Wednesday, August 31, 2011

cgs/y post-love-structures

this is the mark from where i was trying to put myself back together while driving in a rainstorm, and the tire left the road for a moment and i skidded a little bit but i didn't die.  this is the mark i got from a very late night in a country far away from this one, falling on the sidewalk on the way home (you know how sidewalks are in that town), and i didn't notice it til the next day.  this is the mark that stayed on my hand after i was reading about the fruits in your center with electricity in the dark, and the next day it transferred from my hand to my own belly that was sick with anxiety, and it wasn't until a week later and long after you'd left that i realized that it looked like the country you live in.

if i could ask the world to speak to me in simpler rhymes, i would, but i know by now it won't listen the way i want it to listen.  i want simple scenes by a canal where there's something running through the blood, but that's all ghosts and verspertine wishes, and i get letters in foam, complex letters, or one letter that is more complex that i once thought, because it has so many places to travel, and apparently so do you, and apparently so do i, and i wonder about the we, and how that might fit if we tried it on.  we don't have to worry about looking ridiculous in a different kind of dress-up, not from this far away, because we can send the best pictures, the ones that make us to be the reflections of what we are wanting to become.

but there's more to it than that, there always will be.  for this, the short version is that i went to the water and asked her to take things away from me, things i didn't want, things i didn't think i needed: this lover was too heavy from the weight of her own indecision, this one was too heavy from her list of acquired reflections of painful identities that connected her and cut her open all at the same time, and this one, the one you lived in when we were in another country, it was very light and it held something that i didn't expect to see, not like clothes that still fit, more like a wardrobe of costumes that had barely been worn but still held the secrets of our saliva and our sweat, the kind that doesn't wash out in german washing machines, and when i woke up the next morning, i found myself wondering if you changed at all, and if your hair was still red.

and when the more to that came back to itself, and revealed itself as even more than that, i swallowed the best parts of the jewel on my lip, and let it start to glow inside my throat, and by the time it reached my heart, i was already in the sea, and i was already in the sea, and i was awake and in love and dreaming, and i thought of you and the way the sea makes patterns in your hair that remind me of the sea, and the burning in my veins is coming in rhythms of seven, and this is the night that i woke up and remembered that we are both children of so many different seas.

Wednesday, August 24, 2011

cgs/& the hospital is everywhere i see

This is all because of a certain love for owls.  It started with the one that flew over the roof of my car when I was seventeen.  It was at my best friend's house, and his mother was dying, and it was obvious that the owl knew this before we did.  It was not my mother, and not my owl, and not even my car.

I didn't even own a car until I was 33 years old, and already a father, at that young and tender age.  I don't own a daughter, and I don't want to own anyone's daughter.  But it's so nice to meet you here, because every daughter is interesting, and every son has a story about their fathers that they can't talk about. 

I don't know exactly how to connect everything I want to connect to owls, but I know it's there somewhere.  Every father dies eventually, and I might have thought once that if I never became a father, I would never die.


Tonight I'm not afraid of dying, but I am very reluctant to do it, because it looks like so much trouble, especially on the living.  It's like watching someone getting ready to go on a trip across the seas, they look panicked and lost and there are too many details, but you know that at the moment the plane leaves the ground, they'll be on it, with their passport ready and enough to get there, and the rest can be figured out once they get there, that all the details they were scrambling for are the ones that you will have to live with the next morning, and start again to put a life together again.

There were owls' eyes looking at me through the clouds tonight, and I saw one sitting in the backyard of the boy I take care of, and there are owls on all of my daughter's shirts these days.  Owls taught me so much over the years, and Oya teaches me all the things that I never thought I needed to know.  Oya watches the heads of those who get tangled up in the tango of their own storms, and Obatala watches the heads of those who are beyond untangling, the ones who never make it back from over the ocean, but are still required to live out a certain number of years in that head, in that body.

But I learned how to escape my own head, and I learned how to enter back into it for all the most crucial scenes of my life so far.  When I am very tired, or when the day is grown too long with a relentless heat that tries to make tracks on my back, like that unwanted lover who comes back with fire in her eyes and no plans for anyone but you, I look for the most likely birds.  The ones who are most likely to lift my aching heart out of my body for a rest, I give them all my wishes, and all my desires.  This is because I've learned lately not to trust anyone or anything that doesn't speak to me with the right balance between symbols and numbers, and I can't open this memory for even a moment, because the things of the blood will open to the air and change color at just the wrong moment.

Despite the need to lean toward the salty sides of the scale, where bitterness holds its rewards in tasting its lessons, there is enough sweetness here to make the days burn with a blue and quiet fire.  Sweetness holds its own reward in the tasting, but I've also learned not to trust in it for too long, because it often hides more than it reveals.  And I'm starting to get more annoyed than surprised when my machines talk to me after midnight, tying our tongues impossibly with messages that we can't understand.

There is no death in a night like this.  Death is always around, looking for someone to take, but tonight I've sealed the doors and won't answer calls from anyone who doesn't know my combination, the one that keeps doubling impossibly with the weight of a destiny.  But if there is anything to hope for in honey that's been open for too long, it might do well to wait for another day or five, because the lines are tangled and I can't see what I'm supposed to say that will make things turn again.

This life might very well be a glass bead game played by children, and we might be better players if we just learn to live in silence for awhile again, trust the breath, and send only small inaudible messages between birds and cats, the ones that say I hope you are still breathing, because on clear mornings, your breath is the sweetest thing I know in this world. 

cgs/& es un poco complicado

primavera parte
 
mejor que empezar con mi mismo, mejor k empezar con mi mismo en espaƱol, el rostro de mi en el otro lado del espejo...porque, esto es la cosa, la chingada cosa es esto:  no te entiendo, y no me entiendes, y no se si la importa es aki en el piel, o debajo de la tierra donde estamos nadando cada noche sin limites, sin fin...y tu, tu eres en mi boca no en mi cabeza, tu eres sobre mi lengua como el Real de lacan, y no puedo encontrarte en el cuarto de los perros abandonados...ella tiene una pelicula en la mano, es amores perros, por k tambien somos lo k hemos perdido...y la otra tiene cartas en la mano, preguntandome, 'leerme por favor por k no lo se donde estoy ni donde voy,' y la otra esta bailando y aunque no lo recuerdo nada de tango ni mango ni algo de supongo, estoy olvidando poco y poco menos cada dia.

seguro parte

so you come flying, again and again, you come flying over my shoulders like a banshee in the middle of the funeral, and you come to announce a death that is immanent, and if i tell you that you are much too late for your announcement to have any weight (after all, we are already at the funeral and everybody knows that someone died), you might be offended, and so i tie my tongue in a knot (like they do in those talkie pictures that you sell in the back room)...so you come close to me in the middle of the storm, and your hands are covered with secrets scripts and signs that you want me to interpret, and this is the day that my vision decreased by half again.  i see less and less because i know where i'm going by now (whether i know that or not it's still true).  so i can't read your hands today, and i don't want to, because to bring them close will only make me miss them.  and still you come flying, and my heart is still left on the rock where i was praying last night, and if you get to it before i do, you might do a spell over it, or you might try to eat it, or you might, and this is the most likely path to take, you might hold it with a plan in mind and then forget the plan and start speaking to me about something that i don't quite understand, about the sound of bells on a waist and how they remind you of something and i'll remember that this sound is important, a very important thing, and we'll both talk for half an hour about this very important thing, and it will be a moment to forget in the history of moments everywhere, and i might get to leave with my heart if i can grab it when you're not looking.

you keep falling asleep in the sun, i wish you wouldn't sleep out here, not on this day, this is that part of the year when it's much easier to die than we might think, and i lose people this time of year all the time.  we both grew up here and know the rules of this place.  once you cross the mountains, all the usual rules are off, and the only thing that applies here is that we have to stay hungry, and we have to drink everything we see and every chance we get.  you keep falling asleep on the edges of a bare mattress, one that you'd planned on moving into a new house by the end of the year a long time ago, and i keep falling asleep on the same mattress in a different room.  the bee that stings my hand stings you, because there is no difference between you & i, and it might not matter so much that your name keeps changing all the time.  i still know you, i knew you before you were born, and when you show yourself to me, i fall in love, and when you hide from me, i miss you, and we both might know that i'm more or less as complicated as that.  and you still know me, even when i fold in half and half again, and become something else by the time you've turned my insides outside.  today i have the name of the boy you knew when you were starting 8th grade, and tomorrow i might have the same lips of that girl that left you by yourself for too long and you were always wondering if she'd ever come back, and when you fall asleep you'll see me come swimming under the foundations of your house, a knife in my teeth, because i would fight all the crocodiles in your moat to prove that i am still your soul mate.

triceratoparte

women and men grab my 7 head bones looking for injuries, 7 women and men shoot white light into my eyes, looking for the disc at the back that tells them there is no disease here.  the only injury is the wearing out through time, the way the years have of making things that are close to the eyes so hard to comprehend.  on a day like this, where it's 46.7 degrees celsius, it's harder to see outside or inside, because at this extreme, we are all dying and no one wants to admit it.  so i can't see even more than i can't see, and i remember something, something in march or april, something about seeing, and how that was important, and i think about how much i miss that maybe, or perhaps it didn't happen on the skin but somewhere under the sea.  and maybe that was the moment my eyes started to fail, and the world started to grow dimmer after that, and when you left, there was no reason to look because there was nothing left to see, and that there is an old and senile version of me who took my place, and he believes all of this, and he also believes that his eyes are not getting better even though you came back, because you never really came back.  chances are good that the senile version of me and the one writing this right now both believe that to be true, because nothing can prove it otherwise, because the fotos are doctored.  but there is also enough evidence to see that the eyes started to fade a year ago, when you were making fun of my eyes when i tried to see something on the other side of the beach, and tried to remember the last kind thing you said, and i decided that i wanted to stop looking for a little while and go to sleep for a little while.

either which way, none of this makes any difference in a hospital, none of this matters when there is a hospital, and there are old men and women being pushed in carts, with medals on their chests, only no one remembers how to read any of the words on the medals.  the whole world responds to them by paying attention to the shine, and when the shine is gone, there's nothing left to see.  this is where i hear about what happens to organs when they get old, the things that purify the blood, how they get tired, and how they stop doing what they are supposed to do, and how some have electricians and some have plumbers and there are jobs for everyone when you get that deep into the body. 

the body has things that we can't possibly understand.  the body has parts that keep doing work without judgment and despite and grudge or memory of what took place there yesterday.  the body forgives in a way that most people can't even approach, and when it's done, it starts to break down.  today the future then is not so very important.  this functions and that functions and i'm sad that this part is gone but i didn't expect it to come back and among the living there are these people and this dog and that kind of bee, and this is that part of the year when it's hot enough to burn the surface off and turn the layers back to that the only thing that is revealed is love, and all is love, and for these few passing moments, the only rule that we can possibly obey with any grace is love, and the day begins and ends with love and that's all there is in the in between, and all that anyone can see.



Monday, August 22, 2011

cgs/y the boys in the band so handsome and silent type like

this is just an outline.
she leaves and he panics, mothers and fathers, this is how it is here (it doesn't have to mean it's me).  it's the anniversary of their wedding, and she is going to the beach and he is going to the hospital, and they both offer to the 3rd son a chance to look at the wedding pictures...black and whites of 1964, beautiful people in hornrim glasses...priests looking like priests look before they grew beards and started looking like like like jesus or something (that was a fad that lasted just a short time in this part of the world)...people posing and quoting how people look in wedding fotos...parents of the bride and groom looking a little wise and happy so happy and delighted and a little bit proprietary, and the kids are looking so wonderfully grateful to be part of this new family...wedding fotos of people who are pretending to be people posing in wedding fotos...this is a time when women had a little extra junk in the trunk, and men slicked back their hair like marlon brando with heat in his fists...snap pictures a moment before everything unwinds and we all fall apart, spinning out of control like rubber bands inside a baseball, and we all fall apart...
this is the first time it's been inhabiting the world of men for a long time, mom is gone and inside the house there is a papa who is sleeping and a brother who is sleeping and there is a dog barking at the gate...the scene lasts for only 20 minutes, and to make the most of it, i put wd-40 on motorcycle chains and pump hot air into hot fucking tires and my hands are covered in grease and smell like steel and i think about food, hot red meat, and i think about how to find the woman lost under the cover of night with a boy who wears bling around his neck and has reggaeton on his cell (i mean, come on, really?  that's so cute, and he's just a little skinny boy), and how to open her mouth to me, and how to make sparks on railroad tracks and become wolf in a rainstorm, this is the world of men, and it's metal seeps under my fingers and i turn to the house and everything goes absolutely dreamy again...
greens and blues and blacks with streaks of red come seeping through the cracks under the garage door, no, the world of men is far away, twenty years ago or more, this is the ocean underwater the bottom of the sea where everything looks like desert and the weather is about to turn unbearable...this is an androgynous transgender unnamed category brother from another other mother other world...the sea gets into everything, and for all the order of the railroad tracks, this is the place where my breath starts to become certain, four beats in and four beats out, and four beats in and five beats out, and five beats in and five beats out, and no one knows what lies at the bottom of the sea, and death is always around, and the blood runs through the veins like the rivers are the veins of the world and water is our blood.
and.
i'll see you there on the other side of the moon.
last night was all about the ocean, dreams about living under the sea all night long, and i woke up with my throat so sore, from having been singing or keening, and today dad goes to the hospital and we're going to get news, and i don't know why the ocean is everywhere, maybe i do, but i want to ask, really, what the fuck is going on, i mean really what the fuck is going on?  (and who the fuck is roslyn?)


Friday, August 19, 2011

cgs/y the structures of love

i want to write pretentious words that might make you laugh, but tonight i can't find your ghost.  i want to say the things that might heal something someday, but i can't find the threads anywhere.  i passed through the same mountains that i passed through a hundred times before, and the strings that i made from your hair, braided with nine different colors of glass beads, and ribbons to catch the eyes of the dead, they were all gone, and the only reflection i could see came from broken bottles.  and the sun gets brighter every day here.

i want to tell you that you can capture part of my heart in a bottle, and hang it from the tree outside your window, and you can talk to me here like you might talk to olokun when the night gets too long, and morning still refuses to show herself to you.  i want to tell you about reverse spells, of mirrors in bags, and the way to make it so that when you think of me, you won't see me walking away any more, but you'll see me coming toward you with petals in my fists.  i want to tell you about the things i hold in my hands when i'm trying to remember you, but i can't find your ghost.

tonight even the sea feels far from me, and i say the things i want to the floor of the desert, where the ocean once loved the land beneath my feet.  tonight i remember some of the songs that we like to sing to the dead, so that we can spend some time in their oceans and rest before returning to the living.  tonight i am giving in to the pull of the underworld, and settling in for a few more weeks of the kind of winter that can only live in the broken heart of the summer.  tonight, the only thing that breaks my heart are the same rocks that still refuse to budge, the cold stone heart of fear in the heads of the living who don't want to lose any more than they've already lost in the course of a broken year.

the same sea that once gave me your name when i was drowning tells me to go under, and let the feeling of drowning continue, because after a short while, it will become important.  the same sea that introduced me to the mirror where i could see glimpses of your heart tells me to go to sleep again for a time, and let my head rest on the laurels of the cemetery's residents.  the sea reminds me that when i let everything fall from my fists, i wake up with shiny objects surrounding my head, and life begins to repeat only in series of fives.  three is the irish seal, but five is the key to the underworld.

i want to speak those secrets that might tell you why the channels turned so dark and furious, so that you might have a map to find your way out of this, but my tongue is locked, and the key is around the neck of a ghost i can't find tonight.  these things happen, the bisexual goddess at the ocean floor tells me, these things happen to the living as often as they happen to the dead, and your obligation is not to clarify the gossip of the living or the dead.  your obligation is to whisper my name, over and over, until it comes true, until you can see me in the middle of the dust storm, until you see me in the broken glass on the desert floor, until you see me signaling through the flames, these thousand and one signs we send to let you know that you have our attention.

i want to whisper to you at the edges of the water, speaking quieter than the waves, so that we don't wake the neighbors, so that we can talk until the sun comes up and circles us again and again and again. i want to whisper all the blood out of my mouth, until the broken glass under my tongue is washed out and i am too tired to whisper any more.  i want to whisper long enough so that i can start to hear your whispers through my breath, and your stable and graceful ecstasies can announce themselves through all the walls of the world, and wake the neighbors, and wake the roommates, and wake the sleeping dogs lying at our feet, and wake the things that we can't see at the bottom of the sea.  i want to make ribbons from your whispers and tie them to your waist, make drumheads from the dew on your thighs so that your song resonates through all the fruit trees of the underworld, and sew rose petals from all of your expenditures to line the paths that only the dead can walk.

i want to say the things that only have one meaning, that can only reflect the truth, but my tongue is locked, and all i have are words of longing, spun from the same cloth that decorated your head before you entered this body.  i want to write the story of a textual love that took place on the tongues of the living, but the dead keep entering into the narrative, and demand perfect lyrical reflections.  i want to write the very last perfect word, but the words keep flowing from my locked tongue, blood seeping through the fissures, salt water covering the endless nights of longing in a body that can't forget, possessed in equal measure by the ancestors and the spirits of the sea, who just keep singing, and i can't help but keep listening.  

Thursday, August 18, 2011

situationalities radicalities pretentionalities and anthropophagies for the next 44 years

More and more often, she's been talking about these things and their weight, and their specifics and details that need her constant attention, and the way there is sometimes nothing to fight against any more because it's all a fight; all of these things spoken of, more and more often, in relation to the idea of escape.  This day is a day that begins with a morning that starts earlier than I had suspected, waking up from dreams where my friend is in a dining room sitting at a table with the dead, and she can't leave yet because they are talking about something very important, or about to have that talk.  And waking up to take care of a daughter to get her out of bed to go take care of a teenager before going to take a mother to a doctor to get something spinal taken care of (it's ongoing taking care of, being something that has the potential or the threat of becoming ongoing for a long possibly long time potentially), oh this is a very long sentence (and about to get longer); although I still remember what it is about, and I hope you do, too;  //though it's not even really a sentence any more it's just made up punctuation to avoid a period (wait)...it feels heavier for me, too, suddenly, and I don't want to start talking about things and their weight.  Because I can see where that leads.  And today I feel like the world's mother.

Or something very much like that in some very radically reduced way.  The situation is this:  when someone is called or grabbed to crown with Yemaya as their mother, there are rituals to be done.  There are some rituals in it that are somewhat similar to other rituals for, say, for example, Obatala or Oya, for example, but then differences. and it's secret but it's written down but it's still secret so I won't write it here, but the secrets, well, there are secrets that are not written down either, but when we talk about secrets, haha haha, is it to tempt those who don't know into finding out the secrets, aha aha, or is it something much more elemental than that hum hum hum.   After the ritual where the Orisha is married to the head (to use a metaphor that is useful for so many things except it creates more problems than it is perhaps worth, like making alchemy heteronormative, oh there are too many tangents here; note to self, please investigate why heteronormative is not a word as far as my screen is concerned; Obatala neither, but that makes some more sense really, oh enough with this), many of the practitioners, the santer@s and devotees alike, will disband and carry on with their lives of working and loving and working some more because money is no object to be trifled with these days and we need more of that because it's running out so quickly...but some, for example, might feel a very powerful shift from raising Yemaya like this, and feel like moving things, like moving, like shifting things, like shifting, for a long time afterwards, and even become a little energized by the mother of us all, enough to maybe one morning wake up too early and feel like the mother of the world.

A bit.  But the idea of escape is more essential here, and Yemaya can be escape just as much as she can be part of a union, remembering however that this is the one who could not stay married to Orisha Oko, the earth, because they eat each other as fiercely as they love each other.  (Is that even important to mention, then, because it might fit in some way but is usually, just saying, just a way of trying to explain away why all these other things that seemed so interesting just went away...?? and another chance, another excuse, really, to mention how he still loves her, and he is me apparently, but her that is another question, let's just say it's one of two, and even more importantly here, and tellingly so, complicatingly so, not even one of two, but two of two all at once, that he still loves her, but she is not just one her and that's not so original these days, but certainly certainly so very avant garde, quaqua quaqua...or perhaps it's just usual.  But don't tell me that.  Usual makes me do very funny things.  Like remember conversations that take place up against the bar of a kitchen, whatever is the name for that counter thing, when roommates were asleep or gone somewhere and there was just us and a dog who spoke to us so clearly and told us what we were supposed to be, but the dog also spoke to us with his face too close to us, and we are both so very defiant that we decided to leave what we were supposed to be for another, what week month life.  We don't know.  And we still don't know.  Oh but that's very specific, that could only be one, only one and not two, there was only one and that one was only you, and you might not know why it was you, and I don't know why it was you and I don't know why it was me either, but I'm glad it was both of them because otherwise I would not know you, and that makes me better, turns the lines closer to you thicker and the ones further away thinner, and that is why today I am taking off my clothes in front of your sister.  Tada, tada.

To sum up, then, so that we're all clear here.  These are difficult things, these health things, all so very difficult, and when everyone starts to look manic-depressive or bipolar or in a complicated polarity situation, or falling from nerves or diseases that I wish did not have names, it is interesting to sit in a restaurant when she is taking one percocet, then another, and then I ask if she has enough for the rest of the day, because I like to think of others of course, especially when I can think of them and their narcotics, and say how she doesn't need another for awhile, because that's the dose for 4 hours or so, and she says she does not think about these kinds of things, but takes them as she needs them, and I recognize the bloody flames in her eyes that tell me we're related, especially in this, and I say, That's what I do, too, and that's because I'm a borderline junkie.

Kisskiss the end.

Sunday, August 14, 2011

twitch notes wolf notes any note holynote

scene one: she is lying on the bed with an apple in her mouth. wolf hides in corner (can a wolf really hide? i mean, come on, we all smell when the wolf is there).  coyote cuts open the wolf and the hood at the tongue.  hood pulls out rose petals.  wolf takes the apple from her mouth with his mouth.

scene two: hood sleeps, coyote sleeps, wolf sleeps.  coyote wakes and cuts hood at the belly.  hood wakes up in a dream, and goes to wolf, takes a bite of the apple from his mouth.

scene three: wolf ties hood to bed by hands and feet.  coyote cuts ropes, cuts hood on palms of hands and feet.  hood leaves a doll version of herself in her bed, and leaves the bed.

scene four: wolf disguises himself as the angel at the beginning of the world.  meets hood in the forest and pours petals from his mouth over her heart.  coyote cuts open heart of wolf, cuts open heart of hood.

scene five: wolf is in bed, hood enters bedroom.  hood ties wolf to the bed and coyote cuts the throat of the wolf.  wolf doesn't resist.

scene six: hood is hiding in the corner.  wolf is dying.  coyote cuts open the tongue (in the mouth) of hood, and wolf spasms and howls.

scene seven: wolf is dead.  coyote cuts loose the cow heart of the wolf and gives it to hood.  hood straps heart over her own heart.  love is forever.

(note: underlying sense in all of this is that wolf is preparing hood for a sacrifice, that she is going to be sacrificed in some very significant way, only hahaha the joke is on him).

(note: everything here sounds better in polish)...

Saturday, August 13, 2011

cgs/y canciones tristes de mis muertos

suddenly, the stars, the stars, they shoot but i can't see them shooting the moon, because the moon blocks them, she's like a half face, full but melting in between sheets of cloud that make me feel sad for her because she looks like she's surrounded when it's obvious she really just wants to be left alone.  suddenly, the stars say it's time now to be stable and enjoy the fruits of the something something, after a month of heavy romance, new love, but i must have slept through that part, because i didn't see it, and honestly, i didn't really look when i was living through it.  there were too many boxes to fill, empty, move, and empty again, and now my hands are broken, and i don't know who i am supposed to be.  suddenly, the stars shoot through my head when the honey bee flies into my stable world, and suddenly, there is another full moon with a bee sting, and it should mean something.  and it certainly does.

this is the most important part:

now that there's new songs from a brother i forgot to unbury, i get these notes in my sleep, and if i sleep long enough, i can keep them when i'm awake.  when i rode back through the desert, instead of pressing on at every potential stop, i stopped and drank and drank, it was a lesson from yemaya, whose songs i'm too dry to hear when i hurry, and if i stop to rest, i'm better in the morning, and better because i learned how to take care of this thing i carry in my head.  it's terribly personal, and i take it personally, that whatever human needs have to be seen to, it's up to me to see to them, enough so that i'm starting to wonder whether riding motorcycles is the smartest way to carry this around.  but that's too far away from the most important thing.  the important thing, my brother from the other side told me that this is the trouble:

i'm in a coffee shop with an old friend, and we're catching up, and she says something about, oh what happened to that girl you were seeing?  and i'll say, oh it didn't work out because of x and x and x. and she says, oh that figures i went through the same thing, it's terrible how people can be, you're so right you're so right.  and we leave the cafes thinking about how right we are and how lost this whole game is, and how our lives are better because of all the heartbreaks, and we're all perfect lovers and just haven't met the right one, blablabla...

but if i know who i am, and sometimes i do, then there's nothing to protect, and nothing to salvage in all these stories, and maybe i'm just not as insecure any more now that there is a ghost of a brother behind my head telling me things that an older brother should.  and he tells me that these things i think i've lost are things that i still have, that the dead see things from a longer distance, and the only loss is ego, and that sting goes away very quickly if we pay enough attention to what's happening in the moment.

and maybe it's not a big shift in any direction, but yesterday when the same cafe scene played out, i found myself not saying things like, oh she did this and then she did that and what was i to do i am so innocent blablabla, but instead said, i don't know really it's very sad really she is an amazing and interesting person and i miss her.

and that's enough to say.  and it's true.  and it's more true than anything else i could have said, and it rings so true that i see that i can live with it, and it can be true for as long as it needs to be true, until it becomes something else, but for now, i can leave it there for now.

the sting becomes something else, the sting becomes the kind of sting that can come back, somewhere in the middle of a still afternoon when the only thing that is moving is me (and a bee apparently).  this is what stings.  i'm not going to fight it.  i'm not going to play with it until it becomes something else in the narrative in my head, that's already colorful enough, and on some days, it's beautiful, and when the story continues, it's beautiful, even when, especially when, all my dead ones tell me that what happens next is better understood through the body moving through time and space, rather than finding the link between this sign and the next one in order to predict what happens next, because no one really knows, it's not up to them, it's up to the human bodies to decide when it's time to decide.

but a message from me to the ashes that hold the heart of a new bird:

if you could, if you could return...you know i'm such a fool for you...let it linger just a little longer before i open the trunk that's at the bottom of the sea, to see the jewels that lie hidden there, my heart is like a hungry ghost that's been unstuck in time for too long, let it linger just long enough so that these last conversations between me and the moon can resolve, so that the small things that i need to say to her can be said, so that i can close up these last fissures between the rocks, the ones where i whispered to the sea that at the bottom of my heart, i never did want to get over you, and i don't know if i really need to.  she says don't worry, do your work, and don't worry, and just in case you think we don't hear you, there's a bee with your name all over it, and it's the same one that came around last time, and if you get to dance that dance again, just don't fuck it up, and don't tell the world anything that's not true. representations in art and poetry don't mean what they used to mean, metaphors of skin between folds of cloth are only good for a few things, what happens when the metaphors are removed is more erotic than ice and strawberries.

Friday, August 12, 2011

cgs/y a good cigar is a smoke

the land of the dead starts to shake and shiver, because the brother on the other side of the grass, the one where people tend to rub their feet and not notice any of the multiple systems of signs that are there, ripe for interpretations, has turned away from a purity toward honduras and nicaragua leaves, and is starting to fall a little bit in love with acid cigars.

this isn't a big turning point, or even a slightly essential moment in the story, but it shows some signs that things have shifted.  there's a little more money these days, and more work.  taking care of those ill at ease with their physical body's situation, pretending to be ill at ease, taking off clothes in front of everybody's sister, reading spirit signs in residue from the breath, and giving birth to old spirits in new heads, all of these help pay the rent, and it should make it easier to sleep.  he's waking up more often than not, and on some mornings he finds himself thinking more about the next cigar than anything else.  as much as he would like to deny the signs of middle age approaching (the back is still so very strong, and the quest for the endlessly romantic bread of human hunger still running just below the skin, and the patience for hot days because of the potential for the hot nights), this is one that is hard to keep outside the door.

but a secret, and not a new one, and not one that makes much difference in the land of differance, the smoke makes for an easy and clear communication with the dead.  he travels through the graveyards, and wants to know if he could be the figure on the band, smoking the strangely fascinating herbal cigars at all the best raves with a dayglo mohawk strapped to his helmet.  that he is starting to shift in another direction, slightly more funky than the last, comes as no surprise, and even the most conservative of the ancestors has decided not to tell him to try playing this life a little more even-keeled, because even the dead are convinced that in these neon bones he gets to meet the most interesting people in the world.

on the best nights, in the best conversations between the dead and the living, the best thing that can happen is not a good spell to bring a lover back, or a good way to make the body sweet to attract like sweetness, but the agreement that we are conceived in love, that when we conceive love in our thoughts we give birth to worlds that make it clear that there is no distinction between the living and the dead, and everything we do affects each other.  this love isn't cautious, they say.  this love is reckless and necessary.

Thursday, August 11, 2011

cgs/y the ties that sting

everyone interesting watches the moon, as above so below, the moon is the most interesting light most of us have ever met, but her darkness is utterly devastating, we are stuck flattened on the landscape of the desert floor that looks like the moon, lost before her, lost to her, lost in each other to bless her path across the sky, and the one around the corner is speaking about something new, something we haven't even counted on yet.

i wish on this same moon that i might be one of the children whose chaos is measured and allotted in secretly set amounts, this much chaos for a life, this much confusion for an arrested adolescence, and this much spinning for an adult who is about to enter into that other age, one where these small signs don't have to add up to anything larger, whose chaos isn't a mirror with which to measure the chaos of the world.

but not today, the wish isn't here today, because after a year of new scars, when it seems like there couldn't possibly be more, before the wounds of a brother and a lost lover have even started to think about closing, there is a hole in my right hand where a knife used to be, and there is a hole in my left hand where a bee used to be.  it swells in the moonlight, and i am looking for an answer, something to tell me what it might all add up to, it's in the place where the world is in pain and swollen, in the place where a thousand revolutionaries come knocking at my door, but i can't answer yet because i can't lift my hand.

these new scars are from becoming animal, from a few dozen small sacrifices that give birth to the ocean, these new scars are from the rocks on the ocean floor when the rising tide is ebbing and flowing from the bottom of the sea (note to selves: i didn't see you there, but the mermaids couldn't tell me if you'd left yet or not, i hope you leave something behind, a note i might find there, or a hidden letter on the neck of a mermaid who's always so close to my own neck), these new scars are from the sun from another time between here and there.

i closed it there, i went to the sea and complained about the things i always want to have even though i gave them all away, i complained and then i shifted, and then it closed and became as tight as a fist, a fist that could hold a promise that i would never forget you (i promised you i wouldn't, why would it surprise you? i think it's strange you never knew...).  but the same fist, re-opened by a bee on the way from here to there, a smaller version through a smaller mountain, and i don't know what she is telling me.

if i stayed there i would rot, but when i leave there i am stung. i come back to organize and modify and reconfigure, and all she wants to tell me is the same song from the oceans on the moon, she can't stop thinking about the song from the moon, and i can't stop thinking about her hands.

Monday, August 8, 2011

and wolf notes

this is twitch, this is going to give it all away...

red riding hood and the wolf.
the performers are performing this. of course of course.
media ritual on the screen is this enactment, the representation or reflection of an enactment, lovers enacting scenes in the world, enacting from the energy of a mythic preconscious preverbal hunger that is elemental and time-out-of-joint-ness-ish (-less? sometimes -less, because that's more, or moorish).

media on the ground is the performance, the ritual, the live ritual that is the re-enactment of the elemental things, the blood and the flesh, and things that are underneath the pulse on the skin, revelation and hiding of the blood under the skin.  the skin is a fissure that occasionally gets broken, and blood is revealed.

the media on the ground interrupts her, maria, her dialogues with herselves, her real lovers are herselves, not because polyamory is ultimately onanism, but because nature is polyamorous and onanistic and monogamous and also often always involved in a very complicated relationship, like a french farce...too much in the morning already...media on the ground interrupts her, maria, dialogue and images, the performance performers twitch in twitch gestures and the dialogue is interrupted with the wolf and the red hooded girl, live movement and action this is the place where the media originates, so that we the spectator are watching that space which says it is a representation of a real, but might not be a representation after all.

they wear: white chalk on skin.  cow heart strapped to the chest with white gauze.  cow tongue strapped around the waist like a belt with rope with ropes with hooks (??)....this then is color scheme, white and red, and some black for her hair, or his eyebrows maybe not his eyebrows.

other splashes of red.  under her tongue there are rose petals at the beginning.  it ends with her cutting open his cow heart and pulling out petals.  or beet juice.  the wolf is trying to eat the girl.  the girl is letting the wolf trap her so that she can kill him with the knife she carries.  the wolf is sacrificed so that she can become animal.  coyote is the intermediary between the realms, human becoming animal, and animal becoming sacrificed, to carry the wolf body into the forest of the dead.  happy monday, eji ogbe meji day, xs os.

cgs/y i wish i was here

it's a sinking suspicion, one that shouldn't take as much space as it does, but it does, renting space in the head but not really paying the rent, just sucking, vampyr sucking succubus sucking pig suckling pig some sucking pig (suck).  not the kind of thing, you know, that sinking suspicion that the next person i meet that i want to be meeting, it would be better to just buy her a teddy bear and a vibrator, that these aren't just a great gift basket, but would be better and more efficient for her, and would save time.  not that kind of thing, and not the notion, you know, that i want to fall in love with the next woman i meet, or even, not even, i want to meet the next one i am going to fall in love with because right now i'm tired of going through the past 18 months, and taking the best parts and making them into shrinky dinks that i can keep on a keychain.  but my keychain is full.  that's something.  that's something i can say that's not as sad as i feel today.  sad because not because not because i lost you, but because you lost me, and if i look at the fetishes on my keychain long enough, i can see traces of the x that marks the moment when i left (it took 7 x 7 times of that many moments at the edges of the sea to see the c i left in the sand that marks the spot where i left, that's the moment there, marked in sand and through sand to the rock beneath.  sand is the skin and the rock is the bone.  salt water runs through the channels of the world like blood through the veins.  the aboves and belows keep multiplying in combinations of 7.  including grief. yes, even that.

the part that makes my stomach start to sink the most, the part that cut through the side to the bone beneath, it had no special membrane to hold secrets, nothing but loss, nothing but bloodletting, was the time when the room and the kitchen and the heartbeats and breath became so very dreamy, narcotic without the injection, the time when i thought i saw you in the kitchen, at the back of the room, outside by the pool telling me you wish i wouldn't smoke so much, i thought i saw you, and seeing you reminded me that i wasn't seeing you because you weren't there, that you had a place there but you weren't in it, like a silhueta on the other side of a window, i saw where you were not, i saw you'd slipped out, and i understood that you left without saying goodbye for good, or maybe you did and i didn't hear you because i was listening to the blood inside my skull when i thought i was hearing the ocean.

if you did come back, if you had an inkling to come back, you wouldn't return, because you are too proud to return, i know you very well, but if you had an inkling, i would fight for your place there, because i believe you have a rightful place there...this is spoken as a brother not a lover, in that room, i want you there fighting with your crazy wind moving the world moving the leaves in the forests of the world, making things happen.  all to say, at the end of the day, i went to sleep with the sea in my head and it wasn't the blood in my skull, it was the sea, and i went to sleep, as someone who was a lover, i was grateful to you, but as someone who was your friend, i was angry that you left, and am still angry, and i don't know what that means when my head gets hot.

it might mean what it means right now, that if i saw you, i would take your face in my hands, and i would open your mouth with my rough and aching hands, and you would be forced to taste and to speak this bleeding breathing coming crying life, and learn how to grow up and to embrace these things that are your children (or at least half children).  and if i remember right, if you saw me, you would take my lips between your teeth, and pull me toward you, and turn your nails at a 70 degree angle, to pull me toward you, all tooth and claw, forcing me toward you and keeping me from pulling away, and the fetishes around my neck are melting into butter, and i can't remember what was ever lost there, i can't remember why i was so upset, and i can't remember why they told me that i should hate you.  maybe i can't remember because i never did hate you, i'm only angry at you because you left without saying goodbye, and, when you realized you weren't coming back, you didn't have the courage to let me know.  i would still be angry, but not like this, not like today, and today, i have the ocean at my back and under my feet, and i don't pray for you to come back, but that they send me somebody who can kiss me like that.  try stopping a white horse come marching, try stopping a white horse, try taming a white wolf on a hot day with nothing but blood on your fingertips, try blocking the drains when your house is being submerged by the sea, a spot of red on a field of white and you'll know that i'm still so very close, this time i'm very close, lock heels and wrists because we are so so very close...

Friday, August 5, 2011

cgs/y i wish you were here

this time, the time in between, is not my favorite, my head starting to butt against itself inside its skull, the way mountains make blessings from pears, the way the sun makes pears into liquid, that just might, if one were prone to these sorts of things, melt inside a backpack on the back of a motorcycle so that by the time one got to rest, it would be sticky all over the seat and all over the hands, and that might remind one, if one were inclined toward such thoughts, of a night in a hotel when things started to stop making sense.

everybody wants a perfect lover, and those who have been on long roads understand this better than anyone else, because time melts the things of the ego, and makes the things that we think we need to demand start to go away between one turn and another.  i don't want to think this all has something to do with age, but maybe i do know some things about love, and maybe i know things that i was hoping i could tell you, so that you wouldn't have to learn the hard way, where lovers are revealed as strangers when you first notice that they have one hand on your heart and the other hand looking through your purse.  don't worry, he won't see those messages you keep, don't worry, she won't understand why you smile when you twitch like that, don't worry, these secrets are safe between us.

this is august 5th, and it's not a day that anyone needs to remember as anything remarkable, but it's as strong for me as any other day like it, like may 17th, and if there is ever a time when they name a town after me, they will have streets named for these dates, because they might seem like important moments in the mexican revolution, but they're only marking some small but significant loss.  only significant because the people involved no longer speak to each other, and if we knew that at the beginning, i wonder if we would have ever started.  it's a tricky road, and i'm not sure i'd ever want to take it again with someone that i really cared for.  makes it hard to go down that road, or makes it hard to care.  for now, i'm just keeping that road closed until i can get these things off my chest.

i would love to be in the city, the city where we found our secrets at the edges of the sea, and not hear your name in any circles, but it comes up here and there. it would reveal too much or something to say that i don't look for you in every white car that passes, because i don't look for you any more, and whenever i see a white car, i tell myself that i'm better now because i'm not looking for you in that car, and the person in the car is a man and has blond hair under a golf cap, not you, and i am healthy.

listen: this is a better start.

i am driving a motorcycle from phoenix to san diego.  somewhere close to mohawk valley, i understand that i know this, i know this way very well, i've done this before.  there's something that feels good about the way my back is hurting, and the pull of the wind against my head inside my helmet that moves my earphones to a slightly painful place.  i chew on my lip ring to get a little shot of an ache that reminds me of the way her lips pulled on my lips, when she had that look in her eye that meant she wanted to move into something just a little darker.

my head is clear, though, and remembering things that happened don't fill this empty space with an empty longing for something i don't want to repeat here, not now, not yet anyway, remembering these things is like visiting rooms that i like, and i can open the doors and see the things that sparkled in the dark there.

the hotel room where things fell apart, not because we realized it was over because there was no more love there, but because a silly little boy was making promises to treat you badly was immanent, and you had to leave after one last thing that lasted for another sixteen hours, the hotel room becomes slowly filled with dogs, yellow dogs and black dogs and speckled dogs that place their faces too close when you are speaking, and there are pieces of metal in my mouth, things that i realize are things that are part of you, your metal is coming off in my mouth.  and we don't have to go, and nothing is wrong, and no one is leaving, but there's a certain springtimey sunshiney promise in the air that you will leave as soon as things turn good.  the same hotel room is now filling with roommates who have questions about the speakers, the same hotel room is filled up with actors speaking things that sounded like something else, the same hotel room now has a new couch in the front room and there are spirits everywhere who are working to make things happen in the world, and spinning me out of one room into many, all of them as wet as the sea and as salty as your skin.

i see the empty smiles and hear the desperate whispers in the dark, someone is paying attention to someone, and it's nice to be heard in the dark, in the middle of a dark room when the world outside is too bright and couldn't care less.  i see the weight of a hundred lovers pressing against the clothes on the floor, pressed by phantoms into a black hole that gravity will never reach.  i hear the sounds that are too much for the walls, and insist on boring through them to announce something that was once wounded is now healed.  i also see the small specks of light in the corners of eyes, the ones that recognize each other, after this lifetime, after that lifetime, here you are, i thought i recognized you, and here you are again.

all i have room for in my pockets, my pockets wet with melted fruit, are those same specks, and i take those with me, and play with them between my lips and teeth, making them spark against the ring in my lip, and i think about the ocean ahead, and the ocean about to inhabit another head, and how this all relates to some kind of movement, and how i thought i had to learn how to hate in order to close the door, but i learned some secrets here, in this room when you were sleeping, i learned some secrets, and my favorite one is the one that tells me i still love you, i am still in love with you, and i can take this with me, and it's won't make me too heavy to keep moving toward the ocean, whose secrets will unlock me utterly, the way we unlock each other, and maybe it's the same kind of love.  

Wednesday, August 3, 2011

cgs/y todo lo demas/breath before the sea

there's no way this would be kept very secret for very long, and i tried to hide it from you, and hide it from the rest of the world, i found a rock next to a cave that held equal parts blue and equal parts green, and i buried it under that, but it was too big, once it started to grow, and once it started to grow it began to look like the idiot serpent, the one who let itself be tamed, the one that lived somewhere between the forest and the ocean, and no one knew how much it would grow until children began to disappear and then we knew that this was a different kind of game altogether.

after three days, or maybe it was three weeks, it's hard to tell the time when time has decided not to matter (note: for the living, it's the only river, the one that moves the blood through the veins, and it is inside and outside of everything; for the rest of us, it's the river that's above the ground, you have no idea how complicated it becomes when you break through the surface, and you might even wonder if there are rivers in the sky, of course there are not, otherwise it would be raining blood all the time ((note to self: it does rain blood all the time.  they don't need to know that, though)) ), after three of something, when it was obvious that the secret was not going to be kept for long if it was known to you at all, your tongue being made of a cross between palm oil and lightning, sharp but so very easy to unleash, it was decided that there would be a series of three lessons, simple to say but impossible to learn, and they would be given to you thus:

1. the fight between you and your ego is the most important fight you will ever lose (and you better lose)
2. the animal buried deep beneath the skin, not buried so deep at all.
3. the breath connects everything.

and from here you would be free to decide if the lessons were about this one or about that one, about the first thing or the last thing, and we hoped, we hid in the edges of your sight just as you suspected, and we hoped that you would get it confused, and think you were being given messages about something that no one could care less about, and you might think it was the most important thing in the world, because it only happens that the things that the sea can give you are things that will be given when your back is turned, the seventh wave come back to drown you after you'd thought it retreated for the rest of the afternoon--that very moment when your eyes unsharpen for a long sleep--so that you'd remember it like you remembered that day when you fell in love as if that were the secret itself (and there's nothing to prove it's not).

the living respond with a cipher:

august 5th only comes around once a year, the last one was not so very painful, and only because it was organized pain, and perhaps that's why our noses are so entirely connected to pasts we can't imagine as having been anything but painful.  but clearly, the spirits who brought me here have to understand by now, if i say i love her and loved her and will always love her, it doesn't mean it's exclusive, or that i'm trapped, but just that i think this is going to go on for a long time...it doesn't mean that i'm trapped or lost or locked, but only that i recognize her, but you know that i recognize others, the souls of these folk are polyamorous, nature is polyamorous, and i am not only among them, but of them, and happy to be here, thank you, i assure you, and i adore you, and the only thing left to say, at the end of every day, is i miss you.  

Tuesday, August 2, 2011

cgs/marked/stained/planted

these are the dangerous thoughts that i don't want to say. but they're not about me, so i'll say them anyway. you don't want to be the role you're in, because that means that you're living in a western, two brothers, one went toward the light, and one went toward the dark...but this should come as a relief (any time any one comes it is a relief if not you need therapy and for god's sake stop it with the strangers you're only making their lives worse, selfish beasts all of you): you're not that light, and he's not that dark.  it's as complex as any modern novel, which is to say, there are those who won't even like it won't even want to listen to it won't ever take it seriously, they're the ones who don't like non-linear stories, who think metafictions are pretentious, and who like to hearken back to the way the masters did it, but here's a little clue for you all: the ones who like to hearken are all still living in phoenix (just because you are doesn't mean you belong, look, there is a whole subculture here who take it as a matter of survival or maladjustment to live here with irony, we don't mean to, we just do, our families or our bank accounts keep us here for now)....or something about heroin in the dust...? listen, there's more to it than narcotic addiction, dark tendencies toward letting one's own blood out in public, and a fierce streak toward creating something out of nothing, nihilistic artists were always so interesting, and so is your brother, and so are you, and that's why i will always love you because we are the same, we are the same, more alike than penguins even...she asks you what is your type what is the kind who is the tribe which of these are you drawn to, toward whatwhichever kind of girl kind of a girl kind of girlie girl are you compelled to cultivate in flirtations or long evenings that turn into days where no one gets out of bed? and to that you had no good answer, because the answer is always the same: who's my type? oh, my type is you, it's you, it's you, it's you...

MANIFESTO OF CROSSED ONTOLOGIES Everybody (and by everybody I don ’ t mean everybody I think I mean one person, and I mean you, in par...