Thursday, June 30, 2011

stable

wear a helmet because this is going to blow your mind...


(these fucking laws of physics, the way gravity works on a body trying to move through space, and the difficulties of walls and doors, maybe just the price of being stable matter...and maybe there are some of us who are more restless than others in this scheme, because we have clearer memories of the time when we were not stable, and recall somewhere what it was to be pure light.)

Wednesday, June 29, 2011

exception #22

except.
this boy, this boy i take care of, takes my mind off of my incessant need to take care of myself (it's easier than i think but when i think about it, it gets so complicated), and takes my mind off of how this still makes me sad, but this is interesting, and this is turning in interesting directions, and mentally moving my things from one place to another has gotten me to sleep at night (among other things), and considering how these altars will be placed to make things magical and turn things that look like infinity on their sides until they become perfect raw beginnings, yammer yammer yaya, and this is fine and my mind is clear and my heart is clear and clean and this week we're watching star wars from the beginning, because i only saw the very first one they made and lost interest and discovered pot and pall malls and making out in parks and cars and parked cars...and last week we watched all the harry potter movies and i liked them very much and i always thought it was funny how many santer@s like those, but then i forgot how much i like wizards of waverly place (and not for the reason you think...well, a little maybe), but we finished those, or are savoring the part one so i can be ready to see part two in the theaters when it comes out, and oh this is interesting because i kind of do like these things, even though left to my own devices i would still watch french post-structuralist films and anything with a taste of complicated gender situations, marxist sentiments, revolutionary possibilities, or ideas of how to make love and art and life blend together, anything with poetry that is poetry i like...but.
the only reason i'm putting this post in here is to say one thing: i forgot that seeing the first movies in this star wars series also means that i would be watching this natalie portman queen senator figure, which is fitting, not that there's any resemblance, not physically, only in the queenly and senatorly fashion, because i would vote for either, and if i were a jedi (all santer@s are, shh, the force is ache, shh, the road is talky today, shh), i would be pleased to serve either (in the old ways, and in some new ones, especially if there is food involved, and rabbit masks), but only it starts to hurt more than i thought, and the physical resemblance might be there, a little, but it doesn't matter because it's enough because of the lifelong comparison, that i'm trying hard not to be in my body any more when she is kissing him and he is kissing her because they might never see each other again, and seeing that makes me wish that i knew more about how long it would be before i saw her again, because if i knew it would be this long, i think i would have kissed her just a little harder, enough to remember, because sucking on  my ring doesn't pull hard enough to remember that last moment because i think i was trying to detach already because i suspected it might hurt, even if i didn't feel the last time her teeth bit my mouth until just yesterday.

Saturday, June 25, 2011

dopamine

the connections between deleuze's ideas of desire and new information about dopamine on the desire for desire are not lost in the heat of these days.  it comes in like a slow, hot mess, and we are living incarnations of the same slow, hot mess that gave birth to a hundred civilizations that learned how to adapt to the heat.  watching scorpions in the shade, looking for clues about the next great love that would take our minds off ourselves was the beginning of facebook divinations.  if god is everywhere and everything, then maybe the mercury messengers do walk thru cyberspace connections, sending the right tarot card at just the right moment, but it's also likely that there as tricky there as anywhere else.

the one thing that these tricksters all have in common is that they seem to like it when we make connections where there are none to be seen, or at least, nothing that's not simply incidental to the moment when everything is already happening anyway.  insane people tend to connect the dots faster than most, and are more prone to putting their own pictures in the frame, so it's true on some level, just very unstable.  this isn't to say that there are some real spiders crawling thru this hot web of days.

but we're easily mislead (and here, by we i do mean me), because apparently some of us have more dopamine receptors than others, and some of us don't get tired after the great love affair of the evening has played itself out on bodies, and there are always more ways to find time not to rest, not to sleep, and not to fade into ourselves.  the same thing that drives the head toward finding an answer to a question is found in the search for another true love, or something like it, and that might just mean that this cinnamon spark is a chemical reaction that we create for ourselves, but it's part of the search that keeps things moving.

i never know if i'm narcissus or echo, but when i find myself waiting for her to pull away from her own image, and counting the days, i find myself repeating myself over and over, until there is nothing left to repeat but my own last words, which may have been her words, but by now have been sampled too many times to be anything recognizable.  and i'm guilty of staring too long in the mirror myself, and like to see my image reflected in new scenes whenever i get somewhere new.  which is where this is.  and i'm waking up to see that i'm guilty of so many things, and things i don't wish to keep repeating.

i do wish i could be content to leave it all back there, to let the moment close on that particular moment, and not find the closure in one of the hundred subsequent moments that could also serve as a placekeeper.  they define things, however, those placekeepers, and none of them are sufficient for me to call them a nice poetic ending to a poetic time.  either it ends or it doesn't, or it remains somewhere in the closet of unfinished skeletons or it doesn't, but i wish i could find a more poetic ending than the one where it's selves looking at themselves in the mirror and waiting for the next right thing to reveal itself.  that next right thing never came.

in the meantime, however, there are many more howevers, and the days went on into this heat, with patterns that tell me that i didn't spend my time waiting for something that couldn't find the way to the surface, because so many other things started to show signs of possibly maybes, and at least two of these are worth following.  so i look for signs in the dirt about whether or not this is the right thing or the second best thing, not even aware that i'm starting to follow my heart, and wonder over the next right thing for right now.  it's just enough to keep me singing through the blow dryer streets, wind at my back, wind at my face, and wind entering into all the parts that want to want, and this is a body in time, this is something that was healed in time.

but every canal i pass, i see oshun there, doing rites by the water, making hair grow longer, making eyes sparkle with new charm, and making the smell of oranges enchant the mouth of something beautiful.  and i sometimes see oshun smiling at me, saying "this is where i closed this for you, because you wouldn't close it all the way, let me take care of this."  if i could look into her eyes, the eyes of that goddess, i would see as many tears as sparks of glitter, because she's tired of me doing these things over and over again.  but she also won't let me close it any further, because for some reason, she loves her just as much as i do, but being who she is, she's also becoming a little bit enchanted with new smells of the season, because she has so many children that she loves, and she's not tired of me when i'm looking for another answer, because this is when i start to make things with my hands, and the world is green again.

every altar by the canal is a shrine to something that once was, and every altar is a shrine to something that will not die, and every altar is a map to another universe, and the only thing they have in common are my footsteps, and the places where waters of longing were flowing, and water still flows in the desert, in a place that's much more mysterious than we ever thought, even on our best days, and even on our best days that haven't happened yet.

Monday, June 20, 2011

la sirena/p1 of 16

i don't know if this means anything at all, but it seems to keep seeming to want to seem like something, so i go to sleep and hope it's gone in the morning and when i wake up the first thought is that yes it's gone finally that's a good thing but then when i wake up more i know that it's obviously not true.  it's a good haunting, a fine haunting, and it makes me more courageous.  this heart is like a leopard, and it has a tooth still stuck on the edges of it, just in case there is any doubt.  listen.  i can't hear anything this morning and that's how i know i am no longer above the ground.

this is what i heard: it's a very dark and mysterious thing, this cave, this cave that reads like a morning, and written on the walls are things that i know will make sense on another morning.  these are words in a language that i speak, and these are symbols in a religion i know, and this is a sketch of something that i love.  but i also understand that from these angles, i am all aphasia, look at my thumbs all messy trying to measure the depth of the world, knowing full well that its extension is shortened considerably, and sometimes even a little numb.

but this is what i heard: this is a dark and mysterious cave.  this cave, this cave takes the place of a moment, takes over a moment, becomes more than a moment until i can start to see that my small achy neck is trying to twist and turn to see everything and taste everything, even though the crevices are all still hidden far from this particular moment.  this neck is trying to lead the body  into another moment altogether, to make love to the entire world in one fluid motion, but every time i try, the world is moving back over me and around me and becomes much bigger than i thought.  this is the arrogance of the age at work, this is the weight of the ego on the age, this is the way thumbs move through the cracks in the mystery of the age.

this is exactly what i heard: this cave, this moment, there is no difference, and no separation, and the same is said for that thing that is you and that thing that is the world, and when there is no longer a subject and no longer an object, the moment and the cave become longer, longer enough to hold themselves and you will slip through like a mermaid, the dark kind, the ones who know how to slip back and forth and create a moment on the walls that will be written on the walls by the next morning.  in this space, everything has to be forgotten, this is the space where the bottom of your feet and the calluses of your hands grow electric because they are afraid of letting go and more afraid than ever because you're just becoming aware that you already let go, a long time ago, and are just now getting around to noticing that the walls are a color altogether different, and the sky is the color it is supposed to be for the time of the day and the angles of the sun and the fact of it being the sky from inside a cave.

this is exactly what i heard:  this cave is a moment this moment is a cave and here you are going to have to leave everything that you thought you wanted or needed behind, because if you don't drown then you won't get to become the next thing, and that's more important than being conscious while dying, more important than trying to remember the last kiss of something that went away, and more important than doing what you're told.  it's always better to assume that you've been forgotten than trying to find evidence to the contrary, because no one can escape cleanly from their own lobster traps when they mark themselves publicly, over and over, as the perfect resident of the same traps.  but if you're willing to stay awake through the moment of your own death, we will take you by the mouth and drag you down under where you will be torn to pieces, but we need something to hang onto, and the edges of your words are so very nice, and just enough, and just enough flash of the spirit on your lips to grasp firmly, and down it goes like a dance between the swimmer and the sea, and we absorb and reflect and replace each other until there is no longer any difference.  and when you are done, you will need to leave everything you thought you wanted or needed.  and when you are done again, everything you love will be torn from you.  and when you are done, when you are done, when you are done, you will evolve and revolve fast enough to become the revolver and the revolution, the core and the kore, and when you wake up, you will find yourself breathing, and that means this is the best morning of your life so far.


Thursday, June 16, 2011

brothertwin

Everywhere I look I see traces of all the things you wanted to do, and all the things you tried to do.  These are the guitars that took the lightning that shot through your fingertips, and they still play songs in my belly, the rhythms of old school funk from the concerts you dragged me to in high school, and the rhythms of a brain trying to make itself feel better, incantations to rabbits come and gone from the surface of the ground, and a thousand interpretations of the Tao, madalas of a breaking mind.  This is another stack of movies we watched in high school, scenes we'd act out on holidays to make mothers and aunts laugh, freezing moments of the times you were happy.  Everything that was ever good in the world was spoken into being by John Cusack and Christian Slater, and I remember nights wearing thin from too much alcohol, and just enough acid to make a horse see tracers in the hay, and the conversations stumbled into sex and gender, and everything started to fall apart, because something in early readings of a post-feminist present meant that I was changing, and I no longer agreed with all the things that I thought we were taught.  You finished all the books, but I see places where you decided the kitchen had suddenly become too far away, and stacks of thoughts pile up until they look like everyone else's trash.  You don't live like one of those crazy old people who haven't left their houses for years, because the threads are all still there, they're still showing, and I see the logic in these remnants of paper, bottle caps, and the hundred and one empty cans of copenhagen snuff.  It makes sense to me.  Because I'm not far from you, except there are fetish objects that speak of the guilt of the survivors for surviving, because all the things I hoped to do, I do, and all the things I want to do, I'm doing, but all the things I've lost are all that I can see when I'm scraping your floors looking for clues to why you got to this moment.  On my worst days I can't get out from under your weight, and on days that are worse than those, I think I'm free of that.  They say that you have to kill the father early on, but we know what happened to dad, and that took care of that stage for me, because when he was born as someone else, without the anger and the violence, I was ready for someone new.  You always hated it when people went away, when the hundred and one disappearing women went away from you, but I learned to hate it when people went away when they were still living in the same house, when they look the same and talk the same, but they sent the shadow away and all there was left was a real broken person.  I wish I could say that I would do anything to bring your illusions back, to bring them like lost birds to inhabit the walls of your dissolving home, so you could feel the breath of spring in all of this.  But now that I'm learning some things about healing, I'm learning how not to bring those things back, and I'm learning that there are too many that I can't heal, especially on nights like these, when I'm seeing myself in the reflections of your broken pieces on the floor.  But I see traces of the things that I can keep, and the things that I can see are no longer mine.  We never got angry in our house, and now I don't know anything else but that screaming can send some of these childhood things back to their proper home, and my anger is something I can own.  It's a hard lesson, and I'm much harder to love than I had once suspected.  But I'm not going to live with these patterns of ingesting things that I don't like, and I learned that some of the things I thought I loved the most could only poison me at the end of the morning, because I don't know how to stop drinking.  It's always been easier for me to find someone who loves me, and then try to figure out how to be that person that they love, by looking for the traces of my possible reflections on their floor, or in the corner of their eye.  But my eye broke this week.  It doesn't know how to look, or doesn't know what it's looking at, and that might be just enough of a hint to keep cleaning up the mess you made, and clean myself with white chalk at the end of the night, and understand that right now, I'm just not right for anyone else to look into, because they'll only see themselves.  So I move to a small room, close to the canal, close to the mountain, close enough to feel any stones thrown at my back.  This is a mark left by a woman who went away, this is a mark made by someone who left and came back too close so that I couldn't find her, and this is the mark that I made myself, a promise to be better, and I can already see marks on the door made by lovers who I haven't seen in too long, incarnations of loves that haven't happened, and a thousand magic spells to make things sweeter, and if there are already healing songs playing in my head, this is a mistake, something that isn't getting through to this broken mind, because I don't trust a soul and fall in love with ghosts I haven't met yet.  I'm not there yet, and that love is not dead yet, and this one here, the one I hold close like an invisible present, is the only one I want to remember under this moon, but I don't know how to water it yet.  I think it's from Switzerland, but it might do well in the desert, and god, I have a feeling it would be beautiful if it ever did get planted.  But I have to keep cleaning first, and there are other knocks at the door that deserve an answer, because I think I might be getting older.

Monday, June 13, 2011

monday

this is still in the month of the day where i was born, which means that it's celebrated here as long as it's being celebrated in other parts of the world, and there's the part that lives in the folds of the ocean where the distance is such that it hits much later.  this means that there's still time.  but i won't complain.  listen.  i don't know if this changes everything, to say the things that are told to me, things that will happen, and i didn't want to say that everywhere i looked, they said that nothing interesting would happen on my birthday, and nothing would change, but that the shifts were certainly there under the ground, but i wouldn't feel them and if i waited i would be disappointed.  so i didn't wait, but i was still disappointed, because i want things to happen all the time, because i am impatient, or because i am a recovering alcoholic and that's what we do because our brains are not the most finely tuned instruments for a clear perception of reality, or because i am caught in some kind of goddam taoist nightmare where i have to keep taking part in karmic debts to pay off things that one of my ancestors did, and the only way to come to any peace is to give in to the cycles and find time to breathe to get away from this enough to see that nothing in here really matters...not to say, the pain the someone goes through, trapped in a body that is in pain, or trapped in a cell where movement is limited, or trapped in a mind that is capable of more torments than any lover could ever bring (and my threats are not big, just tall)...that matters, yes, and maybe the spirits of the energies that are old enough to be god (sic, and ha) do give a goddam about crazy thoughts making crazy people hurt so much, but i am not crazy and when i am confused, i am starting to learn, they really don't give a goddam, and back away and wait for me to come back to the ground (on top of the mountain)....and the only thing i really wanted to say, all i wanted to say, this morning, i was told, take a deep breath, because everything you were told about will start to happen, so take a breath, like a wave at high tide, it's coming, so take a breath and learn how to go with this flow, because the time of drought is suddenly over, and i don't have time to inhale just yet

Wednesday, June 8, 2011

unsettled account/p8

Enough for now to note that the plan, to get clean of all those complicated knots before they become cancers, was as intelligent and well-designed as a war, and it spun, the planet spun, and nothing made dents in the walls of memory, and the bed was as cold in the morning as it was the evening before.  The knots that could become cancer also are as likely to become a new kind of muscle, and I might need that.  I gave it to them, and she wrapped it up for me in the morning, so that it was there like a present at her feet, and she said, "This is the gift I had in mind for you all along."  It should be enough to make me insane, but somehow, I am not, or am insane enough to not realize it, and that's about the same thing (and more exciting than calculus).

I don't think this has happened before.  Not in this place, and not in this order of events.  Even if I decide that I'll go ahead and feel them in the order my heart follows, which is poisoned mad from mercury, it still doesn't create new patterns to match anything that's recognizable, or fits into any story.  There are wolves at the door, and there are wolves who need to be let inside, and there are wolves we're better off without in our closets or beds or heads, but the ones who can come clean, whispering in metaphors that are true, with blood still on their paws, and evidence of their taste for dinner still stuck in their teeth, those are the ones I will listen to, because they have something worth listening to.  This goes back to Mexico, then, this goes back to San Jose, then, and this goes back to a cave in Utah, then, and something worth listening to took place on my skin and takes place on the empty skin in my sheets, the cells continue to grow into something that might become a better story than they have been used to spinning.

But I won't complain.  I'm not complaining.  If nothing else is clear on a morning like this, a morning suitable for a birth, it's that I am entirely convinced that when my heart and my head are arguing, it's time to get out of the house until they've exhausted themselves, because in truth neither is worth listening to with any certainty or authority, especially when they are not on good terms with each other.  This morning is not one of good terms, I'm half awake in a state of grief, and half wondering what might be on my doorstep when I get back home.  Confession: I won't be home, that's just a metaphor.  Confession: the grief is not about anything I can put my finger on.  Confession: I am more Irish and Polish than I realized, and I think I am sustained, especially in times of an ill-conceived war, by swimming somewhere in grey waters, where the slow sharks are clouds beneath the surface, death is immanent, and all the children have lost their ability to play.  Confession: monstrous folk make for enchanting companions.  Confession: I don't think three is a good number, even though I saw something about this in my coffee this morning, I don't think I'd like it very much.  Confession: even so, I still have to make a phone call.  Just in case this all works out.

Except what is causing untold outrage, on a morning like this one, is the copper witch having appeared two times so far, she's always driving a toyota highlander, and she often changes the color to confuse me, but her profile is the same.  She's always taking a foto of herself, and has the screen on her phone set to where she can send it to me, but for some reason something always stops her, her daughter starts to ask her questions about soccer uniforms, a blingy boyfriend starts to talk about marriage again, or a version of herself comes back to her and asks her if I ever thought of tattooing her face to my body.  (The answer is yes, of course, but only for spite, of course, because that seems to be the only way anyone could ever forget you).

(I would never do anything so stupid as marking myself over you, and especially not the face, your face on my face or my face made more holy, it's ridiculous, a ridiculous).

((Oh my god i am getting so very old))

((I wish I thought more about furniture instead of the things I do think about, because my back would be better than it is)).

And suddenly, you send pictures on your phone, and we've entered into technology.  It seems so out of place here, that suddenly this is very much like French deconstruction, only stupider, and without the context that makes it necessary (we know it's necessary, just play along and let me be outraged by the woman in the white suv).

And suddenly, my back is crooked.  Because of the way perspective works, it's hard for people under 6 feet tall to notice, unless they are trained and skilled physicians, and I'm not among those (love hate relationship with physics, especially gravity, because I fall, and especially magnetism, because I am distracted by attractions).  But it's there, and it won't go straight, because the spine is a tree.

This tree is full of strange creatures that make peculiar sounds, especially at night, something only dogs can hear.  This morning, there are bees buzzing my head, and I know what that means, for sure, it means the birth or the death of something important, or something in between death and birth, and it won't be resolved easily, not until the hours start to play in order, not until the moments come one right after another, not until we participate in time, and right now, right this very moment, we refuse to participate, and that's how come we get to drown, forgetting that we learned how to breathe under water a long time before any of this started to take place.

And all of this has happened before.  Like a pattern on the inside of a coffee cup.  And a certain buzzard is starting to get ready to fly, spelling something in the air, some story about love, something that happened to us in time, something that is written in time, the river currents will carry me, even if I do roll over and try to sleep, and pretend this isn't the bottom of the river, and I have nothing left in me to offer.


Tuesday, June 7, 2011

unsettled account/p7

And here I would have to submit and surrender, in leather mask and all, to the notion that I might have lost the thread.  Because we are sometimes behaving like a breath, and sometimes like a wave, but there are those liminal times when we don't know what we are.  Even worse, when we don't know why we are, and the reasons for that are usually somewhere in a mirror at the bottom of the ocean.

Because I had every intention of taking enough time to spell out the spells of that copper witch more properly, to mark her marks on my body, her marks over the scars that matched on our bodies that became something entirely other during a one-night stand that lasted for too many months past the night to call it anything but entirely liminal.  And suddenly, there's this other witch, a witch of an entirely different bent, and I need to talk about her, because this is getting entirely too close to that moment when the sky will shift and my years of being entirely irresponsible are over.

Here is where I reveal the secret plannings behind all of this, that this is a way of closing out those chapters, and letting the door shut on those rooms so that cobwebs might start to gather there, and I can visit those skeletons when I'm much older.  In the year ahead I'm destined to become the person I've been marked to become, with sure steps, and no indecision, and in a body that is free of desire.

Which is all to say, this plan, it seems so very well-intentioned especially now, while it also seems obvious to me that any torment these thousand loves who have crucified me have brought to my door, they have also brought something entirely other, and I am attached, and considering that these are the things that might absolutely set me free in a new body, or rather, in the skin that I am in.  Because it seems clear to me that the only chance we have of really shedding skin and loving the sun is by inhabiting the skin fully, to live in it and love in it until it bursts open and makes room for something else.

And truly, no one crucified me or caused me pain, those martyrdoms existed certainly, but by designs that were entirely my own, and not some curse that comes with my name.

I said goodbye to the copper witch at the river, in the manner that speaks of a culture that is entirely traditional, and in the old ways.  It took months to resist going back before I could see that I had never any intention of going back, or had lost the way entirely and could not, but it took months to recognize that my goodbye was a goodbye.  And because that original ceremony made sense, I knew enough to mark the thing on my face that interprets scents the best, because I never wanted to forget.  Perhaps it wasn't at all because I didn't want to forget how painful it was to lose something precious, but because I didn't want to forget her, for in truth she did touch something buried deep inside me, and I found things inside her caves that I grew to love as deeply as an adult could in an adult's body.

In this same way, then, I have a new mark on my face that carries me into this next incarnation, and it's one that is certainly there to remember and not forget, because something in her, or in the way we moved together, unlocked my tongue, or unlocked a tongue beneath that tongue, and I could never be the same. That may be a small consolation, considering how I have never been afraid of not being the same, but rather enamored with the idea, and with its multiplicities.  But less of a concession and more in the realm of something that rather terrifies me, I saw in her that same possession of an ability to enter into multiple realms with multiple identities, and again this comes back to the idea of the twin, which is unlikely on the surface.

Fortunately I am not given to showing too many pictures here, but one glance at the two of us would be enough to demonstrate how remarkably untwinned we are, and this would be enough to let me rest if it were over, if it were over, but I don't think it is, or at least, I have strong suspicions that it's not.  In order to make the dull gray of the days before I turn into something that registers in the marrow of the marrow, I have been visiting old friends to discuss the magic of blood, and work out the contradictions of love.  Only there are no offers for new skulls to examine, and no spirits jumping from candles and coconut shells to tell me to say goodbye in the old ways, but only comments that we look unlikely to some, but to others, it resembled that thing that only very young children have of making angry people smile suddenly, a recognition that this was a perfect match.

It's a hideous thought.

Because it reminds me of some movie where the man with the bulbous nose and matty hair was running through the streets of Seattle, no less, having woken up to the thought that it was true love, and true love is something for the tea party types to diddle themselves over, because it means something stable.  I can't know all that I am, or all that I'll be, but stability has never appeared to me like a unicorn in a garden, flirting with me to get me to leave (and find a steady job, and give up art, and lock my magic in an attic, and procreate).  The only one who could, in fact, ever turn my head, was that same river goddess, coming with bangles on her ankles and a brass belt on her waist, churning imaginary tides that speak of honey in the near future.  The notion that this goddess is there to bring the man who works with iron out of his shed in order to begin a civilization is rather charming, and perhaps true, but not in any tea party sense of the word, but the most essential thing here is that this very goddess is herself quite mad, fucking insane really, and as stable as mercury.

Which is where this should come to an end, in a pool of mercury, because we don't know who or why we are, and the moment we do, that will surely change, and that's the way it needs to be.  But at the moment, the moon is at my back, but appears in the window in front of me, to remind me that if I know what I'm doing, I am a fucking fool, and there are better things to do than wait for her steps outside my door.

That thought has been enough to make me decided to change my door, and go somewhere deep into a complicated and populated city, where she can't find me.  And that thought sounds right enough, although I know for certain that the pirate in me will soon enough draw her a map on her doorstep in white chalk.

The moon will be in that map, because the moon was always watching over us, and I would not be a good heathen practicing the old ways if I did not honor this mother-father who lights up my head at night.  And if she were at the door, I would not open it, not for at least ten seconds, and then I don't know what will happen, it seems as though it would have to be enormously important and carry the weight of all of our tears, or perhaps it is simpler than that, and perhaps we are only required to play the games that children play in the forest, and let the next moment decide what the next moment needs to be.

I'm not done yet.  But I might be done for now.  

unsettled account/p6

That might be a very unclear way of me wondering that it would be nice to say that now, somewhere far away from everything and everyone who are involved in this business of haunting, I miss her energy, the pleasure of being around her, that her presence alone was what I was attached to, and not her kisses, and the things that lie beneath the kisses waiting for more of the same and deeper and longer and suddenly the air hits these exposed nerves and there is something new in the world.  But any resisting reader, or those tending toward a more sheep-like and obedient nature, that is to say, most anyone, would recognize that I am a liar.  There may have been a personality there that spoke to mine, and there may have been ideas about revolution and witchery that coincided with my own urgings in these directions, but the magnets were fixed in the clitoris and its counterpart.  Not to say there was no heart involved.  That would take a strange leap of faith into a sad and evangelical realm, altogether christian even, in order to align with a system of reason, and the systems of reason at work here are of a peculiar West African bent, and I've already told you.

As much as I would like to be clear and straightforward, there is born in this moment a need to skip around a bit in time.  Those who know me well know me as a very precise teller of very linear tales, and I like nothing better than to argue about things in a very logical manner, as spelled out by all the great Arabian philosophers and metalworkers of other times.  However, it's already tomorrow when I have to shift, and although I am likely to continue then in this, just in case I don't continue, I want to get these minor discrepancies in.

The first minor discrepancy in the story is the suggestion that this certain copper witch would hold a particularly high regard in the history of this skin, and perhaps the highest, and perhaps that's true, but perhaps there are other kinds of witches one might meet on the mouthless road, and those who might be eclipsed are often given to redoubling efforts to stay in the horizon line, but the sky changes, and everyone has to go to bed sometime.  The minor discrepancy here is of another nature altogether, beginning with the idea that this copper witch was the one who made it impossible to ever love so deeply ever again, which is to say, to love without reservation and to enter into a moment with utter abandon.  Here the moment is appearing to appear more and more as if it were the shape of the opening to the uterus, however, and that kind of visual metaphor should invoke a rereading and a rewriting, so that the repetition of the eyes will be very much like repetitions of the pelvis, love is always something different and new even though the muscles might be almost exactly the same, but it's always something new, and always something entirely not new at all.  The pulse we were born on is the pulse we connect to, and when it's the most unavoidable is when we, some of us, are alive the most, which is to say, this is a very conservative story because it is so much based in tradition.

This leads to where I would like to say everything stopped there, because it's so nice to say that I met this one person and she made it impossible for me to love, and I carry a torch for her, and that's how I will die, although it's not at all true.  At least not entirely.  Because although it may have taken a few moments of fluttering like a moth around the moon, following the ebbs of her 28 day river cycles, to come to the conclusion that my heart had been marked, it took the same time to be entirely opened up in another direction, in that way one gets transfixed and revolved, in a real revolution, when one meets their twin face to face.  Or better, face to face and the tongues inside and outside the body making variations on the theme of the rhythm and pulse of life.  But twin is the operative word rather than pulse, or perhaps there is no difference in words, or suffice to say, there is one who made me stupid because she was more like me than I suspected could live in a body outside of mine, and this meant that the other endless love was not the end of every love that I had hoped for.

We all want to be or to have the apocalypse for someone, to show that their heart is as powerful as the river that is home to the goddess of love in the world, and it would be nice to consider that a possibility, but the river rewrites us and introduces new currents and creatures all the time to introduce the idea that she, the goddess, is the only true love, and she introduces this idea over and over again because it is true, and to forget it will make her angry enough to drown you.

For me, drowning has been something to take the form of my ego telling me that I deserve to be treated better, or in the form of my friends telling me that this particular person is not who she seems, or, on the worst nights, in the form of me asking for advice from those who don't have time for the fluids of love on their skin, who need to shower constantly when they are in public, and generally don't believe that being a witch and being in love are compatible (for whatever reason, because it can exist among heathens and boring biblethumped heads in the same breath and wave).

Oh for fuck sake I have to leave this for another important moment, but suffice for now, before I am 44, there is one who held the moon in her mouth, and her mouth was empty enough to hold the moon, and I could see all my poetry in there, except that it came back in her words, that is to say, she held a mirror that showed me myself on the bottom of the sea, and the reason she had this is because she spent most of her time there, too, and we met to try to find each other there, but in truth, we didn't meet there until after I had turned 44, which is to say, my tongue is more than long for her, it longs.  

Saturday, June 4, 2011

unsettled account/p5

This s not a bell.

It's probably important to mention somewhere in here that I am a witch.

Witch or warlock it doesn't really matter, it's not in that neo-pagan sense of the term, with spells and magic circles and the things of old Europe, this is a particularly Caribbean version of a West African kind of knowledge that writes over some of the Polish and Irish skin to make itself visible, but enough of a palimpsest to make it complicated, and difficult to live in a world where things like appropriation are real enough to kill, but also in a time and place where questioning usual realities is expected, but entering into unusual realities is deeply suspect.

But there's nothing really unusual about it, it's just nature, which is extraordinary and remarkable, sure, but hardly unusual, because it happens all the time, and has been happening for more than six thousand years.  In an oral society the knowledge is passed boca a boca, and in a time and place where these things are shifting, learning is shifting, and it's surprising how much reading is involved.  The real work, however, is when there are two or more Santer@s gathered in one or some of four hundred names, and white clothes are everywhere and heads are covered.  In garages and living rooms there are ways of turning any place into what might be called a church, and it was in one of these rooms where all these things I was told came true.

I'm still new, which is what I always like to say about anything, even if it's not true, and I was talking to my godfather in the car, wondering who we were about to meet, because I'd been haunted by a series of dreams of the dead, telling me to pay attention to what was about to happen, and that something like love would be born soon.

They didn't tell me that this something like love couldn't be called love in a way that would make anyone involved very comfortable, and in fact the more it looked like love the sooner it would die and turn into something else.  Maybe I just have a pattern of meeting people who like to be very precise with words, and perhaps the problem is one that only exists in English, when there are too many words for the same thing, or too many talk shows about how these things we think are love are actually something else.  But it's not less complicated in Portuguese, and it doesn't lose its ability to confuse in any other language I've heard of.  But again, I'm new, and there are a lot of languages I don't know yet.  Someone once explained to me that in some of the African languages we work in, love and sex are the same thing, and the idea of separating them out is a particularly European way of trying to make things more proper for when people are sitting in church pews and trying not to think about fucking each other.  It might be true, but it might also be less confusing if the word were removed altogether, because things tend to fall apart when it comes up, someone either runs which is painful, or someone gets married which is terrifying.

I didn't know that she was learning about the secrets of the dead when I wanted to melt my face and body over hers until she melted, too, but it made sense later, and I could go to Europe and say that this was the source of the attraction, but there was something in this movement of this particular body that told me that I needed to get as close as I could to her, and like a flamingo falling on top of her we spoke about ranch dressing, enough to let me know there really wasn't much to say, if I thought about it.  But there's something in this mystery where Obatala loves Oya the most, a kind of magnetism between deep creation and deep destruction where both parties know that they are, at root, exactly the same, and this is when root wants to touch root, and chakras can unlock in yoga or they can unlock by unlocking each other in a way entirely unmetaphorical, but that would not happen for at least another week.  (It took so long).

There was nothing more to say about ranch, and there never will be, unless you are entirely stupid and spend Saturdays at wal-mart to make life better for the whole family, but there is something in the spice that can make things happen beneath the tongue, and I wanted to lure her with my tongue, so something about the wind in the air made it easy to begin letting words fall like teeth.  I don't think she ever half suspected my mouth was filled with so many teeth, and in truth I never suspected she had the same thing, or perhaps, the poet in her was untapped, or perhaps, I hope this isn't true, I sucked the poet out of her, but I don't think that's true.

All I do know is that in all my time of learning spells, I have not been able to recognize when I am under one, or at least not in a way that lets me know that I will be acting against my better interests, and perhaps I am grateful not to know how to recognize this, because it makes it much easier to turn into another being entirely in the dark.

There was a time, I think I remember, when I was barely old enough to drink, where nights with someone I was fond of could last well into the morning, and I had heard that this capacity gets dimmer with age, so that by the time a gentleman like myself would experience a gradual decline where by the time we are forty, desire comes and goes like the desire to fix squeaky furniture, and I wonder if she half-suspected this would be how it would come to be with me.  It would have been much easier, I think, for her to have the affair she was looking for if it had been like this, and it would have been easier to say goodbye to her by the sea when it was over if our nights had been made up of some small caresses and occasionally a moment or two of some distant, deeper pleasure.  But in truth, it was that same version of reality only turned inside out, where there were times when the furniture itself seemed to cry with pleasure and beg for mercy and wonder how this could go on for so very long.

The short version of the introduction to this, then, is that she liked the poem, and it wouldn't be the last one I wrote to her.  I would very much like to say that her soul kiss was like an introduction itself, and that it was only a hint of the hunger in the world, because if it were the deepest felt, then it would be difficult to continue living in a body.  But there are other things besides kisses that make life worth living, and more kinds of sugar than what's eaten fresh off the cane.  However, the things I would like to say are not always the things that I will say, and some of the best things I have to keep buried in my chest, because they would hurt to much to say on the road of the world.


unsettled account/p4

This is all leading up to a certain moment, we were in a cafeteria where they served the worst breakfast in the world.  Austrian gourmet cooking finally taking its place before Irish cuisine in the world's most bland culinary contributions.  I don't remember the pretense, it might have been after a particularly lengthy investigation into vampire signs that signified that behind the veils of mystery there was only a fiancee, a fiancee who was as interesting as the food in front of us.  Your sleepy eyes were tall in the room, carried by your sleepy body and the way we said hello, it said hello, it said hello, and made a canal for its echo.

A year later I'm in Berlin at a table with the Boricua contingency, smoking elegantly and talking about revolution, so it would be in the air when you arrived, sleepy from the airport, I remembered your eyes from that other moment, and decided that the geographies of my heart were endless roads in all directions, and opened up when there were spaces for these echoes.  Because it happened twice, it was supposed to happen in time, and because it was supposed to happen in time, I thought that maybe it could happen to us.  I talked about you in a musician's flat in Kreuzberg, and wondered about how threads might work, and I couldn't see any connections, but held the possibly maybes under my tongue, and sucked my tongue with thoughts of you.  I didn't yet understand the mysteries of saliva, because I was so young back then, a wide-eyed boy of 41 years with nothing but a dream.  The threads in Kreuzberg did unwind in our direction, smiling on the hips of a river goddess, and still wouldn't reveal all their complicated configurations 17 months later, in a room full of Oshun's, and a child of Oya outside the door who would haunt me in all the right ways for a long time after her feet left the bed (this is really just a complicated way of saying: it's ok to walk on my bed).

That dream of you lasted for only a few nights, and played out for a hundred days, and I looked for you in places where I could never find you.  But I found a golden chord one night in the middle of a moment that could turn into art.  I followed gypsy longings into that cave.

There's a lot of caves in this story.

The caves opened up to caves behind the caves, like they always do, and every cave has its own dream of water and the end of the world.  In these dark nights, punctuated by no heat and a lack of a blanket that was not also a dog, the dead came speaking, and when they came speaking to me, they told me to clear out my accounts, because something was coming that would tear me to pieces in all the right ways, and I listened.

(Sequence out of time: sometime in the future, there's a particularly twitching night, where I'm sleeping in too much light and not sleeping, and wondering about all the people coming into the room next to my room full of ghosts, and I keep wondering if you're going to slip in between them, and crawl to my door with an expression on your face that I won't understand, and I'm decided that I'm not going to open up these wounds for you, but I'd only hold you for a long time, and we'd promise not to say a word about the other things that we didn't say, that other people were apparently trying to say for us, and I know those things weren't true, the things they said I said, and said you said, and how we were supposed to deal with that, because it was so important to them, but we wouldn't speak of it, and I wouldn't let you in, only hold you, I was decided, and you were camping, and this would unnerve me because it meant that everything that was true before was still true, and it would be exhausting but I would see your soul in a coffee cup and wish you could see it, and you did.  This is already way too far in the future, though, and hasn't been mulled nearly enough, it needs at least a day, maybe even two if I can be patient; maybe this is all about teaching a wild horse to rest).

It wouldn't make sense a year ago or more that the dead are the ones who open up the pathways for life to continue, but today it makes sense, or at least, if it doesn't make sense, I know it's true.  There have been more than enough nights spent smoking cigars under the moon to know that the bottom of the sea is inhabited, and there are very few among the living who can catch a glimpse, and they only get there by riding on the backs of the dead.  My ancestors are my whales, and those clicks on the sides of wooden boxes are their songs.  Sometimes they are as frustrated as I am that we can't sleep with each other, and for this, they seem peculiarly capable of throwing people into my life to take their place, people that have the gift of second sight, and more than a little bit of knowledge of what to do with the fire that burns below the belly.

In this way, then, that year was cleared, and I was told that I only had one responsibility, to remember everything, and one action, to make grave errors of judgement that would lead to the story that could write itself on the channels of my heart.  It would hurt, but I would not die, and if I decided not to hurt, then I would certainly die, so it was without any hesitation that I walked into the next year, no songs on my lips, nothing on my lips but the foam from a train station somewhere in the middle of east Berlin, where we still walk among the figures of the dead, close enough to Eastern Europe to wake up my blood, and still closer to Latin America, where I fall in love with people to fall in love with its unwinding history.

This next section is a lot like a bell, so much so that you could even say that it is a bell.




unsettled account/p3

Outside of any of these frames, we might not exist at all.

These things need a pretense for beginning, so that they have weight, so that they have depth, so that they have some place to begin, or maybe that's all, just an anchor for a beginning, otherwise we would all be like nervous flamingos, pecking around each other until one falls over on the other and a new love story can begin.  My best days are marked by an impossible relationship with gravity, where my closest relationships with men began with an extraordinary spill (a pint of stout, a bottle of habanero sauce).  My closest loves are marked with extraordinary spills that fly through rooms like the same flamingos in an earthquake, and that's all just a complex way of saying something simple, these fluid relationships are made from fluid and we are fluid and at the end of the day we are as much water as we were at the beginning, and no death is worse than dehydration.

This pretense, this particular moment in Berlin, began in another country, close to where Hitler was born, and suddenly this story has so much more weight, because that name was mentioned.  And it's true, and there are caves where he was collecting Jewish art that have been turned into more subversive displays against forgetting, and in this scenario, I found myself thinking of you, only you, except it was not you, because you were a bit of a vampire from Slovenia then, in those days, in those times, and there is someone out there who still is.  She had the same name as the Nazi's girlfriend (and maybe this is why I am particularly drawn to anyone who begins by refusing to be a girlfriend, although it would make the garden parties so much easier), and that name reminded me of a German-Irish vampire who was only 25 percent Jewish, that is to say, as much as me (I think).

The other, the first vampire (first of the new century, because there were so many in the 80s, or rather, KVD held most dear to the staked heart), unfolded paper mermaids in my bed but they wouldn't be born for another three years.  This one also made a moat around the canals of my heart that made it possible for things to flow later on, and so in this regard, she is very much like the Hohokam, not just because she wants to be, because she once had a dream catcher hanging from her rear view mirror.  She now folds in on a cave where Hitler collected art, and she becomes you only in a vague resemblance, because you share 98% of the same dna.  She liked her coffee sweet though, not sugar sweet, caramel sweet, and that should have been enough of a portent that it would go bad, but here is maybe the only thing that is true: I always see things going bad, that's where I can tell the future, and I'm always right.  It's not in the sense of how we all die and we all decay and meet the worms in the earth eventually.  And not in the sense that I'm afraid of something close, so I write these endings in my head before they happen, and then they happen, on their own or because I push them there.

No, it actually is like that exactly, in that sense, and I don't know if I pushed or was pushed, but I am sleeping alone these days, and I don't mind it a bit, because the twitching is working itself out in private, but I wonder which was which and where I stepped and where I got stepped on, and before I let it rewrite me for the fingernail scratchings of another year, I want to make things right where I was wrong, and write the things that are raw,  and wrap the things that write in rites.

There's a fine line between clever and stupid.


this just in

Friday, June 3, 2011

unsettled account/p2

The story shouldn't have a beginning, but it has to happen in time.  When it's three in the morning and every ghost is finding their strands of hair in the bones in the sheets, it always seems like time is an enemy, and by the morning it always seems as though there was always just enough time.  These things start where they have to start and end somewhere in a place where everything is broken.

So this could start easily enough in Berlin, and maybe it should, and it should continue somewhere south of Tijuana, and it might decide to end somewhere between two cities that don't make many histories in the list of important events of the centuries.  It doesn't mean they don't write on skin, however, and they might even write in deeper layers of skin.  History is always written in the skin, and the ones who get inscribed are usually the ones who hurt the most, because they sense that these events might be forgotten.

It's a peculiar narcissism to think this needs to unravel before I turn another year older, but it's a gift to myself so that I can see these lines making connections to the multiple lines of flight these loves have taken.  It's a gift to remember and to be remembered, even though I'm not in a position to give anyone anything worth having these days.  But you marked me so deeply, that the nights are getting longer, even though I sleep with a clear conscience.   I still itch, the lines cause me to scratch myself in my sleep, again, hoping that the skin might flake off in enough frozen forms to make a form that I can speak to.

It's an uneasy incantation, because there are certain hopes and desires buried here that would be difficult to navigate if they ever came back.  And even though I might know some things about magic, charms and spells that can make energies shift in one direction or another, the truth is that I'm still very new to this, and I don't really understand why it works when it does work.  More often than not, lately, it works exactly the way that I ask it to, which is to say, I'm discovering that getting what I want means getting things that I don't need or can't really have.  It's a delicate balance that I might know better when I'm a little older, but not a year from now, or five years from now, certainly not a week from yesterday.

So I want to invoke you, but I don't want to wake you, because I remember how you get when you're interrupted in the middle of things.  For what it's worth, I'm infinitely interruptible, at least when it comes to you, and I would drop everything to taste a cappuccino from San Jose.

I remember some impossible nights in sheets that didn't belong to us, and the way we had to figure out how to use a pre-war washing machine.  You understood it much better than I did, because I almost broke screws trying to open the lid with a coin, and it was much, much simpler than that, and its mechanics were not hard to grasp, if I could grasp the mechanics of anything.  But I think I would give most anything to hear the stories about your Polish side, meetings in France, and the inevitability of love that crosses over borders.  France and Poland would come back later, and they probably always will, and they had a place before I met you.

But it wasn't until we were like Sara and Bob, walking along by the old canal, talking about form, and something in your eyes made my heart start to skip, and I thought it might be the perfect moment to kiss you for the first time.  We knew where the night would end, because we were orphans without any other place to go, but maybe we didn't know how, until we followed the designs that were laid out at our feet. Berlin streets wrote us before we wrote on them with our bodies.

Kisses in a flat in Kreuzberg, and an ending at a metro station, in between with Santeria chicken scratchings and a thousand impossible art projects, it was easy because the ending was already put in place, and for the middle, all we had to do was connect the dots.  It flutters beneath the sheets of my bed like a rooster from a Russian truck driver.  You didn't trust my magic, and so I didn't use it, and if I knew what I was doing I could conjure you up with a circle of white chalk and a little cigar smoke, but you're somewhere on the other side of the camera, marking moments that I'm trying to inscribe, because I'm arrogant like that, and sometimes you could see fire in that arrogance.  Your humble designs and colors on canvas and cotton betray a fire in you, and that's the fire that woke me up to remembering that I remember how to do this.  I am a fan of elegant endings, because my own are always so sloppy, and more paint is spilled on the edges than actually makes it to the spaces inside the frame.


Thursday, June 2, 2011

unsettled account/p1

It's been like that for 45 days at least.  The sky turns from the color of the far side of the ocean to the color of the shallow parts of Ocean Beach, and her face is pressing against my side and she's moving her body in a dream about dancing, and I'm already awake, and when she finally comes to and opens her eyes, she's crumbling.  That's what skeletons do, and my bed is full of dust.   Please forgive me if this is too emo, please forgive me if this is too much like something out of something that I might write.

I would like nothing better than to take the dust and place it in a glass of water and honey, and wait for the five days it would take to turn it back to bundles of hair.  I think I should be more unsettled by the idea that this is what I would like the most.  I also think that after three years of poring over the impossible inscriptions on skin, that doing the work of magic is the only right thing to do as these perpetual motion machines are all coming to a stop at the same time.

It might seem lonelier than it actually feels, populated as it is with the hundred impossible ghosts who could never write enough on my skin, which is becoming more elastic with each passing moon.  I keep myself taut, because I am apparently unteachable, so the only chance for learning will come through skin and not through any higher mental functions.  Or rather, it is enacted through the tongue, and not the thing that tells the tongue what to say.  I don't know when these things separated, the "I am therefore I am" that got tangled up with undecided impulses, and on most days I am not very grateful for the things that broke me, but I am grateful that I am broken.

I know it lived somewhere in the margins of a book by Zoe Valdes before it got born in me, written on my skin in longing, then in metaphor, then in that peculiar lover's dew that haunts us all when we're stuck between cars, parked by the ocean, and hoping that it's not the police behind us because our skin is not the kind of dry that they like to see by the sea.  I made a list of the things I would lose in this life when my daughter was born, because I wanted to understand that it takes more than food and time to make flesh solid, and love is loss as much as anything.  We don't know where the parts of us go when they do go, poured over skin or kept in pockets or taken in the middle of the night when we're sleeping.  We don't know what happens to the gifts that we give, thinking they are unconditional and pure, but are covered with thorns intended to keep the other pricked and remembering our names, in case they might whisper them accidentally when the next lover comes around.

The next lover always does come around, and the next lover always writes over what we did, and at times it is very much like we are as base and as complex as wolves, and entirely territorial.  It's written in patterns of jealous blood even when the discourse might speak of unconditional surrender and attachment without strings.  And it's writing on me very hard, these days before I get rewritten into a year marked by double Iroso, that there are certain ethnic distinctions among the animals that we are becoming, that make me believe that I'm not at all color blind, so if I say that I do find the Mexican wolf so much sexier than the Canadian wolf, it's because I am entirely racist when it comes to my animal nature, and I know what I like.

What makes me more sad, however, than finding my own boundaries are more present than I'd suspected, is that the next lover might not write as much as me, or as well, but when it's written, my memory stands a good chance of being erased entirely.  That is to say, it may live somewhere in thought, but not in the skin, and the tongue sometimes speaks of longing because it is trying to capture what is no longer there.  That is to say, I didn't know I was writing on her, but now that I see it, I have become very attached to the writing, just in time to watch it disappear.  On the mornings when I am waking up with skeletons, I hope that the disappearing ink is the kind that might light up with enough light, the kind that a full moon can bring, but I can't trust in anything, at least not this week.

And just for today, I won't drink, and I won't trust humans who never walk in animal skin, and if I had any control over my nostalgic tongue, I would promise not to miss her, but I have no control over that.

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