves. We know this as children. There is always that murmuring conviction of family, like the sea around an island. So youth hides in the shape of something lean as a spear, or something as antisocial as a bark. And we become therefore more comfortable and intimate with strangers. [pg. 224]

i finished anil's ghost, which i have been reading, slowly, since late march. i was given the book in january of 2001, a late and unexpected christmas gift. i tried to read it that winter and buckled under the resulting nightmares. as unpolitical as i present here, in the dreamtime, i am more political than you could know. i am a dreamer of conspiracies. my dreaming landscape is scorched with political murders, with terrorists, government takeovers, elaborate schemes that only hint at the depth of the horror. prison camps, underground compounds, the atomic bomb. so, i put anil's ghost away because it simply served those dreams further detail, more conviction. every morning, i awoke plagued with visions of the yellowed, cracked and shattered, burnt and buried bones of secret murder campaigns.

i tried again at some point, again at another. once i got taken away by changes at work. another time my grandmother died and all i could stomach were the familiar comfort of lois lowry's anastasia books. this time, i wasn't going to let my fear stop me. it took over a month, but i finally read it through. blurred vision and deep sorrow. but it's not just the story itself that previously intimidated me: it's the way it's written. the layers, the slow reveal, the way the structure of the book becomes a subtle kind of forensic examination unto itself.

my path as a writer is skewed with recommendations and faint comparisons to ondaatje; flattery i once rejoiced in now lower my eyes with shame. i am not even worthy of a fleeting glance of this holy man's vestments. in a mere five sentences, he reveals me not just as an amateur, but a childish one, at that.

boundary

Wed, 22 Apr 2009 19:17:24 GMT

this is going to sound brusk and i apologize for that. please know that i understand the slang usage is common and i'm trying not to hold it against anyone who doesn't already know my feelings on the matter.

over the last few weeks, i've noticed an unusual number of instances of people throwing around the word "retarded" in journal entries.

linguistic debates abound in mental health, up to and including how to describe an individual's challenges, but our one nearly universal accord is that "retard-" is not acceptable in anything but a clinical context (and even then). "retarded" is a highly stigmatized word that has been used to harm members of my immediate family, and it can arouse painful feelings for me, especially when i see it tossed off as a joke.

language is a matter of choice. accordingly, i'm not backing up this post with demands or threats. i just needed to make my feelings known.

fade to black, pt. 1

Tue, 21 Apr 2009 18:44:20 GMT

we see ourselves how we want to see ourselves or we refuse to see ourselves as anything like that. we become and we become, we see ourselves as "better than" or "not as good as" or, worse still, "exactly like." in some cases, we cling so violently to the romance of who we were some years ago that it crumbles in our hands; in others, we go into such denial about it, make such titanic efforts to push it away that it takes us over, calcifies us. our preoccupation with avoiding that specific label leaves us married to it. to become, or not to become? to forget or remember?

you want to claim and remember all the good things; you want to release and forget all the bad. it doesn't that doom us to the same mistakes we're susceptible to make over and over and over again, filling our lives with experiences and people who will only make us hurt? then, does retelling every cautionary tale, does avoiding every personality demonstrating those tendencies that tend to draw you in and screw you over, fuck you up, does hashing over the mistakes you've made every time you approach a certain activity really leave a great deal of space for happiness?

a man once told me he never regretted his mistakes. he told me this more than once, in fact, he told me it again and again: every time we had a heartfelt conversation, every time some he experienced some misfortune wrought of poor timing, inappropriate expectations, distraction, or human error, he told me "i don't understand the point of regretting my mistakes, so i never do."

he was, in truth, the most regretful person i've ever met. apparently, because he did not quantify his narrow interpretation of "regret," he felt himself free of the title. in truth, he described his regrets externally, as random bad luck, as though he had no role in his own suffering: if he'd never met this person, if his girlfriend hadn't turned out to have so many problems, so many of the same problems his last girlfriend did, if he hadn't been born in this city, if he'd never been offered this job. i suspect he felt not learning from his mistakes meant he didn't regret them, but i can't be sure.

*

some morning one morning not so long ago, i had a dream that a man and and woman were floating, reclined and facing each other in an opulent bedroom of dark wood and jewel tones. the man was gazing up at the woman as though she were his reflection. the woman was gazing down at the man as though seeing him might explain something about herself.

a voice in my ear said something so profound and beautiful i forced myself awake to get it on paper, but when i awoke there was no paper to be found. i knocked my good pen from my cluttered night table to that neverland somewhere under the bed. after too long rooting around for implements on my bare knees on the hard floor, i scratched my thought into a scrap sticking out of the recycling bin with a dry ballpoint pen in the trash and immediately fell back asleep. the result is not legible. i'm guessing it reads "it all comes back like you're looking at it the other way through because you're looking at it from the other side."

it's not at all the words from my dream but i pasted it in my journal because it's as close as i'll ever get.

*

my first months on the internet, twelve years ago, i told my first internet friend that i'd noticed people writing over the process of getting to know me as an individual with stories they told themselves about my mannerisms or appearance. at the time, i might have been bragging. at the very least, i found it amusing, and so exaggerated those aspects of this situation that i felt might make me seem more intriguing to this kind near-stranger i only knew through the kind of long and confessional emails you receive from kind near-strangers on the internet, at least in 1996.

there are attractive qualities to this situation, aren't there? otherwise i wouldn't have so many friends, even into our 30s, who catalog favored entertainment media on social networking sites to such an extravagant excess it transcends the notion of finding common ground with new people and becomes more about defining oneself, trying to create a positive image by pleasant association. or are we using bands and books a kind of protective shorthand, keeping us from finding a way to honestly convey ourselves, convey ourselves in a way that might leave us vulnerable to scrutiny more disturbing than "aerosmith SUXX?"

and so a distracted slouch and long loose hair means i am prone to fits of infinite resignation. so my left handedness reveals eccentricity. factor in basketball shoes the color of fresh blood, a tendency to be forever bent over books of some variety: notebooks, sketchbooks, contemporary literary fiction--and i am assumed any variety of unusual or exotic: an artist, a poet, a lesbian, a liberal, a scholar, a loner, a vegan, a cannibal, a philosopher, an atheist, a witch, a vampire, a satanist, an assassin, a new age bookstore employee.

and that's not to say i've been none of these things, nor is it to say i've been any of them.

the deal is: these labels have less to do with me than they do the people who are offering them. what do you call something you don't understand? do you call it beautiful? that says one thing about you. do you call it godless? that could well say another. maybe you haven't thought it through that deeply, perhaps it's just the assumptions you offer a certain set of visual stimuli. factor in astrology? personality profiles? i'm as guilty of quizzing myself into algebra equations as anyone else; it's easier to say "it's hard to understand me on some things, i know, because of my natal moon in pisces" because perhaps i can route people toward those things they love about people with their moon in pisces, or, better yet, get them talking about their natal moon instead of whatever problem we are having.

no wonder we are left feeling so empty and disconnected. it seems the more we know about each other, the less we can be bothered to learn.

littleton

Mon, 20 Apr 2009 19:55:31 GMT

it's been ten years.

there's still so much we don't know, so many things that so many of us haven't even questioned. america changed that day: or it registered those changes that had been brewing for years behind it.

we heard an interview on our way to new jersey last week that revealed a great deal of what i'd understood about columbine to be conflated rumor: reports back from people inside who were hearing reporter speculation before they knew what was happening, themselves. speculation that quickly became hard fact. i never once questioned the trench coat mafia, the loner-outcast pronouncements, i never questioned "she said yes."

i never questioned. i never even thought to question.
the ground beneath me gets further away.

it's strange, i guess. and terribly sad, at the end of the anger.

but then it always was.

040909

Fri, 10 Apr 2009 19:42:08 GMT

I write small poems
about writing small poems.
The page crinkles up.

040809

Fri, 10 Apr 2009 19:02:27 GMT

We once shared a dream about an infant buried in loose sand.
An old woman reached into the desert and pulled it out.

She knew certain invocations.
She knew those who had one last story to tell can not rest.
She could make answers where for others there was only silence.

"Speak," she said to the child.
The child spoke.
The wind was strong in the old woman's ears.
The infant spoke its sorrow and, having spoken, died.

From this, you determined our stories complete us.
From this, I determined our stories end us.

040709

Fri, 10 Apr 2009 18:52:16 GMT

Ever a labyrinth,
the daughter adopted
her brother's cast-away wardrobe:
everything navy and black,
everything three sizes too large.

Tuesday, at breakfast, the daughter
pulled the cuffs of the thermal
under the "Daydream Nation" shirt
over her knuckles.
She ate little, but chewed
through every response.

After the bus,
the mother made the beds.
At the hallway's end,
she found three clues:

The daughter's ever open door
was closed. She'd made her own bed
and the old sheets were missing.
The porcelain doll on the dresser
had been turned to the wall.

The mother started the laundry
and took a shower.
Stepping out of the stall, she glanced
a smear of blood
on the toilet rim.

She knew it wasn't her own.

040609

Tue, 07 Apr 2009 17:41:41 GMT

A confluence of veins
through eyelet curtains
on midnight upholstery.

Wavering, it's a tired shadow,
dim bottom of the ocean floor.

Turn to me, I say.
Turn away.
Turn out the light.

I've restructured
what’s hard to the eye.
An eyelash falling,

dust on the table too bright
at the sharp angle of morning.

040509

Mon, 06 Apr 2009 16:19:06 GMT

What she said

Sometimes the moon
is too small for my sorrow.

Open window after midnight,
waiting rain in the still dark,
the air on my back
not stirred with your breath.

Nine springs ago,
you took this hand
and brought me to my feet.

Nine springs later,
I still can’t stand.

What he said

Broken twigs at my feet,
broken words in my mouth.
I meant to speak them

but

040409

Sat, 04 Apr 2009 16:12:45 GMT

How the red
breasted robin

flustered skyward

at the gunshot
down the alley.

040309

Sat, 04 Apr 2009 00:39:29 GMT

Something about the fall of light
across the south wall that April
left her sure there was more to it.

She sketched at the edge of the bed,
capturing the shapes, recapturing,
determining what she wanted to see.

The inked contrast of an old love's features.

The penciled listlessness of a professor
thumbing back his spectacles.

Her grandfather's watercolor hands
in his charcoal lap
at the funeral.

Come May, she boxed the sketchbook
and drove home.

The light wasn't the same.

040209

Thu, 02 Apr 2009 18:26:45 GMT

"At this table," Crystal tells me, top lip
swallowing the bottom. "They were here,"
she says, tapping the air.

"Mushroom shaped beeswax candles,"
I chorus behind. I remember.
"There's a beeswax guy over there,"

amber sunlight slows through stacked jars
of new clover honey. Shaking her head,
Crystal doesn't turn. "Not him," she says,

"I looked." All winter we've feasted
on the promised return of the open air market
at 13th and Newton. All winter Crystal

harvested a decision she couldn't make
while apples still weighed their branches.
Crystal's hair rebroadcasts the low sun

in its own language, preserving
it strand by strand. "Maybe," I say,
but she's walking again, into the sun, due

west. "I've got it wrong," she tells me,
"Over here, they've got to be," twenty paces
and she stops short. "Damn," she says,

to no one. "Damn." These tiny desires
we think will wait for us. These incomplete
moments we'd like to hold in wax

until we can feed on them for years.
Behind Crystal, I touch her head
at the temples and smooth her hair into a V.

"It was last year." She inhales. "It's different,"
she says, sun speckled on her shoulders
through the apple blossoms as she walks away.

040109

Thu, 02 Apr 2009 06:40:37 GMT

Ann has an old moon
and a slowing clock

with no hour hand.
She sits behind you

on the screen porch.
At times you hear her breath,

at times her knitting needles
clacking, at times

nothing.

We forget what we dream
and dream what we've forgotten.

There is no pattern to it.
We twist around in circles

half circles, broken rings
old moons, white spaces

broken through choppy water.
Count the hours, or count

the efforts of hours, Remember
what I said, Ann exhales.

What, you wonder.
The unwound clock

stops.

but we know not what we may be

Mon, 16 Mar 2009 19:34:33 GMT

so i will script myself differently:

instead of "i don't know," "i will find out."
instead of "i can't," "i'll try."
instead of "i'm drained," "i'll be better after some rest."
"an opportunity to try something new for which i am grateful" instead of "they discontinued the goat cheese and tomato quiche we liked very much and i am disappointed."
"when" instead of "if."
"it will be a challenge" instead of "no."

ultimately all the issues i take with other people come back to myself: how i choose to interpret what is said to me, what i decide to let in.

perhaps, then, it is a mistake for me to hurt when i feel marginalized, misunderstood, taken for granted. perhaps it is better to evolve these useless fits of feeling into lessons: touch a hot stove, you will get burned. do i take that personally? do i feel singled out and mocked--emotionally traumatized--for choosing to stick myself somewhere incompatible with my well-being?

no, exactly the opposite: i learn to keep my fingers off heating elements when they are engaged. so?

it's not hard facts, is the thing, yellow-and-blue-make-green. i can't do people math, adding and subtracting the pluses and minuses, set action requires set response, make sure everything you do to one side you do to the other. if it hurts too much, get rid of it. it's not worth "it." (what?) i can't do people math, especially because i have my own carry over, my own contributions to the problem, my own amends to make.

or, maybe, i can do people math; maybe i know people math would be easy, so much easier, and the simplicity of reducing patience and compassion to feasibility checks and tangible results scares the hell out of me.

still, learning to keep my fingers off heating elements might not be the worst skill, particularly when they are engaged.

a scar is a scar is a scar is a scar, after all.

shiny AND noisy!

Wed, 11 Mar 2009 00:33:48 GMT

add to the collection of "cool things my boyfriend made..."

more information can be found here.

someday maybe i'll be making cool things of my own again, maybe.

maybe. he does stuff cool enough for three people, in all honesty.

memento

Fri, 20 Feb 2009 20:59:25 GMT

there's always the first film you watch by yourself.

i'm distinguishing between those films you watch alone while the relationship is still happening. of course you spend time by yourself; of course you watch things in those times. of course there are things you keep for your own. you can't share everything, after all. there's a difference between that and the first film you watch by yourself: there is not a choice between keeping it or sharing it. it is the first film you are watching without them. if you find yourself thinking "they'd love this," it might make you stop the DVD player in sadness or revulsion, it might offer some satisfaction, knowing this is something you have and they don't.

i'm distinguishing, too, between those relationships that haven't clocked out their second year and relationships that have gone on for the better part of a decade. relationships that have discovered logistical and financial necessities. relationships that have shifted away from "because i'm staying with you" and toward "i'm staying with you because." i'm emphasizing dysfunctional relationships where you've shifted into such familiarity you mistakenly believe them for an extension of your own awareness. this is about relationships that burn out slowly. disintegrate over a number of years. it's hard to watch that first film any time there's been a bitter breakup, but there's an acute awareness in the experience, almost something initiatory, when this is someone who has been in the room with you to the point of invisibility: years and years, not months and months. you have to have been in that place where someone is such a part of your daily routine that once they are out of it, you need to rehab basic functions. reintroduce yourself to friends and family without them. learn to eat dinner in public without them. learn to walk down the street without them. learn to live without them. learn to watch a film alone.

ester watched memento. she watched it in her apartment, by herself, two weeks after throwing him out. she'd also thrown out his things: thrown them on the lawn, on the sidewalk, down the apartment building stairwell. she'd wanted to give him a sense, materially, of what it felt like to have the foundation of your life ripped out from under you because of another person's seemingly arbitrary desire. nothing was safe. nothing contained. god knows where what you valued most would land, your life had been put into someone else's hands. the last box of his things had been kicked into a corner by the front door, clocking out the grace period it earned for virtue of being a box of books she really liked.

watching the film, she only had on the television, the rest of her home was dark. halfway through the film, she understood she was crying. it was true, she told me. all of it was true. it's amazing, how easy it is to translate the language of pain. a situation that looks nothing like your situation becomes easy to understand. dreamtime context: you understand the process, you understand the suffering itself. you see yourself through the arbitrary perspective of a story that has absolutely nothing to do with you.

ester turned back and looked over her living room. he'd been there only two weeks before. it seemed like three years ago, it seemed like three minutes ago. she was sitting on the floor, seven feet from the couch they'd sat together on. sixteen days before, they'd watched a hitchcock film, unaware their lives were about to turn into one. the emptiness of her home roared back to her like the ocean, but she sat in that room unswayed. she'd wrapped the quilt her grandmother made her around her broad shoulders. her spine was straight, her brow was set. she knew this was not something everyone she knew would be capable of, watching this movie, in this space, at this time, alone.

two years earlier, i'd watched the addiction. i wore a white shirt: white is a mourning color in many cultures. my hair, still wet from my shower, was pulled back tight. i was leaving for the black hills in twelve hours, my suitcase sat by the door. i lit two candles in frosted glass cups and placed them on either side of me.

as ester saw herself in memento, having to reconstruct her past again and again with disputable evidence, i saw myself in the addiction. i'd been ripped from a life i wasn't satisfied with to be crushed under the wheels of a life i didn't want. and here is one way of dealing with this. and here is why it does not work. and here is another way of dealing with this. and here is why that does not work. and yes, you can try to change the way you are thinking. and yes, you can try to celebrate the ways you've been destroyed. and yes, if only you will believe it is better, that will make it so: but it's wrong, it's wrong again, it's fucking fucking wrong. and i sat in my white shirt with a straight spine and a set brow. i sat in my room with my candles lit and every other light out. only acknowledging that you've been broken and working in that reality will allow you to have a life outside of being broken. the pain is real and it doesn't stop. you can survive it, but only in respect of that truth. it was true. all of it was true.

the film ended and i leaned forward until my forehead rested on the carpet: i'd done it. i'd watched the whole film through. i'd understood my flawed logic through arbitrary eyes.

it was not something i knew i would be capable of.