CHRIS DANOWSKI // PERFORMACIONESIZNE MONSTRANDOFACCE

art and life

2012-02-01T20:44:00.000-08:00

please forgive me, i know i get these things confused, and maybe there is no real line between them, and i know that already, and this is already resolved because it's already set in motion, but (to make excuses) these repetitions are madness, an unbearable madness, but when they turn into a metaphor they become so beautiful. and at those moments, all of our failings and fragility become powerful in that other light. and if i could live in that light all the time, whatever is unbearable becomes the thing that opens up to something more utterly beautiful than we could create with our mad designs. in this, however, i think this is something i need to leave outside the realm of art and life so i can get to the next thing that's calling, those things that are desperately calling at my doorstep at three in the morning when everything is becoming heavy, sucking in the last part of night before it gives over to the day again. this, i think this is something that can live or die without my desires anywhere on the table, and maybe then it will have a chance to grow. but i don't know who i'm supposed to be in this next part, who i am supposed to take with me, because all the personas feel wrong, and none of them are lovable unless they are myths. and i can't regenerate ears the way they do in cartoons, and all my spirits carry scars and lost parts with them, and some carry holes in their hearts into eternity. art is myth is a key to unlock a destiny, is an accusation against reality. when my feathers are sticking out, i am not safe. and when the woman with brooms comes sweeping again, this time angrier than the last time, it's time to leave the room until all the ghosts have argued themselves to sleep. it can take years before a construction of a persona reveals itself to be useless, but just a moment outside the room to connect to the heartbeat. the path is the breath. the breath is the road to the heart. the mad fairies there, those are the ones to pay close attention to, they find the gifts left on the table, and when i'm lucky, and when my heart is beating, they wrap them up and send them back before i have the chance to open them. a tragedy averted. this is a fantastic love story. there's not enough time to sort the truth from the lies, and there's not enough room to write the same stupid love song over and over again, not with the music that's just on the other side of that thin veil.

epic love; it's about time

2012-01-30T09:41:00.000-08:00

It's already almost always February already, and everything that's fresh about a year happens in February, or January, it better happen soon because I am running out of places to fall when I pass out from holding my breath, and I'm not allowed back into the old places.

Epic: the love of the sun for the moon and the moon for the sun.
You would think they wouldn't be so different, but they are because they never match.
He's on a 20 day cycle, and she's all 28 or 30, and it's so hard to get this in sync.
Except this time around there are solar showers and it's making everyone flare up occasionally, and the sun and the moon see the best in everyone, and they see the worst in everyone, and these might be the same exact things.
This is the epic of the sun and the moon.
Next month is reincarnated lovers, and the weight of history (should not equal karma, but hey there you go, what the hell were you thinking would happen when you decided to ride again, right after you got done with the last ride)???
Silly silly moon.
This is me.
The moon. Tricky situations here that are confusing, and that's just goddam perfect.
This is how it starts to play at the end of January, when we should have known from the beginning:

The scene opens and she is mad mad mad.

The sun says: You're mad aren't you?

The moon doesn't talk for a very long time, for her it's an eternity, but she's so goddam old that what used to be an eternity for her is only a day and a half.

She takes a breath and says: A little mad. You shine on everyone and everything, and I told you, I told you, I don't mind, but you woke me up, you woke me up when I was in the middle of the nicest dream, and you told me you couldn't get me out of your mind, and I avoided it and I denied it, and then and then I decided that and then I wasn't sleeping anymore anyway, so I gave in, and when I rolled over to look at you so you could tell me why I was in your mind, and what I looked like in your mind, all you could tell me was that you were so busy with so many other things, I gave you a chance to tell me something important and all you could talk about was how your life was so hard because you have to shine on all the planet and it's so hard to keep them straight, and I'm just apparently I'm just I'm just another call for you at 3 am when you are cold, and and and I'm mad.

Sun: You're not just another call.

Moon: I know, I know. I'm emotional. Moony.

Sun: You're still mad?

Moon: YES.

Sun: Because I made you roll over.

Moon: Because you made me roll over. Now it sounds petty, when you put it like that, you make me petty, and you you you are too far away to pet and how does that make me feel, huh?

Moon chest butts Sun it's the last time this month, and this causes solar flares to fly off and make young lovers everywhere go stupid, and even old lovers go stupid, because this is the chance they had to touch and that was all they got to do. Goddam Sun and Goddam Moon. This is a world made for the Dwarves, and the tall people keep pretending they can see so fucking far but they are wrong wrong so very very wrong. Fucking tall people are not so very tall. Let the Dwarves take over, they can work with this and we have fucked it up.

It's really embarrassing for the Moon, because she has a new lip ring (it's old now but that's not that important) and feels like she has to speak for the rest of us, and she does, but oh, when she does.

She is not as old as the Sun, and smaller, but she has taken time to get to know her landscapes, and understands early on that the bottom of the ocean is larger than the universe, even when it's eating too much bacon and butter and expanding like one might imagine Norway would expand, and it's not easy to talk to her when she's like this, so it's better to just leave her alone and hope she does the same with you. Except. There's always so much more to this story. The Moon is suddenly aware that this year has started with a long and cold wind on her face, and it's frozen her lips, and it's made her eyes tear in the dark of the night and the light of the day, and she's just woken up. This is the best time to start a year. Right now. This very minute. Exactly like this. Not even thinking about the Sun, not at all. Fuck.

alchemies of water and air

2012-01-25T20:36:00.000-08:00

I lay still at the edges of my covers. There were rough mountains beneath my head while I was dreaming about the last time the world ended. There were floods receding from under my sink. My houses always flood when there is too much to feel and too many details that get lost. Finding the place where the broken fingernail is letting in too much light and covering it just enough so that it might heal by the morning. Taking the last screen shot before the world turned to iron and iron technologies and keeping it frozen so that I could refer back to it when I needed it the most. Lifting the lipstick stains off the edges of the same sheet I slept in when I was getting crowned with African spirits, and holding them suspended in the air, and telling myself that the world seemed to be sleeping, but this is how wizards calm themselves when the lovers are gone far away. And the flood washes through anything anyway, and I'm left with my broken fingernail, the one that looks like hers, and the stains are on my neck, and the frozen face from a sad night is burned into the sides of my belly.

These are the icons and fetishes I sleep with, no leather with zippers and no silk straps with secret words, just the thousand and one descriptions for sleep that I have when everything is so far away from this hungry belly, the one that only knows how to eat after midnight, when all the neighbors are up and coughing in their beds.

And in another blink, there's a sound in the dark, and I'm chasing after potions to keep the blue light of the moon centered just above my chest, and I'm distracted long enough that it sinks down, the moon fading into the water of my flesh, and the room is lit up with lines that go in every direction, and it's strange I never knew, I think it's strange, and this next world is already writing itself on the walls of my longing, that will not fall asleep. I put these things under my pillow, and forgot about them, and didn't know that the ocean would rock me harder until they came dislodged, always already always there.

When I was in another place, I spent hours memorizing the parts, so that I could reconstruct them for myself on a cold night, but the parts never stayed still long enough to separate, they always held the mettle and the ore of the whole, and all I knew was the whole, the forest was the trees and this was something that I never thought belonged rightfully to me.

So I followed the drum for another 270 nights, listening to the pattens and getting distracted by the way these stories unfolded the other forgotten identities of a life of already alternate identities, and on the worst nights I could only fall asleep by telling myself that no one knows and no one cares.

First silence is a welcome lover. Then it becomes unbearable. Then it becomes a constant pounding at the back of the neck, and then it burns more quietly, a soft blue that turns white and is impossible to hold, and that's the point when fire and water start to speak, as if for the very first time.

This was a burden that I wouldn't give up, because it was the only way to keep dark in a time where there was too much light. This was a pain that had to burn its way out from the inside, so its inscription would write on me from the inside out. You can follow your heart, they say, but first you have to let it speak to you, and you're too sure of yourself for that to happen.

To love this ocean you have to be more than man, more than woman, and trained in how to follow the beat of the drum until you become the mountain that speaks, the mountain that shakes, the mountain that erupts on the lap of the sea. Panic turns to love, and love turns back into panic, and you don't need any particular friend to read your marks in the dark, anyone with eyes can read them for you, and it says what you should have expected, it's that thing that you didn't want to say but had to say anyway, it's that lesson you thought you learned but had to walk through in your flesh anyway, it's that lover that goes away but you decided you would love anyway, because any wizard can tell you that the feeling that time has stopped is that same moment that the horses under the sea are working their way to the surface, and they start riding you until you can't remember the promises you made to yourself before you saw her marks on your ribs, a story that isn't complete, it's never complete, because it's true, those marks you made on each other with your tongues reached all the way to the bones, and there won't be another day that passes when you are not hungry, and there isn't a mask in the world that can disguise you from your real twin.

this is why it's all so very different and not about you or anyone

2012-01-25T07:10:00.000-08:00

this is disguised, it's a writing disguised as this story about a pigeon, a chance to check the brakes, there were two in the road, and the one flew at the very last moment, and a 2 and then a 1, and that's such an interesting number.
this is more interesting and not at all what this is about, just something to remember, first this:
please dont judge me
this will show up in something later.
this is what this is about, and not about anything or anyone at all.
this dream, i'm stoned and walking thru gavin's apartment, or hotel suite, somewhere in the pacific northwest maybe, we're traveling and i'm stoned, and i'm looking in the mirror and this is all so cinematic, and i'm suddenly worried because i want to be more high and i am leading myself back to get more high even though i know i should not be high at all because of what happens and wanting to die eventually and i'm wondering if this is going to be a problem but maybe it's about my back, my back hurts and i could say it was for that and i know that won't read true to anyone who knows me, this is complicated because on one hand i have to consider what i'm going to tell people and on the other i have to be more high, on the first hand there are options and on the second hand there are not options, i have to be high and there are no more hands, and suddenly i am waking up and i wonder why i'm waking up and realizing that ok this helps to sort things out, because it was a dream, so i don't have to worry about how to talk about this, but i do have to be higher because it feels so cinematic and i am worrying about that, but then i remember that this should not be a problem because i don't like being high and i am relieved. at this moment my phone beeps, someone someone something something on facebook something, i open my computer because it's something to see for sure, with a dream like that waking me up and someone something commented on something i something and it's a minute before midnight so i was only asleep for an hour, and got so high in that hour, and now it's a minute before the day i'm writing this and it all seems very significant.
because pigeons are allergic to pot, they don't bloat or explode like seagulls with alka seltzer, but they get very paranoid, and throw themselves at motorcycles to get the voices in their heads to stop, poor poor things, the day won't get stranger it can't just try to get stranger i fucking dare you
and i am 14.
x
c

been there done that (x5x5x5x5x5)

2012-01-24T07:22:00.000-08:00

"That's what it is," he was thinking, in the middle of a thought, like it were the middle of a conversation that they had just left off. And honestly, every life is picked up in the middle of a conversation, one left off from last time around, and the ones that are cut short are not beautiful because they're short. That needs more, he was sure, but first, continue the first thought, in the middle, in the middle of a life, picking up on where they left off, a thought she gave him that he wanted to give back to her in a new form, because that's the nature of the gift. Too Derrida. Not really what this is about. Life generates itself on its decomposition which is regenerative because it decomposes, it lives and dies, comes and goes, comes and goes, and we said nothing all the day, and did not come, and did not go..."some are born over and over and are very old souls. And some are born into one life, one time only. And some, that's you, or her, that's her, there she is again, comes and goes sometimes to water and sometimes to land, and I think I do that, too, and the others have an advantage to this place, because with so many times around, it's like home to them, but not like that for us, because we're only home under the cave where you can still here the sounds of the waves, even though it is too far above our heads to make out any of the sounds, not natural to be here, nothing natural about this place at all, not to her, at least, not to me at least, there must be others, but now that we is the only one I know, the only one I know."

This would be longer, he realized, he would rewrite it all and it would be longer, perhaps Wednesday, because everything is longer on Wednesday, it is longer and lasts longer and everything worth waiting for is reminded why we wait when it is Wednesday, but wait on that.

Lives do not become beautiful because they are short, and loves do not get made beautiful because they are short, they are beautiful for reasons that no one can say, it's a certain mix of a certain spice, a secret. Things that are short are tragic. And worse when they revealed themselves as so very beautiful right before they die, because that certain mix does not come around very often, and it makes things grow.

Step Two, we turned and turned and turned again.

And this time it's a parking lot of an Indian restaurant, and he was talking to him about her, but not so much, not so many details, just that there were thoughts, and sweet thoughts, and it was somehow sweet but he didn't expect anything, just wondering about patterns, because remembering this time around or that time around, and especially that one time around when she could not emerge and he could not submerge, because they had their meeting places crossed, he was dry and she was wet and it was like that for a very long life, that was the worst, but this one, not the worst, not at all, but remembering this has happened before makes him feel part of something much larger and older and waves of something coming through him, something hard to put into words, something like the weight of tears and longing on the flesh that makes the blood flow, makes the blood flow in sweetness, the kind of sorrow and longing that makes things emerge, makes things submerge, over lifetimes, and despite time, here you are...and he's talking to him, and the bees, here come the bees, one bee, here comes one bee buzzing around his head, a funny thing, be careful of the bee, and the bee comes around his head, again and again, circling and landing and circling and landing, and he knows what this means. They come around again, after lifetimes, in new bodies, and he's become so attached to this particular body, though, and doesn't want to have to wait for the next one, because he sees her with his hands in the air, in the air she is lying on the air in an afternoon that will not turn to light, and her body is covered in honey, and her body is filled with honey, making jokes about nuns, what made sor juana so sore, and this is a sting and that is not a sting and everything is a little like a sting, in varying degrees of tension and release, and this is being stung, except he is not stung, only courted. The bee is buzzing his head, and he is lost in his thumbnail, it still has the moon in it, it still reflects the sun, how much sun and how much moon, everyone has a little or a lot of both sun and moon, held under the tongue after communion to remember which lover you were to know which you were supposed to be next, nature loves repetition, the first time is not always the best time, but the third and forth, yes, and every time after, and sometimes sometimes always it always takes at least 256 times to get it right the first time.

epic status

2012-01-18T07:41:00.000-08:00

this is a repeat of things if you have been particularly stalky:

(dec 11-jan 12)

Orpheu Mixes the Songs of the Dead: An Epic for the Ribs

"She's standing on the point where the river meets the ocean, with a wish in each hand. I ask her which one she's going to choose, and she says, "It doesn't matter, they're both the same. And every time you remember me, the moon gets a little bit bigger.""

"The siren who was protecting her door was reading the lines on my face, and said there was good news. "But it's strange," she said, "those flighty ones, those are the ones who know the least about flying, because anyone who knows about flight knows that first you have to learn how to fall.""

"Woke up to a braid of hair tangled in a blue cloth that smelled like the ocean. Heading back to the sea, trying to see how long I can pretend these things don't matter any more."

"The thing about waking up into a dream where you're underwater is that uncanny feeling that you never did leave there."

"La Bruja del Cobre is complaining about the cold, and wishing we had more of that soup I made for her a long time ago, and she is reading the blood running parallel to the bones in my hands. "Everyone has their own alchemy: art, love, or money," she says, "and yours is love. But you knew that already. For other people it's art." She is looking at my forehead and remembering something. "For other people, maybe, there's a difference.""

"Orpheus," she said, "if we don't act like this is a war, then maybe it won't be one. Can we stop acting like this is a war?"

"He wants to say something original and profound to Eurydice, at least mention the newest scars, but his tongue is hijacked by mad faeries. Fortunately for him. "'We miss you,' hiss the Lovecats," he says."

"He couldn't remember if he was going down or up, but either way this was deeper. There was the sound of wild dogs circling, and he could feel the marks she left on his back start to burn again. When hunger is sustained this long, it becomes something else, becomes part of the pulse, becomes a gash or a glimpse into the eye of a goddess who is always raining."

"She said that when the floor of the desert looks like the moon, when snakes fall from people's mouths when they speak, children's hands are hiding birds and dogs are disguising themselves as trees, you're closer to the moon than you think. And there's an ocean under your tongue, so remember that when everything hurts the opposite is also true."

"The dogs keep barking at the waves, and the woman with brooms for hands is frantic to clear the area of sand, on the other side of the mountain everyone is holding their breath steady; the longest night waiting just underneath the lips of the sea."

"My feet keep getting tangled in all the seaweed that threads its way through a year, and when I see bigger waves on the horizon, I start to panic, because I don't think I can run fast enough. The woman with scales on her legs keeps telling me that the threads are there to keep me from running in the first place. That's how it happened to her."

"It's the longest night of the year, the kind of darkness where you can't see your feet moving across the sand. The sounds of wild dogs and things of the sea start to gather from far away. The tides are the only things with a sense of direction on a day like this. A decision to stay still, and leave it up to them."

"dog wakes up barking, dog stands at the foot of the bed and licks my feet because she is ironic, dog says, i am the sea and the mountain, i am the fox and the wolf, the butter and the churn, the honey and the fingers, and you, you, you too are more than you were when you fell asleep."

"Covered with ribbons and bones, the dog wakes up again and again with the same dream about the love affair between the sun and the moon, where they carry each other's pictures in their wallets, the dog licks everything the dog sees to mark the returning of the light."

"The sun is staring at the moon for a long time, then says, "You, you look very familiar." The moon says, "Stop it, I am not playing that with you again.""

‎"You think about me way too much," is exactly what Persephone says, and she could very well be right. "You could very well be right," is exactly what Hades says, sprinkling more pomegranate seeds on her plate."

"Odysseus is looking at the sea with longing, and waiting for something from the moon, but she is silent (but she is smiling). He misses being on the water, even though it tries to tear him to pieces every time (and he is smiling)."

"When I open the door, 2011 is standing there, salty water dripping from her hair. "Just give me one more night," she says, and I should say no, but I can't."

"‎8-5 mentirosa revoltosa"

"five witches standing around me chewing on leaves with wild dogs in their eyes, they mark the ground with an 8; i'm asking, when do we go into the forest? and they're answering, when did you ever leave?"

"And so at the beginning of the year, the sun decided, that's enough, the moon is too much to think about, that he would forget her. But it really only worked for a week every month, and for three days it was so much it was more unbearable than ever."

"Fists full of feathers and a moon that pulls at the living and the dead, we never get over the reeling at the mysteries of birth."

"lunatic restless writing the book of love without the long spaces between the chapters (longing) and tickling the surface of the moonplanet with new hipster shoes, when failure is certain adventure is always near"

"The ground outside my door is covered on the morning after a vinegar moon; half-used love spells, branches coated with white chalk, and a small piece of chain. Like spring coming without warning, I'm not yet packed but already leaving."

"A white room, a white chair, a white cloth tied around her eyes, the blind sculptor reading my cards at a white table, and she says, "Shave the ribs, clear the area, make room for someone to write epics of underworld rescues over your ribs, using the bones as stepping stones.""

"The moon is up later than anyone, waiting to see the sun, a thunderdrum buried in the back of her throat, and a thousand kinds of courage gathering in the center of her rivers."

"I'm watching the movie about the guy who learns to appreciate his life and trying not to be too marxist about it, when five crows fly onto the coffee table and I can't see the film. "Ok, I give in. This is a beautiful and clumsy start to a year, one that's going to be good for any kind of birth.""

"things i still love in 2012:
butter, hysteria, mystical experience, devious stares, dark corners, blue lights, fearlessness, papaya, the cycles of nature and memory, the moon, impossibly spicy food, sitting in the dark, and cream."

"i had a dream that abelard & heloise were alive right now, and she wanted him, but she remembered what happened last time, and so all she could do was send him new wallpapers to decorate his room in cityville
#idontknowhowcityvilleworks #evenmydreamsarepretentious"

"He woke up to a starry sky, with no trace of the moon. She left without saying goodbye, he thought, unaware that she had burned herself into his shoulder over the course of two hundred and eighty sleepless nights."

epic poems are tragic poems

2012-01-11T20:32:00.000-08:00

Calliope, sing me sweetly, my breath is supposed to come like a hum but it burns into the air like a drum, and the patterns are songs I never heard before. This song should be the song about the twist of an ancestor stick in the ribs, should not play too hard or too sad on the ribs of the living, this burning in the chest comes out too quickly, and there's not enough time to seal the room so no one else can hear the words, only an echo from the edges of these worlds, playing 56 octaves lower than last night's dreams. This is a time of dark spells and salt on doorways, even though it looks like there should be bird songs in the air, but all the birds are nervous, and all the messages at my door talk about the things I have to close. The new year starts with an anxious prayer, one that goes on relentlessly until the words no longer make any sense, and the storyteller has to switch tactics, because the main characters already think this is a different kind of story than the one they are living in, and this kind of recognition of powerlessness, coupled with the beginnings of a map, are the things that tragedies are made on.

At the beginning of the chapter, the hero knows he does not get the girl, and the adventures ahead won't make him rich, and the rest is still too unknowable. The only way to enter into the poem is to place oneself at the will of the muse, and let the poor excuse for a map be the only light to serve as a guide. The rest of the guides are liars, and they tell the truth only often enough to keep things interesting. There is no clear light in them.

At the beginning of the chapter, there is a woman hanging upside down, looking at the world with ironic eyes, this is a waste, this is a tragedy in the making, this is a version of something real that happens on the surface of the earth to those people who might believe in it. But she has been born and raised to believe in nothing, but there is a map, and that's more than enough, and no reason not to, let herself be cut loose to begin the first part.

The first part is a little rough, because it is unformed, because it will only take form when the second and third parts start to unravel and we can see the threads start to weave together. Right now this is all much too loose, and there are too many variables, and objects that no one understands yet.

The objects are (in order of appearance): an arab strap, a round ball of white powder, a container of water from the muse of the erotic (she runs through all of this because water runs through all of this because water runs that's what it does), a prayer card from a funeral, and a small round mirror.

He is lying in state at the start, only not so stately, having been recently torn up a bit and living a little too much like a fake rock star, even though he is already much too old. He's been told who he is, and even acts it sometimes, and sometimes dresses the part, but he doesn't recognize it enough as something that belongs under his skin, so it feels like a costume.

If he were a little more well-rested, he could put some of these things to make spells with to good use, but he's still waiting for his shadow body to wake up. He doesn't know, however, little does he know, that the shadow is already up and clearing paths and everything is in the right place. Little does he know that all the prayers and songs made in the dark in the middle of the desert are about to be answered, and it would be too easy to say that the same thing is happening to her, but it is, and this is where the last epic tragedy starts to come to tell its story, because they do that, so that we might recognize what the territory can be like if we decide to go through it all again with our eyes sealed shut. That decision is still and always up for negotiations.

after another flood

2012-01-10T07:41:00.000-08:00

The floor of the desert outside my door is covered with objects that I didn't see the night before. There is a pair of boots that wore through when I skidded off the side of the road. There is a broken bottle of perfume with a jagged flower made of glass on the stopper. There is a torn jacket that has the name of someone I love written on the back of it. There are also letters that I wrote on the inside, in the front pocket, next to a bag that holds my heart, or something like my heart. All of these things are covered with a thin layer of cobweb, and everything is wet.

You never know what kinds of things the floods will bring in after a vinegar moon like the one we had last night. Everything comes back. This makes me feel hopeful and terribly sad, because I have a sense that this hopeful feeling is very temporary here.

There are too many people walking around for this time of morning, and I don't recognize any of them, so I do kind of wonder if they are alive or from somewhere else, if this is a trick of light from the moon. Nothing makes sense and everything is a little bit sad, and some things are more sad than others. But everyone here seems to be a little more wrinkled than people usually look, maybe it's because I'm working harder to look at them this morning, maybe this is a morning when all the haggard people have been released from their burdens and we all get some peace and quiet.

It's not too long, though, before I hear the sound of flutes and drums, and I understand that this is the next story, the next chapter, and everyone who will be in it is leaving soon, and I am supposed to be in it because it is my book. I run back to my door, because there's someone close who I want to be in the next chapter for sure, and beyond that I have no desires, and no requests, and nothing more to ask for. I see her from below, she's overlooking all the damage from the flood of the vinegar moon, and her eyes are full of silver slivers and they bleed silver and red, it's beautiful, just beautiful, I love the look of silver and red from her eyes, especially from her eyes, no one else does that to me.

I find my way to her door, which takes about three months, but eventually I remember the way, and by the time I get there, I see that she has tied her feet to her chair. I tell her that everyone is leaving, we have to go, I ask her to go with me, we have to go, I ask her or tell her we have to go, I don't know which, I didn't think it would matter so much.

She points to her feet and says, "Look at what happened, I can't move."

It's very sad, sure, but it happens all the time, I've done it to myself enough times, and it's easy enough to fix because the solution is as easy as it looks, only this time when she says this I do start to cry a little, and this turns into something that lasts for a very long time, because there's nothing that I can do, and I've seen this sort of thing too many times before, and it can takes years to untie a knot that's that simple, and I start to remember last night, and how the flood outside probably did come from me, from all of this, because this has been going on for a long time now, and probably so much longer than most doctors would recommend, it's far past four hours for one thing, and for another, my stomach still hasn't healed over from the glass flowers and that was even longer ago than this. And I know I cause floods whenever there are too many things beyond my control, and whenever there are people who want things from me, even though they can't really say what they want, because that would mean some kind of commitment, and no one wants that, not in this century, not with things as they are right now, revolution is not a good time for a new relationship. So the flood that started all of this, or that was a part of all this, this is all my fault in some ways, or at least the flood is my fault. Even though I was working in cooperation with the moon.

But the sounds are getting louder, and I can't avoid it any more, it's been too many months now, and the vinegar moon seals doors, and it's time to go. If we don't leave, we might become like those undead things that disintegrate in the sunlight, and I'm too much phantom to be allowed to disappear like that. So I say we have to leave, I ask her to leave with me, I tell her it's time to go, whatever I say is the wrong thing, but I see sea monsters starting to reach through her window, and they're going to get in because the water is rising. Because of the flood. My fault. And she points to her feet and reminds me that she has tied herself to her chair, and she says, "You can see the difficult situation I am in."

I think we are both in a difficult situation, but this is a good opportunity, and it might be the Greatest Adventure Anyone Ever Had Anywhere Ever, and I realize I probably should have told her about this before now, because it is rather rash and sudden, but there are sea monsters, and it really is a good time to go, and it even seems like another flood like last night could start bringing things back to life, but not the ones we like, a flood that brings back the ones that shine like gold but lie like thieves, and are more interested in the jewels in our skin that the ones under our tongues, the ones who refuse to use words like "lover" or "later" but tattoo our names and faces in their skin as soon as we've fallen asleep. This is no place for anyone who's awake and can see that whatever this moon is bringing in through the windows, it's not something to wait around for, that things are going to get very complicated, and the sound of the song outside the window is so much closer and it's really so very sweet, and it sounds familiar, and it tastes like honey and cinnamon and grass and peppermint, and even though I don't realize that these tears are already falling on my face again I do realize that I am not in her house any more and that my feet are on the ground and I'm moving with the direction of a beat that was once distant, and is now as familiar and familial as the bells that ring in my blood and even though I don't recognize any of the people around me, it will come soon enough, all of it will come clear soon enough, as clear as it's supposed to be for me soon enough.

but then there's also this

2012-01-09T07:20:00.000-08:00

Odysseus wants to set out again, but there's something still keeping him here, and he wants it to be like that forever. This is not Kalypso's place, this is not her sister's place, this is not even the place he was just a few months ago. In fact, it is the very realm of the dead, the island where the dead are disguised as the living, and it's impossible to find on purpose, and those who stumble upon it accidentally fall in love with the place even though they know it's trying to kill them.

He landed here without knowing it, and he was being courted by nine muses without even knowing it, and he thought they were the Muses when they are anything but those Muses, because these muses have been sent by someone else entirely, and when he thinks he knows who it is, this someone else sends out another flock of birds to distract him, so that he won't pursue it any further. This is where he is supposed to be right now, is what he tells himself, when in fact that's anything but the truth, and so far from the truth that it just feels right.

But it is not.

He mulls and mulls and mulls, and eventually everything mulled will turn into wine, and if he drinks the wine he will forget everything, and for a very long time, and it's a very good chance that he will stay crossed over, stay crossed in the land of the dead, and never come back. These are his pomegranate seeds, and the underworld is open 12 months of the year, and is even open on weekends and holidays. While he mulls, he is also writing, and he has decided to write a letter, and the letter comes out something sort of a little bit like this:

Dear K--
Oh my god you have got to be out of your fucking mind. This, this, this, I can't do anything with this. This is the only card I haven't played: I am still in love with you. Please don't take it personally. Or come and find me. I can't find you. You call me close and then you run away. I can't find you. It's like chasing a cat that turns into a bird that flies away. Find me. We could sleep together, or just have coffee. I am not particularly attached to anything. But open to whatever, you know. Especially the sleeping together part. But I wouldn't push it. I mean, I'm cool about everything. Or whatever you want. You tell me. I won't keep pushing. Or even waiting. I'm done. But I'm here. You know. If that's what you want. Find me. I'm wearing the same scent from when you left.
--O

And here O was short for "Oh, fuck, what the hell am I doing?" because in truth no one should play their cards for a lover that they cannot trust, and it's even worse when you do that in the land of the dead, but how could he know that.

(He could have opened his fucking eyes, supposedly, but even then, he wouldn't have been tall enough to see things from any height. He is tall but not that tall. No, what he needs, what we need, is to become birds, to see things from a higher perspective, and on some days it's more metaphorical than others, but this day is turning out to be less and less of a metaphor, and it would be epic if the year ahead were filled with things that seemed like metaphors but were really not at all, exactly themselves.

The androgynous bisexual goddess that lives on the floor of the ocean is the floor of the ocean, and she represents herself, the beginning of life in the world, and more mysterious than anyone will ever know, and nothing more, and nothing less, and metaphor of nothing except for herself. The head that is cleaned with feathers dreams of being a bird in flight not because the head wants to become like a bird, but because it is becoming bird. And the land of the dead is not a place where the skin goes to get shed, but it is the land of the dead, and no one in the realm of the living should be walking in the land of the dead, and there's no metaphor that's better than birth or death for anything, but here the death is a metaphor for death, and the face in the mirror is the face in the mirror.

He, this Odysseus on another adventure, about to start another journey, is ready to fly, and he takes one look at the ocean, long enough to get dreamy, and blinks his eyes once twice three times he blinks and his head goes forward and the muscles on his shoulder blades tighten and he falls fast into a narcotic sleep and off the cliffs at the Ocean Beach of the dead, and when he falls, the nine sirens come screaming, trying to catch him, about to lose their jobs their cushy siren jobs, and the indecisive lovers of the last decade come to testify in heaven, asked to give an answer, yes or no, but they don't understand the question, or don't want to commit to anything just yet, it's been a year or two years or three years or maybe it's been a lifetime since they had this chance to meet, but that's not long enough to know for sure, and there's lunchtime coming and who knows what the choices will be it's so very hard to get out of bed when the world is this complicated, yes or no, it's a simple question, but it's too early to reply, this is too soon too sudden, is this the same question from three months ago? yes or no? really? this is too sudden, it was sudden then and it's still sudden now, and he falls, and he is so deep asleep he looks dead almost, and he falls, and if there ever was a time to come forward and say this, yes or no, just yes or just no, she answers, Please remind me of the question, please just remind me of the question, and she aches for him and her loins burn for him and her heart needs him and she just doesn't know what her time will be like next week to commit to anything so sudden, and while she is still deciding, the rocks on the sea open up like a sweet and vicious hole, and suck him in, and he is not dead but gone so very very gone, his chest fills with the wistfulness of all the squeaky dog toys of all the squeaky dog toy shops in the world of the southern hemisphere, and in English and Spanish and Portuguese and Esperanto, his chest beats squeaks tears open and bleeds for her he wants her he wants her he wants her he was waiting for her for so very long and he doesn't even know that the muses are dying, and his sucking ears sing sucking sounds he is being sucked into a song he doesn't recognize because somewhere at the bottom of the sea there was a mermaid who was intent on saving his life, and this is exactly what she did and the happy part of a vicious hole is the whole hole and the sad part is obvious and the next part is goddam fucking epic.

except there's always a new cafe

2012-01-05T08:58:00.000-08:00

Every new year they begin their fiscal calendar by revamping everything that ever was at the cafe between worlds, and for the new year that is doomed to be one filled with destruction and the end of everything, even Jesus, they decided to put in new blinds. The blinds for the new year were literally blinding, made of a composite of gilt and the tears of a hundred undecided lovers, so that anyone spending too much time looking out the windows would be unable to see the forest for the trees, and fall into an incomprehensible and irreconcilable sadness. They made an important business decision when they first opened, at the beginning of the fourth world in the calendar, when Cortez landed on the shores of the Americas and thought he could make something shiny and new based on betrayal. Despite this beginning, the cafe was surprisingly empty of any traces of the spirit of spite or resentment, although it certainly is a place where the regulars can come to feel things again.

It is said that whenever there are combinations of gold and tears that certain spirits who rule over the human heart will come to inhabit and confuse, wherever appropriate. And these spirits are not entirely appropriate in any way, except in their taste in shoes, but they do lack in the principles of social decorum, which is what makes them such enticing and entertaining company.

So it is that he found himself seated in front of a table of empty espresso cups, with a fresh spirit of betrayal and a keen desire to read his own future. Even though it was still terribly early, there are already too many cups to discern a clear future, because chance would seem to want to make sure that the patterns were all different. Only this is not the case this morning, because the gods of chance are here to make an annunciation for this next year of his life, and the messages in every cup are the same because the patterns of the grounds are all the same.

This is not supposed to be a good year for vague messages, and one in which those usual obscure flirts will not lead to any idea of something-somethings in the air, that's already so 2011, and it will fit him like a horrible leisure suit if he tries them on, and leisure suits are not proper for a motorcycle. It is still much too cold. In fact, he is starting to wonder if he will ever be warm again. In fact, he is starting to wonder if all of this recent reborn hope and longing might have been a trick of the light.

In fact, that's entirely true, a trick of the light, in order to bring his body from a there to a here in a state of severe agitation, where everyone and everything around him seems empty and old. It's not the worst way to begin another year, because such states are useful for either shedding skin or causing a kind of a severe stroke that is almost imperceptible, except that at this moment he thinks he is having a stroke but isn't awake enough to notice that the inside of his helmet is layered with old skin. Enough to simply watch it shed and let it fall away, but he, oh he is much too much engaged in the process of mulling things over.

This rough beast is one that has been slouching for a very long time, and this is the morning when, while he is entirely focused on the slouching, the beast has decided to roll over and die for good, and it will be some time before he notices, because he is focused on the shoes of the beast and not the breath. The breath is absent but the shoes are magnificent, oh so magnificent, with three inch heels and a lot of spike and spunk, and show a certain panache in design, just like the shoes the elves used to make. The breath, on the other hand, is from other elves, the dead kind, and some days those are the only ones he can see. Without giving away the ending (everyone dies), he doesn't notice yet that the red couch he is falling asleep upon is breathing more than the beast, and that's because the couch is living furniture.

He has not had to contend with living furniture for some time now, and the reason it's so necessary today is because the living things of this world are multiplying already, after only a few days in, because that much death and destruction, the kind that only a world's end would bring, there is a panic in all the kingdoms and the phylums, and this how that issue gets resolved. It takes five goddesses to open a door, and it's the same for closing...and when they are reluctant, the door will not budge, and when it is something they all want in unison, then there is nothing that will keep the door solid, and when there is any conflict among them, the body starts to shake and shudder to reflect the indecision of the universe and this is why love is a shudder, because those shudders are the way the bird sheds her uncertainty and enters into the realm of something solid.

And when the conflict reaches a peak, then everything starts to come alive, and the more he avoids it, the more alive it gets, insistently calling him into the place where he is supposed to be living, and this morning there are red couches everywhere and they are all making him very anxious because they are ready to close one door and open another.

"It's not that hard," they tell him, but he cannot hear, because he does not expect it from a couch, so instead he interprets this as residue from something else, something else altogether and entirely different, that has also ceased to really matter.

Every goddess swings, and every heart swings, but it is like roulette, where eventually it has to land on a number, and he is acutely aware that he is not the one choosing, but the number, and his number is being played, and this makes him very resentful in the place of so many worlds. The black birds come, because they always do, because they're good at it, and they come cleaning his heart, and this makes him even more anxious, because what happens after that has always been tumultuous in the past, the the past is the present.

It is 2012. There are people raining outside. This year will begin something extraordinary, something that hasn't happened yet, something that only exists in the sparks in the inner chambers of the heart, ready to pull, the dice or the gun loaded with powder that doesn't travel well, and doesn't stand the test of time, and the flashes of gunpowder are not enough to backfire on his head, but only enough to obscure the light, so that he thinks he is looking out the blinds too much, when, in fact, it is not not not not ever too much.

no more cafes

2012-01-02T21:15:00.000-08:00

It's that peculiar trick of light that's always there at this time of year. There's a warm glow around the days, marked by the sun, where signs of spring are already swimming just below our waists, we move through a haunted water that isn't yet wet. None of this would be unbearable if the other things didn't play out the way they always do, and this is what happens.

I go by that cafe where I was getting used to meeting her, the one where we could talk safely about everything that happened before and everything that will happen later, without having to worry about sleeping together. It's a little too public, but private enough that she can bring out all the objects she likes to play with and we can put on leather masks and watch the servers start to get nervous. In this cafe, no one knows who we are, even though we come here every day, because it's one of the few places where everyone recognizes that no one wants to be recognized, and no one really wants to be alone. I go by here. And I told myself that I hoped it was closed for the holidays, because I didn't really want to see her today, but when I see that it really is closed, my heart drops a little. I guess I was lying to myself a little.

The windows are not clean, but I can see through them to the tables, and there is a chalkboard behind the register that says, "Happy New Year." It looks very dark and grey in there, and it makes the rest of the day look a little grey, even though I know that the sky is a prettier color than it has been in awhile, and everyone is talking about weather. I suppose I like to think of it as a place that's never closed to me, but today it really is.

There are things about the sadness that I was feeling a month or two ago that have turned into other things, and some of them have stayed exactly the same. This is the "how things are" that everyone who is healthy learns to live with, and I am uneasy, but not as unhealthy as I have been before. I would like to say that I understand there is no river twice, and I do understand that this is the time of year when I look for the repetitions in everything. It happens a lot around times whenever there are big shifts, and there's one shift that is an 8 and another shift that is a 4, and there are more numbers involved that make this all very complicated. And I like to try to freeze time whenever there's something coming, because I want to try to remember exactly what I was doing before everything changed.

There are big bags of fruit on my floor, and they're waiting to feed the African goddesses and gods that were born in me, and there are beads on strings that mark another opening, and soon enough I will be talking to them all with coconuts, and soon enough I will be driving across the desert to where people lose everything so someone else can get born. I am starting to understand that birth is a metaphor, always a metaphor, and it always refers to something else, and everything else refers to this. This is how things work in the natural world, this is how things grow, and this is how things die. Sometimes it's nice to be connected to something much larger, and darker, and secret, and sometimes it is overwhelmingly sad, like the sadness that a mother feels for the children she loves too much.

This is how it is with us. We have a gift that is a large debt that we can never repay, and sometimes we get to find the sadness of that gift when we fall back into our bodies and fall in love with another one of the sea's children. This season holds magic and this season holds light, and the trick is to know that the sadness doesn't come from us, but it's something we inherit because we have the ocean running in our blood.

references

2011-12-28T21:06:00.000-08:00

This is one of those days where there is an endless stream of work. It starts right when there is no more bed around me, and I'm brushing and scrubbing things and wishing I could remember what I just dreamed about. It doesn't come back. There were sea monsters and dogs and someone was trying to tell me something from far away and it doesn't come back. And then there is an endless stream of work. And it doesn't even occur to me until the very end, when I'm rubbing my cheek and remembering how it felt like there was a bee there, and that wouldn't make any sense, not with a day that ended like this one where there was nothing to mull over, and no hidden agendas to report. And there were no impossible desires, unless I look closer, and it could start to look like a day of impossible desires, so I decide not to look. It should have been a day of cafe writing, trying to decode which ones were supermodels with appointments, which ones were there from time off from their day jobs because of the holidays, and which ones were there to think about alchemy and the moon. (No one ever comes there to think about alchemy and the moon, or we would certainly recognize the moon on each other's shoulders and recognize the sea monsters coming out of our mouths, and of course we don't) ((This is the time of year when everyone is wondering who they will kiss at the new year, and I can't wonder because I understand that what I want is impossible, even though it might be easier than breathing, but it's hard to breathe during the dead days)) So I am instead surrounded by older men who work in the back yard of an ex's house while I keep her dog company and work on the endless stream of work. I am putting together words for money, and it is turning out to be just enough. Enough so that I could buy the perfect pair of badass boots, if I could find them, but I can't. To be relentless like the water, and to be able to move around things like water, and to adapt to surfaces and temperatures like water, this is what I see for a year ahead. I also see a figure just up ahead, someone I can't quite make out, like someone from a dream that I can't remember, and I might know who she is, but I might be wrong, so I decide not to be right or wrong about anything. And there are older men in the back yard who are telling me about water tables and water management and I am listening instead of getting angry and telling them that they cannot control the water, it is relentless, and it's good that I don't speak because it wouldn't turn out the way any of us wants. And there is a big cop motorcycle that I am driving because no one knows what's wrong with my real bike but until they do, this is what I am on. And I move through the streets like I am water. And I watch Ally Sheedy go down on the blond girl who means well, and they're talking about art and heroin, and it's enough to make me remember that these are things that I would take with me if I could, and I can, because I am becoming water, and I take everything with me in my wake. In my wake, I carry a thousand kisses and a charm that smells like me. In my wake, I carry a thousand cures for sleeplessness and a book on how to wake the dead. In my wake, I carry dogs on motorcycles and yellow beads and a needle that captures things and makes them into what they want to become. In my wake, I carry the siren's number, so I recognize the call when it comes, and when it comes, we might wake up, and we might wake up beside the mountain, beside the only mountain that knows how to wake us up and show us how to love, because it's not easy and it's not as simple as that but it's written on my veins and it tells the story of the sea, and the c is always me.

dont start

2011-12-25T21:24:00.000-08:00

This is the part of the year where the solar calendar (20 days a month) and the lunar calendar (30) come to a close, ending at a total of 360 days, and the last 5 days are the Dead Days. It's good news for those of us who spend a lot of time getting news, advice, and especially recipes, from the ones who have gone before. It's also the time when some of the traditional Mayan people know the gods are out walking, and its their domain now, this surface of the earth, and the best thing to do is stay indoors and eat well. And also not have sex and not get angry, because those things are too hot for these days.

I'm not Mayan or Mayab and not one of the H-Men in their worlds, so I don't have to worry about following all the prescriptions. This is also good news, because one of my favorite presents is a mask that covers up my face except for the eyes. It's white and has roses on the top, and there are so many possibilities.

I'm a little skittish, though, because every time I try to imagine anything with masks, it starts off very interesting, then somewhere in there, I am asking, "Oh, my gosh, I'm sorry, did that hurt? We can just go get coffee if this is too weird," and that ends everything for everyone. I understand all the implications, and the main one is that it's only happening in my head, which should mean something.

But at the end of a year with so many things that have happened in my head, I'm learning how to listen to it a little more, the things that are true, and separate them from the imagined problems and hurts, and not get so angry at myself for saying and doing things I didn't say or do, and also forgiving anyone else for things they may have said or done, or not done. What upsets me is only a problem in my own mind, and this is certainly good news.

It's not very easy, though, in the season where Pan walks by my doorway every morning telling me there is something to do out there, and Oshun visits every night with her black birds to tell me that I am supposed to leave it all up to her. It's not easy. Not because I am tied to those old definitions of m-f that say I am supposed to be the active principle, and the sun, and the seed, and the aggressive one (these things are true, and they're true for everyone, but the game plays out much better when I take that up, because, I don't know why because, when I want things to happen they tend to work out better when I make them happen, and anything else usually means I've given up). Not because I am possessed with a life that is full of grieving and loss, although that's true for me as much as anyone (although there are things with me that are connected to the graveyard that make these things more grave with me). It's not easy because, for all the things that happened in my mind, the ones that took place in the world that other people participate in have made me want to stop and look closer.

Looking closer always gives me a sense of want and longing, and it's impossible to break out of that kind of absinthe spell, and probably because I am not supposed to break free, but figure out the trick of how to live there, or at least visit, or at least open my doors to it. And I think that saying my door is open is not enough, because it's not true, because it's not really an open door. I hold it shut even though I think it's open, because the last person to pass through that door made me stop and pay attention, because that's what happens when something important is happening and I am paying attention. I was.

The best way to put a love spell on someone is to tell them you like them, and the best ritual for opening a door is to open the door. This is not a good time for starting any new things. This comes as very good news to anyone who suspects that something is not done. So I try to smoke a cigar through a mask without a mouth, and sit on a porch in front of a house that isn't mine, and whenever I get an itch to make spells in the kitchen, there are black birds who come to my feet and remind me that I need to leave the spells up to them, and wait for Pan's advice on how to get through another night, and remember that we are not gods, even though there were moments where it certainly seemed as though immortality were immanent. This is a revolution, after all. The best thing that could happen is that we don't lose, and that we don't win, but make room for something utterly unexpected. That's what we are when we're heroes. Utterly unexpected.

entre los culos, no hay espacio

2011-12-23T07:54:00.000-08:00

Meanwhile, she is thinking about cows, and is very much concerned with the one that is certainly about to step out right in front of her. Only she isn't sure exactly where that might be, because so much of the road is uncertain. It's that time of the year when there are cracks in the cement, and there are not enough workers coming to repair all of the things that are breaking apart. It's not crazy, she hopes, but she is certain that she is starting to see glimpses of the dwarves who live beneath the surface of the road coming out to have a look at the world they will inherit.

That's not bad news, not for her, because those very same dwarfs who are making lines in the air with their hands when she is falling asleep are more capable of taking over all of these important operations. It's obvious to anyone who's paying attention that this isn't working, and these are the ones who can do things right, because they are always so much closer to the sea. The sea is where you will unlock me, she thinks, and throws the thought out of her mouth through her tongue, because she doesn't trust where it came from. The dwarfi (the correct plural) have been running things without our knowledge for a very long time, and it's better not to say these things out loud because she starts to think about how she might be sounding like the kinds of people she wants to avoid. But everything I try to avoid is the very thing that I always end up hitting, and I never do get to hit what I aim for, so maybe I should start playing with the scope of my own life, and learn how to hit without shooting the target.

It would be better and so much easier if there were not crabs crawling out of the cracks in the road, far too many to avoid certain disasters and tragedies, and she really wishes she could look away from the road because she doesn't want to see what it going to happen to these crabs.

She starts to turn her attention away from the unavoidable horrors that are about to take place by thinking about her daughter, who is becoming a miniature version of her, and getting larger all the time. Eventually, with the right amount of food and water and sunlight, the daughter will get larger than the mother and if she has the right escape plan, she will have slipped out entirely before she is eaten. Except for now everything is very much okay, and her life is complete, in its way, in its way. There are threats of being eaten that also come along with the threat that she will be engulfed, and if she is smaller than the daughter then she might be more aligned with the realm of the dwarfen people, and that's not as unsafe as the rest of this is turning out to be. There are also three wonderful things to think about that will make this holiday complete, and they all have to do with bachata. She is bachata, after all, and even though she has never been to the soil, the rhythm is in her bones. Suddenly, she is becoming aware that the narrator in her head is actually making fun of her, and it's nice to know that someone cares enough to pay attention, but not like this.

"I am more annoyed with you than you will ever know," she says to the narrator, who cannot hear, or it would be written, it would be wood, glass, and stone.

In the end, she hits the cow, trying to avoid the cow she runs straight into it, and hits it so directly that either there is a sudden death or the kind of energy exchange that the souls change place. She isn't sure what this is, except she is aware that they are both still breathing, and that might or might not be a good thing. She is only aware that she is even more annoyed with the narrator by now, who she cuts out and cuts out over and over again, but it always comes back.

"Why do you keep coming back?" she says.

And the narrator (which is nothing less than her ego, and nothing more), has this to say. "I have been watching you do these same things over and over for such a long time that I've learned how to make a rhythm from your repetitions, and I am the song running through the back of your mind, the back of your mind, whenever something is about to start again. You were praying last night to be more connecting to the things that are, and even though there are no ouija boards in this cafe of your mind, the dead speak through the living, and the living might not be limited to your blood relatives, and might include the plants and the cows. This is something that I arranged because I love you so very much and you always turn away before the meat starts to turn juicy. This is the butter sauce of the things you lost, and there are birds flying from your mouth whenever you feel so very much alone. Pay attention to them."

At this moment, and not uncoincidentally, the flock of birds before her eyes thinned out, and as they thinned and their number turned from a hundred to three, she understood that this was love and that this was war, and that the ones who left the sky were settling in her stomach. It would not be so bad if they were not trying to peck their way out, but that's what they do. She doesn't want to think about him, but she does, and she wishes for a revolution as violent as the last one, only this time she hopes that they both get to wake up, in a warm room, with daughters who don't turn into giants, looking at each other through the eyes of cows, who know more, who know so much more, than we like to think, and all of the other things that don't go away even though they might be dead and buried.

conversations with broken men

2011-12-22T21:31:00.000-08:00

first part

this is true. i'm sitting outside and smoking hand-rolled cigarettes and starting to feel this burning in my chest start to feel like a cold feels, if i could feel my hands i might know for sure. but i don't know anything for sure, not at this time of year. this is the point where the light comes back, but it is also really the second-longest night of the year, and tomorrow is the third-longest, and there are more long nights ahead. that could be good news.

but this, the true part, this is what i wanted to tell you, that i was thinking this cold was good because it's getting out of the way, and soon the desert will warm up a little, and i think that's a good place to return. i don't know how long you're here, i don't think i am supposed to ask.

second part

these are conversations around coffee, always coffee, always talking about the same thing. it would be better, so much more convenient, if all of my friends were in love with the same woman, her name could be sara, and we would all be getting together to talk about how things are with sara, how the revolutionary hero is watching his heart move backwards and forwards while sara gets in and gets out and changes her look, and how the musical wizard is living with sara and how he thinks about her all the time even when she's with him all the time but it's even worse when she's gone, and how the shaman with the broken bike is missing sara and thinking about something beautiful that happened once but it happened for so long that it became a beautiful poem, someone should write that poem someday.

the broken men are complaining about being broken, and the broken men are becoming aware that the thing that is broken is the place where all the healing waters come thru and release, and the broken men are not aware that these healing things also come from them, because they are so concerned that they are broken men. this is a night of sudden recognitions in the dark. on the second darkest night of the year, some of the broken men go home to sara, some of the broken men wish they were sara, and some of the broken men are already gone deep into the desert, with the intention of grieving for sara but unaware that they are turning into something else entirely, and this is always the way of broken men.

thirdly

he decides that he is not going to send any hidden messages after this one. this is the last time he will speak of it, and afterwards he will walk the earth, like caine in kung fu. he decides that he will take all the love left in his heart, and ask the woman with brooms for hands to sweep his heart out, and after that there will be no more talk of these things, and everything will be what it looks like on the second-darkest day of the year.

but the worst part for him is that as soon as the love is swept from his heart, he looks up and sees a shooting star coming from the cold north, and before he is even aware that his mouth is open and his tongue is moving, he is whispering her name (and it's not sara).

and so fourth and so on

this year wore on the bones like every year, and the bones of the ones who were here at the beginning of the year who are not here at the end, they wear their way into the way that we sleep, and i am dreaming of white cats with grey spots who know the secrets of flight. this year wore into the organs of the living, and while we were busy trying to build bodies without organs, there was something that was starting to grow, and some of the warrior men were starting to show signs of age that had nothing and everything to do with the war. the war that wore through our bones was only made worse by the endless promise that it would be over, and every checkpoint i drive through is a little further and a little closer to someone that i almost learned how to forget. and every checkpoint gets a little more tense, because this is a revolution, and some of us are wizards and some of us are shamans, and all of us are healers, and on some nights it seems possible to re-define god. they say there are a thousand names and a thousand faces for god, and our 400 gods have a dozen names each, but that's just math. at every checkpoint, i am leaving a small piece of skin and cloth, parts that don't work any more, and if i leave them scattered they won't have time to gather together again and come back, because things like this might take all the time in the world. it's taking a lifetime to shed all my skin, and it's taking all my breath to keep myself from folding up like a clam and falling back into the sea, but in the middle of these wars i remember nights when it felt like i was learning how to breathe under water, and how to walk on the floor of the ocean. beauty is soft when there is a whole morning ahead and every cafe is filled with women playing with their hair, when it comes holding a heart in one hand and a mask in the other it is as brutal as the current and as bright and sharp as coral, but if you look too close at my name it won't take long to understand that i always was a child of the sea. and if i am broken it is only because i am always breaking, trading my tongue for stones, something that can speak about what it means to redefine god, and fevered like the bones of a soldier, like the eyes of a wild horse, like a diviner looking at the patterns on the sand and finding something in the pieces, like a lover distracted by the glintings of jewels that decorate the faces of the ones who know secrets of how to put things back together in patterns we can use. like a friend who suddenly recognizes that shooting stars are never seen by those who need too much, or those who grieve too much, or those who believe too much, but by those who are engaged in a life of telling the story of the love triangle between the sky, and the earth, and the bottom of the sea.

turning

2011-12-21T21:31:00.000-08:00

The world is turning, apparently, in the way that it can only turn when it's moving from darkness and back into light, but everything is much slower than a movie or a novel even but not one of those French novels where they describe everything, and it's boring because it's the 19th century and there's not enough dance breaks. (But I know, I knowwww....they danced in France in the 19th century, and that's how I want to dance with you, with all our stylish masks, this could work)...

This is hard right now because I have just been given a new face, one from the bottom of the sea. But I am stuck in the world of wounded men again, and one of the casualties is my motorcycle. So I am having long conversations on the phone, where I am saying things like, "Look, I don't care how it gets fixed, just fix it, mister," and, "Look, we can play this two ways, see..." and the men on the other end of the phone are putting up fights, and we are all fighting, fighting over my sweet cherry ride.

If I was like this for just an hour every day it would be all right, I could do it, but I'm not like that, not for long, because these are the kinds of masks that freeze on a person's skull, and I need that because it is doing important things suddenly. Like turn into something that I thought I couldn't be, that I thought I couldn't have, and suddenly all the big questions are all right, and time is moving in a direction that I like, but I don't know how to manage all the details.

But because I have no other choice, I am stuck buying gas for a very big van and thinking about my motorcycle more than I like to, and wondering about how anything ever really happens for some people, how the deck is certainly stacked. But I need to remember, this is a revolutionary time, and nothing here is what it seems, and every stone turned or not holds things we can't understand, so, so, so, I focus on the seasalt that sticks to the bottom of my lip, and listen to the blood in my veins, and these old songs that keep coming up to the surface are beautiful songs, and all the lovely mermaids are singing and crashing with the waves, and the small desires that keep us up are the only things worth listening to these days, because they might unlock some of the things that are trying to boil, boiling like a rage in the middle of a storm at sea, and that is where you will unlock me.

capitulation nombre alla mar

2011-12-17T21:51:00.000-08:00

He sat for a long time at the edge of the water. There was a table in front of him and a chair underneath him and another chair across from him. There was coffee in a fancy white coffee set in front of him and he was aware that it was getting cold, so he was drinking it himself because he was starting to see that she wasn't going to come. What was worse is that he hoped she would come. And what was worse than that was that he forgot to invite her.

Meanwhile, the dead come singing, just long enough to introduce ourselves in the foam on the wave, and when we see things like this, it is always more embarrassing than heartbreaking, really, because we do know some things about moving time and space, but it's up to you to make plans, and you don't know how to make plans that will work.

At the bottom of the sea, meanwhile, he is talking to her and she is talking to him, and they are doing all the things they like to do with each other, but on the edges of the sea it just feels like they are tapping on walls at each other to let each other know secrets in morse code. But the code is not the same when it translates from the depths to the surface, and it gets interference, and comes out in numbers, and that's why lovers are so often stuck in each other's company arguing about what these numbers might actually mean. And they argue about times and dates and numbers of other lovers, codes written in numbers on phones and the number of times they are looking at other people while they are talking, and it is all a boring mess.

Under the sea, however, he is looking at the walls of fire in her eyes, the things that tell the stories of what happened between that last moment and this one, and there are cemeteries and there are dark rooms with neon lights and music, and there is the color behind her eyes when she is alone in her room and thinking about him. She's learning to speak in other languages, and is trying to play him her music with his eyes. This makes the birds that live in the back of his throat wake up and sing, and the sounds are words but they don't mean half as much as the drum of the tongue when he sings the words, because the drum in the tongue can only be understood when he plays on her. So there is always a lot to talk about between them. And he is wondering how to tell her about the wild horses that live in his veins, and how they have been sleeping, or riding without him, and when she is gone he feels like a wild horse on an empty beach, and he has been there so long that he can't remember being upset, only missing her.

Children of the sea should meet by the sea, or at the very least think about each other when it is raining. Rain is more related to mermaids than he ever understood, he wants to tell her, but it's a ridiculous thing to say under the sea, where everything is obvious. He wants to tell her how he heard her, when she was thinking about him when it was raining, how he always heard her, and he would like to tell her that he thinks this means he always will, but it's too late in the year for promises, and at the start of new years the only thing that a lover needs is a blanket. He is singing something he heard, about how a woman doesn't need any better covering than a man, something from the sixteenth century, and he is singing about unpacking the complicated text because they are more complicated texts than what is in the cannons of the sixteenth century, they are a different kind of gunpowder altogether, and he is totally unaware that she is surrounded by sisters that are gorgeous monstrosities in between the things of the human race, and the things of the sea, and if she were not so enchanted herself she would realize how enchanting she is, at least to him, at least at this particular moment, when he is still raining, he is raining, because he is swimming in a love spell that never went anywhere, except here, under the sea, to hide from the storms up above that never did have anything to do with them.

capitulato nombarrando onsaydos: the very last thing ever

2011-12-15T09:11:00.000-08:00

Not really last but last so far up until now. This morning was another one of those very upsetting mornings that can only come around once in a great while, but they've been coming like waves like waves that come when a baby is trying to come, and impossible to keep up with, and this is like giving birth except nothing is getting born, not another human anyway. And nothing is really like giving birth except for giving birth, and nothing is like war except for war, and nothing is like performance anxiety except for the anxiety that comes with a performance.

Perhaps every one of those terms can be held in question, and perhaps it would be good to have a conversation about the words, using other words like "problematic," "complexity," and "situation," but it's that kind of conversation that has lead to a morning as upsetting as this one in the first place. In the first place, when he woke up and he put his feet onto the cold floor, the first thing and the most difficult thing about the floor was all the sand.

The excavations of the old house and the sand that came back with him from the coast seems to just be building, and it should be thinning out and waning away. It feels too much like the dust from the moon started to fall to earth and it's hitting here. It is not his house. This is not his house. That seems like an important thing to say. He had a house once, but not any more, and this is not that house.

He also had a vehicle before, and now the thing he is driving is not his. There are a lot of borrowed things, and it is starting to feel like nothing can actually be what it is called, and this is kind of exciting, because that also means that everything can be whatever it needs to be. And by the time the moon dust settles and we need to go back to calling things by names again, these things could be different things entirely and have different names entirely. Things like girlfriends could be entirely different by the time the next moon comes around, and that's a very interesting idea, but this one is also interesting, and he's fully aware that he's not exactly miserable these days. But he's not exactly happy. But not miserable at all, because he heard things that seem true, and the things he heard are not bad things if they are true, and might even verge on being true and beautiful.

But this isn't that kind of vehicle, and this isn't that kind of moon. This is the moon in half already, it went away much quicker than it came, that's how they always are, he supposes. This moon is lighting up the beach, and when his feet his the cold floor, there is sand, and there is beach extending out as far as his feet can reach (and much further because he is tall but not that tall, this is not one of those incredible long-leg man stories). And every few feet there is a version of her, the Copper one, folded in on herself and sleeping like she were in a cocoon.

This is entirely alarming because he thought that she had been away long enough that a few thoughts here and there wouldn't bring her back like this, but they always do. She is like the stations of the cross, and as he walks to each one, she tells him something that she could never say when it really mattered.

People are like that, he thinks, you never can really know what they're really thinking, but then again I really don't know exactly what I'm thinking. He walks to each one, and even though he's well aware that he's being watched, he acts like he were so very much alone, because this would all be easier if he weren't being watched.

But no sooner does that thought come and go (and it could certainly be enough to change a life, because anything that digs into the dirt of liberty can move mountains in a life), when the final version of her comes as a kind of a half-horse, as far as he can tell, and she's being ridden by someone just as interesting as herself, and it's not the most pretty thing he has ever seen, but not so far from it, either.

Someone, he can't tell who, one of the people involved in the scene anyway, someone of those, says, "It does take two to tango, but three is spectacular."

capitulato nombero oncei-oncei

2011-12-14T08:26:00.000-08:00

I wake up in the cabana again. It's been a long time, maybe a number of years, at least months. I am waking up and I feel kind of terrible, one because it's been over for at least a year and I'm still waking up here, and two because I dreamed about this before I even met her and that means I might have made the whole thing up. I would be okay with having made the whole thing up, except it seems like she's been involved for at least some of it, and that some of it made her life a living hell, because we know too many of the same people, and they talk. And as time goes by, and more time goes by, she doesn't look so good in the big picture of things, she kind of looks a little bit insane and sad.

It's not like that's anything unusual, though. In the time that I started chasing after the Eternal Feminine, I have become a little insane and sad myself, and maybe that has something to do with the moon, that my mother the moon takes us all down eventually. And it just might be that eventually we all become insane and sad at the same time, in one of those ways that everyone wakes up at the same time, and looks at the clock when it's 11:11 at the same time, and it's magic.

That fortune teller, the one with the barnacles on her clothes at the edges of the beach, I can see her in this dream where everyone wakes up, and she would say to me, "Wake up, it's 11:11," and I would wake up and look out on a beach covered with old lovers, and they would be naked like in a big Spencer Tunik exhibition, and they would be covered in an interesting smelling oil that would look interesting in the sun, and they would be saying interesting things like, "Wow, we are all just talking about how sorry we feel about everything and we would like to help you because we are angels in the flesh," and everything after part gets a little bit blurry and it's hard to think any further than that, and I am starting to have doubts about this 11:11 thing.

But I am having a lot of doubts these days. My main doubt this morning is that anything good could come from waking up inside this cabana. It's the one we always rented, La Bruja del Cobre and I, when we were taking our vacations on the beach. None of this is a fantasy, at the core, it all is really happening in real time, except for the part about the vacations, because most of the time both of us do not have jobs at all.

My doubt this time is that I can live here in this cabana, even for a little while, without falling backwards and falling in love with the things that are no longer here. This is really all about falling.

I want to think that she is no longer here, either, but I see her here enough, visiting this same spot where we spent so many of our summer vacations (not really, but that sounds so civilized) ((and it might make me much more attractive, especially to people who are looking for people with 401k plans, and I'm not saying I don't have one of those, but it was just recently that I found out that you didn't have to run that distance to start collecting money, money is so very interesting, isn't it?)). And this time, I see her, because she is not here. There are marks of sand in the shape of feet, like they were prints of feet, or perhaps they are called feetprints. They look like marks left by the dead, and that makes sense, because we are both very close to the dead and that's why we found each other to begin with, and that's also why we lost each other but that's another story that still makes me very sad and it was my fault even though no one else seems to think so.

So her Muertos are still so very close, and they have her feet, and I miss her feet because they were terribly interesting. There was a chain around one that could scratch you if it wanted to, and it often did. And I miss running my hands along that chain. And she's long gone, and has left with a very obvious trace, and it's sad except when I look outside the cabana, I see her there, standing and looking into the sea.

I would like to say that I did not run when I saw her, but I always do, and my heart jumps in a way that is unusual for my heart, in that it seems like the murmur that she left me with, except it hurts just a little when it's related to seeing her, and I don't understand what that is about. I run to her and when I catch up to her she isn't moving, she is stiff and her eyes are wide and she is staring at the sea with a vacant look. This is a kind of catatonia I have seen before, from other lovers who are a little bit in love with death, and the thing that is the most familiar is that it is fake because I see her blink. She sees me see her blink and the jig is up. And the news is out.

And she says, "I want you to take me to the top of the stairs, but turn around before you get there."

"Why?" is the most reasonable question here so this is what I do say, in the form of a question.

"Because if you turn around, then I will freeze, I will turn into a pillar of salt, and then I can finally rest."

This is very hard to hear, because I can see her face in another world, one that is not this one, where she is crying, but she can't allow herself to do that in this one because, because I don't know why because really. Someone once did something that disappointed her, and she made a decision is because, I guess, but how should I know. It's also very hard to hear because I know she is tired, and she should be tired, because things are a little harder for her than they need to be, but that's sometimes the way it is with the children of the graveyard. It is also very hard to hear because it's the wrong story, she's not turning into a pillar of salt, this is the story where she gets lost in the underworld, and can never see Orpheus again and he doesn't get to see her, and it's very sad. It's sad because she has the stories confused, and I can't correct her, not here, because that would be rude, and she would think I think she is a little bit stupid. It's also sad because I turned around a long time ago and lost her a long time ago and I never would stop missing her, even though it was a long time ago.

And what's even sadder is that by now she has started to notice that I have a face painted on my back, and it's not her face, it's someone else's face altogether. I feel like I have to explain, and because this could very well be a dream, there is also an equal chance that it is not, and that's the best place for me to try to explain things.

The face, I explain, in this dream, is only appearing on my back because it is what I have been thinking about lately, and I think it's very good, because it makes me feel good to think about. There was this moment when I lost things and then I found something, and it wasn't until it was a gorgeous storm for a few months and then the storm moved somewhere else (somewhere north, I think, a little north), and it wasn't until later that I realized this important thing. And this important thing, I explained to the Bruja who wasn't made of salt even though she really wished she were, was this: I had been falling backwards into the world that looks very much like this one, courting and being courted by the Eternal Feminine, and this was suddenly one of her aspects that made questions out of her titles, because she was Temporary, and sometimes Feminine, and sometimes many other things besides, and even though I'd heard about this, I had never met anyone who could do it.

Like anyone who has spent any time at the bottom of the sea, she was many of the things that she appeared to be, and many of the things that no one else could see, and by the time that I noticed that the sea monsters that were coming from out of her skirt and coat meant that she was as deep as the ocean, I had already started falling backwards, and that made me sad, because I lose everything that I fall for, at least up until right now. There were also other things that I adored about her: that she had a collection of faces that matched my collection, and she also had so many more that I had not seen, and that meant that if we were ever trapped somewhere between time and space, we could be many things to each other and never get old. I keep explaining these things to the Bruja, and now especially I am trying to explain how this is reminding me of my thumb, that what happened with this sea monster, or mermaid, or same thing, was like my thumb except it happened to my heart, like part of that got taken off, and it wouldn't come back. But it didn't make me sad, I explain, because I think what happened to me also happened to her, and those parts are finding each other somewhere at the bottom of the sea, and they can speak when we can't find each other, and it's a beautiful story, I think, and this is what I explain. And I don't know why I'm trying so hard not to cry and failing miserably, and this Bruja is also looking very sad, because, she says, I look like I may have fallen in love and it's not with her this time. And I explain that, No it's just because there's a tattoo of a mermaid on my back that I look like I'm in love, she's only visible on my back because she is what I think about, and that doesn't mean anything.

It's not been the easiest morning, not by far, and I am more and more upset now when the Bruja is wiping the salt from her face, and is seated on a series of nine rocks, and she's seating me before her, and looking into my hands.

This Bruja, I wanted to be her lost lover forever, but before my eyes she has turned into something else altogether, and change is always hard. She isn't reading the lines on my palm, she is lifting the skin off my bones like it were the skin of a piano on a beach, and she is reading the blood running through the veins.

La Bruja del Cobre is complaining about the cold, and wishing we had more of that soup I made for her a long time ago, and she is reading the blood running parallel to the bones in my hands. "Everyone has their own alchemy, art, love, or money," she says, "and yours is love. But you knew that already. For other people it's art." She is looking at my forehead and remembering something. "For other people, maybe, there's a difference."

orpheus descending

2011-12-12T08:32:00.000-08:00

The scene begins with the daughter, at the foot of the stairs to the ocean, and she turns and she looks at the father and she says, "We have to go down, Daddy."
This ocean, this stair, this entry point is loaded, it's a loaded gun, a crossroads marked with white chalk and gunpowder, and to cross over means to be blown in a thousand directions at once. I am terribly nervous about writing this scene, even now, or especially now, now that we're in the middle of it. Because this point is a threshold that got crossed on a night that was too late and too cold to be naked, naked as children playing in the forest. This point is a threshold, a place that got crossed on a day when things needed uncrossing, first at the river and then here, on this space, to get clean of all the thousand kisses in the depths of something that didn't know how to sustain itself.
Before we went down, I saw myself making the same masks of her face, papier mache masks that reflected every one of her nine images, I wanted to keep it holy, I wanted to keep it sacred, I wanted to keep it somewhere near the door to my place in the world, somewhere between desire and ecstasy, but something shifted on the way. I found the masks I had made had all come to gather in front of my hands, like a ghost, like a sad and lonely ghost, and I never know what to do with these phantoms except to pull them close and try to kiss them, kiss the ghost, whisper hello and goodbye and hello, across lifetimes I recognize you. Only this time the paper was growing thin and dry, and when I went to kiss the ghost, she crumbled in a thousand pieces and blew away like ash, and that was the only thing that I held that was worth keeping, the ashes of something that I would never really understand.
And I also understood that these things that I was holding from another lifetime ago, they were separating themselves by themselves, the dross from the gold, and my daughter was leading me into the underworld this time, because this time needed a child and not a lover to be the guide.
I watched her descend, she hadn't been here before, but she was Persephone hungry for pomegranite seeds, like the bee always knows exactly where to land (on the center of my head). There's too much water here to see clearly, so I am just trying to remember these things when I remember them. And when she got closer, and I could see that the waves were getting furious, the rocks begin to look like the bones of the dead. We always get more afraid of death when we're close to coming back to life.
Now there are clouds and now there is rain and now there is a light flickering in the parking lot in the middle of a morning where I'm here and not there, and there is nothing that needs to be born in words, because it's in the middle of its own birth, and it's so close to death that it seems important to pay attention to everything.
The round crossing guard is wearing black and red, and there's something about to identify itself, where the breath on the neck is going to announce itself with a voice.
I know some things. Some things about this place, some things about how I can watch the daughter playing on the lap of the sea, and I want to help her find shells that look like bones, but I'm stuck on the edges of the waves, eating sea foam and painting sea monsters with my hands.
That one, half this and half that but neither and both all at once, the one that shifts, is leaving traces and marks on every edge of every precipice, and I don't know if it's something I recognize across lifetimes or across oceans, because I am starting to suspect that this lifetime is the first time this has ever happened, and it catches us both by surprise.
I left a part of myself, the ashes from my hands, at the edges of the doorway to the underworld, and now my hands leave marks that are from the living blood of this body, this body right now, the one that wants and the one that remembers and the one that doesn't know where all these parts are supposed to go. The foam that runs through my blood is raining over my head, the foam that takes apart the things that are no longer necessary, and leaves the bones on the doorstep for another reconstruction, this foam is whirling at a thousand miles an hour, and there's no place to stand that feels like I won't be sucked under. But I'm already under. The feeling of falling comes strongest when I wake up, when I first wake up, because it takes that long for this body right now to remember that anything that feels like falling for that long is worth the time and attention.
And at the edges of the ocean, from the mouth of a cave, there's a boy that just left the center of the earth, and I remember her because I didn't ever stop thinking about her, and I don't know who she's supposed to be, and the same thing could be said for myself, except I think it might be whoever we want to be, as much as identities can create themselves in the middle of a storm on a winter night like this with the moon like this with the sea monsters gathering like waves like this, and I think I like it like this.

driven

2011-12-09T23:47:00.000-08:00

the skin of the car is shedding between here and there, and now i'm here, and the skin is gone, and all i can see is the shine of the car. these things, the ones that were buried in the rocks and came to life, are still here, rising underneath my fingerprints like there were bones there singing songs, and the one song that i always heard is also still here, cinnamon stones telling the stories of the people who were here, and everything that was true is lit up by the moon, and everything that was not true is lit up by the moon, and it's bright enough to hear, and i'm almost drowned out by the ocean in my ears, relentless moon and ocean in my ears, and i think this place between places, i think i can call this home.

notes from the field

2011-12-07T20:54:00.000-08:00

the writer reports in from real time:
the kind of night where i am finding myself trying to eat more than i did the meal before this one, feeling too much like a ghost and thinking it would be heavier if i were heavier, like i might not float away. riding through cold streets, taking my little girl to a school concert - she's in concert black and wishing she could wear boots instead of velvet shoes, and the wind blows against her legs. she is thin as a faerie on a night like this, but just enough to keep us all on the ground, riding into the wind and hoping we don't pick up the wrong kind of speed that could take us up. it's not a good night for flying. these last moons building up to this next one, coincidences and second chances are in the air, but i can't count them on my fingers, they float away with the tip of my thumb from another time altogether. and if it weren't for her, i think i would float, that i would find myself floating, if i didn't have this spiral going through my lip. it's a staple over my mouth, and i'm not sure what else is holding me together, but it might be that, with all of its multiple meanings, hooks and mermaids and locks on secrets, closets that hold more flesh than bone, and it doesn't matter if i am trying to fall apart, because this is keeping things together, just enough to remember how to do these things, with cold hands and a heart that wants to be anything but heavy on a night like this, weighing down and waiting and making things with my cold hands, watching for signs of what designs this moon is trying to call up from the depths of the ocean.

it's important to keep in mind

2011-12-07T07:12:00.000-08:00

This story is a love story. It's a love story that looks like it's about someone you don't know, but it's about you, and that's why it's always so uncomfortable to be writing this in public. There are things that I won't say in public, so the story won't have everything, but there are enough spaces between words, and fragments that are left out, so that you would recognize those spaces and fill them with the same things I'm leaving out, so that we're still talking here, and we're talking about the same things here, because we're always talking about the very same thing.

the last thing i will ever say about that

2011-12-06T12:57:00.000-08:00

the first part can't matter because origins and beginnings never end because they never really start because they are always already, and the middle part was not for anyone else to know, and the ending was so much in public that it took a lot more water than we had to get our hands clean. so i would live in the middle if i could but i'm supposed to be somewhere over here in the river of time, and i suppose i am way over here, but we don't live in one time or one place ever, unless we are very very dense, and that's never been true for us. except in one degree. maybe two, or a few more, but not in the usual way.

so at the end of the day it doesn't matter what they said, and it doesn't matter what i hear, and it shouldn't matter what you hear because the only thing that was really true about any of this was what you heard from me and what i heard from your mouth, and if i could have your words over me like a blanket then maybe just maybe your meaning would keep me warm, and it's what i would do for you on the rainiest days, or the ones where there are no wolves knocking at your door and all the foxes are keeping themselves well hid.

i won't speak about it again.

tres dos ambos mundos y te por tres or quatro o algo diferente

2011-12-05T08:20:00.000-08:00

A deep breath at the place in the cafe where she can't see him. They were sitting in the same booth and talking and while they were talking they were moving closer, first he comes around to sit on her side of the booth, because she wanted him to see something on her phone, and it was the perfect way to get to the side where she was, and the very good thing about it is that when he moved to her side she didn't move to his side, not away from him, and they were on the same side and she wasn't running and neither was he. Next was that moment when she was asking him to see the picture on his phone, and it was maybe a dog, or maybe a baby, something very cute for sure, something terribly cute like a dog or a baby, and she moved a little and he moved a little and the tops of their legs were touching and it was interesting, because there was a point when he was trying to hold his leg still and that was a mistake because of a certain nervous condition that made his leg shake whenever he tried to hold it still, and that was sort of bad, except it moved further on, the way of all flesh pulled by gravity, and that was inward here, where she was on his lap and he was wrapping himself around her by the legs and nothing was shaking but everything was moving back and forth, just like that, and it was that very certain point where the flesh starts to hum and so were they, humming in the cafe of the world before god and everybody.

It was a little too much for him so he said, "Excuse me (and note to self note to editor, first thing we will need to do is look at past and present and future tense and first second third person oh this is terribly inconsistent but it's always what you think it's about so it might be ok, no we need to fix this I will get my people on it)." And he went to the place where she was not, and that place was on the rooftop, where she couldn't get to, because he was a little taller than her. And even though he was much older than her he was also much more limber and he could jump, hahaha, now let's see who's really old, eh eh eh????!!!

I worry just a little bit that I am getting older and weirder, and it's going to be going like that for a very long time.

So he was on the roof and she was inside, or maybe she was gone, he did not know because he could not see her, because he cannot see through walls, what does he look like some kind of a wizard? And he was smoking even though it bothered her because it made her feel like he was doing it because he was frustrated with her and that meant that she was accidentally slowly killing him even though that was her wish every now and then (we're all human, and we need a break from things that don't stop moving). But he was not smoking because it bothered her, but because it was so very cinematic, and he felt that it would be terribly ironic to be doing something cinematic in a novel, and yes, goddammit he was there on the roof smoking at the sky, and he made his confession>

"OK, so this is all I can say, it's all I can say, 'I love you, but it's not you, it's me.' The way you sit in my memory, I want to carry it like a child in my arms, everywhere I go, and everywhere I go people will see the weight that I carry, just so I can tell them, 'It's not that heavy, it's really not that heavy.' Because we all carry our lovers in our arms and on our backs like a coat, like a perfect coat that doesn't fit anyone else but us, and at the end of the day, we're all in this together, we all wear the same coats, and they all have their own peculiar themes and variations, and maybe, just maybe, just maybe, there's a saturation point where the number of lovers ceases to matter, more numbers won't keep us warm, but like the elders seem to understand, it's the quality of love that makes us perfect and light and hungry for the things that wake us up.' And if I can say that just once but say it right, then I won't have to keep saying that, and suddenly I am light I am light I am light."

And that was that. And the world got very bright and grey all at the same time. And no moon revealed itself, and no shooting stars fell from the morning sky. And when he went back down, he fell on the way, and he fell on his coat of lovers, and they all began to complain that he was incredibly clumsy and needed to focus, they all told him he needed to focus, and it was a complaint that was so powerful and so echo-ey that it felt just like being married.

At the same time, on the other hand, on the brighter side. He didn't realize that this was an act of surrender and it was a marriage, but marrying a destiny of a sort, one where coats and permutations and subtle and radical changes in the design and the method of weaving the cloth became something like a process, like giving in to a process over which he had no control, and you would think that would unlock things and make things perfect and right.

She was still sitting in the booth, still a little bothered from what they were doing before he left, and a little flustered by the smell of the smoke on his clothes, and a little upset that he was still carrying an effigy of her in his arms, because that meant to her that she was sort of dead to him, or at least, what he carried that was her to him was not really her at all but something else, and it looked like her and it talked like her and it wanted the same things she wanted, and he loved her double more than he loved her, because it was something he could carry and she understood that she was not that at all. And she wanted to be carried, for a little while, she wanted that very much. We like to be carried, and no one is worse off by being remembered, because being remembered is like reproducing without having to take all that time and energy to sleep with people.

He felt a little bit odd to be talking to her there on the other side and holding her there in his arms all at the same time, and it didn't take long before he understood that she would not be able to sit on his lap even if they both wanted it badly because her double was already there, and he was wondering if this living in metaphors might not be all it's cracked up to be. Her metaphor was feeling heavy in his arms, but it also protected him from all kinds of unwanted solicitations. Her metaphor was feeling as unbearably light as anything he could exhale, and he wanted to exhale more wishes. Her metaphor was becoming very much like that hungry shaking bird that already lived in his stomach, the one that stammers and shudders and bleeds because love is impossible and necessary all at the same moment. Her metaphor would grow, until it could wrap herself around him, and hold him still and silent for three days, or months, or years, and when she unwrapped him, he knew he would be born into something else, and he would be like a small bird that would eventually learn to move freely in the world, like a wizard, like a sorcerer, like any bird worth its weight in salt. Her metaphor would tear him open again and again, and when he was open and bleeding he would find his way to the rooftops and register all his complaints and confessions and wishes, and he would be almost completely unaware that he was being put back together as something he never suspected, and it would be longer than a lifetime to decode those taps on the back of his neck. Her metaphor would turn him terribly terribly bright, filling every room with wishes as elusive as any shooting star, born with one foot in the middle of a grave and one foot in the middle of another transatlantic flight. Her metaphor would be like a hungry child in his arms, and he would learn to love her like a hungry child, even when she was asleep, and even when she couldn't hear anything else but the sound of the ocean in her ears, her head a seashell, her body a cave for the waves to come and go.

And she felt herself becoming heavy with salt, and he felt himself being torn apart from the inside, and everyone in the cafe became exhausted from trying to turn back to flesh from stone.

"This is why lovers can't be friends," he said, even though he knew it wasn't true.

She, meanwhile, became too dry for this part of the world, and felt herself rescinding herself back to the sea. He was whispering her name, and it was no longer so sweet, but a little spooky. And she, meanwhile, turned herself into a particular kind of sea monster with a particular kind of tail, and she began to make her way to the sea, and when she got to the foot of the mountain that separated the desert from the ocean, like the desert were him, and the ocean were her, and they could fall in love again if that mountain moved out of the way, she felt the winds whipping her in all directions and she thought, "I didn't know it was like this, every time, to see me it is like this every time," and while she was being blown in all directions, she started to blow in all directions, and she became wind, and he became mountain, carrying versions of things in his arms, and those things turned to shapes and formations that every other lover would see when they were on their way, desert lovers on their way to be with the ocean, like two pieces of cloth that can't ever clasp, like two pieces of cloth forever trying to clasp.

ambo's mundos (next) ((not last just next))

2011-12-04T17:57:00.000-08:00

This is already well-established, then. What this is, then. This story, told from the other side of the grass, from my point of view (one of the dead ones), and told all over the heads and hearts of these few people that I have decided are important enough to me to pay attention to, and there is a complex web of relationships that might not be altogether related very much at all altogether told, but if they do all have one thing in common, it's that they have not forgotten how to talk to the dead.

That is exactly what makes this a love story, then, not because those who don't believe in ghosts can't love, they can, but it's entirely different, and a different kind of passion, then the kind that builds with intensity, intensities based sure on friction and physics, repetitions of movements of the flesh that wake it up and make it hungry, but also here for the necromantics it's that these movements also wake up the cells of the ones who passed on, and they want to come back, and their only chance is through trances or trance dances or occasionally through another birth. But no one is getting pregnant in this story yet, it's not another human birth that I want, that would be another story altogether.

But it is a love story, it's always a love story, the pilgrim who progresses through sloughs and things isn't interesting me these days, because he ends up pure in god's love and light, like all pilgrims do, and that's one reason among many that I can't stand pilgrims.

The reason we're still in the Mundos shop is because it's not done yet, and in truth it will never be, because everything in the world/s happens here. And the best things that happened here are things that haven't even happened yet, so while he is trying to think about what to draw on her napkin to let her know something important, there are other things at work, things that have nothing to do with who he or she might be right now. On certain nights of the year, lovers are stuck in time, stuck in spaces they once were and never could leave, because they left pieces of their hearts there. Out in the back, where no one who is of a pilgrim lineage ever dares to go, there are a hundred pancakes, half-eaten, left in the dirt by the lover who chose the object of her affection over the butter, and if she were ever to come back, she would see a hundred versions of herself, looking for traces of half-finished meals, wondering if she hadn't made a bad decision.

It's not a story about bad decisions, though, because all decisions are right if they are made, and if she were to look around long enough, she would find the signs he left for her on the wall that sealed him to her for a time longer than she imagined would be something he wanted. If he were to visit, and stay well past dark, in an abandoned house that no one ever lived in, he would see the things she drew on his chest with her nails, and he would also see the marks of the other lovers that marked him even long after he was convinced her marks were the last.

All to say, they continue, this genetic material continues to take root and form, and tries to find the right path, when sometimes the only right thing to do in the dark is to say happy birthday and wait for more light to come, when the morning seems to be refusing to turn, but it always relents, because it is being pushed by the ocean.

He is in the shop, then, drawing something on her napkin, and wishing that she would turn into a mermaid so they would never have to worry about having to pretend they were perfectly happy being mortals, with court cases and circumstances and desires that come to make spirits feel less than light, and chained to the bones that don't want to know who they are.

(and more)

Don't forget

2011-12-04T07:16:00.001-08:00

This is a love story.

la parte arriba de la linea entre ambos mundos

2011-12-01T08:32:00.000-08:00

I was on the road trip that could only take place in between time and space, and this was the one where I was visiting old friends. First I would see my tongue, and then I would see my heart, and it would make sense if both of them were living with her, but they were not. In fact, the her with whom I assumed they would be living was not one but a number, that is, a number higher than one, and so it was becoming very necessary to try to keep track of the pieces of things. She was pieces, and she was many, and there were more hers than I had known about, but it was suddenly important to follow the tracks to all of them. If I could follow her fractions, then someone might be tracing mine, and this is the way we could keep track of each other and help each other put each other back together each other. Not that I was falling apart. Not ever.

The only reason I knew that I was still thinking about her was the fact that the sun on the road in front of me looked more like her face, like I was driving into her mouth (rather than the usual face of the sun, which for me, like most of us, is a Tzotzil Mayan elder, possibly male or possibly not, but probably yes male yes because of the phallus that is hanging by his ear ((left)) ). This was the funniest thing about it, the most ironic thing, because I understood so very well that I would never actually reach her mouth, that it was always just out of reach, and I was starting to understand what sailors go through when the moon is making them insane, and why they turned manatees into mermaids.

I was on my way, then, on the road trip, then, and I decided to stop just then and have a snack and look at souvenirs, and I pulled off by a shop, Ambo's Mundos. The sign outside said that they had pancakes made from dates offered 24 hours a day, and a free butter bar. Although the idea of the dates never sounded very good to me, the butter sounded so very French that I had to stop, because I was so worldly (am so worldly), and this was between so many mundos that it just made sense. I turned off the motorcycle and let myself just sit there (stand really because if I sit then the whole thing falls over and it can break your leg because it is so dangerous to be on a motorcycle, even when it is not moving), and I let myself just consider this moon this sun this face of hers that I was chasing and it was always just out of reach. And that made sense because I don't know why because really but it made sense, and seemed to be perfect, a perfect way to enter into Ambo's Mundos. In my mind I was thinking about a story where the boy misses the girl, and isn't even aware that he's playing with that idea of the feminine and the lunar, but finds himself buying things in series of 28s, and it doesn't even dawn on him how much he misses her. Thinking about this story, even more than thinking about the moon, I felt very much whole and well put together, so much better off than the character in the story I was creating. He was an awful mess. Just a mess. Slept with a girl a few times (maybe 56) and still so hung up about it (maybe it was 3) and he can't get over her and thinks he's romantic (3, there was something about 3 that was just insanely crazy and good, so so so very very good) but he's really just insane and not at all well because as long as she's there in his head, no one else will enter, until the next one, except the next one always comes along and enters, and stays, and it's not very easy for him, the character in the story in his head, not like it's easy for him, the character in this story that I''m writing right now, and so he feels so much better than he could have imagined earlier upon waking this morning, with the sun on one side and the moon on the other.

But the real story, what''s happening right now, is so much more infinitely important, because it is in a cafe and it's really happening at this very moment. We are crossing the line between art and life, and it's fantastic, and even exihiliariating, because it is so real and visceral. His hands are cold and his mind is racing, racing, faster than the motorcycle, and all of his life is an attempt to catch those lost moments and still live in the present and still be aware that the road up ahead has a cow in it, and he needs to be careful, because cows are so very important here. His mind is racing so fast, in fact, that he forgot that this part is told in first person, and once again the "I" became a "he" (resisting readers: resist the text!), but that's something I can fix right now.

I am in a cafe. My hands are cold. I am thinking about cows.

Since it is that kind of cafe, she is sitting across from me, and she is wondering if we should eat the pancake and explore the butter bar, and the answer to these wonderings is always a yes, and the universe is on our side. And as she's wondering, I'm looking at her, and thinking about the next important thing to say.

She interrupts, however, and she asks me point-blank, "Are you really trying to live through the first conversation again?"

"I'm not," I say. But I am. But not again so much, because it's not one that I relive very often. I am thinking about talking about first dates and making a joke about porn, because it would definitely break the ice, because it would be inappropriate. She would say something about how she never actually saw porn, anywhere, which is very unlikely, because of the way things are in the world right now. It would get entirely too complicated after that, so I try to steer away from porn altogether, and try to imagine us making an amateur porn film, except without the porn, with the same natural light and hand-held cameras, and instead of doing those kinds of things to each other, I am imagining how it would look if we set the camera on a high chair and it would film us eating date pancakes with all that butter, and thinking about how filming people eating is the new porn, because porn is what shows what we really do but don't talk about.

In that film about butter, they begin at a table at the cafe, and she is looking at the pancake and she is looking at him, and they start off slow, a dab of butter to begin, and soon enough they are melting the butter and pouring it over each other, and somewhere in this Marlon Brando with white hair comes in and starts to take charge. The men with the wide jaws are always taking charge in all the best films, and when Brando is in charge of the butter, we are in very experienced hands indeed, and it's electric and visceral and gritty and it's just like goddam life, beautiful and ugly all at the same time.

In real time, however, she is very upset, because she gets that way whenever she is beckoned from her sleep to participate in this same scene all over again, and I woke her up before there was enough butter to warrant waking her up, and it's not as confusing as it could be. Because I know why she's mad.

"I'm mad because you keep wanting to relive this," is what she says.

"That's not true, it's not true at all," I say, and I am a liar.

"Then why am I here again?" she says.

"Because I don't know who you are," I say. "Because I miss you," I say. "I don't like date pancakes, and I never will, and the idea of a butter bar isn't exciting to me. I've always liked real butter, all on its own, and at the end of the day, that's all you were and all you'll ever be to me. Real butter. You don't need anything else. But I don't know who you are, and I have no idea where you went, and I am still looking for you, and quizas quizas quizas..." I trail off, because it drives her crazy when I don't finish my thoughts.

Only it doesn't drive her crazy, she is already not paying any more attention to me. She is texting someone here at the table, in front of the pancake and everybody, and it's cruel and absurd, and I get terribly angry about all of this.

I am afraid suddenly that her texting at the table will remind me of the time that woman was texting that cruel little man from the hotel room, in front of him and he pretended he didn't know but he did and that makes her a little dim but I am not bitter, and suddenly I am afraid that every time someone texts anyone from now on, I will feel threatened, and get so unreasonably angry, that I might say angry things, things like, "Please don't text while my tongue is on your heart." And that will cause no end of trouble.

She is texting and I am trying not to relive this part of things, but it's too late, I am already stuck here, stuck with the version of her that got so very tiring, the one who couldn't focus, or decide, so entirely unlike me who has a razor-sharp consciousness and never second-guesses. Except to wonder what it would be like to pick up the threads of her and the threads of the thing that was me, and try to weave them together again, and see if the patterns had numbers that might be worth pursuing. It would be easier if the idea of her were more stable, but the reality of her were not, because in the mind she becomes mixed into a very large and complicated one, where in the world she keeps breaking up into pieces of the whole, and the whole is the only thing that is worth pursuing and entirely impossible to hold, so much so that at the end of the day, there is only that thing that wants to want, a drumbeat that plays a very particular song, and that song was the one he heard, not for the first time, but it was a very clear time, when he heard it while there was a date pancake and a face of someone that he knew he would love for a very long time.

Fabric breaks open whenever there is a word like love trying to work its way to the front of the tongue, and fabric breaks in spectacular ways, always making room for other ways of covering and other fabrics, it is not jealous, nor greedy, nor gluttonous, broken fabric is the cream of the butter on the pancake of the world. And in this moment I have never been so far from all the things I care about in the world, and never so close, because it's always blinking back, on the other side of a very thin cloth.

(more cafe scene coming just you wait)

under the line (afterthought)

2011-11-30T20:35:00.000-08:00

She, of course, was not who she thought he was. For that matter, he was not even close to who he thought he was, and everyone is always wrong about all of these things in spectacularly misguided ways. While he was meeting her in other forms, she was meeting him in other forms, and there were moments when he thought he had gone back in time to her, and times when he thought he had moved forward, and this is what sparked the idea that maybe we don't have to live in the fixed points of the present, but that these things happen simultaneously, and concurrently, and repeat (sometimes for the lessons, but more often than not for the force of the repetition that makes life resemble the drum, the drum of the tongue, the drum of the heart, the drum of the heart on the tongue). And the trick was to learn how to stay in the present while traveling through time. As if a life were an act of time-travel, based on repeated patterns and the moments of their recognition. Like recognizing a matching scar on a lover's body. This has happened before, and this will happen again, and the meanings of the rhythms will only become clear when the lovers go back to the beach and begin with a conversation about the cold night and the moon waiting underneath the clouds for someone to follow the clues.

the part beneath the line

2011-11-30T12:13:00.001-08:00

And another season starts to wind itself into the ground, like it were returning to the center of the world, like the dwarves who are preparing, making careful gnawings on the walls of the world, because that time of reversals is very close, and they do tend to increase in chaotic occasional sporadic bursts on the way from here to there. However. It’s not for us to know why we are stuttering and the milk and the blood of another time keep running down the sides of our faces whenever we meet the new and perfect lover. It’s not for us to know why there are more forces working toward nailing the chains into the wall by the wrists of the living, and why there are fewer and fewer with each passing generation who are willing to speak on behalf of the living. Fucking phantoms all of them, living a life already in the grave, as if these things were already decided. Not for me to understand why the living are acting out their version of what they think is death, perhaps capturing something to make it still, a cat playing with a mouse on the edges of the waves of history, and history is always at the center of things. It’s not for us to know why she can’t wake up, or why she can’t go back to sleep.

This is the exact kind of morning, though, where it’s apparent that there is something about to begin, and if I were in my right mind I would do what I can to warn the living that it can’t be for the best, not in the way that anyone can conceive it, and for those who understand that the underside of things is where the diseases start to grow, and where things begin to decay, and where things are cut away down to the bone, to that point where we are all on the verge of death or birth, that’s when and where the dividing line between the best and the worst makes itself terribly clear, and the dice falls always to one side and not another, but it falls because it is pulled, that is to say, gravity has everything to do with it, and we have moved through time and space to make things fall the way they fall, not that we control gravity, but we affect it.

Enough so that.

The verge between this kind of birth and this kind of death is always approached at the same speed as any other verge, and I don’t know if I can speak so clearly about approaching verges, not here, not like this, not with all these people watching.

Enough so.

That the things we do in the morning have threads that repeat in the evening. It’s reaping and sowing, and the lesson is not necessarily one of karma, but more like: you just fucking watch yourself all right.

On this verge between seasons, between creeping and stowing, the insides of all of our jackets are lined with needles, and the blood on our chins is not appropriate for public places. And it’s at this verge that history herself does become visible, that gray cat made of dust that you see out of the corner of your eye whenever you are in a particular shade of grieving, history is visible, and this is that time of year.

I would give more than these teeth and this marrow to love her again for the space of an afternoon, but here is where I have to remember something entirely important, that is, history is that kind of lover who always has a razor inside her mouth, and stands at the edges of the playground with large eyes that shine like a baby animal, and she shakes like a baby animal, the kind of cold that only the oldest bones know, and she makes you want to hold her and make her feel safe, but before you get there, there is other work to be done. And the worst of it for her is that every time something starts to turn the insides of her locks upside down, that shining point of slipperiness where one decides to slide down into the world of the senses and surrender to the falling, that’s the very same point when the blood comes trickling down the sides of her mouth. At that point everyone in the room understands that it is much too late to apologize. And that this last earthquake has only just started, and the waves that are lining up for the shore are doing so in successively darker shades of red.

So while on the one hand I understand that it is kind of comfort and assurance to the living to say kindly things like, “The small things, they don’t really matter,” in truth, they really fucking do matter, and it’s much heavier than that, and entirely worse than anyone could imagine. At the end of the day, when those men who lived their lives in suits and are now dying so all alone because they behaved like total bastards every day of their existences, when they look upon the one or two people who can still stand to be in the same room with them, and say, with one of their wasted and dying breaths, “I didn’t sweat the small stuff,” that is the very moment when the dead ones come laughing.

For two reasons: one because their concerns were terribly petty and two because they even missed out on the details there.

It’s not necessarily necessary then to point out that most of the time spent living is an engagement with missed opportunities. God is in the details, and the small stuff is worth sweating over.

That’s entirely neither there nor here nor anywhere, so beware, while I am entirely morose and loose enough to speak a little too freely this morning, there are entirely important developments, and it’s entirely essential to pay close attention to how and why things are starting to unfold in unfortunate directions.

Because the story is always a love story, and there’s never any way out of that (hold on for just a moment, because that needs a qualifier, but not an excessive one, any story that is told from the other side of the grass is romantic at its roots) ((keep in mind, further, that because of my unique position, I can eat the roots whenever I want, so I may not entirely respect the genre, and no one should unless they are trained to be that fucking stupid) (((I am not unique, only as unique as you, but there will never be another one like you until the end of the world when the dwarf who is your double takes your place, so you just fucking watch yourself))).

All right.

The heart is a drum and the tongue is a drum, and this is a perfect morning for playing on her heart with his tongue, but it’s much too far from that kind of season. He didn’t expect it nearly so keenly that he would wake up again so very unserenely, where that copper witch seemed as if she were kissing him from the other side of his eyes, from inside his head, like she had worked her way inside his head, and the very terrible thing is that he knew he invited her, and he prayed that she would come. He always prays and she always comes but neither of them are awake enough to recognize that this is the way things are happening. It’s often enough that when he thinks of her and she thinks of him there are riptides that make the waves flutter in ways that no one could have ever suspected, and the world turns on an entirely different kind of axis. Nothing as bold as love, but another kind of lover altogether, this being the dividing line where anything might pop through the surface. It’s never wrong to hold the tongue (except for when it is absolutely time to play it like a drum, and that time should be clear to anyone with a notion for the motion beneath the belt) and let the moment come and settle, and this is what he’s done, for so long now that his small apartment is entirely flooded over with still water that’s much too cold to live in.

He has been taking to sleeping on a rubber mattress, then, like all people might do when they are living after a flood, and even though he is convinced he slept through it, he can remember very specific things about every scar that came from it. It’s one of the peculiar things about this generation, having been trained to consider their narrative authority questionable at best. Their experience denies their perceived unreliability, and very much like the generation they are nipping heels with before and after, it seems to be a part of a very elaborate plot to cheat them out of something valuable.

Knowing that you’re right about something is a curse to every righteous generation, and wondering if you might be wrong about everything is the curse that’s given to their counterparts, and it does go back and forth every time, in the same, studied measure. The generations bounce back and forth like a metronome, and although there are some who might think it is modulating, moving faster and faster each time until there is no difference between right and left and life and death, that is not the case at all, it is always the same exact speed and frequency each time, because we are living according to energetic forces that are very very old, and nothing humans can do can change the velocity of the waves.

Except. Except except except. The way he thinks about her, and the way she thinks about him.

The truest love the world has ever known has been that one between half-mortals, who do not recognize the forces in each other, and assume only half about the other. That’s why this story works so well, because of the tension. Or perhaps it’s better to say that this is why this story is about to work, because we are about to see the tension at play, and it will be so goddam beautiful that your heart will have broken long before your eyes have taken in the words such is the power of the story-telling at work here. So. This morning. He wakes up and she is scraping the insides of his eyes with her imaginary tongue, she, the kind of witch who works long distances (though not always accurately), and she, she is wanting to make his windows clear so that he can see her, and when he wakes up she is the only thing he can think about, it’s his tongue on her heart, his breath on her sternum, he wakes up smelling the smells of her skin and his breath, something unique and impossible to replicate.

So he wakes up in love, and she is gone, and the elders in the land of the living are advising him not to be caught up in any kind of longing, but the youngsters who died before their time are advising him to just love the heart and the chest and the body and the soul of that woman already, even if she is far away, because that’s all there is, and it won’t kill you, necessarily, but it very well could do the opposite, and bring you to life, as if for the very first time in this waking shaking trembling world.

thanks for jumping

2011-11-24T20:18:00.000-08:00

So this is the scene. I'm being strapped into this harness thing and there is this teenage boy doing the strapping, and he's looking a little distracted, because, because for one thing I am a little taller than the last person he strapped into this. I am also a little heavier, but not altogether too much heavier, because children eat a lot more these days in this part of the world, but that brings up the other because, and this is because I am not a kid. My daughter is on the other side of the room, being strapped into a harness by another teenage boy, and we are about to go flying into the air. I tell myself that I am doing this for her, so that we could be seeing each other jumping, and although that's nice, certainly nice, I know that I would be doing this anyway, because I cannot resist.

This isn't the first time I've been strapped in to something with my daughter recently. It was less than a month ago when we were flying across a lot of space on these harnesses that are meant to keep you from falling to the ground because that's what gravity would like to do to you. This time we're not flying across, though, we're jumping up and down, except jumping very high, as if we were out of reach of the usual laws of physics. But just like last time, it's something that makes me very happy, as if this were something that I were missing. On some days, it does feel like flying, but there's not enough real flight in it. And on some days, there is this wish that I could be escaping from things.

They're not the usual things. It's not because I need to claw my way out of a circumstance that's unbearable because of the distance that happens between lovers, and it's not because I am growing bored with doing the same things every day. In truth, my days are all very different, and I am rarely wishing that I could be something else than in this body. But there are so many things that I would like to change, just a small amount.

Like, the way we can't jump twenty feet in the air when we try. Like, we can't cross through the rules of geography and time, and visit the ones that we miss the most, and bring back a souvenir from the journey (like a hotel napkin, or a flag from their country, or their smell on the inside of a shirt collar). Like, we are not entirely immune to this decay thing that happens to everyone, it seems, and for some it moves faster than for others.

I don't think this is where I see my daughter yet, entering into that river of time where the body decays, but it must be true in some small way. Very recently I realized that I stopped thinking of her as a likely subject for a sequestration, where spies from the government come to take innocent children into their custody and try to barter for abstract concepts. She is tall, tall enough to be visible from distances, and loud, loud enough to scream someone's ear to that point where it starts to ring a little bit, and wise, wise enough to know that there are always people around to help if things get uncomfortable. So even though she is out of that, she must be into that phase that ends in something like adulthood, and there's a decay that comes with every stage, and more decay at the end, but this is still close to the beginning of the chapters that will make up the stories that make her life.

There's an uneasy feeling I get, though, when she is flying in the air, and I see something on her face that looks like the same relief I feel, so it must be true, then, that sometimes she gets a little bit tired of all of this, in the same way we all do, but I didn't notice it on her before, so she must be changing. I must be changing somehow too.

I haven't wanted to freeze anything lately, not the way I used to. Making this moment last or linger, they're just happening, and I'm participating, and there are things that I can do and things that I cannot do, and the days are rolling into each other like wolves fighting. I see signs of things getting worse for some people I love, and some of the things I had hopes for, and I see things getting better for other things, and other people, and I would like to say that I'm just letting things happen, but it feels more like I am participating in the world while riding a motorcycle that is taking turns a little too fast. My teeth are tight and my stomach is stretched back against the bones in my back, and the air tastes like metal, smoke, and blood. Despite that, watching her jumping into the air is something like a perfect beautiful moment, and something about these moments with her are entirely perfect, and something about that tells me that I can pay attention to the blood in my veins and the wind in my lungs, because there are people aware of my movements, people who depend on what I do, and how I react to things. And this moment is more important than any other, because this is the place where the dead speak to the living, and when we speak back, it starts to sound like those particular kinds of songs that can stop time. Tonight, it's the perfect time for the living to stay on their side of the grass and the dead to occupy theirs, and wish that no one enters into the others' realm before it's time, and I'm holding my breath, because time rolls forward, and time comes to visit like gravity or death or the kind of friend who can hold you in the middle of the air with just a thought. For just long enough to take a few deeper breaths, and let the magic that will be necessary sooner than later start to gather force between the heart and the rib, poised on the edge between falling and weightlessness.

the operator of my pocket calculator

2011-11-20T22:07:00.000-08:00

This is the third time this month that I've decided to start looking like an old man. It never lasts long, as long as any teenage phase, but always as ridiculous. For some moments, I am aware that I'm at least seven weeks shy of looking like the hermit in the cartoons, and that gives me a drive that I never felt before. It always ends the same way, though. I am at my parents' house visiting, and they're watching television, and we"re not sure whether we should talk or watch tv quietly, so we do both, only halfway, and as a result, we never really get to hear what they're saying on tv, and we never really make out what we might be telling each other. Someone with an important voice says something about someone important, and one of them takes this as good news, and says, "Things are changing."

"Then why are the police spraying students in the face with pepper spray?" I say.

And it doesn't matter what happens next, because I feel like a dick in a beard, like an old and angry version of Mike from All in the Family, and I have to go home and shave.

So it's inside a head like that where I find myself excavating the bottom of the ocean. That's where I go when the mystery of the other world seems to be hiding, because usually it's hiding somewhere here, and I can at the very least hide out with the mermaids until the world above gets their magic together.

Tonight, everyone leaves me alone. I'm not unfriendly to the things on the bottom of the sea, but I just don't feel like talking.

"Why don't you feel like talking," she says.

"It's been kind of a dark time," I say, before I even see it's her. If I'd known it was her, I would have tried saying it with a little more grit to my melancholy, because to me that's a little more flirty, although no one else ever sees it that way. "I didn't think, or I expected I would run into you here," I say.

"Which one?" she says.

"Whichever one is more interesting," I say, because I'm not in the mood to make any of these decisions.

"I'm just looking for a poem," she says. "I didn't mean to interrupt anything. You look very busy. And, by the way, you don't look as old as you're trying to look, you need at least seven more weeks."

She always knows how to read me, and that's why I like it when she's in my world somewhere. I can't hide, and down here, it's not much time before I can decide that I don't really want to hide, but I need more time to think about all these things.

"What poem are you looking for?" I say. Not that I'd know.

"That one you wrote for me," she says. "The one you always talk about."

This needs a little explanation. On the bottom of the sea, there are places where all the things that we write to each other and never send are waiting. The poem she is talking about, however, is lost as far as I know. I see places around us where there are many, many unspoken things, and places where there are only short notes with a few words, or maybe a drawing of something good that we wanted to happen. I try not to spend too much time here, but on some nights, that's all there is. Tonight, I came down here because there was a sinking sadness that pulled me here, and I didn't want to think it had anything to do with her. I haven't seen her in a long time. I came here because I was noticing for the first time that this life is very short, and there are important and beautiful things that happen that have a way of slipping away too soon, so I was looking for something like an anchor I could use later, when I was awake again, and the world was green and blue again, and the magicians were back to work after the holiday.

But she caught me. Because this is also the place I go to write new poems, and they're not always about her, but she's always somewhere in them, because since I met her I can't put anything into the mouths of sirens that don't have some piece that reflects her. I'm still not convinced that I came down here to think about her, but she appeared, so I have to take this as something that someone had planned.

"I didn't come down here to see you," she says. "Don't get any ideas."

"I'm not here to see you, either," I say, because it sounds like it might sound good, even if it's petty, and especially even if by now it's no longer really true.

"You did something new to your tongue," I say. Because it's only polite to make conversation with people around you.

"You noticed," she says, and when she opens her mouth, there are a thousand worlds that come spilling out. They all have sounds from a thousand inner voyages, and I can see figures in there that I don't recognize, and a thousand signs of things that I don't understand.

"It's a very pretty tongue," I say, and that's a little too much, especially considering how much time has passed, and so I start to look for the poem, because it's easier than doing anything else at the moment. There's a space close by, the spot where we first met each other down here, and it has some of the colors and sounds of falling in love, but I don't want to step there, because if I step there with her, then she might see all my footprints, and she might know that I've spent more nights than I want to admit visiting that spot. So we're looking. We're both looking, and it's almost nice, because it almost feels like something is happening, and when I turn over a stone, I find a stash of papers with my name written on some of them.

"I don't know who wrote this," I say.

"I wrote those," she says, "and I keep writing those. I don't know what I'm supposed to do with them."

Tonight, the mermaids know something we don't, and have better ways of dealing with things than we can ever know, and I'm tired of the world up there, and just want to spend more time sleeping, so I can be here, where so many shadows come and go, where there is always a rumbling in the veins, and I don't know if it comes from something that happened a long time ago, or if it's something that's going to happen, and here it's just impossible to know, because the usual rules of time don't apply. But for some reason, this is the night where I stopped missing the home I never had.

recuerdas algo de aquel cafe

2011-11-20T14:42:00.000-08:00

No importa que her lips are starting to snow all over me when she speaks, she wants to say something, pero ni modo, el tiempo nos escapo, and we turn back to the snow falling from our fingertips. This is the moment when the thing starts to turn, the bull that lives in the center begins to turn in his sleep, and the entire puzzle becomes rattled. It's never easier when it's rattled, and it's never more difficult, the puzzle is always exactly what it is.

She tells me about how she likes to spend time looking at her fingertips, and wondering about how this impossible puzzle has solutions, simple solutions that are only difficult because they take time to play out. We can twist the pieces all we like, but we have to wait and watch how they play out, and, she says, neither of us is born for that kind of waiting, and so we keep twisting and twisting them. Her greatest fear, then, and it should be mine, is that we may occasionally fall upon the perfect solution, but we twist again before it has a chance to work itself out, and that we might be always missing it.

"Why don't you make a move, then, and let the pieces fall for awhile, make a single simple move and let them lay where they lay?" is what I say, and it sounds like someone else talking through my mouth. My lips don't snow, but her face is starting to be covered by flakes. There's something about the weather between us that's agreeable, even though it's a little cold, and there's a threat that if we stayed too long we would die, forgetting to come back inside.

I'm starting to wonder why it always has to be like this for me, something threatened, something dark and looming, and if I could become some dark erotic angel for a time, without laughing myself to death, I would put on that mask and let it work itself out until it went away or until it molded to my face because it always fit perfectly. When she puts on masks I had always assumed it was just something particular to an age, that this is what we all do for awhile, but the longer I know her, the more I can see it's something particular to our age. As if we were born in a time when a stable identity was the first thing on our minds, but the last thing we want, because we've seen what happens to the ones who find masks that fit too early in their lives, and by the time they are ready to move in a new direction, they are already old, and looking terrified because they can't remember how to get out of the image they embraced.

So this proposal, then, to make some kind of movement that might suggest a decision, is already too much, and I know exactly why, but it still puts me somewhere that I don't understand. It's as if it's all on her now, as if she might have the key to get us out of this, to find the trick that made everything turn, when things started to go wrong. It's as if she were a kind of a last hope, and if she took the chance, she could unleash all of this, and I was already angry with her for not being brave enough. And it was worse because I understood that what was happening to her was what always happened to me, and I never found the way to make the secrets fall into place.

We live under a microscope, and everything we do is being observed, and we've taught ourselves how to use these tools against our observers. It gives us a keen double consciousness, something in us that splits off to observe our being observed, and on some days it makes us powerful, and on some days it just makes us crazy.

So I try to turn the rivers of time back just a bit, back to where all I could think of was the time when her lips were snowing, it's not far away, but it's already too far, and I miss it, miss it terribly, because in the time that I was thinking, she was talking, and I didn't hear a word, and now she's angry with me.

"You always get like this," she says.

"Remember that time we were that couple that never got heavy with the weight of snow on our backs?" I say.

"We've never been a couple," she says. "We don't do those things."

She's right, of course, but I still say, "If we're not a couple, then we are we always spending so much time together?"

Tonight no one is wrong, and everything is snow, and the only unexpected thing that might happen would be sleeping.

la parte entre cafes

2011-11-18T21:06:00.000-08:00

There are always series of cafe scenes, and it would be better to gather them all together at once, because the nature of time is such that it does work more like memory and less like a train wreck. The train wreck of history is unbearable because it reminds us of our own lives, but it's also incomplete. The successions of losses and disillusionments that make up a life are only one side of the dice, and it has more than six sides, 256 in fact, but that's too much to give away right now, before the ceremony that teaches us who we really are. There are more sides, always.

It would be easy, then, to go in a kind of train wreck order, that is to say, chronological, but that would be incomplete, and never as much of a train wreck as we like to think. It would be much harder to gather all the loose threads together, gathering them together by color, colors to represent the 256 themes, and there are enough colors, certainly, but no easy way of spilling it out so that the patterns are all visible.

However, this is perhaps more an aesthetic consideration than anything, this is a succession of scenes. There will be more. There are always more on the way. And even though sometimes we like to think there is nothing happening in our lives, the scenes taken out of context start to add up to pictures that are much larger, and we always find that there was more going on beneath the surface.

It would be better to start at the bottom of the sea, because this is where he always goes when he dreams, because this is where he always goes when he is about to get born. Every rebirth is a quotation of the first one, and the first one goes back much much further than our birth certificates say. Every document is written by a liar who doesn't realize the weight of what they are documenting.

In the first cafe, at the bottom of the sea, he is talking to his friend, a compañero in the revolution that started in 1848, or much further back, and for them at the moment, it started when Che got on the back of the motorcycle, and it started when Cesar decided to try talking with the farmers in California, and it started when certificates and the laws they proclaimed stopped making sense to so many people who were trying to stay alive.

It's ten o'clock at night, and I'm parking my motorcycle. The cafe chairs and tables are spilling out in the street. I am already a half an hour early, and I decide that I might smoke and write something short that I can use for an introduction next weekend.

He is already there, so I abandon those plans and take up the original plan, to meet with Michel and talk about art and love.

"I got here early," he says, "and so did you. This is important."

"I was going to write my introduction," I say, because it sounds important and almost French, the way French people are always writing introductions to important things. We have important things, too, Michel reminded me, and this is important.

"Your cap is pointed at the top like an elf," he says. "You'll need to adjust that, so we are like revolutionaries, and not subjects for mockery."

Oh, Marcel, you make me adjust my cap in the middle of the revolution, because you know, somehow you know, how do you know? you always know.

When we talk, it is as fluid as the coffee that pours, and as rich as the cream, and as hot as the French woman who brings the coffee. Except she is not that at all, but more like a man, because there are always men with important beards in this cafe, doing important things with their beards and their caps. It is always easier to imagine there are French women here, because of the nature of our meetings, and our lives, and I don't want to talk, but he corners me, like a cat, or a bull, or perhaps somewhat like both, a cat dressed up as a bull, ready to fight, knowing it will always land on its feet.

"What is it, Odysseus?" he asks, cornering me, like a cat in a bull suit.

My name is Odysseus, or something just as important and heavy as cream.

I can't answer.

"You are pausing, and it's going on endlessly, and it needn't be so entirely painful." He pours sugar into his coffee, and lights a cigarette, even though one is already burning, but it's for effect, and a good one, too. "You can't hide your heart from me, because we know each other too well."

And it's true, so true, so very very so true. We do. Indeed we do. And we laugh like men at a bullfight, even though we are the cat we have come to harness.

My confession spills out like coffee beans from the mouth of a bull, a bull with its mouth filled with coffee beans. "That woman," I tell him. "She is only half-French." And I cry, because that's what we goddam do.

"The one you're seeing now?" he asks.

"There is no one I'm seeing right now," I say. Which isn't entirely true. There is one, one or three, who has my heart in her mouth, like a cat, only I haven't told her that, yet, because I can't decide between the one or the three, but they each play out in my imagination, so vividly, and it's so very tender and furious with each of them, and so filled with exasperating complications. But, because these scenes of such beauty and terror have only happened in my mind, I should not count them as real, because my therapist advises me not to, because I get into trouble that way.

"Oh," he says. "Then the one from this summer?"

"No, before that. The one before that," I say. "The second one before that, I mean. She was only half. Half."

He cries and I cry, because that's what we goddam do, and then he tells me that this isn't important. Because her other half was also interesting, so terribly interesting that half was, and he is right, and we are right, and we are full of coffee, and there is no more fear.

He then goes on to brag, endlessly endlessly, about his latest conquests, and they are so filled with desire it makes my heart choke, but there is nothing French about these conquests, and I think they shouldn't count, but I would never tell him that.

"Women keep us young," I say.

"Agreed," he says, "except that I am young, and you are kind of old."

It's all true, more true than I could ever admit, but I don't feel the least bit tired, but there has been so much coffee that I will not sleep this night. During the moment when he was distracted by a string of text messages, I had time to think about mortality, and lost love, and the way cats have of pretending to be something they are not. I also had time to think that these moments with Michel reminded me that we were involved in a complex performance of living, an experiment where memory and experience could interlock and form connections that made sense. We both knew that we were living in a strange time, and in a place that did not nurture its generations, and we understood that we had to nurture ourselves, and each other, and find the threads that might make sense, and keep us from taking ourselves too seriously.

By the time the third espressos came, we were ready to talk about art, while shadowy figures were running through the streets, looking for something they could call home. We are not as alone here as we think.

la parte baja de la espalda

2011-11-16T20:33:00.000-08:00

Just because there were too many banshees running through the neighborhood, because it was that time of year, and that kind of neighborhood, it had to begin next to a grave. The entire story had to start somewhere close to a grave, one that had been closed for a good many years, and one that had opened very recently. There also had to be dogs, wild dogs that live in the forest, and only a few will know why entirely, and the ones who guess will be half-right. There also had to be a series of three, three somethings, and because he was so afraid of not getting the ritual right, he made the rite by knocking three times on the ground. When, in fact, the three had already been knocked for him, in other ways entirely.

The first was the father, sick with sickness in the father parts, the parts that make any father feel part of something larger and deeper. The second was the brother, sick in the mind parts, the parts that make it easy not to mind when the inside is bleeding a little more than it should, because that always seems just right when the mind is just not right. The third, something less urgent and more selfish, was his own work, not the essential work but the rent-paying work, being examined as a living body for art students and medical students, selling his body in essence (but not the essence). He was joking with his friend the night before about how they never had the courage to sell their bodies on the streets, and he was making ends meet by selling it in rooms with better climate control than hotels. It was interesting how things change over time, and how things always stay like they were at the beginning of time, when we can learn how to slow the breath.

So that was the three, and none of the three was enough to drive him to hide his head by a grave on the night the story began. It would have to be something related to lost impossible love, and it would be even better if there was a revolution involved, and that was entirely possible, but at the root, in the roots that fill up everyone's grave over time, it was something else. The story began in the grave because he wanted another story to begin, and that seemed like the best place to begin, so that's how it began.

There are always more threes. Three treatments for three weeks in a row for cancer (not him, this is his father again), and three times that his brother tried to find him somewhere in the dark in the last three days, and three times that the dead called his name before he fell asleep, three times in one night. There are always more threes. We miss them like we think we miss the dead, so they have to keep recurring until we start paying attention.

So it begins then in present tense, in a tense series of threes, by an open grave, one that he opened, and when it opens he is covered in the dirt that covered up the body of a baby boy. So the present tense is preparing for a release that it can't possibly do on its own, it needs a lover, and the lover is the future, because that's how the present spins to look at the past, for the kinds of webs of connections that happen in series of threes, and the past is like the dirt of our own grave pushing us forward into the present. So it begins with a threesome, then, with the past and present and future all looking for each other in the dark, hoping they will be the center of attention for at least a little while (and they will each get a turn, this is something that I'm saying only as an assurance, because assurance is the best way to get through those impossibly long nights, when no one wants to admit they are too tired). And so it begins with him, who we have not described, and me, who has not been properly introduced.

I can't introduce myself the way that anyone would really like, because there is too much of these pieces of bone and dried blood on my hands to be accepted into just any room, so I have to keep those stains secret because I need access to all the rooms. I will say, though, that I was once him, but had to give that up in order to become something else, something that could see a little further. He, on the other hand, is easy to define, at least easy for me, though not always very readable to the ones he loves or the ones who love him (and they are always the same, even though he likes to pretend that they're not, in order to make his own life much deeper than he thinks it is; we all do that, though, at the end of the day we like to tell ourselves that this lover never really knew us, and the next one will likely be the same, even if they are the same person with the same basic skeletal and cellular structures; why we do this isn't entirely a mystery; it's related to the romance of these dark times, where nothing is resolved, and nothing can be counted on, especially love, or because of love). ((Love, on the other hand, is a complex word that needs a definition before we go any further. I feel that we've already reached the point in our relationship where we can talk about these kinds of things. Love is a foolish choice of words whenever we might be talking to a theorist who has no sense of humor. But I have never met a theorist who is worth their salt who does not have a sense of humor, and never ever without a capacity to be touched in the center of the part of the self that responds to words like love, even when they are not just whispered in the dark to make things go a little faster. Love is, for the purposes of who we might be to each other in this story, love is the only thing that's left after everything else has already happened. Love is what comes after jealousy or suspicion or greed, love is what comes after infatuation and obsession plays out long enough to reveal the beloved object as entirely without perfections, love is what comes after everything and everyone else has already come and no one wants to go to sleep.))

He, then, now that we know that I'm me and I can't tell you any more (because of the blood and bone on my hands), he is exactly like you, only a little heightened, because we all like to see ourselves represented in ways that are shades more exaggerated than we really are. The "really are" is of course entirely problematic for a number of reasons that any reasonable gender theorist can tell you, and there will be a bibliography offered later for further reading on that. But before that, this, this story begins by a grave, the one that held the bones of his brother, the one who died before he was born.

"I have seen too many wars from this side of the dirt, and every war reminds us of where we were when we walked on the surface. We are the dwarves that haunt your dreams and enter your room when the door is locked and everyone else has gone to sleep. Wars characterize every age, and every generation likes to think they are going through something extraordinary. In truth, you really are, because every generation is exceptional, because of the repetitions and not despite them. But I've had the chance to learn some secrets since I've been away, and I learned how to stroke the bones you will one day leave in place of the thing you know as you, and I know the sweet taste of the meat you leave behind, and I look forward to meeting you again one day. But for now, I can only know you as a ghost, and for me it is an unbearable distance. The distance between the living and the dead is unbearable for all of us, but it is no different than the distance between lovers while they are living together and trying to learn what it means to love each other. The sense of separation is the same, and always there, and it lies underneath everything that we do, on either side of this uneasy equation. I died before my time, and this means we have the same tragedy, because everything that you ever loved or will love has to die before its time, in order that you learn how to do this. Those that understand these rules make the best dancers. I don't have to tell you why."

(to continue)

relentless

2011-11-09T20:25:00.000-08:00

tucson dance of the dead
He never walks home, unless home is very far away, and then he walks as far as he can, to that point where the legs start to make sounds that can't be heard until three days later, when that particular search is resolved. There's nothing that has very much resolution lately, it all seems to be a part of a strong and straying stream of becoming. This particular becoming, however, is anything but light and full of flight, it's one where the bone is hitting the hard gravel of the endless road.
His body is prone in an office where people are learning how to be doctors, and there are hands on every secret place, and hands in every opening except for the mouth. Because the mouth is safe, he knows that he is safe. As they move through his flesh with nerves that are starting to come apart at the seams, he is trying not to be distracted, but it's impossible. A tall, black bird is in the corner of the office, disguising herself as a chaperone, because so many things are happening behind closed doors and there need to be some witnesses. She is not particularly sympathetic, because the same things have already happened to her three thousand years ago or more, and she knows that he's finding out that the repetitions are bearable, but the first time is always the one that rips you in half.
He's been ripped in half before, by other medical professionals, and the worst times were when the professionals were using older tools and older traditions, and these are the ones that left the best scars. This won't be a scar.
Earlier in the day he was in another office, where his father's body was prone before a team of professionals, and the oldest one was holding a jar that had a sticker on the side that said, "chemotherapy." The oldest one asks his father for his last four digits, and it all begins again. This is the middle of things, he was thinking, this is just the middle, and no one can say how long a middle will last. But this definitely has the makings of scars.
He is thinking about his father's body, and thinking about the bird, and wondering why this can't be more like a dream. Some people say he likes to live in metaphors, but here all he can see are patterns, and they have the makings of scars that might read like metaphors, but for now, he just wants something like theory. Something like a vocabulary that could talk about the male body and desire, and medicine and anatomy, the way things seem to bounce back and forth between the clinical and the erotic, with absolutely no smooth transitions.
This is the body and all its cellular workings, sometimes lilting and sometimes galloping and sometimes being galloped toward a place where the heart stops and everything starts to become something other. This is the body that wants, the body that hungers, with all of its flesh that responds to smell and touch and memory, being pulled into a space where gravity is something to be overturned in order to find something that's true in the presence of another human being. Perhaps the only thing that crosses back and forth is that same bird, here she's black and in candle light she is blue, and at sunrise she hides inside the mouths of sleeping lovers.
Every fissure is a contingency, a space that's waiting to write and be written upon. Some lovers insist on using their fingernails to write the last four digits, and some ask permission to make more lines that might demarcate a future incision, and everyone wants to be remembered because everyone wants to mark the body.
This is the end of the 20th century, and the 21st century has been insisting on its birth for a long time now, only it doesn't have very much to introduce itself, because so far it has been nothing more (and nothing less) than a series of quotations written on the bodies of the ones who live here. His warrior marks are buried under three months of hair, so these strangers can't see who he is, or where he's from, and none of them will think to try to guess his sacred name. The warrior marks of the father had been placed on the father's body, but that was so long ago now that they have reached the corners of his eyes. and everyone who has been there in that field can recognize him.
He only knows his father's secret smiles, the ones that have always put him above and apart from this world of the living. This father has lived on margins for more than half his life, and he keeps the secrets he learned here in those same eyes.
There is also a mark on that boy's back, where they placed steel in his spine to keep his lungs from collapsing, and it connects somewhere to these other lines, new technologies for the old rites of the pains that haunt the living.
His daughter remembers something, and reminds him with her remembering, about the two of them dancing together, on one afternoon when he was in his new space. The song was something Irish or something Gypsy, recorded on the latest technologies, and when they danced together it was something modern, but something very, very old, and something in the blood. Death and dying might be one of the rites we live through, and one that we have to walk our children through one day, but they're connected to the heart of a black bird, who calls the drum with her tongue and wakes up the oldest parts of the blood. These are rites for the living, dances of death and dances of rebirth, tying the eyes of the father to the smile of the lover, because they all signify the same thing.
If anyone can give birth to the 21st century, he thinks, it's that black bird. Because she understands how these things work, and every generation is blinded by its own technologies, hardly still enough to see that the typos on a smart phone work as charmingly as any old charm, connecting bodies to a chord that we are all born with in the back of our throats. Everyone sleeps, but very few have the patience or the stamina to wake up.

dont bother me while im still raining

2011-11-02T21:43:00.000-07:00

i'm still raining from europe and starting to rain all over latin america, from the edges to the centers of everyplace that knows itself as america, this place that we call home, where we speak too many languages that are not from here, and our tongues get colonized in a thousand directions, but our hearts stay young...i have a murmur from the last time i fell in love, and it flutters whenever it starts to wonder what the next movie will look like...because i love movies here, the ones from here are the ones that invade the borders of our dreams and reconfigure our alliances, and every film that's not about the father who learns how to stop working so much and love his kids is a movie about a revolution...this is the kind of thing that is familiar here, and we hear the stories about plazas and september 11s and wear the masks of english bandits, trying hard to stare into the sun so we don't have to make the connections about the peculiar repetitions we are living through...it all begins when the young people decide they need to eat and are suddenly aware that it's not necessarily in anyone's best interests to keep the people fed...and the old people are all starting to compliment this generation for realizing what's happening, and doing things about it...an old couple in a coffee shop are staring at me and my daughter, and i'm sure it's about liprings and punk boots, but i'm wrong. she admires us, and tells us that she was the music director at the high school across the street, and in '68 she created an anti-war play where the kids wore the uniforms their parents and grandparents wore in other wars...and she tells me she stays young by eating onion rings for breakfast and traveling with her partner...my father is not yet moving in my mind into the generation of old people, but he has the same sparks in his eyes when we talk about revolutions in the streets in the country that he loves so very much, and i always forget that he planted the seeds for falling in love with the possibility of a revolution here...and earlier that morning i was sitting in the veteran's hospital with him while they poured bacteria into his body to eat cancer...the old men in the hospital all smell like republicans, and i want to fight them because i'm irish and i want to argue for lost causes because i'm polish but my eyes can't fight eye contact, and i decide to use all the trappings of old world courtesy and say "have a good day, sir," and when they hear "sir," their eyes go watery every time every single one every time, as if no one shows them respect anymore...and my heart starts to murmur and i find myself wanting so many things when i'm in the presence of so many ghosts, ghosts about to cross over and ghosts who are lingering near their heads to bring them home, and i start to miss her more than anyone could ever know, more than anyone could ever have loved a woman while living in a mortal body...i don't know what it's for, and i don't know how it connects to learning how to heal, and i don't know what role this love plays in a revolution, but maybe all revolutions are about a longing for something that was too young and tender to live on its own...and my daughter is too old for those tragic childhood diseases, so she's safe tonight from my crazy melancholy, and the dogs don't understand as much as i'd like them to...the boy gets soup, he's afraid of choking lately, and i have to be careful and be there with my hands and my eyes, because his hands don't work as well as they once did, so i'm focusing on his mouth and my tired and scratched up hands, i tell him that last night i was a calavera, and we're all phantoms, and he wants more soup, and in my inability to focus on anything but a daydream (i'm meeting with the suicide girls over coffee in a room full of bean bags, they've been reading my blog and they have so many questions...and it's a musing) i am looking at my daughter's hands, hands that are starting to make drawings of mermaids and goddesses, and we're cursed with the family enchantments...bridget drugan, the gael who knew secrets in oak trees is always calling this time of year, it's time for the heart to murmur and time for me to listen...and these lost warriors, the fallen heroes of unsustainable myths, i want to sing something for them...so i find myself looking at the tough guy writers, shepards and hemingways and bolaños', bodies broken by alcohol, fighting a battle between beauty and darkness, and darkness always won...but i know how dark beauty can be, and i was taught by my mother that when she came that i could never say no to her, and i know something about the goddesses that haunt the genitals of warriors of all the gender wars, and the goddesses that learn their secrets through centuries of eating flesh, these spirits are cellular and in these days the ether is so very far away...real love is written in fire on the flesh and burns through to the bones and leaves us all a little less than we once were, so we know what it means to long, and why we have no choice but to go further into that beautiful darkness, until the darkness becomes light, until things like darkness and light no longer even matter, and we learn how to become as relentless as the rain.

and then it gets a little weirder...

2011-10-26T22:00:00.000-07:00

diwali lights make sharp the things that have grown dull in a dark season, relentless heat turning to relentless cool, and at the end of the day i have nothing left to fight, and no reason to fight. all the battles of the day are resolved with breath and a return to seeing. it's all so simple, but it's even simpler than that even. i'm wrong about everything, and i don't even know what this is, and i'm not ready to let it come to light, because i have to keep one step ahead of these things, or i might just fall into the river of time. what if we became like those rare things that know there is more to know, and let the seasons decide these things? it would be like giving in to a demanding lover, or falling in to the gravity that wants us to fall. in these spaces in between spaces, the top of the mountain kisses my head and the river loves me like no human ever could, knows me better than anyone in a body could ever know, and on those kinds of days, words stop making sense, and stop meaning to matter. but i have things hidden under my tongue, notes written on river water and kisses trapped in plastic water bottles. i can never remember a last kiss as much as i remember thinking about the next one. i can't close things properly, i leave them sealed shut in places where i know i open them in the middle of the night, and i always leave them right where i can find them when i start to panic. they shine like lights you can see from space, lights that never go out, and after all these lost things i hide in my closet, i think i know how to tell when a light goes out forever. i'm not trying to confuse you, i'm just trying to tell a story that i can use to help me remember this right, but language is a fracture, and my hands are aching, and neither hand nor tongue can capture the things that i know that i can't put into words. these are the best songs. my favorite is the one about the boy who tries to capture it all in a plastic bottle, but it keeps spilling out. when he finally gets it all inside, and secures the lid, he carries them to his bed, and while he sleeps the best parts come out, the ones he could never expect or complete or describe, and they fill his room with light. in the morning, there is a rainbow of colored lights coming from his tongue, and in the morning, he feels like he might actually be living in the world.

at night, sea, monsters and telegraphs

2011-10-23T21:51:00.000-07:00

I've been soaking in the dirt from under the surface of the earth for more than a season, and the only sounds that make sense are the music of the worms, and the rhythms of distant footsteps. They sound like tires on a grid from under a bridge, the place where I lost my sense of direction for the last time. And I've been rocked to sleep by the waves under my back for so many nights now that their sounds, the ones we always dream about, the sirens, are the only sounds that can wake me up. Human voices don't make sense when they've been playing in traffic for too long, and the only ones I can trust are the ones who have been buried like me. We're not alone then, and not apart, not from the rest of this other music, and not from each other, but we can't see each other in the dark, and it might take a radical act of faith to assume that you are really there.

I want radical actions tonight, in vestigial situations that remind me of my dozen uncertain homes, the ones that move away from me when I'm making saints close to the ocean, the ones that fall to pieces after disintegrating from the inside, and the childhood places that get transformed by cancers that are anything but metaphorical (and tonight, metaphor is the only thing that can rock me to sleep, no body will soothe me and no words can touch the spaces outside of the careful demarcations of where I have to be). These illnesses threw me far off course, and none of them were mine, and every time I woke up, I had to make up a new course, always different, always guided by some memory of fire, and they always guided me back to you. And I don't know who you are. And I don't know who I am. And this landscape is so much like a dream, and my heart beats like a dream, and my blood burns like a dream, and waking up is no longer possible, or even necessary.

These words that fly past my ears when I'm trying to hear the mermaid songs, I can't tell if they're happening now or if they happened before, beats of the drum to mark the space between then and now, and the thousand miles of sentences that sentenced us to life or death or maybe just love. And the stars play like telegraphs, until their colors are words, like the beats of a drum, and their revelations play out in double vision, where five cups become ten, and coins are divided, and even the sea monsters seem to have nothing good to say except to complain about not having enough money. No one has any more money these days, or else we would all be indoors. And all I want is to let my breath become fires that fly far above my head, so that you can see the signals that say that I remember you. And there were nights, not very long ago, where you recognized me, and it came as a shock every time.

And tonight, when I pass by the places that caught us, the whirlpools where faeries and morbid sorcerers were singing our names, I have to remember that the people that I have been between then and now add up to something I don't wish to define, and find myself incapable of divining. But I see things in between the shadows of the heat of the days, and I see things that tell me I'm waking up in the right place, and I see things that remember every breath, every kiss, and every cry. It's a constant craving, built from caves of desire still inhabited by bodies that want, and bodies that are terrified of any ultimate definitions. I always fall in love when I meet someone who doesn't know their own destiny, who has performed all the rites that allow us to see the future, and understand that theirs is one that cannot be found except by travel. When the night is still refusing to turn into day and my eyes can't be more tired, and the vision more doubled, I think of you. When I approach the part of the day where all the angry ghosts come out to play and I discover they don't possess me any more, I remember you. When I am too tired to go any further, but find myself moving faster to catch up with the version of myself who knows and understands things like longing, I become like you. And I don't know how to ask if you're ever coming home, because I have no home.

I keep falling in love with people who can live in tents on a sidewalk, and I keep creating imaginary kitchens in my mind. They're always decorated with temporary designs, and there's always the smell of garlic and hot pepper on your hands. I'm making you something from roots, from yam and potato and ginger, something to keep something in place, because it isn't true that we are rootless. Our roots are cut, and the memory of the cuts are still too contemporary for any of yesterday's theories to heal, and today's songs are too indiscreet (the things of the sea don't respect any rhythms that can speak only to the living). It could be another time of revolution, or it could be another time of dying, but there's an ecstasy hidden just beneath your bones, and a thousand revolutions to be won with tongues. They think we can be tamed like foxes, because they don't know how to recognize a horse when they see one.

from under the sea,
i am c

Horses

2011-10-22T22:17:00.001-07:00

She says she sees horses whenever her eyes go soft. No soft horse ever won a race without imagining it ahead of time. This is not the first dada revolution. Not the last, either. We need more trumpet players in our bedrooms, and jugglers in the hallways, and there are never enough sea cucumbers in the bath (for guests). The next lover to insult everyone's mother, and propose an alternative to capitalism gets a prize. It's this short text about horses. It's the only poem I could write you, on a night like this, when the daughters of the next revolution call, worried about the ghosts, interrupting all the shaman parties and electronic sound shows. We will live to fight and love each other another day.

toward a muse

2011-10-19T21:49:00.000-07:00

(Calypso missed)

It's been more than a year now since Odysseus left the island, and forgot about Calypso entirely. Except it wouldn't be wrong to say that the last statement is wrong, he didn't forget her (would you?). The next island he gets to, he is buried under the ground while a little goth girl takes care of him. Like Isis, she is left with the job of putting him back together, after he'd been taken apart (by himself, the self a taoist reflection that took the apparitions of sea monsters, mermaids, storms, and relentless waves). The girl wasn't entirely stuck, like Isis, in other patriarchal stories that make the goddess the one who is there to help him come together; in fact, even Isis had terrible problems of her own, and we don't have to spend a lot of time on the girl's problems, they are entirely her own, and have their own right to secrecy. Her first problem was not being a goddess herself, so there was no gift of immortality there to curse or bless her at the end of the day, but it's hard not to imagine that she was getting something out of the deal.

In all the wakes he'd been sleeping through, his head was soaked through with a strange gift of prophecy, and he learned how to see things in the bones of the dead, and developed a strong attraction for anything related to the sea. It wasn't because the sea reminded him of Calypso, but because Calypso reminded him of the sea. So he had things that could help the goth girl, and it had to be that way, because he was altogether terribly ungrateful to her for all the time she spent putting him together.

While Odysseus was sleeping in his temporary grave, he marked the nights he dreamed about Calypso, so that he could show them to her when he became immortal, because he wanted to tell her, "Look, these are all the nights that passed between then and now, and these marks are the ones that I spent thinking about you."

But it was never really about her, and perhaps never even really about him, but about the energy that had erupted on the earth's surface when their bodies came together, and this energy brought up the bones of the dead and the watery spirits of the oceans of the world. To the ones who are always already immortal, when these energies enact themselves in the human body, it is like watching jello trying to conduct electricity with neon lights, entirely beautiful, and it does not matter so much how the jello feels. For the jello that calls itself Odysseus, the feeling was simply uncomfortably haunting, waking up into something just so fucking right, and when the electricity was cut, there was a lack that took the spectral form of haunting. He missed her body, he missed her looks, he missed her hunger, and at the end of the day, he entirely missed the human being that these things were connected to. It's terribly sad to see him like this, when there is so much that he should be paying attention to, but probably all for the best that, up to now, he does not realize that he has had his body transformed into a very delicate instrument, one that knows intuitively how to be a vessel for electricity without destroying itself.

So when he wakes and draws images of her in the sand, it takes months and months before he forgets what she looks like, because the images have started to look like someone else. It's probably better that he doesn't know that the someone else will always be someone else, that Calypso was never attainable by him, and he was never attainable by her, because even lovers (or especially lovers) never attain each other, and only mark spaces where something else can enter.

His mouth marked like a fish that had been caught (by a mermaid, no less), he leaves the island and the goth girl has nothing more to say to him, and he's still too asleep in his mind to wonder why that might be. At some point, all the heroes have to learn how to be better houseguests, and this is not his time for that.

He goes back home. (Because "Odysseus must return!" -- Tadeusz Kantor)

Home is never like we expect it to be, everyone we knew has gotten older and more tired, and there are always more kids interested in vampires than before. He is surrounded, then, by bored grey people, and vampires, and nothing is in color for awhile. It's no one's fault but his, and maybe not even his, his eyes are older, and still haven't learned how to see in the mortal world. They're too full of visions of otherworlds, and futures that are clearer to him than the present, which seems so terribly murky, covered with the heat of the day and the illusions of the night. One of the last things Calypso said to him was about his vision, he tried to remember it differently, because it is much better if she said things like, "You and I, we will see this clearly one day," instead of, "I can see very far, because I am not old like you, I don't get old like you're doing right now."

She was almost unsentimental as a defense against falling in love, and he loves that about her, and loves so many things about her that he carries her double on his back. Everyone knows, then, about what's on Odysseus' mind, because it is on his back. He doesn't cut her double loose until he's found the right river, he tells everyone, but he is always looking for the right river, but can't find the one that would surely flow back to her (and if he did, he would be on it). It's another terrible moment, where we are all embarrassed for him, and wish he would learn to focus on the feet in front of him. The feet are getting terribly interesting, after all. After all, there's a revolution in the city he left, and the home he came back to is so much less settled than he expected.

But he won't ever really find her until he realizes he is not looking for her, and that would take a hundred consecutive leaps of faith, the kind of obstacle course for the soul that turns us into things that we are not, things we never thought we could actually be. That could, in fact, be the very thing that marks the kind of story that is simultaneously tragedy and comedy, where the main characters are changed utterly, and don't even realize it. The trip around the sun in human skin is one that can feel so painfully slow that we aren't able to see the points when things shift, and if we were able to experience the moments that are months, fully, without any fear or desire, then we would be entitled to enter into eternity with a light heart.

And he isn't able to see how the months with the goth girl trained him to carry a heavy heart and still live, entering into the eternity only occasionally, through the subtle fluctuations of a mouth locked in a kiss, or the view of the city from the top of a mountain, when everything else seems so closed. That is how he feels, after all, that the city is like a series of stores that have all been closed, and he can't enter any of the doorways as a guest any more.

If he were to wake up, which he will, he might start to see the enormous debt he owes to all the lifelines that crossed with his on his passages between the theres and the here. If he were to wake up, he would see his place inside a torrent, and learn to embrace all its ambiguities. If he were to wake up, he would see that the longing that haunts his sleep is not for a past, but for a future, one that he is walking in at this very moment, one whose chords are as complex as a tango, as ripe as a pomegranate, and as shy as a small white bird, like the one that is getting born inside his chest while he longs, while he longs, while he longs.

TC proposals

2011-10-19T20:17:00.000-07:00

For immediate release (Call for proposals in Spanish and English here):

¡Teatro Caliente! ANNUAL FESTIVAL OF TRANSCULTURAL, EXPERIMENTAL PERFORMANCE

NOW IN ITS NINTH YEAR...

¡Teatro Caliente! a three-day festival of transcultural, experimental performance, features local work by performers pushing the barriers of their forms (interdisciplinary, visual art, dance, music, performance), and reflecting and re-representing the cultural make-up of the southwest in general and Phoenix in particular. This brings local and international artists together to share ideas, with an eye toward opening the barriers and quality of experimental performance work, fostering creative relationships among local and regional performing artists and organizations who might not otherwise connect,

and creating spaces of artistic dialogue in multiple languages,styles, and points of view, bringing international awareness to the vibrant Phoenix arts scene.

En espanol y despues In English:

ESPANOL

El comité curador de Theater In My Basement estará aceptando proposiciones para el festival “Teatro Caliente” de 2012. Este año el festival sera realizado en Downtown Phoenix del 26 al 28 de Enero. Nosotros estamos en la busqueda de trabajos bastante experimentales, transculturales y transgenero los cuales pueden ser basados en cualquier tipo de estilo (incluyendo, pero sin limitarse a: Arte de Performance, Danza, Multi-Media (incluye presentaciones de PowerPoint), Solo Performance, Teatro, Música, y cualquier trabajo interdisciplinario que caiga afuera de las categorias de las corrientes principales, cualquiera que estas sean). Buscamos piezas de diferentes duraciones, pero entre 10 y 55 minutos es una buena pauta. Manteniendo la misión del festival, se le dara prioridiad a trabajos que representen las diferentes poblaciones de Phoenix en cualquier lengua. Entrada al festival sera basada en innovación, experimentación, y transculturalidad.

Para aplicar, por favor mandar lo siguiente:

1 página con la descripción del proyecto. (100-200 palabras)

1 página con la descripción del grupo o del individuo. (100 palabras)

Un link (su sitio del web, dropbox, o algo como asi) para una muestra en audio/video del trabajo propuesto (o si el trabajo es nuevo, una muestra de trabajos anteriores). En cualquier caso, haremos todo lo posible para mandar un miembro de nuestro comité

a ver el trabajo en persona.

El plazo para consideraciones de trabajos es hasta el 8 de Deciembre del 2011. Por favor mandar los proposiciones (o cualquier pregunta) por correo electronico a:

teatrocaliente@gmail.com

Gracias, cambio y fuego,

TIMB

ENGLISH

The curatorial committee of Theater In My Basement is accepting proposals for the 2012 ¡Teatro Caliente! festival. This year’s festival will be held in downtown Phoenix, January 26-28. Like usual, We are looking for highly experimental, transcultural (and transgender) work in all fields of performance (including, but not limited to: Performance Art, Dance, Multi-media, Solo Performance, Theater, Music and any Interdisciplinary work that falls outside of mainstream categories, whatever those might be). We’re looking for pieces of various lengths, but between 10 minutes and 55 minutes is a good

guideline. In keeping with the mission statement of the festival, work that represents the diverse populations of Phoenix, in any language, will be given priority. Entry into the festival is based on Innovation, Experimentation, and Transculturality.

To Apply, please send:

- 1-page description of the project

- 1-page description of the group or performer

- A link (to your website, dropbox, or something along those lines) to video/audio samples of the proposed work (or, if the work is brand new, samples of prior work). In any case, we will make every effort to send a member of the committee to see the

work in person. The deadline for consideration is December 8, 2011. Please e-mail proposals, and any inquiries, to:

teatrocaliente@gmail.com

Thanks for your interest.

This is not a test.

toward a muse manifesto

2011-10-17T21:55:00.000-07:00

This is especially special for those who are not so amused...oh, you will be, you certainly will be.

Part one:
Preface (the face before the face, the face before the fist of the manifesto)
((or possibly manifishto, mishto with the fish))
(((it's already too surrealistic, too dadaistic)))
but oh, we need dada now more than ever, dada, where did you go? and dada replies, kaboom kaboom jajaja boomboom baby i never left, i held u while u were walking on that beach, poking the dead fish with the stick, like all the little boys do when they're learning about life by studying death...

theorum #1: it is stupid to use one clear, well-constructed phrase when twenty-seven will serve much better.
(this is not a good theorum, because there is no proof, except for the blood of all the wars of the 21st century, lining up to make rooms to count the dead, but the rooms are not cleanly demarcated, because the wars were never clearly marked, because they were impossible to end)
I apologize that the manifesto took such a sudden and dramatic and even tragic turn, one filled with the melancholy of the times, that melancholy we all wish to throw off our backs like a sack filled with dead fish. We all know that feeling of inevitable gravity, and even I am having a little trouble staying awake, and I am more manic than most of my dear compatriots, the one who hold these things dear and so self-evident, but we sold the evidence, and it still didn't help us to get our houses back, but at least we had good sandwiches, on many different kinds of bread, four more kinds than our parents could ever have dreamed of, and if that's not cartesian success, than I don't know what is. (and three different kinds of pickled peppers).

Pre-fish (cont'd, from above, never really started): It is obvious that there are those who do seem to really believe that socialized medicine is the same thing as terrorism, and because of that very face of the fact, we have to assume that the entire world is turning completely stupid (which is impossible, or at least too hopeless to engage with), or else language has lost its sense and meaning.
I do realize that this lacanian lack is not so absolutely modern to make any waves, but we should only note that at some point language was being used as a tool, then it became a virus, and now the signs and signifiers are lost to something altogether other (and not the good kind, not the kind that makes for the poetic erotics that makes the world spin on the woman's hips) ((why does it have to be a woman? oh...it's a song, look it up, it's fun and bouncy))...the world has lost its voice, and the only acceptable form of communication from this point forward is the art of the moan...not a lost art, at all, but not very loud until recently, but recently...

Part One: La Verdadera Parte Por Fin:

But first, a personal anecdote:
I was certainly pre-occupied. There were these golden threads left on the sage bushes on the side of the freeways of the world that came from the silk underwear of so many lost loves, and I was busy making plans with Oshun to enchant and bring these threads back to their owners, but Oshun is always slight of hand, and my Oshun's path is the one without hands, so who knows what the hell she is up to, she is the goddess of Love, and because she is Love, she is crazy. And I was crazy, wondering why I couldn't leave this city, losing so many things that I didn't need, the naive part of my heart, the end of my thumb, a house somewhere in there, and other gracious spaces where my friends let me hide for awhile...and I was wondering about my daughter, how she would get by, how she would grow up in this world of gender situations that are always under re-construction, in a place particularly unhospitable to any other others (the proof was in the blood on the chins, arms, and legs of lovers who were only looking for a place to rest, like any of us, or rather, like me) ((since the proof was sold to buy oranges, I had to replace whatever anger was there with forgiveness, but that's another story that makes so much less sense than this entirely personal and revealing anecdote))...the meat, then, in this vegetarian story is the moment that I saw the image of the man in the Vendetta mask (how do I know it was a man? I don't, really, but he sounded like a man when he shouted at me, but I know full well that men are not the owners of the shout, this goes back to the moan, the shout is the cousin of the moan, and we all can get along in this noisy house)...I saw this mask and realized that I was pre-occupied, but woke up inside of a very sexy kind of revolution.
This takes us to:

Part Seven (por fin)...
acabamos de llegar a nuestra tercera punto de vista...no es simplemente k todos somos marcos, por k siempre esta asi, pero mas, y masa, por cada revolucion sin masa, no hay corazones de lata, and if we admitted that this is about corn, or bread, or cornbread, then it would be easier to argue, but I am suddenly over 40, and this is disconcerting, because when I turn blue in the face, it means I have to exfoliate, and that has not happened yet, and that might be the real tragedy of our time, that time moves forward, and we get older all the time, unless we learn how to breathe...breath connects to the drumbeat, the originary boom boom in illus tempore, eternally returning to love, it always comes back to that...and arguing might be useful, but it requires so much discourse, and I don't even believe myself when it gets into that, and discourse is blue, and it wrinkles, and this is about aging backwards.
(please allow me a slight tangent here: I age backwards, like Merlin, it's true, but it's a secret, and that's why I would never say it in public, and write it in a blog, which this is not)...in the course of our recent revolutions, the 60s counterculture, and the 80s movements for fighting hunger and stopping the United Fruit company from uniting what they wanted to unite, the best tool of the oppressor was found in discourse, to ask the participants to name their cause, their griefs, and their goals, and while we thought this was a good idea, they were finding ways of breaking us into groups, separating us each according to hisher own goals, and the game was suddenly not a game, but lost all the same.

So (suddenly this is so personal) I am walking toward the protest, with my daughter, carrying a sign that says, "This is my favorite revolution so far :D" and we pass by two women in a truck who are selling clothes and american flags, and they start shouting at us, "What are you protesting, what are you protesting, HUH?" and we don't answer, because this might be the first tactic, before the seventh:
A clear cut rule of non-engagement.
And now the seventh:
Stay vague.
This last is the advice of my father (anti-oedipus to his bones even though he may not know it yet), who, after having been through a military regime that punished him for his intelligence, and unwillingness to sell it to the highest bidder, civil rights marches and a life of watching the world come unspun like a rubber band on a freshly-opened baseball, has learned some things about how this might work.
Dad, you are Dada, and they never gave you credit. Until now, that is.

There is nothing naive about a generation that grew up watching eyes traded for eyes, and all the dead fish of the world lie on the beach, so far from the sea, we all just wanted to get to the beach for the afternoon, in this revolution, what we want is to go to the beach. Hell yes.
There is nothing naive about a generation who sees that there is a terrible dividing line, the executioners and those who refuse that, born in a very real sense on the last breath of Troy Davis. Those who feel responsible for his death, and those who do not. A terrible dividing line, and it should give us a headache, but we can't sleep, and we shouldn't sleep any more. We'll trade catnaps and keep the world from burning, Vendetta masks slung on our backs, and wondering how the pot heads feel when the cows walk by.

The Real Point (El Ombligo del Angel de la Historia):
This is the time of the year when the dead start to walk the earth, confusing the twilight with the sunrise, and entering into all the backrooms when no one is looking. They look a little bit like lost Goddesses and Gods, and they might as well be, and we might as well start lighting the halloween candles and praying to them, because the dead know things, and when our prayers take forms like song, we are enchanted, so very enchanted, perdido en el canto, and the boomboom of a revolution in progress might start to match meter with the rhythm of the beating of the hearts of the dead, and that's a dance of death. Enough to make the world spin on its axis again, enough to wake the living, enough to wake up a muse, and from where I sit, incense cigar burning and lightning in my missing thumbtip, it looks very clear to me here that she clearly wants to play.
Preoccupation becomes occupation, and the post is written on the soles of the living, dancing with the dead.

tone pome for a lost wolf

2011-10-12T22:35:00.000-07:00

i wanted to tell you about the time, when i was only sixteen and the impossible loves in the world were already closing in, when i was bombarded with too much camus and starting to wonder about nihilism, when i was only sixteen and the world was not as young as they told me it would be, when i was wide awake in the middle of a night with a full moon that came in through the window, silver water on my head and on my bed. i opened the white sheet and when it reflected silver back to the moon, i knew this was going to be much more than i expected, and i went through the next day wondering how and who i could tell about all the secrets i was finding there, and i never wanted to stop feeling like that. it went sleepy on me for a while, and then it didn't come back, and i thought it was gone, and that's why every time i fell in love with you i didn't want to be far, because when i was far i was worried that i would start crying, and i don't like to cry, because it's dangerous on a motorcycle. but it came back when i least expected it, when it was 120 degrees and everything seemed lost, and everyone around me told me and reflected this loss, and i wanted to believe them, but there was this silver light that was shining through everything. and every time i made words work it started to make the engines in my blood start to turn, and the animal that i was couldn't compare to the animals that i learned how to become. everything in this has been learning, learning the things i thought i already knew, but never knew if they would work in the world, too old by now to pretend to be young. this last moon was strange, and brought things to light that still look terribly cloudy, and i'm not sure of any of it, but i know that these things do work in the world, and sometimes the old world is more worthy of love than the young one, and sometimes i can see that they are exactly the same, but i didn't know that until i started walking in it, walking a little slower, trying to understand what it might be like to walk with love, until my understanding became something far from relevant, because this is love, and that's all it is, and that's all it will ever be, and it's silver and it shines and it reminds me of who i think you might turn out to be, when all the false lovers are gone, and all the masks are worn thin, and all the tricks in your backyard pots are put to rest so that the next thing can begin. i'm putting my spells on hold, and holding things under my tongue until they dissolve like rain, and putting to rest all those voices that tell me this moment is not enough, because they are liars, and rain pours through everything that we are, like the hundred moons through the window, that count the months and the sorrows of the dead, and they say that everything that we are is more than we had imagined, elements and ancestors guide our blood, and the road to them is the same one beneath our feet.

reflections of a reflex

2011-10-08T22:35:00.000-07:00

my house is clean and i've cleared out the cupboards from the dust of the months between a there and a here, those points not being entirely fixed, or even fixated enough to make for an obsessive love story about someone missing someone, vice versa or not. it's unlikely that the points in between will make any kind of lovely patterns, chaos snowmen that speak of an intelligent plan, but i'm still waking up knowing that my arteries end on the banks of a river, and underneath there are plans being made to make my heart know something it didn't know yesterday. i didn't clear out all the epazote that spilled, but i don't think i should, because i want that to collect something, i want it to attract something, but already i'm giving away too much.

my favorite movies are about death, and they never end sad enough, not desolate enough, the now what's of the silver screen seem like empty gestures, even if they do happen in real life. there have been too many brushes this year, and enough losses to constitute a real sense of loss, and this is the radio music of a year that doesn't seem to want to try to change its station. more death and more loss are on the way, and more birth and more things that are found, suddenly, under a silver moon when the promises we make to our spirits are held in a place of accountability, a packet that is buried under a virtual tree, but maybe you know me by now, and the things that are virtual here are also very literal, and there are things that i buried here.

there are silver flakes in the bottom of my mouth, residue from speaking in tongues in public, and remnants of the chemical flashing thru his blood to keep him in the world at least a little longer. those medical spells are working, for at least a little longer, and i've been too tired to cast any love spells, and i don't really have time in the morning for breakfast. but if that was about to change, i would hold this silver, the flakes that taste like blood at the end of the day, and start to speak of things that i know are coming, and things that i know have gone. and i would tell you a million stories about the woman that i loved, the copper witch who blew thru me like a wild horse, because you might remind me of her, and because she once reminded me of someone else that i lost, and because i move like a wild horse when i am sensing that i might be called upon to grieve soon enough. and i would tell you a million stories about eyes that are kind, and reveal too much softness, the kind of softness that has to be covered up with organization, intention, and escape. and i would hear a million songs that come rising from under your silver tongue, on a night when there isn't enough time to say the things we need to say immediately.

i changed some things when i was moving clouds of dust from one end to another, and praying that copal smoke would take away the things that are no longer necessary, and bring back the things i left behind because i was in too much of a hurry to say goodbye. my mother doesn't own the marrow, but she knows it better than anyone, and she knows the promises that i made to the river. i don't forget and can't forget the promises that i made to the river, and as much as i would love to grieve and long and hide in a corner, i find myself making things with my fingers, at the time of day when the day is barely hanging on, in that space between worlds where matter and spirit start to change places, and it might be a confession if i say that i can't always tell the difference any more, and it might be a confession to say that i find myself making spells, even though i'm pretending to be falling asleep, even though i'm pretending this isn't everywhere, even though i'm pretending that i won't let myself fall.

kinmaya

2011-09-30T21:55:00.000-07:00

reflections of an art model (1)

this might be a new series.
(we'll have to see)
we have to see the sea, it's out my window, they're falling in the streets, they're bleeding in the streets, and i have cow blood on my heart and on my groin, the mornings are cool and lovely and perfect, and the birds that turned into bats are turning back to birds again, and i am seeing white feathers everywhere.

they say, in a kinmaya way, that i am un lazador de mundos (with white tones) ((baba fururu, u pwn me)) (xo x 8 plus +o in the 4 movements of the sun)

i just want to sleep. i am staring at a fox wrapped in bubble wrap, this isn't the first fox today, there's something about these foxes that will keep me up, but not yet. i am staring at the fox until it turns into a gun and this is part of the counter-revolution on wall street, where people trade guns in bubble wrap, but eventually the bubble wrap becomes the gun, an act of sympathetic capitalist magic where the container becomes the thing itself. but it's fake, and we've all been cheated, i kick at the walls with my punk motorcycle boots and ask simply that we wake up after i nap, but i am already napping, being drawn in charcoal and pencil and already napping, and the french girls are trying to kill the boys with their stares but no one is dying, it's frustrating, it's not the french girls' fault, it never is, and my daughter tells me to stop interrupting because she has something important to tell me about how her friend was talking just as fast as she was.

this is the week of fast-talking children, making something out of all of this.

but i am already dreaming, i am already so far asleep, and the smell of the blood is starting to turn on, and someone tells me something about someone moving away and she's living somewhere with someone and honestly, i don't want to know, i really don't want to know any more about that. i am dreaming, but it's obvious that i am half-awake, but these objects in my hands are turning long again, and this is not my dream, i am not alone, suddenly, at the fringes of a hot summer about to turn mystic, i am not alone, and this could be the best news i have heard all day. love is shades of blue and chrome brown eyes that i won't forget as long as she's gone, and it comes haunting in shades of blue against sheets of rain, there is a scene there, inside the sheets there is a scene, and i can't quite make out the figures but i think one of them is me and one of them is not.

and before i can go through the rain, there are teenage boys asking for things, and there are sad girls wishing the noise would just stop, and there are curious boys and girls eating ice cream somewhere on the fringes of the world. everyone wants to get past the sheets of rain to where the magic is starting to move things, but we have to wait, because we have sheets to fold and other people's dreams to dream, and there are foxes gathering at the edges of this forest, this african forest that is always so strangely inflected with slavic teeth, and my ancestors are moving in the blood in my jaw, they keep telling me to look at the nine of cups, and when i finally talk in my sleep loud enough to let them know that i am listening to the nine of cups, something starts to catch fire, and this is going to be another long night, one that could last nine months if we're lucky.

twitch notes/faux(r)eal

2011-09-27T23:21:00.000-07:00

Twitch is a project that came from various contradictory impulses, the same kinds of conditions that cause us to twitch in our corporeal forms. First, there is the impulse to connect selected histories, with the intention of looking for common threads that might tell a story that makes sense. Next, there is the impulse to investigate those particular feelings that scatter in the air like angry birds when love starts to go in impossible and untenable directions. And last, there is the impulse to find a suitable form through which we might be able to enter into the moment directly. To throw off the loose strands of histories that no longer sing in pretty tones and enter into a historical moment voluntarily.

It's impossible not to talk about love when thinking of this work, then, and perhaps that's how it should be. Looking at the more ridiculous things that all lovers do, get jealous, act out, or withdraw, and then finding the core of these reactions through direct and indirect relationships with the material of relationships. We found, through the course of developing this work, that most of us tend toward certain hyper states of consciousness when the thrill is no longer as thrilling as we'd once hoped. We also tend to try desperately to make up versions of ourselves, new identities, that can open spaces for new directions of thought, hoping the heart might follow.

When the heart is stuck between two places, there is a twitch. When impossible histories of gender expectations meet with the possibility of writing new gender situations, there is also a twitch. This piece takes place in that in-between state, before consciousness decides to follow the directions the body has already chosen.

The images on the screen are rooted in Marie's pre-real place, where dreams are waiting to form, making perfect reflections of moments that play themselves over until they become like the best sad songs. The scenes are two versions of Marie with two versions of impossible and ridiculous loves. The live performance actions are where the heart of the myth is enacted, Little Red Riding Hood embracing and becoming her own wolf. It's not meant to be a clear narrative, otherwise we would wear our hearts on our sleeves, rather than strapping them to our chests for a peculiarly vulnerable offering, with hopes of a transformation that will lead us into sustained movements in time.

hybrid installation rhizomatic performance work

2011-09-27T12:26:00.000-07:00

this is the seminal work, this is the ovarian work, this is the work that crosses all the borders and barriers, this is the only thing worth seeing at the end of the 20th century, and it is already too late. because the 20th century ended a few years ago or more, and we're still doing the same things. no one will know this is a repetition, without a revision, this is hiphop from the days before garage band, and it sounds much worse than we think it does.

begin with a white room, a latin man is sitting on a white chair, with a white piece of cloth over his head. a caucasarian man is standing behind him, pouring three different colors of syrup over the same head, lime, vanilla, and cherry. in a bold move that represents the evils of the northamerican empire, the lime is replaced with blueberry, and history is erased and eaten, like a cloth on the head (note to self: do not eat heads).

next section: oh my god this gets just so much worse and there is much more blood now than in the first part, because ohoho, the past is prologue...he is lying face down on the floor, on a pile of various chicken organs. there is a lot of visceral response expected from the part of the audience, and some disturbingly unexpected colors from the organs mixing, only no one can see it because he is lying on it and so the performance fails.

more

cgs/y too far to rest

2011-09-23T22:25:00.000-07:00

This is a turn, one that came on unsuspected. Everything worth following comes unexpectedly, Alice didn't expect the rabbit, and didn't expect that he was part of the Spanish Inquisition. With whatever drops or ounces of Spanish blood in my veins, I'm mustering up the courage to stop pushing, to smoke a lovely cigar in a night that is a little cooler than the last one.

There was a moment, just a short one, on a night when I couldn't get away from the heat from the cement or the anger that was playing darts in my own head, one of those nights where all the lovers seem just stupid, but the body is still too connected to the pulse of the last time in a bed with hotel sheets to be out of love, or out of reach of its peculiar spells. I'm sitting in front of a room full of people who are trying to draw my head, and it was draped like a pirate if I remember this right, and it was the worst night of my porous memory because they could see through the pores in my head and see traces of her, like a palimpsest of her face over my face. I couldn't leave it like that, as much as it seemed romantic and true at the time, because my head is my own head, and no one can see in to tell me about the things that are there, not when they are that obvious, because obvious statements make me bored.

I remembered what it was like being sixteen years old, when these things didn't matter, because there was always something else around the corner, and it was easy because it was all acting.

And I spent the next twenty or so years trying to take apart that very thing, the impulse to represent something in an accurate reflection, the impulse to reflect something in an accurate representation. Because art could do more than that, and the art that I loved the most was capable of much, much more.

And I spent hours in spaces with other people who felt the same way I did, but didn't know exactly how to get there, and we fed each other with an energy and a presence that suggested that this was not only not real, but that there was no real to reflect, and the idea of reflection was an insult to history, that re-creating any event with an accurate portrayal of its reality was condescending to reality. And we found that there were other realities that could be represented, and that by exploring these and making plans to present these in a public way would give the spectator just enough of a glimpse into themselves that they would have a hint at the real that lay just out of reach. Our symbolic worlds were ways of speaking of the real without trying to touch it directly, because that always struck me as a poor reflection, or a roadmap to a kind of madness that says we can know what there is to know.

Dada became a goddess or a god, before I knew that there was a Dada I would meet someday, after I'd been initiated into the forest and had gone to the river.

In another moment, I'm in a room full of actors who are trying to portray someone who's just received news that a family member had cancer. The idea was to create a standardized performance so that we could present the same character with the same emotions every time. Somewhere between a mirror exercise and an improv, I found out that I could enter into this kind of representation, even though it was raw and absolutely present, no sense memory required, and it didn't insult the people or the events that I was going through.

And my blood was running in my veins, and I felt sixteen years old, and angrier than I had ever been in my life. This was an uncomfortable revelation, because all the things that I'd spent so much time rejecting seemed to still have a place, and that their place was still very useful in the things that I was trying to do.

And I learned that my stories that are told in the dark are not stories I am telling myself out of an incomprehensible sense of loneliness or loss, but from a loneliness and loss that made me angry because we all share these stories. Or we have the capacity to relate to them in a significant way, and that some assumptions I had made were very wrong.

I rejected the western forms because I imagined that not everyone in the world shares the same capacity to understanding reality through these methods of reflection, that there are still people in the world who see a horse with only two dimensions, and that there are places where the goddesses and gods are so loud and clear that they infect everything, and it's impossible to create a world that does not include everything. So I included everything, knowing I was leaving some things out, and also knowing that there was no method for this at all, and the old method would not work at all.

After spending three years or more living with African goddesses and gods in my head in my house, I can still talk to someone about being afraid of losing my father, and they can still seem to know what that might be like.

It's not that important then to recreate everything, to throw out all of the things of cultures I don't naturally respect, because I am learning that there is freedom in pretending that we understand each other, even though I am uncomfortable when this is sometimes shown to be true. I am not tired. This is not about throwing something away because it is too exhausting, but it is about taking the things that worked, and picking up the threads of the ones who came before us, like they were fleece left on the bushes for me to find, at this particular moment, making things turn gold when I had given up hope that this particular journey would be something other than darkness.

Like a lover who is possessed by the soul of someone you lost and need desperately, these traces are threads that point to something inexplicably real, and simple, and easier to carry. These things might be this and not this, this lover might actually be her and not her, and it will all probably change at some point in the near future, but I can pretend for now, and this might be better than wondering how to make worlds out of shadows that have never been real. Because we do touch source, I've been there, and I can look in your eyes, or the memory of your eyes, and I can see that you have been there too.

cgs/y por que nosotros somos ustedes

2011-09-21T22:40:00.000-07:00

this is not the worst thing that could have happened after a few days with a little food, and a little sleep, and a lot of coffee. riding madly thru the streets of phoenix to get a little girl home after her bedtime, bouncing between cars because i am faster than sound when my head is cool, white lightning in my head, and i am not confused. this is different than yesterday.

a short man in a hat gives me hope for the place i live, and troy davis leaving the world gives me doubt and too much sadness for that same world. but not so much the city, which is also different than yesterday. tonight i want to sweat on september nights in phoenix, i want to sweat next to the steroid drunks who bumped my little girl (they didn't know, they didn't understand, we were there with fucking helmets, this is not supposed to be a war, but we are clearly in a war, class and race and gender warfare, and everyone i love has something at stake). i want to be sweating in phoenix right now, loving and working and making art with these people. there's hope here, and some of the ones who have given up hope are doing very interesting things with their time.

but listen, i am terribly choked up tonight, and it's hard to see as straight as i would like. and i keep getting reminded that my eyes are so much worse than they were at the beginning of the year...i have the eyes of the father (and i don't mean dad)...but that dad, the biological one, is where i start to stammer and can't speak as well as i think i should. these things come back, and while there are things that can be done, the same lightning that flashes through my tongue flashes through the surgical steel and i hope it can surge through his body without taking it off the surface of the waking world. i am too tired to want to think about the things that he gave me when i was the child on the couch when he was trying to take away the pain on so many sleepless nights. children are sleepless in my family, and when we are adults, our hearts are anxious, and they twitch and murmur, and it always makes me think about lost love.

so tonight i have a stammering stuttering song that can't quite make it to my lips, like the bird in my throat is too fluttery to make a clear sound, so it just sounds like this.

bells come to wake me up, nothing better than waking up to a bell that comes, and the sweetest bell in the world is a bell, is still a bell, and all these miles have done nothing to erase that cool silver lightning love that flowed and flowered in my veins when i was captured into knowing you.

tonight i can see that there are more mountains and more rain, and more stories to sing about the things that happen on the floor of the desert and on the stairwell at the lips of the sea, and it doesn't matter how much i put my anxious heart on my altars and ask it to stop singing about you, it doesn't stop singing. and it shouldn't make me choke as much as it does when the cards tell me clearly that you're still there in the center, that you never did leave the home that i built for you there, and there's a fire that still burns.

and it burns my veins, and it burns my skin, and it burns my eyes until everything small becomes blurry, and the larger details are all that i can really focus on. i am all forest and no trees, but i do know that when i enter into new forests, i do get lost there, and i like being lost, because my heart knows where to go.

this is a song about lost love, about losing something i can't ever really lose, and finding things, small traces of things that i want to know. let the fire in my veins guide me, then, since no external gods will show me how to leave with any kind of grace, or hyper-phallogocentric finality, let the things that burn in me take me forward and move me through the world like a machine that knows the channels of these concrete rivers that line the floor of my sweat-soaked home. this is where european and latin and native bloods have to either fight or mix, and on some nights, a bit of both is how we learn to invent a fiercely local tango, one that dances around the home in our heart. the endless longing is not the conquistador, and not the inappropriate appropriation, the longing is not the colonist, and when i surrender, i am not colonized, i am born here, this is the night where i am born here, on the edges of this equinox, with fallen victims and falling fathers and mothers whose hearts are relentless and exhausted. i'm making things, and i'm not letting you become the muse this time, but i'll let the muses lead me forward, because they infected me through the veins every time i fell in love. i'm not looking for your twin or your distant cousin, because your incarnation is the first of its kind, and keeping my house in order will keep things warm, prepared for another night of sweating deep in the desert, my throat intact, and my blood running like a river, taking aim like an archer, for the moment when i can speak without stammering, and without regretting a single thing we never said.

muses

2011-09-14T21:52:00.000-07:00

this is more important than forgetting to expect the things i thought i was waiting to expect.
the table below is from wikipedia, of course, where the Greeks always posted thoughtful blogs about their favorite goddesses. i would never stoop to it. there are too many wolves at the door, too many howls against the moon getting small again. that's the last chance we ever had to make a wish, and it will never come around again until the next one, and then there won't be any chances after that until the next one. the howling makes me nervous, but if i tell you here that i can hear it, maybe just maybe you will stop? or maybe just maybe it's me. there's nothing more nervous than casting a spell that you just know is going to work. watch for signs of light outside your window, we're woken up, it's not a dream, and it's not just the wind and the rain this time.
idea for this next work, making connections between these and the local versions in the americas...so far we can syncretize:
calliope-olokun (our story is an epic story, only she knows all of the details)
clio-yewa (history as story of humans, she holds all the bodies and knows all the stories on the body)
erato-oshun (easy match)
euterpe-oya (knows the songs of the dead because she hears them as they enter the cemetery)
melpomene-obba (no one knows tragedy better, longing for an impossible lover is the greatest tragedy)
polyhymnia-yemaya (songs of the tongues of the living on the water of the world)
terpischore-yemu (the first dance, the one that started it all)
thalia-nana buruku (comedy is born of tragedy; yemu gave birth to them all but she nurtured them all)
urania-ochanla (marked and marking the sky)

the heart of this is to start something larger than before, something deeper than before, more baffling and lyrical and even accessible than before...putting identity at the mercy of these muses for 9 months, spending one month on each to make a short film/performance...some will have more media than others, some will be bare of any media at all, some will be a new song or series of songs, and some will have to be invented as we go along. i think i need to ask a lot of people to help on this one, it's going to be a long work...

and at the end of this day, my heart still goes out to the ones who have to suffer pains that they did not expect, hoping that the time spent on their particular roads will give them endurance and inspiration to keep going, because something good is coming of all of this, tonight i am sure, because it happened to me that way.
ache.

Emblems of the Muses

Muse	Domain	Emblem
Calliope	Epic poetry	Writing tablet
Clio	History	Scrolls
Erato	Love poetry	Cithara (an ancient Greek musical instrument in the lyre family)
Euterpe	Song and Elegiac poetry	Aulos (an ancient Greek musical instrument like a flute)
Melpomene	Tragedy	Tragic mask
Polyhymnia	Hymns	Veil
Terpsichore	Dance	Lyre
Thalia	Comedy	Comic mask
Urania	Astronomy	Globe and compass

Cgs/the politics of despair

2011-09-12T15:28:00.001-07:00

Every situation in the v.a. is complicated, and everything refers back to an originary idea of what it means to be a soldier (sometimes a warrior), and every originary is a cipher or an asterisk that leads to something else. Not enough footnotes in the world to unpack these identities, some are still carrying proof of themselves in vinyl covered folders. We all want to get confirmation that we are, that we really are, but we also suspect that every situation is temporary.

She asks him, "Why are you here?" (Always a good question)
He tells her, "Cancer came back." (Never a good answer)
It's a peculiar thing to be floating like this. Shards of black glass that the Coyote pulled from my heart before she went off to howl, they got lost outside my doorframe, and should have made things hurt less by the morning. But you don't know our mother does when you are not around. Since you left she has taught me so many things, and one in the morning is her favorite time to teach. I rolled over too quickly, she was dragging me to get out of bed and go outside to listen to her. Black shards flying out of the edges of the moon, they look silver when the ocean is under my tongue. This is going to be a long war.

It's more peculiar to watch how things grow when you stop fighting. I change my sobriety date to St Patrick's day last year. 17s are important but I don't know what they want yet, like I need another place to feel the sting of the edges of the blade. I don't know what any of this is for. I see you disappearing when you leave, I say it's not magic, you never said you were coming back. But it becomes up to me to seal the doors and windows to keep you out, because when I open my tongue to your salt water, I grow haunted and so very grey.

I don't know what any of this is for. You're coming back, but another mask and another name and I won't remember it's you until your hair falls over me somewhere where it is already one in the morning. I don't know what this is for. But I love the sea. It's where my father came from, and where we all go.

cgs/& why i never drank over you

2011-09-07T22:03:00.000-07:00

This thing is coming to light, this thing is coming to pass, hiding in the cupboards, making furtive moves behind a chair that I still don't have, moving through the stolen milk crates and the beds that make up the furniture (and a lost bed that got taken away in the night when no one was looking), crawling across the floor and disguising itself like a rubber ball that contains all the colors of the rainbow. But it won't reveal itself yet, it's a chapter of a story that hasn't started yet, and I'm not in any hurry to open the book.

There was this exchange. The daughter is doing math projects, and the father is doing yoga on the floor. They're both on the floor, really, on the floor with the dog who is unable to contain just how happy she is that this is all happening on her floor. The daughter says, "I am going to put glitter on your stomach, is that all right?" The father says, "Yes, of course." She says, "It's body glitter, so it will probably stick for awhile."

It's a good thing, a very good thing. He forgot to cover himself with chalk after reading cards for a stranger that afternoon, and there were some lingering things that needed to be neutralized, and body glitter is some of the best voodoo on the market, but hard to do this ritual exactly. Tonight, this is done exactly the right way, and even the ancestors are pounding their fists on the floor at the way these things tend to arrange themselves.

His stomach is sinking lately, really, upset at itself for worrying about things as mundane as money. Spending money lately on frivolous things, like trips to old west towns, fried things in restaurants where the waitresses all have brown eyes, and keychains for remembering the places she's been. It's important to remember, he thinks, but even more important to build a list of places, and to keep going.

This is a family disease, old Gypsy spirits in the bloodline, a constant restlessness to seek and to wander to feed the seeking. "And outside in the cold distance, a wildcat did growl..." It was very clear that there were things in all these moments that were suddenly terribly important.

Not the least of these came when, surrounded by hippies disguised as cowboys, or the other way around, he was struck by how this place was fed by ideas of masculinity and femininity that no one in their right mind could possibly live up to, and these days, could want to live up to. He was thinking about her again, not the daughter, another her, a too young for him her, and a string of old friends who grew up on border towns, but on the wrong side. On this side, they sell everything like crazy, but all the coolness is removed, and there is only a cynical celebration of muscle and glands, the kind that wear themselves on the bars of motorcycles so that there's no question about anyone's intentions. On the other side, there are other things worth paying attention to, not least of which is that there is better music over there.

Over there is so far away, though, because they forgot their passports, and are stuck in a place where the only decent thing to do is to honor the dead. During a short visit to the cemetery, she tells the father that she wants to be a saloon girl, half zombie, half living, and all history. This is a history that every generation wants to recover, but no one really knows how, because the courage has been burned off all the residents, or at least as far as he can see. He wants to tell her about real Cowboys and real Coyotes, ones she knows, but she has a look in her eye when she talks about these things that makes him stop. Maybe she can figure out the trick to this particular lock, his generation fucked it all up. This generation might have better ideas, but right now they all seem too wounded. Maybe patriarchy does ravage us all, or maybe it's these old ghosts wanting to set the record straight, or maybe it's the same thing. Better to pay attention only to those ghosts who want to live through acts of fearlessness, the ones who know that at that terrible dividing line between life and death, gender as we know it ceases to matter. But it's also likely that in times of crisis, it's all that most of us are aware of, so we try to take it with us like a shield, and we crash into things that make us entirely different. Usually entirely different means much stupider, because we don't know how to let go of the things we no longer require.

Sorely disappointed there were no Gypsy fortune tellers in any direction, he knew that he had become one somewhere along the line.

This is what the cards said.

Whatever plans had been underway, with cups and chariots and lovers and fools, everything had been interrupted by swords. It seems so far away, but it could have happened yesterday, because it probably did. There would be more illness all around, and death all around, and the old lovers were declining any entrance, but some offered blessings to look further down the road, and some were holding on behind curtains that he wouldn't recognize as familiar. He didn't want to believe any of it, because there was an urge to build something beautiful out of all this heat, there were gardens that hadn't come yet, and they were visible by doing tricks with eyes and light.

Then there was news, an aunt with an emergency that needed her heart opened up, and the father of the father with new growth inside the thing that just housed cancer, and a boy who was starting to choke, and the brother of the father who was starting to inject insulin.

The daughter complains that she broke her wrist, but she can move it, so she does math projects on the floor and pours glitter over his stomach. This would be all right. There would be suffering and there would be pain, but there was magic here, reflected in lights that came from her hands. That's how you heal, he thought, that's how it's done. The thing that hurts you becomes the thing you learn how to use.

That girl was there, too, the one who guided him through endless nights that turned from cold to unbearably hot until they broke in half, she was there, too, and she was saying that she could never be all that he thought she would be. But she was wrong, because she became something so much more, like an idol, or an amulet, something to carry around the neck like a beautiful scar, like a beautiful jewel that didn't try to hide the scar underneath.

This was the place, then, where men were looking at the kinds of suffering that opens doors to the next world, and wounded women were preparing to heal things. He knew that he'd taken his place in things, become the father and started to live in its myths, but he'd also learned how to become that other thing, and there was something in that shapeshifting that made it suddenly very urgent to tell his daughter about these things, and he couldn't tell her directly because she might miss it if it was too direct, but it was something that could be unfolded, like a dress, or a paper fortune-teller, or a life.

cgs/today i am fragmented

2011-09-06T18:03:00.000-07:00

So when I walked in and saw her sitting on the couch and eating a pickle for breakfast, I put my tongue between my forefinger and thumb. She was on the verge of so many things. I felt like I was on the verge, but that may or may not be true. In her case, every structure I had tried to throw off in the course of a life was there to announce that she was on the verge, and there was very little I could do. I thought about sugar and spice, and the way she always chose pickles, or hot peppers, or black nail polish, over anything sweet, and understood that the only thing left for me to understand was that some things are worth forgetting about, and others are very important. At this moment, it seemed like it was necessary to be in the room with the pickle smell and not react in any direction, because in this case, it was about sugar and spice or something much more original and interesting, and I didn't want her to think I was encouraging or disapointed, but I knew, I understood for certain, that the last thing the world needed at this moment, was another disappointed father.

cgs/&the bells

2011-09-06T12:30:00.000-07:00

Like a kid on Christmas morning, or like a kid who's been staring out the window by himself for too long and just realized that they were marching in, that the soldiers were marching into the town, I woke up feeling like it was up to me to wake up all the grown-ups in the world, finding them asleep at the wheel, in charge of things, making things and breaking things, and pretending to be things they couldn't possibly live up to, and shake them, saying, "It's time to wake up, it's time to wake up, we have to wake up now, it's time to wake up."

cgs/&slowly to autumn

2011-09-06T07:27:00.000-07:00

It was happening all around me. The season was starting to change, and I was no longer in love with anyone any more. And everything was just starting to hurt. But I'd never been more excited about smelling things in the air that were starting to turn green, like a season of dying had come to an end, and I knew that this had something to do with me.

cgs/y why i am not a cartesian apologist

2011-09-02T08:12:00.000-07:00

(oh but unfortunately, as much as i hate to admit it, i do know that is)...
this is getting ridiculous, this thread that keeps showing up everywhere...the black one that looked like your hair, and i remember eating it, and then two years later i ate it again, and in all that time, in between those times, you turned into so many people, so many different people, and none of them reminded me of you after a month or two, enough so that i don't know what they did to you, and i don't really understand what happened to them, either.

something on the way to becoming something that i already was or they already were, something on the way between here and there, and when i recognized that they were no longer you, it was like something coming true, like they were coming true...she was like a wish that came true.

so i swallow my breath in tunnels, and hair flies into my mouth because it sometimes doesn't matter what things are shut or locked tightly, persistence is rewarded by nature, and bravery is so very rare these days that no one can remember if nature rewards it or not. there is a woman in berlin who told me that it is, and i would believe her if i can find her.

look. i'm not talking about the versions of you that i can find here, the versions through which you like to paint your own representations, this is more like plato's cave than the waking world, even, and that's already a cave. this is a cave within a cave, once removed, and dressed up to look like it isn't a cousin. we're all going to dress up and pretend that we are not related, but you might recognize me by my tattoos when the clothes start to come off. they never do come off all the way. i'm not talking about you like that and i'm not looking at you talking about me like that. there were real people once, i remember, on a porch or in a bed or under a borrowed blanket or finding the skin of priests in graveyards, there were real people once, and i am trying to find my way back to them.

but there is more thread and more hair, and whenever i think i've eaten the right strand, the one that has your taste and smell, you go away and become someone else, and i don't know what i'm eating any more. i am the cow by the side of the road, remembering the time when it was once sacred. this is the wrong time and the wrong place for any of these things, but the pieces are all in view, they just haven't found their way to the table yet, because we lost track of the table.

this is not a new post

2011-09-01T09:50:00.000-07:00

and not urgent at all, listen, this next thing...oh i have no idea why i have to tell you these things and tell you right now...
the ocean, the sea, el mar (and her brother lamar), and all that those 7 sea things out there yes those...project new project based on my love is the sea, a fictitious project that happened once (note to self, do i even have the script for this any more, and if i do, can i please remind myself what the hell it was about? i think i liked it very much but it reminds me of the national, it is sweet and sad but it all kind of sounds like everything else)...ok so we'll find that...based on that then, only so i remember it, a new version that has nothing to do with the original and entirely recycled but not in the least at the same time...cuz i don't want to get over you, oh this is a love song about the sea...and suddenly there is nothing more to say until we get to part two.

part ii
that came up too quickly, that part. reverse the route of che, or trace it exactly, and begin at the tip of the continent and work my way up, performing performance with nothing but a motorcycle. and a projector. and 35,000 dollars. it will be just like a revolution in the beginning, except there will be more money, better transportation, and a lot less love, because although che was great he was also too co-dependent, and in the end, that's why he became insane and started walking by people just so they would shake and pee in their boots...
part ii is the real artificial meat in this, where we plan the geography...it's not a tour of latin america, but a long line of flight that investigates something about love and longing, something about missing the sea, and something about how we might or might not know how to talk to each other any more.

part iii is too late but it's already time for it but i am not there i'm gone.

cgs and september

2011-09-01T08:34:00.000-07:00

and i miss so many people these days, and wonder if anyone was ever here, or if it all took place elsewhere, and if it only can happen elsewhere, in another time and another skin, and if it has to happen there, then i will leave here this morning and won't stop until i get there, and i can't call to let you know i'm on the way, because i can't send messages when i'm on the way, and maybe it doesn't even matter except it does matter that i know that i am on the way (i'm surrounded by friendly fools here, and none of them look a thing like you, but i don't know how i'd even recognize you, hot as it is, my head as hot as it is)

cgs/y post-love-structures

2011-08-31T21:59:00.000-07:00

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.

cgs/& the hospital is everywhere i see

2011-08-24T22:45:00.000-07:00

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

2011-08-24T09:32:00.000-07:00

primavera parte

mejor que empezar con mi mismo, mejor k empezar con mi mismo en español, 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.

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

2011-08-22T09:07:00.000-07:00

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?)

cgs/y the structures of love

2011-08-19T22:44:00.000-07:00

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.

situationalities radicalities pretentionalities and anthropophagies for the next 44 years

2011-08-18T18:19:00.000-07:00

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.

twitch notes wolf notes any note holynote

2011-08-14T07:04:00.000-07:00

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)...

cgs/y canciones tristes de mis muertos

2011-08-13T21:48:00.000-07:00

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.

cgs/y a good cigar is a smoke

2011-08-12T21:14:00.000-07:00

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.

cgs/y the ties that sting

2011-08-11T21:30:00.000-07:00

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.

and wolf notes

2011-08-08T09:28:00.000-07:00

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

2011-08-08T09:02:00.000-07:00

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...

cgs/y i wish you were here

2011-08-05T20:16:00.000-07:00

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.

cgs/y todo lo demas/breath before the sea

2011-08-03T08:33:00.000-07:00

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.

cgs/marked/stained/planted

2011-08-02T08:37:00.000-07:00

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...

cgs/y still more?/note to self: fire all the investors

2011-07-29T09:17:00.000-07:00

brother from the land of the dead speaks about the brother in the land of the still living:

nothing much is different in terms of rhythm and tempo, nothing much at all only in terms of observation of open observation in ability to observe observingly, not objective, not omnipotent, just free to speak of these things more freely. things such as:

he misses her. the her is problematic because of reasons one might suspect if one were suspicious of these things (note to self in world of living: one should be suspicious, because although they are useful categories, they need more care, especially at this point in time when there is enough evidence, evidence of the violent kind, that there is a war on, and in wartime, thinking like a warrior means to use care, use caution, and to keep the list of enemies close at hand)...he misses her then problematically her not problematically miss, miss in the sense of longing and grieving, yes that, yes that again, yes that's a good line, yes that's a good line again, longing and grieving are the same same same...her, though, her means so many things, and so many people, and the people all have so many faces and so many identities, he wants her to be this one, the one who moves like olokun on the bottom of the ocean and knows him there...knew him, perhaps, does she remember him? does she still recognize him? did she go away because she was hearing things from sources inside and outside her own head, sources she didn't necessarily trust, sources that kept telling her that he was speaking about her behind her back, saying bad things behind her back, when nothing could be further from the truth, but they'll soak it up, they'll soak it up, they'll soak it up...but the one who has olokun in her room and sleeps next to olokun, he would write poems to her olokun and try to reach her there somewhere in the bottom of a poem, but it's already done, but he wonders if she thinks about him too much, she must think about him too much, because she's in his thoughts all the time and that's too much it's like grief it's like longing it's like obba missing shango, and he doesn't miss her like that...she another she, these are all she's, it's predictable then, nothing complicated, it's just in his head that they stay she's and he identifies them as she's, and he might be wrong and is probably wrong, it matters, though, it matters very much, matters enough to remove the mark under the light of the moon with a promise to keep some things under the tongue, the best thing about you is something that i will keep secret, our best moments are held under a pocket of muscle around my heart, and if it binds my heartbeat at the end of the day and stops my breath in the night, i will still keep it secret, because the blue light that comes from your body did not slip out so that i could speak of the rainbows from your tongue to the waking world at large, but only so that i could hold them like a communion wafter under my tongue, dissolving under my tongue like you dissolve under my tongue, and i am stuck at the end of another month sending coded messages to you under the cover of this hot morning light...she, this other she, the oil from costa rica coffee beans on the fold of skin at the place where her neck meets ear, gravity pulling the drop to a mouth whose lips are full enough to weave stories of the beginning of the world through her teeth, and a remarkable capacity to become animal and human again with the speed of light on the water, he misses her birth, the way history marks her belly with equal parts europe and a continent whose history is unwritten on the undiscoverable parts of the skin, where no one can reach without a map, he misses her maps...or the worst by far by far is the one who is about to happen the one who is about to fall on his road, something very much like immanence is breathing under the bed and is about to come into the light, and it could be so many things, on the verge of something that is about to happen...but worse still is this sense that the back of his neck is starting to tighten because tomorrow is the time when all this debt will be paid, and he is suddenly aware that it's going to be important, and likely as anything it's going to be less important than he thinks. because the figures in the story really don't go away, not all the way, and this one who moves like a ghost will speak again, and this one who spoke so well will still remain silent because she can't remember electric hands, and this one who started to hate herself will wake up suddenly at 3:23 and tell herself that what she wants is not possible in this world, in these configurations of skins, and she won't breathe a word of this to anyone. his belly is growing tight again and his skin is starting to pull to burst open again and there are heads inside his head that want to speak again, about you can't go home again, about this one won't come around again, about this is the first time again and everything again bites again like a word or a heart who's teeth have always been sharp but didn't really glisten in the light until they drew actual blood, and this is blood in a pocket in a mouth and under a pillow for dreams that might hint at a moment that's about to enter a life like a river in the middle of a cave that no one noticed until it was friday, and until it was really, terribly and utterly, before noon, long before noon.

cgs/y the blowfish/wolf, sledgehammer, stutter

2011-07-26T09:13:00.000-07:00

this is the difficult part, he starts to think to himself, and he doesn't even realize that he'd thinking this same thought at least 17 times a day, it travels through the bloodstream at 756 megabytes per second, or something impressive like that. this is the part where you take a breath, and this is the part where you just give in, and every part comes with another breath. but just like drinking stopped working to take away that initial freezing of the metal lining in the stomach, a few years ago, now smoking is having that same effect, and even with just a few puffs a day, it's not helping and his throat is starting to hurt.

he would like to think that this isn't the difficult part, and that it will get worse, that he's some kind of captive that's being taken in to another realm by forces that will shape him until they can present him to the world as the strongest person who ever suffered. he would like to think that the throat is hurting from the screaming inside cars with the windows rolled up. but he doesn't get to spend much time in cars, and if he were screaming in the open the way he thinks he is, he would not necessarily have the same freedoms that he does. in big cities, people complain when someone is screaming a lot, and no one is complaining here, not yet. he would also like to think that the reason there is no relief and no release from these things is that this is building in one of those slow movements that end suddenly in death, like the heart was slowly filling up, and that sooner or later is would do what a pot does when it's been boiling for a little too long. this has got to be something greater than what it is, because everything is always much more than it is, and one can never see the elephant from all sides at once, and we are all blind, or missing fingers, or something important and sad.

it's not as big as it seems, then, and probably not entirely small either, but exactly the size that it is, and the notion that it might actually be what it actually is does bother him a little, and he knows it's a little more than it should, perhaps.

last night he slept with the dog again, a dog that used to be his, in a house that he used to live in. this has been a strange couple of years, and there are lots of nights in the wrong house. this house is right, however, but just not for him, at least not for now, and the dog is feeling out of sorts herself, as though she were aware that she were going through something large and heavy. he slept in the house, not his, with the dog, not his, if that's not too proprietary, after having run his fingers over another 1200 pounds of items that belonged to his older brother. he put them into boxes and taped the boxes shut. he recognized some of the items, the books especially, because they used to talk about these. the shamanism and the jungian analysis and the morbid comedian talking about smoking and drinking. he also recognized that some of the items were unknowable, small boxes that held a weight that was not for him to understand. some of the objects belonged to another time, and the other time would sometimes lurk and pace in circles around him while he packed, and occasionally pounced on him when he forgot to keep himself braced.

the dog was with him here, too, in an apartment that was not his, because he felt somehow responsible for the dog's loneliness and suffering. she looked so very sad and lost, and he wanted to do something to help, even though he was starting to understand that this sadness would go on long past the help, and she might not even feel the relief that he thought he would feel if someone were going to help him.

it's a terrible thing when someone is reflecting and reflected everywhere, and can't even see their own reflections and projections. that's what he was thinking, without irony, he thought, and thought that was terribly funny.

it was all becoming part of the moment that was leading into a moment that was going to be more difficult than the ones that came before it, placing objects in boxes and trying to make them lie flat and make sense. this was all going to be difficult and required more and more moments that began with a deep breath. then the dog, not his, not that anyone can own a dog really, but they were very close, had a tie, the dog, then, the dog, the dog seemed to start to understand that this apartment was in the middle of so many others, and that there were not only other people she really should be meeting because they could very likely help her with her career as a dog, and those people had dogs and cats that could likewise advance her position as a dog in the industry, and this made her suddenly go mad, and bark and make noise that should make her throat hurt the next day, if there were any justice, he thought, without irony. her barks, then, came from a long line of urgent desires to work something out, a deep need to connect to the things that were close by, and to sever ties with the ones that were starting to hurt her.

her, the dog, not him, had recently been through something that would be considered rather intense to just about anyone, and especially to other dogs who had been through the same thing. her, or rather, she, she had known some exceptional dogs in her life, and had the opportunity to be touched by these other, exceptional dogs, in ways that would possibly seem painful, or filled with a terrible pleasure that held the very seeds of its opposite hidden in the light of the sun. dogs know sun, and dogs know when it is sunny, and dogs know when they are sunny, and this sundog was understanding that this was a period of very intense light. the last thing she went through, the dog, was a greater balance of sun and moon, having been through what might be considered a love affair in the world where they use words like "love" or "affair," (and the dogs do not, not these dogs, they are neither dogs of war nor dogs of love but something entirely both and neither all at once). a greater balance of sun and moon is what it was, but at the time it was all moon, because lovers always think they invent the moon, and perhaps they do, or perhaps that is what the moon is for. but there was more sun in that, or what might be considered the "male principle" in the realm of the alchemist dogs.

this sunny dog, however, was no alchemist, having recently given up that mantle in order to become more adept in the realm of witchcraft, related, perhaps, but not the same, except that all paths lead to the same thing, one hopes, which is nothing less than the transformation of the self into something like gold. sunny, being sunnier than most, did not adhere to those structures that conceived of principles as feminine or masculine, but so what, so it was, it was just so that the sun and the moon both took their part, and when she was so deeply in love (need to find a better word) with her lover (better word is out there), they would fluctuate between sun and moon with passing breaths and no one could tell who was what, who was the girl dog and who was the boy dog, and who would be everything else in between and outside these terribly regional boundaries. sun and moon dog trace the four moments of the sun as if they were born under kalunga, and everything has time and direction and force under kalunga, and kalunga under dogs is the same kalunga under anything, one dog nation under nsambi, but dogs in love sometimes do behave automatically, often confused with dogmatically.

automatic dogmatic dogs sing songs to each other long after the sun and the moon have changed places and are no longer blessing their fur under their light, no longer bless their fur because they hide from the sun and the moon, and the dog was feeling somehow terribly absent from herself in this house, in this apartment, under this roof that belonged to too many for too temporary a time with too many demands. landlords steal the souls or rape the spirits of everyone and everything, capitalist, marxist, or automatic dogmatic fur-lined dog hearts.

all of this to say, he was thinking about projections and reflections and the reasons people avoid thinking about themselves, and about how they might even try to avoid thinking about their own brother if there was enough pain in it, and he was wondering about how some people avoid thinking about the things that they are becoming, where the pattern they don't want to acknowledge is the one they are walking into again, and to know it ahead of time would mean that we are all controlled by instincts and freud and the other daddies were right. or it might mean something else entirely, something that is only known to the world of the dogs, the ones who can cross back and forth between the realms of the living and the realms of the dead, and carry the secrets back and forth when the sun or the moon is in the right spot for keeping things hidden. and it might even be possible for someone to look for the thing that was lost from childhood in every lover they meet, and there might be reasons that go past freud or even jung, and have something to do with bloodlines and generations.

he didn't even want to start thinking about a lover who wasn't there, one he hadn't even met yet, but he knew that she would have to have some kind of gypsy blood somewhere, and also have a capacity for sudden transformations in the dark, and also be just like this one, and just like that one, and just like the one he imagined without wanting to imagine her, because to imagine too much ahead of time would make a projection, and the next one who came along with any lover's intentions for him would enter his arms and into his projection at the same time, and they would never meet.

at the same time, he was also sure that he had become a part of someone else's projection, and recently, and often, and it was happening again in other realms, and when it happened it didn't make him run as fast as he thought he might. under the spell of a projection, he understood, it was entirely possible to play the role that was assigned to him, and play it better than he'd played the role of brother, husband, father, lover, or friend, and perhaps the best projections held more than a little animal nature in them, and that gave him room to become everything he desired. this was something he wanted to remember, because he wanted to allow this possibility for the next one who came along, or the next one who came back and said they were new, and that becoming animal was becoming entirely exhilarating to consider. because it was possible. he couldn't find string to tie his finger so he did the next best thing, and pierced his lip through with a ring that didn't quite fit, was a little too large, because this whole needed a mark, this hole needed room, and this white pain would keep him from getting too sentimental about packing up the things that reminded him of who he used to be when his brother was also someone else, and the world was a little more secure because he had someone who could protect him from these things.

the dog was still too lost thinking about her lost lover, and too afraid of the footsteps on the ceiling, to be counted on, and he picked up the things of his brother with his own shoulders, the ones which were no longer large enough to carry the weight of the world, but could stand all the weight of the animals living in between his shoulder blades.

cgs/y the moops/wet wolf (el lobo excitado)

2011-07-25T09:02:00.000-07:00

it's always hard this time of year, he is thinking, whenever this time of year comes around again. last year was one thing and this year is another one entirely, & he is starting to feel a little too hurried, having already poked his face through with a barrier between this skin and the skin of another, & it's no time to grow morose or nostalgic over anniversaries that should have been one thing and turned into another. he is wondering about the moments when, having fallen in between a running stream and a wall of dirt (some would call it a ditch), the narrations in his head start to fall down the face and run out his tongue, like his face were a place that could be like a fountain, or a kachina when the maker is possessed.

but this is no time to be speaking of tongues, not here, not now, not like this. the tongue is silent, the tongue has to be silent about itself, because if he starts to talk about the tongue, he knows, he's going to start saying all sorts of things about her.

it's becoming well known that he simply can't keep a secret, except about the things that are not between anyone else but the people the secrets are about. it's becoming known that too many people are talking about him, and he needs to get clean. it's becoming well known that he cleaned himself by alternating between the hot light of the morning and the cool bath of the midnight sky.

and this is when he starts to remember some things that can't possibly come to light, but here they are in the light. things like: this scar here, the one on the edges of the tongue, comes from the nail used to mark the moment when he saw that his words escaped his mouth and spoke of her, and spoke of the way he drew pictures on her body with his tongue, an evening that was a new ceremony of blessing that played out in a very old pattern; and the saliva dried in a picture that he loved because it reminded him of her; and the things he never wanted to forget about her were growing more numerous the further away she got, and that in this way he started to see how she was becoming absorbed into that pool of things that happened in the past, and part of a long series of exceptions; that the patterns he drew that only she could interpret were seen by other eyes, and the other eyes started to reinterpret with their tongues, and spread the news that he was talking about he behind her back.

enough so that in some times these things would be called distortions of the truth, but here, in the ravine or the ditch, the truth is in process, somewhere between birth and death, on the precipice of both or either or neither. and his heart is suddenly moving away from the precipice and toward the firmament. because of this:

the one in the corner, the one who cleans, the one with the broom, the one who is not one, not three, and not tied to the broom, better called they or ones than one, but they/she like to be called the one, because they are attached, because they attach, they, the one who cleans, comes through, she comes through, she who comes through cleaning comes through cleaning, and she comes again to clean. she announces herself without an announcement, she calls attention to herself with the sounds of her cleaning, she makes herself known through the sounds and the rhythms of the dust that turns and turns and escapes through the window when the storm sucks air in two directions. she comes to announce without announcing, and it is always the same. it starts like a request, but there is no request. she comes to announce that it is the time of year when all the plates and all the floors and all the things that stand between the tongue-eye and the firmament have to be swept away. clear the area is what she would say if she came announcing with an announcement, but she doesn't come this way because an annunciation means that no one has ever heard her name, and she wouldn't accept that there is anyone who doesn't know her name. the one in the corner cleans and they say that it's time to clear the area and to get clean in the heat of the sun and the cool of the rain, that the third cycle is about to begin.

this was the saddest part of the story for him so far. because there was a morning, one that began in a most unusual way, with a wet desert floor and the body of a small animal with a very long tail on the floor at the feet of the cat. because there was a morning where he started to wake up and started to have a feeling that his thoughts were not yet clear but were coming clear, and that this would be a day that could be guided by clear thought. and that this was not the first morning like this ever, and that is was coming in a long line of mornings, and that it may have been going on for at least a month. and the clarity was coming from making decisions about how to keep things away, and how to figure out not to want things, and a realization that this not wanting was starting to turn into a wanting of the things that he had, like they were. the ceiling was high enough and the floor was low enough and the air was wet enough and the moment was the perfect length of time to count as a moment, and everything else was just decoration, and that this held the secret of some kind of sorcery, or some kind of witchcraft.

he woke up enchanted, and not for the first time. and the notion that fall would come after summer seemed like the most extraordinary thing in the world. and everything was about to fall into place. and something that fell into place would be a three in a series of three, and the three would fall into place and take many things with it, because it would fall with the force of a star denser than the ones aligned at his birth, and make holes where time might peek through and lose its place and sense of direction, being turned around madly, mad like a wolf come in fresh and hungry from the rain.

cgs/y moors/the wolf @ the door

2011-07-15T23:37:00.000-07:00

there is a brother. that's already been established. there are two, in fact, and it's not a new fact. already established. and the one who walks on the surface of the world is walking in grey tones, looking at the world through the eyes of a broken wolf, and the one who is under the surface is seeing the colors that only wolves can see when they've crossed over into the underworld.

this will all shift soon enough to that one, the dead one, who wants to speak about some things that have been bothering him since long before he woke up, and he thinks it might be important to send some messages to the living, and he is apparently of the same bent tongue clan as me, and is practicing painting with his tongue.

but first, a shift to mark on the trunk of this summer, because we are all fourteen and need to telegraph every single turn, he, the first one, not the first first one, has been stuck in the space between the dog and the wolf for the better part of a year now, and hasn't yet noticed that the space has shifted, and the wolf is taken over the area, and walks through the forests of desire at three in the morning, night after night. it might be him, it might be other, it might be both and more. there are those who spend their lives becoming tamed, and their stories and journeys are inspiring and often very sweet. but there are also those who spend their lives in a long process of shifting toward the opposite of taming, and not quite wildness, not the same thing as the unleashed fire of the very young or the very drunk. there are those who take to taming with the same despondence, or repugnance, of the class that never has any of their affairs in order at the end of their lives, who hold boxes of papers and pots filled with secrets that leave the living puzzled over the strange signs and ciphers of their recently deceased.

he remembers how the girl-boy lover once told him that he became more animal when their was heat running through the veins, when yellow candles burned in closets that couldn't be opened without a tornado or a flood, and he wanted to tell her that she woke this up, it was her and not him that brought it to the surface, because when two animals meet under the light of the moon, there are rarely any good decisions to be made that don't lie in full accord with the urgent shiftings in the pulse. the pulse is the heartbeat of the world, the first drum, the first song to god.

he wanted to tell her so many things, but so many of their turns left him speechless, all he was left with were words dancing around love, and sometimes dancing in the fire that is love, and sometimes going beyond whatever definitions of love might be running through the fire in the head at the time. he also wanted to tell her that for him, love is a bell, and is always a bell, and that bell didn't belong to anyone but oshun, who rules the rivers of the body, the pulse is a bell, a cry to wake up the living, to become conscious to the moment, and in the moment, we are all becoming animal.

especially this very moment, and this is the shift, and not entirely comfortable, because her face changed somewhere on a very close side street, and the face he is speaking to at three in the morning isn't the one he remembered from before, but he can't tell her that, not yet, because she doesn't know yet, or if she does, she's not sure what this all is supposed to mean, and is trying to puzzle these things out herself, playing with the same strings in the dark that light up his darkest hours like a firefly. and the strings are the very same chords that might weave a heart to another heart, or might make a new story, or might be simply a golden thread that's waiting for someone to notice.

but it's terribly hot these days, and sometimes it takes more energy to notice, and sometimes the sheets are already too warm for one body to bear. best to leave it for the moon to decide, best to leave it for the wolves to reason out on their own, and report back, like a story that comes directly from the land of the dead.

part ii
the brother speaks from the land of the dead

you make me sad, you make my heart spin in new directions like a butterfly, you make me miss the fathers. there aren't enough fathers in the stories any more, because you're living in a time when no one believes them. love for the father, from the father, is a door to secrets, but all you can see are the ways some fathers have of inclining packs of people to deny their animal nature and kill like only people know how to kill. but i learned some things in the seasons i've spent under the ground, and i know your caves, and i know the secrets that are buried there.

i won't tell you anything new, nothing you don't already know, but i'll tell you in a way that might be like a song, so you will listen to the song you forgot.

nothing makes the dead laugh more than hearing all the complicated ways you have of talking about fucking, so that you don't think that you're just talking about fucking. nothing makes the dead cry more than waiting for you to recognize the spark of your real nature, and watching you try to figure out new ways to put it out.

grief is the fuel of the fire that burns your veins to wake you up in the morning, and forgetting is the sand on the fire. some of you love as if you're still trying to grow up, where each lover is something to get over so that the experience can live somewhere in the part of the belly that carries bitterness; some of you love as if every new lover has the potential to carve their name on your ribs while you're sleeping. maybe you should choose a little bit better, because they indeed do have the potential, and these are your ribs, and you have to walk with them, and they will be the bones you turn in the dark when you are awake in this very curious dream.

if i had the chance to live in a body until i was shaped like yours, i would like to think i would do it differently, but we know you well enough to know that we would always do the same things. that lover that you told too much, the one who could suck out your secrets with her tongue, she is written on the walls of time long before you or her were born. that lover you were afraid of, the one who made your tongue dumb, is written on the same walls. nothing changes the things that are written except for the times when lovers speak their love to each other, and that's when a new story begins, and a new series of threads start to explode from the mouths of the worms who live here. the ones who eat the dead are also the ones who write the footsteps of the living, and the raw matter is all the same.

another secret. this raw matter is never base, although it might be called that, there is nothing ordinary about the cells that make up the burning in the skin that knows longing. longing is where stories come from, any story worth telling, and any other story will bore me back to the grave.

so i won't stop to hear any war tales that are not based on longing, and i won't listen to tales that move for the love of money or power, because they are the ones that remind us in the end we are all skeletons, and we already know that.

and so do you.

longing is the key, longing is the doorway to a long road, longing is the reason you're here, and you all cry and cry and cry because longing is so long and the night is so dark, and you wonder why you are here, and if we tell you that you are here for longing, it will be up to you to figure out what to do with that....
(cont'd.)

firma #1/series 4

2011-07-07T11:08:00.000-07:00

‎"cafe c/kalunga"
firma to wake up the eye of the heart after a storm/firma para abrir los ojos, y hacer el corazon disponible despues de un haboob
from "biology is magic, nature is messy, firma series four"
media: cascarilla, espresso, thumb, cell phone
--from phx/lola's, july 7, 2011

cgs (y mas)

2011-07-06T10:35:00.000-07:00

she could learn a lot from the dead. or they could learn a lot from her. the dead, who have already crossed over to that other point of crossing, are also in an in-between state, and are much more amenable toward helping the living who are in the version of that over on this side of that.

cgs (more)

2011-07-06T09:32:00.000-07:00

part i (cont'd,)

she also said "lol," and that's sort of important. he's never been entirely clear why, but it's always been important. either he said it, or his friends said it, that if you're deciding to sleep with someone, their saying "lol," can really seal the deal into that category of "no." he is entirely sure he has a category of "no," and she would fall cleanly into that, although in categorical form it was not an imperative, but that's only in the physical plane, in that realm of materiality that is so terribly fleeting. in other words, in the ideal, he would never consider it, but this is not an ideal place, and in this broken paradise, he would make an exception, and he sometimes enjoys thinking about how this was so begrudging to him when, in truth, she was exceptionally capable of holding a place for him that should rightfully be reserved for a goddess.

this isn't metaphorical, or from too much robert graves (do people read him anymore? does anyone remember him anymore?), these goddesses are really real, or rather, really there, in an ideal and material place for him, not necessarily by choice. he heard muses a long time ago, and started to listen, and then he knocked, and they answered, and when the door was open, to let the room breathe, the ocean took over, and seafoam covered everything that was once just a poem. she was like a poem, but she was also made of something that could be contained by skin. not entirely contained. too hard to forget about that. fissures and expenditures always make it possible for time to enter through the bloodstream, and demand nothing less than deep and rapid breaths, and a heart that would find its voice somewhere in the middle of the night when no one else is awake but the lovers and the dead ones.

this isn't anything any more than a secret thought that he isn't able to keep very long, held in the crease of an unbroken tongue, the thought that he always wanted to learn how to dance the tango, and considered himself to be much too arrhythmic to even try, but on some nights with her, it almost felt like they could do it, and it was almost like they didn't even have to try, and the quickening breath happened often enough and easily enough that it was like the laughter of children. that it fell like anything falls, that it was as easy as gravity, and it was also easy enough that it was very clear to see that it was falling as far as anything could fall, and that it might hurt when it finally hit something that might be part of the magic of blood. eventually the bodies will fall until someone breaks, gets pregnant, or steals something.

this isn't anything less than a story about gravity, and it begins with a near-conception, and ends with the sound that bones make when they hit the ground. but everything that's essential, the sticky and the sweet parts, are deep in the middle.

and the most interesting part by far is one of the few scenes with a physical description so far. there is a woman with brown eyes in an irish green shirt, and there's too many cell phones in this cafe to hear anything but the sound of something bright happening between paragraphs, but it all fades so quickly into the morning that he doesn't even stop to think about how his orange shirt is perfect for her, that they could make ireland together, only he is not comfortable being orange, but that's too political suddenly and uncomfortably.

his friend takes photographs of him curled up in a praying buddha pose, then he takes a picture of him staring into the lens, his fingers a "v" and his tongue in between them. this is the picture he wants to represent him for awhile, because he wants to be a bad boy, or wants to be seen as a bad boy, or maybe it's just because it's hot now and being a bad boy is all he can think of, because in the heat, everyone has run out of ideas. it's a little alarming then, when, her picture, he sees her picture, suddenly and uncomfortably, with her fingers and tongue in the same position, and she is a remarkably handsome bad boy, enough so that he kind of wishes suddenly that she were his older brother, but she is too young for that. unless he were born on a leap day, which is still possible.

there is a lot in this that has to fall in and out of the realms of the impossible or not. before he knew where his brother was buried, it was one story, before he knew exactly the spot, it was another story, and before the bones in the dirt began to speak, it was a possibility that existed in his head as a series of limitless possibilities.

everyone, perhaps, is more comfortable with the idea of limitless possibilities than we might like to think. when they fall into the realm of definitions, that's when they become something else, and usually disappointing.

"why am i so important?" she was saying once, crying once.

he didn't know how to answer, because it was not a very good day for answering anything. in the first place, he had recently begun to learn that all of his sins were committed at the edges of his tongue, and never in the dark, and always in the light. he decided recently that he wouldn't speak about her, not to anyone, because it was becoming clear that anyone was not willing to keep things between anyone, and that anyone was speaking about him as much as anyone was speaking about her, and anyone was hiding their intentions, and the whole thing felt spooky at best, and somehow very republican.

so he couldn't even answer her, because he wasn't talking about her, not even to her, but now he understood that if he could answer, it would be something like: because whenever she fell into the realm of definition or determining becoming, it was always as an in-between, and this in-between was not only a space that he loved, but that this space held a human being that he also loved, and would never understand, and that, in this way, she reminded him of him, only slightly different, like a brother or a perfect lover or something in between.

(cont'd.)