Wednesday, March 28, 2012

dog days of march

The big and otherwise gregarious dog is smoking on the porch again.  It's at the end of a long dog day in a month that is full of dogs, and the dogs are still lining up in their dog cars to go to their dog homes and the dog is sitting on the porch and smoking.  It's not his house.  That's important.  It's not his house.  He doesn't live there, but he does right now, but it's only to take care of a smaller dog, one who is learning dog tricks to perform in the dog world.

The dog is smoking.  The dog is smoking in a brooding kind of manner, almost like the dog dylan crying dog, maybe too much like that dog, maybe he needs new dog models, but it fits ok.  He does have the dog motorcycle, and he has crashed it, so it's ok in his own dog myth to tell these stories, some of them look the same.  There's a Sara Dog, too, of course there is. 

"Of course there is," the smoking dog thinks. 

The dog is thinking about how this day started well before this morning, and it unrolled from there, where at every turn, while he was trying to find the right song to listen to on his dog player,  the one about lying down low and being forgotten, he was hounded, yes, that, hounded by a handful of other kinds of dramas that really didn't involve him.  He is thinking how he was asked for thoughts in every situation, and the thoughts led to more invitations for more thoughts, and he didn't have very many of those, because he is a goddam dog and needs to not be thinking too much. 

"These are simply puzzles, and ones that don't need me in any way," the brooding dog says, almost to himself, almost as an afterthought.  Dog then burns himself on dog cigar, his thumb not meant to smoke, because it is not a thumb, because dogs do not have thumbs.

Dog is deeply concerned, and there are furrows on the hair on his face, and he thinks how if it rained, if it flooded, his face would be like a field that would map the places he and the Sara Dog have gone on the dog motorcycle, and how there were more places than either of them had ever suspected to still see, but that's so far in the future it makes him even sadder than he already is, and he is a sad dog. 

Dog is deeply concerned, because of the history of dogs that has written on everydog's body.  He is feeling like he is nothing more and nothing less than a collection of dog texts, dog religion, dog love, dog genderplay, dog economics, and the terrible things that are happening to some dogs who wear doghoods in their dog neighborhoods.  He is thinking about how he has spent more than a countable number of years (times seven for dog time, the number of the sea, seven, sea dog time), trying to unfold and uncomplicate and recomplicate all of these dog narratives, and throwing away the trappings of the ones that are not useful for this dog point in dog time, and still he is stuck in the middle of another web of narratives, and forced to play dog games that he is so very wary of.  It's exhausting being in dog culture, and there are harder things still.

This is a very whiny dog.

The dog who is whiny doesn't care for criticism of himself at the moment.  He is smoking a cigar under the moon and dreaming about a SaraDog, but he is impatiently turning codes over in his doghead.  This would be easy if there weren't codes, but it wouldn't be worth it.  On the one hand, in dog religion, where there are many dogs and many dog faces, there are structures of power that are difficult to negotiate, even in dog terms, even in the cult of natural dog religion, the one that practices the things that go back to the dogroots.  And dogs today are both traditional and modern, and ritual codes have to be enacted even through cell phones, even with their clumsy dog hands.  And there are dogsex differences, too, that need to be taken into consideration, especially when they enact themselves in dog genderplay, and they always do, because dog genderplay is always a part of the text, because they are always standing in dog history.  And for the codes of doglove, he thinks about all his dogfriends who are going through dogheart troubles, and he cares enough to get upset, but they don't do anything, they just can't touch him in this place, on this porch, because this porch is every porch, and the porch is where dogs fall in love, and the tiny beatings of his dogheart are so bittersweet that he blows dogsmoke to dogstars and says, "Even if it hurts, I am so grateful that I am a goddam dog."

Tuesday, March 27, 2012

milan kundera should write this

The moment when one of the lovers says, "I'm coming home," that is the moment when the orchestra starts to crescendo, and the sky starts to rain out of relief.  But it is the moment that the story comes to an end, when they have decided to enter into a different kind of story, and one where the sky won't cry very often any more, and the moon becomes a pretty object that sometimes gives off more light than at other times.  When one of them says, "Please don't go, please come back," that's another story altogether, or rather, that is the story.  That moment is the moment they have decided to reinvest it with tension, and frustration, and an untenable, unresolved longing that no one thinks they can bear for very long.  But in truth, perhaps we can, and perhaps those of us who are more given to being poetic and living in metaphor, perhaps we can live with it for all of our lives, or at least make a decision early on to try.  Without those small moments of relief, of course, like the stolen kisses between trains, or a night together in a strange city, and the story would die a horrible death, but would not die as utterly as it would if one or the other decided that it was time to move in together and buy a dog.  Unless they were both extraordinarily smart.  Extraordinarily smart and probably good looking people could probably do it, only they would have to be smart in the same way, and understand that time runs out in the same way, and also understand that every window eventually falls shut in the same direction.  And nature does not like to create lovers who are that same kind of smart, not at the same time and place, because that would no longer be a tragic love story, or an epic love story with a happy end, but something else entirely, something that would resemble something like a revolution. 

Sunday, March 25, 2012

and more sea

i can see how these things work together, in this new moon where the things that contain water are sealed tightly, where higher thought and desire work together in a forward and backward motion that replicate the motions of waves, of the tides beneath the skin, and the dances of bodies between sheets of white cloth, and from a distance i can see the patterns on the sheets that make numbers to mark bodies for the course of the coursing of these bodies over the year ahead, and from a closer distance i see the colors of skin that try to weave together when they are desperate for real heat, and from a closer distance still i see the skin glow with a breathing that wants to want the things that teach us how to swim in the oceans of the world.  if i were tired of heat i would hide from the sun, if i were tired of water i would come in from the rain, and if i were tired of endurance i would stay home and enjoy the weekend doing nice things around the house, but i'm not tired any more.  there is a constant moving in all the quiet rooms of all the quiet houses i sleep in, and flashes of canine teeth that ring in the dark like bells, i won't be sleeping for a very long time.  i can do this, the first part is always a test of mettle to see if i can stay in my own skin without trying to freeze it so it breaks off, and the second part is learning how to add a little more gracefulness to the motions, and the third part will make you crazy in the dark.  i want to read the numbers on your skin, like they were my favorite parts of my favorite book, and go back and reread them way past the point where the pulse points are memorized.  i want to find you in the cave by the sea, making tracks on rocks for me to find the next morning, not because it will tell me that you are thinking about me, but because the tracks might tell me that the rocking of the sea is in your head and working its way under your skin.  this is the way the nervous birds in my chest turn into seagulls, moving my blood to a place that's close and so impossibly far away.  i could make numbers for all the kind of longing and draw them on your neck with the feathers that i pull from my throat, and make up stories about impossible things that wolves wish for when they are circling at my feet, but the only thing impossible is the way they seem to know how to fold months together, so that this moment merges with that one, and the conversation yesterday comes back with the feeling of your ribs under my fingers, but the months move like waves, they flow forward, songs in time, songs on skin, and they roar in my ears, making turns and decisions and choose all the right boots from all the right shops, marching forward as if it were a war, as if it were not a war, and none of this is far away at all, not far off at all. 

Friday, March 23, 2012

more sea

the cafe was never going to be as good as it was when i found it the first time, like every other cafe, it becomes to full, and no one remembers what happened there the day before.  i'm trying to get clear of it, and right when the building disappears in my rear view mirror, my bag of magic breaks loose from the back of the bike and goes tumbling into a neverworld, and i'm alone again, but only long enough to pull off and say fuckall to the trucks who come careening toward my back and turn around.

this isn't the first time i had to turn around, not here, not in this place, but it is the first time i got to find something that i lost.  magic bag strapped back on the back, and i'm heading full speed into the sides of the mountains ahead, once again.  the world is covered with anxious glitter, it's another show about androgyny, and all the performers are nervous because we know we're being watched.  this place in between, it's not a nice place this time.

in my bag, i have lists of things i'm supposed to do, and things i'm not supposed to do.  so far, this is working.  and i'm heading back into the mountains, and on the other side is the sea, and when i get there, i might have time to get used to being in love.  when i get there, i might have the chance to sort out the things that i can see from the things that are still buried under the rocks in the river where i opened up my heart so that it could be loosened up from the roots to the graveyard.  when i get there, i might have a chance to know what i'm supposed to know through my tongue and through my fingers.  my short thumb is burning, and my palms are growing harder with these miles.  and my chest is strong, but pulsing with the movements of the same bird that always shivers right before it gets cold. 

if you found me, still as a statue and covered with chalk and salt, would you cover me with your tongue until i came back to life again?  if you found me, at the foot of your bed, blue and sleeping and covered with seaweed and sand, would you still have room for me?  and if you found me, making tea from the roots i find in the graveyard, would you stay for a night, even though the dogs were hungry at home?  and what if we remembered who we were, that we were hungry, that the salt on our tongues from a year could crack open and flake off, salt crystals for the windows to bring the spring back inside, even now, during a new moon, when all the sirens are gathering outside the window, waiting to blow us awake in a million directions, shaking the bells around their ankles and necks, calling us to eat?


Thursday, March 22, 2012

marked suffering

To be made to undergo, to endure.  To carry.  The root is the same as passion, and passion flowers are named for their resemblance to the crown of thorns.  This is all so very cry cry bob dylan cry.  This is what my phone tells me, on the way between here and there again, in the same cafe between two worlds, and everyone I miss is here again, in their ghostly shells.  I'm sorry I couldn't go to the cemetery this week, but there was a cleaning, and it's going to help me to decipher the words of the living and the dead, and by April I should be able to tell them apart.

On some mornings, my daughter is the one person that I need the most in the world, and those mornings are growing more and more frequent.  That's how it was this morning, I woke up and she was there, sleeping in the other room, the one where strangers' voices intercede on my dreams, but she sleeps more deeply than I do, because she is still growing a lot, and I'm just growing in different ways.  But after two weeks of waking up with a wish that I would be a little more asleep for a little longer, I am getting used to the idea that our bodies continue to grow in other dimensions, and I've needed a lot more food lately.  I'm terribly hungry, and that's just a small part of the reason why I'm here already, at the cafe, before I even left to trace my bones between the desert and the ocean.  The mountain is for ancestor bones, I wish she could see it, not the daughter, she saw it, the other one, the one who stays by leaving. 

But she's already here, in the cafe, and I'm trying to decide about whether or not I should finish my sandwich, or go and talk to her.  It should be an easy decision, but conversations with her are hard because they always end.  And then it's just me and my bones trying to find my way up into the mountains again, and the mountains always tell me that these things are set in motion long before I was born, and if all I do is live to track them, then everything will work out the way it was designed.

It wasn't very long ago that I thought that following the designs was a mistake, that I always had to make new marks in the clay, new fingerprints on the canvas, and new sounds in the rooms where no one had heard those sounds before, but today I just want to be able to make the sounds that are already there come through me.  It's a subtle distinction, but it's an entirely different view of the world from the inside. 

So I'm in the cafe, because I left early so I could escape, but everyone is here, and she's the only one I want to talk with right now, but there's this sandwich.  I wish this were more romantic, that I could say I got this sandwich with ingredients that reminded me of her, but in truth, I don't know if she ever really ate all that much, which is good for some discourses, because she isn't food.  There's someone in the corner, the one who is always still there, and she was always all butter, and everyone loves butter.  There's someone new, she's close by, and I think I could talk to her, but I'm not entirely sure yet, and this year I am only doing the things I'm entirely sure about.  You would think that this would mean I don't do very much, but that's not true, and I have to keep reminding myself that these are the things I am sure about.  The work, the images and the words, the dreams turned into poems to the goddess of dreaming, the food, this cigar, those boots that zip, and the ones that wrap around my calves when there's a war on.

In my dreams I meet her here and we talk about the war, so many wars, and while bombs are falling we're discussing the sexiest silhouettes, and the things we get to do when we're wolves.  But this isn't a dream, it's something else, something entirely in between, and something that separates me from the world like I were watching it through sheets of rain.

For too many months I've been thinking about things that can never be, and everything changed when I found out that the things that can never be already are, the things I wanted but couldn't have were already there, carrying a face buried in the back of my motorcycle jacket, reflecting me back to myself through smell, and all of a sudden, all of a sudden, all of a sudden.

Everything changes when we have our heads turned, and our eyes on the road beneath our feet.  And I want to stay, but these are ghosts, ghosts who are unfair or unconcerned that they take away from their counterparts who walk in real bodies in real time.  So I have to go to the ocean, to make prayers to the ocean with the rain that falls from my body.  I'm not alone.

sirensong

en español:

video/recorded

2-5 minutes
Yo soy la sirena, la que se perdió en el mar, y nadie me quiere, el mar ni siquiera me quiere, y el amor no me puede soportar. Cuando yo te veo, caminando, yo te veo caminando en el fondo del mar, yo lo se que me estoy soñando. Y he estado despierto un poco demasiado largo. Por demasiados años que llevo aquí, en el fondo del mar, soñando tu cara, tu cara, por que tu cara es un sueño. Y tu rostro era el rostro de mis sueños antes de que fuera borrado. No se trata de borrar. Esto no es simplemente una otra canción de amor perdido en las cosas que se borran. Porque si yo fuera a cantar a las caras que desaparecen, usted no me escuchó cantar, sería el tartamudeo, hablando de una alma en pena, que está a punto de perder la voz. He perdido mi voz, o estoy a punto, estoy en el precipicio, a punto de perder mi voz. Como cualquier cosa conmigo, estas palabras, voy a tratar estas palabras como si fueran mis últimas palabras, y que serían las mismas palabras que ya te lo dije. Lamento que yo destruyo lo que me gusta. Lo siento, yo destruyo lo que me gusta. Y lo siento por lo que está a punto de pasar a ti, y si tu quieres asegurarte que las cosas sean justas, entonces te diré lo que me está pasando.
Me quita el aliento, la saliva, y unas gotas de tu sangre, en mi piel y la boca con agua de mar, y por el tiempo de la mañana se despierta, todos estamos ya comenzando a secarse, y los cristales de sal se están reuniendo en la superficie de nuestra piel. Sin embargo, mientras sus ojos están a punto de color azul con azul de frío, con el sueño, azul, con más de una muerte chiquita, mis ojos captan todos los colores del arco iris, y yo nunca duermen. Nunca duermo. No muerte chiquita, ni grande, no hay muerte en absoluto, yo nunca duermo y nunca mueren. Sus ojos se siguen, y para mi, mis ojos dicen tic tic tic, mi tartamudez ojos, tic tic tic, mis ojos están llenos de sal, mis ojos se están quemando con tu sal, y en algunas mañanas, que es todo lo que puedo ver. Y luego, también, desaparecen, te conviertes en una estatua de sal y desapareces.
Pero yo sé algunas cosas. Sé que algunas cosas que tu nunca llegarás a conocer. Sé cómo llevar las cosas muertas de vuelta. Y sé que los secretos acerca de cómo traer de vuelta a la vida, y aquí está la clave. La capa de sal que sella los ojos cerrados para siempre, la capa de sal que sella tus labios cerrados, es tan útil para mí, la sal es tan útil por lo que sabemos cómo hacerlo. Porque yo soy astuto. Y yo sé cómo hacer cosas con mis manos y mis labios. Y yo tenía planes acerca de ti, y yo dibujamos diseños de tu mientras tu dormías, mientras tu estabas obsesionado por mis canciones, cuando estabas soñando conmigo antes de que tu me conoció. Y me baso diseños en la espalda y el cuello mientras duermes. Y yo sé cómo reconocerlo cuando tu vuelves, yo sé cómo reconozco porque me ha marcado, y si el mar se vomita tu cuerpo porque ella lo encuentra asqueroso, yo siempre le llevará en, yo siempre te llevarás a mi casa , porque tu me haces impotente, mudo, y temblando, y lo siento, lo siento, lo de lo que ocurre con las cosas que me encantan.

Sunday, March 18, 2012

match stutters

hold just for a moment this wave hold this wave hold this wave just for a moment this time this time comes marching comes pouring this time comes pouring like a wave this moment comes like a wave marching this is a wave hold this hold this back hold this back with your tongue with my tongue hold your tongue back hold it back/doghead mount on the wall watching over my shoulder watching my shoulder doghead waiting on the wall waiting to suffer another silence and another storm the ghost of a dog gathered at my feet hovering my feet like a shoulder in the world in the earth i am standing on the shoulders of ghost dogs and the ghost dogs answer/yes that's right sir you are right sir absolutely right sir that is right sir you by now are aware that these things that come biting through the ends of your fingers at night are not from outside you sir do you know sir how long a night can be sir i don't think you do sir i don't think you do you might know the taste of blood in the back of your mouth and you might remember the taste of blood in the back of the beach and you might know the magic of blood in the back of the throat but when you are following the same scent for one hundred sixty lives sir and you can still keep them separate it's then and only then that you know why there are some sounds that are startling and some that are songs and our songs sir are grieving songs sir because we have done this before sir too we have done this before and we're not done and we don't expect to be so why should you sir why should you/edge of breath puff a magnet to the phantoms on a night as cold as this one when the winter comes back to call like this one and your teeth in the back of my neck such as they are such as they are my breath is a prayer in the air like a moan painted with moisture and filled with helium like a song to the air where you might find me where you find me in the air helium rising smoke rising prayers to phantom dogs rising sunk like a thunderstone down to the end of the arrows of rain deeper into the belly of the earth this is how things grow back into the belly of the earth again this is how things grow back like an arrow through the wind into the belly of the earth past the belly out the other side to the bottom of the sea as above so below ask above sew below and make the pattern with the spiral with your hips like a spiral in the earth like a hole like a mark like a place where we can see from where we can hear from where we can trace the stories of all of these complicated births where the singers at the funeral are twisted inside out until the sounds are the same as the ones we sing on birthdays as if waking up were its own fertility rite as if coming to were a fertility rite as if the sounds of dogs running faster on the drops of rain in the wind were the endless loop of a fertility rite

Friday, March 16, 2012

march stutters

I don't know how this works.  I know I told you about the one who loves oranges, the one by the river, the one in the river, the one river in the world, she loves you, she adores you, she always loved you and adored you and I think that's why she wouldn't let me forget you even after you were away and I thought that's what I was supposed to do.  I think I told you about oranges, and when she is opened up and I am there with her in the closed room that only the initiated ones can enter, the ones who have gone to the river, the ones who have been turned animal, I think I told you that when she opens and says pour yourself into me, I pour from my eyes, I rain from my eyes, and it was just between me and her.  Except, this is the exception, I guess it's true the mistress narrative/s, we write exceptions, the subject and the object is always the exception, and that would explain why you show up in the patterns of the paint of words that I throw around on these walls, that was a compliment, it's always true this is all true but I don't know if it has weight yet so I will have to wait but.  This is the exception, I thought it was her and the thing I have with her, she makes me rain, pulls it out from my belly through my eyes, except this.  Today it was all the things it was supposed to be when it was a morning, and it was not raining, and it was not midnight, and the one who is related to the chameleon in my head, or maybe so related that it is the same chameleon in my head, that one, says, come to me, son, come closer to me, and he says this chameleon he says, do not say you are ok when you are not ok, and that's when the blood of a tangerine starts to rain from my eyes.  this is not a response to that not to that i will write that under cover of a secret message this is not a response to that but only a way of getting the details right because they are important, and time is moving faster and i can't keep track of these scratches on my arms i don't know where they come from but i knew they would be coming, so this.  So this.
This is a body that is covered with the dust of dirty branches, and these are lips that crack from not enough rain and these are eyes that yield fruit when they are held, by your words, under your tongue, living in your throat, and they say aha aha i see exactly what you are saying and you say that is a terrible joke and i say this is a feather in your throat in the form of eyes, please let's travel somewhere together, spring is here and we really should get away and see something we've never seen before, and it might take an act of faith to see that this is where the ocean learns the rhythm of the tools in the earth, and the earth writes himself to sleep with the songs from the water, and that they know each other without ever touching ever again and that's mythic enough, but maybe that's good enough for them because they don't have to move in human skin, and maybe they don't remember how hungry it gets, except maybe they do, and maybe they really do, and maybe when it rains they are not crying over us but from inside of us and that this is only what we're supposed to do. 
And then this, less about the body, but not at all apart from the body, this Abelard and Heloise, when I first heard that story I felt the bones in my chest start to break apart like they were brittle like they were withering like a bird, and I thought it was about something that had already happened, and you hadn't happened to me yet, and it still doesn't break me apart to make the ribs crackle like sticks in my straw body, not yet, but something there says I think I know, I think I know, I think I know why the dog howls at the moon, and we've done this before, at least once before, and this time we switched parts, I was her and you were him and now I'm older and a teacher and now you're tracking the prints that nuns leave in the snow, and their tracks have all the marks of a beautiful wolf who doesn't know that when she walks alone, she is divine, and this breakable loneliness is our goat song, and that these prints have all the rhythms of a goat at midnight, when the mushrooms are inside the ribs and the eyes are all the spectrums of every tangerine in the world, and this is when I start to turn, and my hands are startled, here comes a poem in the middle of a crowd, screens that number five and eight start to reflect the images of what we see when we are in the middle of musky bodies in an electronic time, somewhere in the middle of a future we don't remember agreeing upon, and these hands start to shake, because I was not expecting, I was not expecting, not expecting hands to grow pregnant with trembling, and this is where my teeth would start to dig into the metal on my lip, wishing for blood, just a drop to get through this long night of reflected master narratives turned to mistresses, and this is where my hip bones start to pulse with the beats that make the flesh start to turn, this something else is what I was born like, something else is where I was born, by the river, becoming animal, and haunted by the thought that if I could find you in this forest, I would trace your eyes to the fur under your arms, the layer that speaks of where we first met, and where we always meet, and I would drink from your fur, even though one drop it would take only one drop to know everything we are not supposed to know, but I would drink, until you would remember what it feels like when the earth is raining over you, and the ocean is raining inside you.

Friday, March 9, 2012

march started/hysterotic

Listen, I know it started, I had things, I had things going on.  There were people and these things that I was doing with these people, and some of these things took longer than others, and some of them didn't take very much time at all, and some of them took a long time but it felt short because it was so nice and then it was gone and then it was this again, walking in this again, moving in the world dragged from below by hot metal in between the legs and a rumble and a noise that matched the thing that growls when it misses that thing that it loves the most in the world.

And listen, if I had my wherewithal, I would rearrange things, beginning with the always already written history of my heart, and I would make this very road beneath my head the one true love, the thing that I love to love the most in this world, because the road will never go away, and I will never be away from it when I go away, but always together, like we were born to know each other.  Things like that, birth and knowing and twin fingerprints and stars, they make this heavy, just heavy enough to stay on the road and not float into the ether and disappear.  Because I have that.  It's one of my problems.  Floating away.  I do that.  Some people are born to fall, and I fall, but I was born to float, and I do that, too, and that's more dangerous, because on some of these mornings, I am almost sure that the next time I float will be the time that you lose me forever.  It's not what I want.

But March, listen, this is March, and not historical, but entirely erotical, and it might be even likely that it's a little of both, because February was so short and wants to continue.

This is hysterotic.  No wonder no wonder.

And when talking about hystery and arrowticking, and things that are short and want to continue....oh my oh my oh my, not that again, no no not that again.

But yes why not this month is erotic, and this will start by talking about the body, and will stay in the body, the body will move the thought, and the thought will slide backwards and forwards like a wet moment in time that gets wetter as it moves through time and begins to beckon something hidden, something hidden and obvious that wants to come to the light to see the light to spill itself out in the light, that place where her hands are on you or on herself and it's hard to know which and doesn't matter which her hands are in her hands and they're moving and everything is about to turn so suddenly finally about to turn.

And that's why this could be a place to escape the head, and the things it wants to say, about the way we used to be, back when we were pacicetus (pakicetii?) and halfway between dog and fish, or better between wolf and whale, and if that were true, then we might remember something more, something that would pull us all too far back into february again, and it's impossible to go back to february again until next time around, so I will see you the next time around, and we can share lists of times that wolves and mermaids came into our beds and tried to drown us in our sleep and we woke up with a strange heart that was charmed and so heavy that it was almost impossible to wake up at all, and compare the wrinkles on our hands, the fingerprints that hold the water of a year, and still match, even in February, even in March, when we are calm, settled, mystical, hysterotical. 

Monday, March 5, 2012

metaphysics of longing

Her tongue was blue again in the morning when she woke up.  It hadn’t happened like that for a very long time, but she certainly felt that way long enough, and that’s part of what made it so interesting to her.  She felt it without the evidence, and suddenly, here it was, her blue tongue.

Her blue tongue would not convince him, though, so it wasn’t spectacular evidence.  This would become like a story, this is like a story.


And it should be like this:

In the morning, her head feels a little like a Tupperware something, one of those containers that is tightly sealed shut, and her head is a container for words.  In the morning, she feels like her head is sealed shut, full of words, and they echo to the point of just almost being there where she can hear them, but not quite there, so she is stuck going through most of a day on the verge of understanding something.  Something that’s said either by her or to her or through her.  There was a time, not too long ago, when someone was saying for her, and sometimes it was very pleasant and most of the time it was very harmful and hateful, and now it just strikes her as one of the things that people might do if you’re not careful. 

That narrator is in her head, she realizes, and asks it to leave.

Because it is supposed to be like this:

This was always supposed to be a story about iterations.  Who gets to speak, and speak for the first time, and who gets to come the first time and who gets to avoid all the repetition the first time so that the other one will have to be re-iterative and everything else that happens the second time.  So when he spoke for the first time it wasn’t exactly a pure thrill, there was always something else going on under the surface of things (a ridiculous statement, not because it is not true but because it is obvious and even more obvious than that even).  But it was also not so much of a thrill for him as he had hoped, because there is no first time, and they both knew that, and he was supposed to have whatever thrill there was from it being close enough to the first time, or rather, as close as either of them would get to that.  But it was so much an always already repetition, this speaking and all the power plays involved in that were already spoken and played out, and he could never quite explain how it was becoming clear to him that theories of repetition in language are really at their core theories about being in a body that comes back, and being in bodies that come back and repeat and leave and come back.

And with that came the underlying idea (again a ridiculous idea because there are too many underlying ideas for anything to single one out, they should all be random because they are all true anyway already) that when he spoke of her after or wrote her after that it was an attempt to capture that part of her that repeats, that comes back, and he would be jumping the gun, really, playing the next life out in a language game.  However, not but, but however,  if language makes us, then it could be very much the same thing, at least for him, and if it sounded true to her, then it would be like that for her, too, and that didn’t have to mean they were playing god.  The core of it was a sense of helplessness about missing each other and not knowing what else to do, not yet anyway, not at this moment anyway, not for awhile yet anyway.

So in the end it was also a language game, except, and maybe here because of that, the end was seeming much and much less like an end, but like a short pause, that he were paused and she were paused but their lives continued on anyway, which is not so much of a pause as nothing at all, time flowing forward in the way that it does and they were going forward with it, in a way together but not so very much together that they were waking up and saying things to each other about breakfast.  Neither of them ate breakfast, really, but it was more than that, it had to do with space.  Bodies not inhabiting the same space at the same moment, but being somewhere else, doing things to themselves and with other people, in a way that would suggest to anyone with an empirical sensibility that they were really not together at all but very much apart.

Which seemed to suggest that the end were really that, an end, and that was true and now this was true, except, there were exceptions.  He would continue to wake up at three in the morning and she would be there, and the same thing happened to her, and often enough that they would write each other to check the times and the places and they would match of course, and that made it all so metaphysical that it was also sad.  Because metaphysical means that they had to find places outside and above the physical plane, but still working within its structures, and that said to them that the physical plane was, at the very least, an issue, and on some days it was an unbearable prison, and notions of next lives would not make it easier, but could make it much worse, because it could be said to resemble something like waiting. 

All lovers wait.  If they were waiting, then they were lovers, too, but no different than anyone else, just lovers who wait, but in a slightly different way, and on bad days the differences were negligible, and on most days the differences were the honey on the tongue that made them both able to open their mouths to the mouth of the world and speak back.  Prayer.  Speaking back to the speaking world is prayer, and only time would play the part of the answer, so in between waiting there was prayer and they got so lost in prayers that the waiting didn’t matter any more.

Saturday, March 3, 2012

vertigo/3

This is just endless, apparently, so many parts and so many things to describe, and so many descriptions of parts that need to come apart before they come together.  This might get a little too explicit, this might be more about Bjork, or at least it has something more to do with Iceland than with anything else.

It's an island that's a volcano, the whole island is a volcano, and every tourist guide will tell you that the faerie folk who live here are entirely peculiar to that, the volcanic rock kind, and they seem very sweet and kind, and in truth, in truth they are, but they're also not so fucking stupid as the other kinds of faeries, not the ones who like to sprinkle children with dust so they dream about jesus and the like, these kind are far from jesus and have never taken pictures with lambs or pine cones or those kinds of castrated kittens that everyone loves to post on their walls so they have nice dreams.  This is hard, this is very hard for me, talking about faeries is always difficult for me because there is always too much to say, because I love them too much and there are so few who really understand them, and the misunderstood things that I love are the things I like to talk about, and the ones who perceive me as misunderstood and like to talk about me are my favorite ones, not because I am my favorite subject, it's because we are my favorite subject, and I don't have enough to read about us, so I have to write this.

So this is what I have, then.  The things I write about the us, and the things other people write about the us, and that's enough to read to remind me that this aching feeling that this space is apart from the world and connects me to it and makes me fearless in it, is not an illusion, but just not always reachable right now, that this, these, these things that are written, are written about us, and maybe it doesn't matter that there are only two people in the us, and maybe that's enough, or maybe that's the perfect number for what this is supposed to be.  Most of the time.  Or something like that. 

There's too much to say about the way the faeries on this island work, that this island is something apart from the rest of the world, and that the elements here make it inhabitable to very few sturdy people, but the ones who get the deeper dry cold also get the deeper dry warmth, and this might very well make them the most exotic people in the world.

I think I might mean erotic.  Or I think I might mean sensual.   Or I think I would rather mean than think, or something that comes through the fingertips, that might be sparks, but those sparks, like lifesavers, are only visible in the dark, and the only thing there is to say on a Saturday morning is that I am so sorry that I didn't touch you more when you were here, but I couldn't, and I think it was the same for you, and that makes it seem much harder.  Maybe it's like a tattoo, the way you wrote on me, like a tattoo, it can't be retouched once a year, but needs successive days of writing, re-writing, and re-writing, and we don't get to have those right now and who knows why and it doesn't matter so much anyway because I worried that I imagined you wrong, and was imagined wrong, and got to find out that we were right, the things we hoped would be true turned out to be true all along after all it's ok it will be all right everything will work out no one knows how these things will turn out it will be ok.

Friday, March 2, 2012

vertigo/2

Just this, a little more here, like this.

Yes, exactly like this, keep going, but be patient, it might take awhile before your body turns blue like it does.

Not thirsty, either, short answer, short reply to a poem written in clouds, I'm not thirsty at all, is what he would say, and that would be enough, like the knock on the wall if you ask if the ghost is in the room, that answer, I am not thirsty either, is like the knock on the wall.  He should stop there.  But he keeps talking, keeps on like that, because there's too much more to say, he wants to say, "I want to be haunted by your ghost."  "Is that all right, is that all right with you?"  and "Baby, I don't want to know."  It's terrible or sweet that every song reminds him of her, like she came through his sacred spaces and sprinkled him with the white powder, except he gets the feeling that they were both sprinkled, that something else was doing the sprinkling, like it were planned, like it was something that they were supposed to do, and he wants to know what he is supposed to do next, and there's nothing to do next except talk about what it feels like to be inside a charm, to be so utterly and completely charmed, and this, this is suddenly science, where they say that scientifically love, that first blush whatever whatever bullshit whatever, only lasts a year, or a year and a half, and then the brain gets used to the chemistry and starts to settle in and look for the rocking chair and the bag of chips and the conversations with each other about heart smart food. 

And suddenly this is a year, and it's supposed to have changed at least a little, that infatuation, or curiosity, should change a little bit, a little bit less, a little less like a storm, not like riding a white horse at midnight at the edges of the sea, more like a rocking horse, dadadadada, just like that.  It shouldn't be so out of the body and into the body, but when he sees her, in a crowd by a door by a table, through a window where the shades go transparent, suddenly and utterly, where he sees her and he is aware that the skin on his body has become like those shades, utterly and suddenly transparent to her, and his eyes are open, the pupils dilate all the way, because he lets her all the way in, and she lets him all the way in, and instead of feeling exposed or vulnerable it is exactly the same thing that happens to wolves who have lost each other for a long time, they just open to each other, like wolves, or lovers who meet over lifetimes, or strands of dna (there's so much science in this), they just open and it feels like the symbol gets completed, or the bell finds its tone, or any number of mainstream references, you complete me, blabla da da da.

There should be more but time is so short and suddenly he remembers there is just not enough Bjork, and there should be, who knows why, maybe because he is the same age as Bjork and that's kind of hot. 

Thursday, March 1, 2012

vertigo/1

Suddenly.

There was a girl on a motorcycle.  And then, and then, there was a wolf, and then there was a wolf, and somewhere in there, there was an adventure that took place and the adventure was impossible to put into words, but she would try, and he would try, and then everything refused to go back to how it was before.  Not like a normal life.  Not like that.  Not returning to normal the way people talk about that.  Something else. 

Something like the clock inside the chest called the heart or something large and iconic like the heart, if not the heart, then something heart-like, something that always returns to a typical state, more typical than normal, really, like that, something like the clock could not go back to the typical state, could not re-set.  That’s it.

Start it again.

There was a girl on a motorcycle and there was a wolf and then suddenly the re-set program was missing.

It was like a crazy bird crawled into his skin and moved him from the inside, and made his face start to twitch, and he suspected she was moving him from the inside.  Meanwhile, she.  Was being moved from the inside, and when they were moving each other from the inside they were only making trouble for themselves.  It was troubling.  And there was no re-set.  That’s it, just like that, no re-set, moving from the inside, trouble, girl and wolf and that was all there was to it and that would be enough if that was all there was, more than most get in a life, most get hot and bothered and then they get themselves into trouble and then they get bored, but not crazy bored just sleepy bored, something that most can sustain for the remainder of a life in a body that is winding down, after high school we all wind down for the next 50 years, 60 years, some amount of time, unless we are interrupted, unless we get pulled out of the classroom and taught secret secrets, something they don’t teach in the classroom because they don’t know.

Hold on.  Something about an interruption.  In between ruptures there was a resting place, only this resting place had no re-set button in sight, so it was not so very restful, but bothersome, it was bothersome, and they were bothered, something like a big old hot mess of bothered hotness.

It was not summer.  Not at all, not really, not quite, because they fell asleep before summer ever got there.  That’s the saddest part of the story.  Not really.  The saddest part was this:

Long after all of this, and there’s something that needs to be said before we get to the long after but this is not very well put together at all, not at all, because after her he was no longer well put together, could not pull it off, could not walk out the door without being recognized as a wolf with some serious trouble inside him, twitching him from the inside, long after this, the saddest part (for him, this is only about him, except it’s also about her, but they get each other mixed up with each other sometimes as the story goes on, which is probably exceptional in some economies), the saddest part for him was that moment, the one that gets repeated, where his friend would say, “No one ever knows how these things turn out.”  And the friend kept changing faces, or rather, it was different friends who kept saying the same thing, “No one knows how these things will work out,”  and he would ask them, How does it turn out for them?  Does the girl get the wolf in the end, do they turn into each other in the end, does he become like a real boy at the end and have to wear shorts and suspenders in the end (because that might be an objection to this exceptional state of being in between, not wanting to become that thing in shorts not ever oh hell no), or does she turn into a real girl at the end with shorts and pigtails and pink ribbons and texts that say lol lol lol oh hell no, or is it her turning him into a wolf all the way and her turning into a wolf all the way and when they are animal all the way it is that state of having the trapdoor in the belly drop open and all the needles fall out and they find out what it is to be reckless, to be really reckless, is it that? Because he wants that.  Because that reminds him of her.  That feeling when the belly is more bare than ever, and everything is so very bare and they move together, covered with honey, stained with bloodhoney to the roots of the hair.

This is already too complicated.  He wants to know how the story turns out then, how it turned out for that them, to see if it could be that way for this them, and every story turns out somehow, it does turn out at some point, for a little while…in this one the wolf and the girl or the boy or the boy and the boy and the girl etcetcetc, they are together in the end, and in that one they lose each other, get married to people who turn out to love television more than anything, and they get sprinkled with the powder that makes them bored and sleepy and happy enough to stay in bed for the rest of the morning until it turns into the end of a life where the heart stops utterly because the veins are filled with artificial butter and no one can longer move any longer.  He wants to know how it will turn out for them, only no one knows how it turned out for themselves, because none of these stories ended yet, because they are not past stories.

In the past though, in the past only the stories about the tragic lovers make it into any of the complicated texts.  Unless they are stories about goddesses and gods, and they can’t be those, but maybe just maybe they are supposed to be pretending that they are. 

And that idea, that maybe they should pretend they are, starts to get into his fur and infect it with blood and honey, because there is something about all those stories that reminds him of this story.  There are lots of love stories, and he has lots of those written on his shaved ribs, but this one rises to the surface the most because it cuts the deepest and leaves the deepest marks, simply because there was nothing simple, she read him like a text, and he read her like a text, and it happens like that with any textual lovers writing on the textures of the skin and the fur, except here they read the footnotes and understood them and it seemed like everything that tried to move toward understanding only opened up more complexity, a sense that it was geometrically progressive toward more progression.  He, a drop of him on her belly, exploded outward and inward in a thousand directions.  She, a drop of blue sweat on his tongue, exploding like a text that could give birth to a universe, this was biological and not biological, this and this and this and that too, and so far outside an or that it was like floating on one of those ice rafts they have in the reindeer movies, far off at sea somewhere, hoping to be taken under, or hoping they might run into Bjork, hoping this dream might not be a dream at all.

And what’s worse, there’s more, and what’s worse, no more time.  Not here, not now, not like this. 

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...