our pact

this is our pact, just as he wrote it for us, and without hesitation, doubt, or fear, I have accepted:

We are both shameless as whores, guiltless as lambs. We will not be vindicated and we will not be damned. We shall expect neither redemption nor damnation. We shall live as incomplete human beings and we shall withstand our incompleteness with bravery and candor.

And we shall say no to tragedy.

except it’s mine

I woke up in the morning with my two front teeth feeling out of place, pushed in sort of. I wondered if someone had punched me in the mouth during the night. I recall some distant dream. Yes, that is exactly what happened.

Walking home from the store I see some trivial thing, the title of a movie on the cinema marquee perhaps, or beer bottles in the street, and I think to spontaneously release my fingers gripped round the bottom of the bag I am carrying. What if… what if I just let go? This would only be ok if, in the instant the bag hit the sidewalk, I would vanish from the earth. I have never existed. I never drank in that bar alone filling a notebook with stories about grandma or how much I loved anyone. I should never have had to feel it was safe to bet on betrayal. Twas a bitter pill, they said, disconsidering A: it was of their own manufacture; and B: how many I’d had to swallow in their presence until then. Testing the choke or the flinch, vicarious hyenas and madmen take away a pocketful of notes for comparison and a glimpse into a life one doesn’t even see in the most depressed student’s art film. I knew someone who, when he felt a little sigh in his chest, o melancholy, isn’t it grey! or the tug of age, o loneliness, isn’t it blue! called himself a poet. Here: when she drops the bag, get a closeup on that apple rolling across the sidewalk; if you’re trying to make me laugh wait for the squirrel to run up and try to drag it away; if you’re trying to make me sick, throw your head back with a bemused quasi-intellectual smirk on your face, pretending you have depth. Ho-hum, say these members of the leisure class, integrity hasn’t a colour, only a pattern, and that’s too difficult to describe by one who lacks rhythm– why even bother with it?

Two men walk into a nationwide, corporate chain restaurant marketing itself to middle- and upper-middle class suburbanites as eco-conscious and good for your health. One says to the other, “Shall I have the tuna, which has been trucked from thousands of miles away, or the three-cheese omelet?” and the other one goes, “Hm, they both sound good. Why don’t you decide while your twenty-cent tea bag steeps in your five-dollar cup of hot water.” They probably rode their bicycles there. No, they couldn’t have crossed the highway. Hey, mom and dad were there too, they drove the station wagon. They put dinner on their credit card. They left a shitty tip. What’s the punchline? Hypocrisy is tasty. Wait, this story isn’t funny at all.

So let’s talk about the weather. Is it schizophrenic enough out for ya? You bet, Bob, when I went to sleep it wasn’t my fault, but when I woke up I was totally responsible. Well, they say this hate-wave will clear up by the weekend. Is that so? That’s what I hear.

Another day, another dime, another life without reason or rhyme.

Guest Entry: Hole in the Wall

by Etgar Keret, translated by Miriam Shlesinger
 
 
On Bernadotte Avenue, right next to the Central Bus Station, there’s a hole in the wall. There used to be an ATM there once, but it broke or something, or else nobody ever used it, so the people from the bank came in a pickup and took it and never brought it back.

Somebody once told Udi that if you scream a wish into this hole it comes true, but Udi didn’t really buy that. The truth is that once, on his way home from the movies, he screamed into the hole in the wall that he wanted Ruth Rimalt to fall in love with him, and nothing happened. And once, when he was feeling really lonely, he screamed into the hole that he wanted to have an angel for a friend, and an angel really did show up right after that, but he was never much of a friend, and he’d always disappear just when Udi really needed him. This angel was skinny and all stooped and he wore a trench coat the whole time to hide his wings. People in the street were sure he was a hunchback. Sometimes, when there were just the two of them, he’d take the coat off. Once he even let Udi touch the feathers on his wings. But when there was anyone else in the room, he always kept it on. Klein’s kids asked him once what he had under his coat, and he said it was a backpack full of books that didn’t belong to him and that he didn’t want them to get wet. Actually, he lied all the time. He told Udi such stories you could die: about places in heaven, about people who when they go to bed at night leave the keys in the ignition, about cats who aren’t afraid of anything and don’t even know the meaning of “scat.” The stories he made up were something else, and to top it all, he’d cross-his-heart-and-hope-to-die.

Udi was nuts about him and always tried hard to believe him. Even lent him some money a couple of times when he was hard up. As for the angel, he didn’t do a thing to help Udi. He just talked and talked and talked, rambling off his harebrained stories. In the six years he knew him, Udi never saw him so much as rinse a glass.

When Udi was in basic training and really needed someone to talk to, the angel suddenly disappeared on him for two solid months. Then he came back with an unshaven, don’t-ask-what-happened face. So Udi didn’t ask, and on Saturday they sat around on the roof in their underpants just taking in the sun and feeling low. Udi looked at the other rooftops with the cable hookups and the solar heaters and the sky. It occurred to him suddenly that in all their years together he’d never once seen the angel fly.

“How about flying around a little,” he said to the angel. “It would make you feel better.”

And the angel said: “Forget it. What if someone sees me?”

“Be a sport,” Udi nagged. “Just a little. For my sake.” But the angel just made this disgusting noise from the inside of his mouth and shot a gob of spit and white phlegm at the tar-covered roof.

“Never mind,” Udi sulked. “I bet you don’t know how to fly, anyway.”

“Sure I do,” the angel shot back. “I just don’t want people to see me, that’s all.”

On the roof across the way they saw some kids throwing a water bomb. “You know,” Udi smiled. “Once, when I was little, before I met you, I used to come up here a lot and throw water bombs on people in the street below. I’d aim them into the space between that awning and the other one,” he explained, bending over the railing and pointing down at the narrow gap between the awning over the grocery store and the other one over the shoe store. “People would look up, and all they’d see was the awning. They wouldn’t know where it was coming from.”

The angel got up too and looked down into the street. He opened his mouth to say something. Suddenly, Udi gave him a little shove from behind, and the angel lost his balance. Udi was just fooling around. He didn’t really mean to hurt the angel, just to make him fly a little, for laughs. But the angel dropped the whole five floors, like a sack of potatoes. Stunned, Udi watched him lying there on the sidewalk below. His whole body was completely still, except the wings, which were still fluttering a little, like when someone dies. That’s when he finally understood that of all the things the angel had told him, nothing was true. That he wasn’t even an angel, just a liar with wings.

quiet

I have been in a panic of contradictory thought, between defending myself and accepting as true that I am the universe’s receptacle for emotional cruelty. I have walked as a lone warrior long enough. It is time to now sit in the sand and wait patiently for the desert to take me. I can be quiet now. I do not mean to be so slow, I do not mean to be so ugly, and I am sorry for it. I will remove myself from this earth in due time, but until then, let me ask while I can still be heard: please do not someday punish me for being unattractive. My picture has not been taken in the last year, not since I have been so thoroughly whipped and starved. It has been aged over the last ten months, I hear, some five to ten years. And since I know my soul matters for naught, and in fact seems only to arouse anger for that my appearance does not match its allure, I apologise. This spirited horse has finally been broken.

Minneapolis 01.21.08  llh:rjb 

Re: mirror

It is worse in the mornings. When you’ve been neglected and starved for affection as long as I, you do not wake up– well, not really, maybe a little– and imagine being able to roll over and get on top of someone else. If it has been long enough, and if the ignorance of your existence, your very humanness, has been profound, if you do not fit in with the established norms and even the mentally ill will not have you, you discover it is not sex the body needs or wants. It isn’t the face that matters and wants attention, it isn’t the shapeliness of the limbs that desires validation by means of entanglement; it is one’s very core that is lonely and yearns for another body to be pressed up against it, a counterweight to disperse and diffuse unused emotional energy. When you’ve been neglected and starved as long as I, you discover it is not the meeting of reproductive parts that the body most craves; it is the meeting of hearts and lungs and guts that would make you feel not alone in the world, that would make you feel safe. It is a deep spiritual embrace, not a deeply penetrating fuck, that we need. People have been tricked, but as long as they keep themselves distracted with quantity intercourse, they will never know it. It is worse in the mornings, and perhaps I only complain because I do not prefer to start my day with tingling eyes that have become so accustomed to this sensation that I do not in fact ever cry about it. A friend of mine says my ability to be alone is noble and inspiring, but I do not think it can be these things since it is not my choice– well, not really, maybe a little– because the fact of the matter is, at this point, when I wake up and I roll over onto my front, what I imagine is someone coming in close and what I want is just to be held. And maybe they even like me enough that I will also feel them trailing a finger lightly, aimlessly, through my hair.

Re: Holiday greetings, pt 4

thoughts previous to the holidays:
so. we have come to that point in the conversation. a sudden, awkward silence falls like a thick blanket of snow over a noisy city, quieting the rush of speeding thoughts, ideas, maybe dreams. maybe dreamlike twinkling fluffs of fluffy imaginations, the impossibly slow resistance to a gravitational pull, lackadaisical mental somersaults in mid-air, but a resistance nonetheless, laying low and reflecting upwards, sparkling: orange, purple, blue… the first chime doesn’t wake me, a message which can’t be believed, and so the day passes, and so the night passes, and so what else is new: candleflame, orange, purple, blue. the second initiates the dance– (it’s like a dance, brixton)– “the snowflakes were beautiful,” yes, that is true. “Whose turn is it to go?” “Does she think I’m stupid?” “Did I embarrass him?” “Was that too much?” “Was that too much?” The whole thing plays back like a cassette tape on a handheld player, the volume so high all those things in common jumble together and distorted fill a space, like a small table in a café between two people, the espresso machine competing (and winning); the excuses, recognised as such, of great American novelists [awkward, conversational commas, pause] tossed aside, and that space filled just so with just such kinds of things as to make difficult a change of subject. “So… what else has happened lately… what else is new?” “Whose turn is it to go?” You there, in that chair, isn’t it strange that we have been only separated by the chance of time; but then, could it have happened any other way?

thoughts upon:
“but he doesn’t know how I dress? he wouldn’t recognise my mosey from a distance, in the dark; he couldn’t tell from a picture a body covered up in a hat, scarf and multiple layers of warmwear; he doesn’t know my voice; he doesn’t know this is my neighbourhood, someone else would have to point and say, ‘hey now, that looks like someone i know…’; he doesn’t know I am not the sort to take pictures of things, but that I did in fact take a photograph just before of a streetlight oft referenced in our poems and prose: wish we were here, and though I thought better and did not send it, [insert chime] ‘the snowflakes were beautiful.’ oh god, the cosmic conspiracy, The Alchemist.” “Don’t fret,” this one said. Thank you, that’s right. Don’t fret. Flitterfall to earth like slowly somersaulting snowflakes, that beautiful wander by the river on Christmas night was not altered by the chance of time. Everything is as it was.

and since:
I wonder if drowning in the river in the winter is any more unpleasant than it might be in the summer. My head is underwater. There are many theories about my name. They are all incorrect, but they all grasp, probably naively and ineffectually, at light in darkness, and so point to something not entirely inaccurate. With many days off to lie in bed, I made good progress on the book I am reading. I am within a hundred pages of finishing, though a hundred pages in a volume of very small print, two columns per page– so my hundred pages are other people’s four– on thin, somewhat transparent paper, like a Bible. o yes, I have thought of mentioning this for some time. (Dammit, the shopgirls, always the shopgirls, they always beat me to the punch. But my book is hardcover, I whine, and totally black, with gilt edges. My punkrock upbringing taps me on the [chip on my] shoulder, dukes up, “oh yeah? well you don’t just look the part, baby, you live it.” Damn right. *validated*) So then, many women are often reported as seen to be me, and I always wonder, “Well was she pretty?” I wish I could look at them myself. This knowledge that you have been within a street or two of me has inspired certain impatiences. Maybe I will stop fixedly gazing at the sidewalk as I go along.

Minneapolis 12.28.07  llh:rjb

Scene 9

Scene 9: Impenetrable Stones
Unbeknownst to them, I saw the two together the night before. I can’t forget the image, two heads poking out side by side from the blanket. They were in my bed, contented and happy. Finally, again. It seems it’s been but the blink of an eye now, almost like it was something I could ignore as I sit now at the end of the bed talking to my friend Cindy, who sits casually opposite, about inconsequential things. Oh, she knows his history, with her, with me, but I haven’t had yet the humility to tell her about last night; I work very hard at representing my relationship with him in such a way that no one, and I suppose not even myself, can say I’ve been told so. While she says some things, and I say some things, I know he will be home any moment, and while I say some things, and she listens to some things, my hands get nervous. I try absentmindedly to smooth the duvet cover we’re sitting upon of the folds caused by my weight, as if I can convince the bed itself that everything will be alright. There, there. And like some cruel, cosmic conspiracy, he walks in to the room just as a tiny rhinestone slips from one of the folds into my hand, and he sits himself—I dare say with an air of adamancy—in the chair near the end of the bed. I act like nothing is out of the ordinary, to everyone (I have become quite good at this), about both of these things, and continue on with my chatter and smoothing, until a second tiny rhinestone rolls out. I pick it up and stare at them in my hand, and say very quietly almost to neither of them, “They are from her hair.” Cindy becomes confused as his posture changes noticeably, his defenses aroused. “They are from her hair,” I say again, “She had a barrette in her hair.” I sit up a little and pull part of the duvet back and begin to rummage. An earring, the kind that dangles, and gold. This I hold up for all to see, because I wear silver, and certainly nothing that suggests movement. He still hasn’t said anything, but Cindy knows whose it is. I even get the impression that she has intuited what else I saw last night: that this woman took off each bit of jewelry, one thing at a time, slowly, methodically, and set them to be broken and left behind. It’s time to go all the way with this, I decide, and reach behind the books on my windowsill to show her something else I found earlier. It’s a charm to a bracelet, “It was a gift from him, it’s engraved. It says ‘miss you.’” And while I mouth these two words thickly, he grabs something from his pocket and throws it at me, as if a crumpled up piece of paper is going to stop me this time. Cindy doesn’t know what to do, he and I, we just start fighting; and for a little bit we go on like this, fighting with sharp but hushed words, until something he said, and I don’t even recall what it was, made me give up. I gave up everything, the façade, the blind, protective cover of some unique value I wanted to believe I had, and the love, if you can call it that—yes, the love went with it as if my very skeleton had suddenly dissolved under my skin. I slumped down in the middle of the floor, and, with my face hidden in my hands, cried violently: she is perfect, okay, I get it, she’s beautiful and perfect and better than me. He bent over me from behind, and in tandem with my sobbing words he yelled out loud like I’ve never heard out of him before, close right into my ear so that I would never be able to forget the truth all my life: “she is perfect, she is beautiful and perfect, she is prettier and better than you!” And can you believe, all during this scene with me on the floor, there was still a part of me that worried what the hell I was going to tell my friend when it was all over, how I would apologise for him after he’d gone. He had always been such a soft-spoken person.

Minneapolis 10.13.07  llh:trl

testament

Current mood: Jaked 

that I’ve got only the backs of two checkbooks upon which to say everything there is to say tonight, so I’d better write small and hyphenate between syllables and double consonants and write nothing that is superfluous, such as a description of the man to my left who just asked to buy a cigarette from me (but dodged payment by flattering conversation in which he supposed perhaps I’d written the book on the counter in front of me, but which in fact was written by a certain John Steinbeck— or perhaps the conversation was meant to be unflattering in that he supposed I’d sit here publicly reading a book of my own authorship); I should also not make any mention of the significance that Elvis Costello is on the jukebox, nor should I complain with a strong sense of injustice why it is only I who must ride my bicycle past sidewalks upon which we walked away from plays; I should say nothing regarding the fact that I resent very much that I’m the one who would find themselves having to sit in booths upholstered with gold glitter vinyl in piano bars, smiling, laughing, making pleasant conversation and not thinking about that thing I’m thinking about; or that I’d arrived at the punk rock bar in which he knows he could easily find me (but never bothers to, think about that) to see there happens to be a dirty blond-haired man with potential for overweight sitting next to Perfect Asian Woman and really I shouldn’t listen in on the discovery made by the Elvis Costello lookalike bartender that these two have just been married— eyes forward, there’s a photograph on the mirror before me, behind the bar, of an old friend’s ex-wife—here I lose my flow, my train, someone is lost to me and it’s not who anyone would think it might be—it’s just that it has been exactly one year since I’ve been held in the arms of either of them (checkbook two and take a moment to twist the pen out of its barrel, speaking of which, sinking with each word, perhaps I should think a little more about how I plan to die)—yeah, twelve months and they could be in St Paul or Serbia for all everything matters, respectively, and I’m sitting here half after midnight with a novella on the counter, a distraught woman with her head in her hands on the cover, a laughing ex-wife in the mirror (“hahaha, I took his dogs and his faith in you a thousand miles away”)– o happy newlyweds, you’ll see, he said to me, and so (but not in the way anyone would think) I have; Elvis Costello is on the jukebox and serving me drinks, both of them beg to know what’s so funny ’bout peace, love and understanding, yet neither of them offer any answer to the question (twist pen)—stop, pause, think, stop… he bought a pack, the man to my left, and gave me one later.

Currently reading:
The Wayward Bus by John Steinbeck

That close

Current mood: unsure

This is the first entry I write directly into wordpress. By the time it is read, it will likely be irrelevant.

10.00pm: I leave work for the Triple Rock on my bicycle. I am highly motivated to not make it home alive, somehow. In total darkness, I unlock the shed where my bike is kept, everything is still. Three people were murdered within three blocks in the last few days, including a bicyclist out for a ride before bedtime. Married guy on his way to bid his best friend good evening, kids, the whole loving friends and family who will miss him thing. I hear a rustle in the corner, behind the shed. No luck, it was just the wind. Perhaps I will be hit by a car on the way.

10.15pm: I arrive at the Triple Rock, foiled again despite taking an unlit, unfamiliar route with therefore unexpected potholes, unusually hostile, aggressive drivers, and the coincidence of having worn all dark clothing today.

10.20pm-1am: Nepstien, the bartender on duty, is particularly chatty and friendly tonight. He correctly identifies without any prompting a psycho-stalker of mine, and guards my drink behind the bar while I take a cigarette break now and then from the short story I’m reading about two toddlers, a wife, her parents and the family dog, who are murdered in cold blood by the husband on Christmas Eve, 1985– I am clearly in a safe, intuitively protective space. A friend who has been in his boy-cave for the last 12 months reappears by text message and keeps me company in this way all night between paragraphs. He rode 135 miles today, and wants me to ride with him on Saturday. I commit to a future invitation.

1.10am: I set my bike in my garage, and numbly turn out my lights. I have to sit down on the dusty, leafy floor of the garage and have the breakdown I’d meant to have before leaving work tonight at 8pm, the unfulfillment of which left me sitting at my desk in psychic, physical and emotional paralysis for two hours before the idea to get hit coming home drunk from the Triple Rock tonight inspired me to finally leave. I guess I don’t know how to become that drunk, or perhaps I was too drunk to remember my great idea; and though all the other elements were begging the universe to have mercy upon me, out of habit I used my lights, dammit, and caused traffic to be too aware of my presence. So I am alive (“I should have left at 2″), and this is what it’s like to be alive (“more drunk drivers on the street”), weeping on the floor of a dark, dirty, leafy garage, utterly alone and thinking about the innocence in rabbits’ eyes and God, begging to know what to do anymore. “Please, tell me what to do,” I mutter to the sky, but, “Oh, I suppose too much of that is heard every night. I am selfish, unoriginal…” and no doubt a little girl crying out for love while sitting in the dark amongst ten bicycles in Minneapolis is too silly for the big guy to consider. Something scuttles by within inches of my crossed legs. Too large to be a mouse, too small to be a rat (“so what about this mousy rat I know who walks about pretending to be a man?”). In ten years here I have not seen any rodent that was not a squirrel– not in my house, not in this garage, not in the yard. But this life is not significant, this life has no meaning; it is just the first time in ten years there happened to be a crying person here to disturb such a creature at 1am. I compose myself, I have to compose myself before going inside.

1.20am: One friendly bartender in the face of things, one lonely friend resurrecting himself from his own heartaches, thirty slowly passing pages, two cigarettes, two drinks, six to nine murders and three slippery hours later, I am writing. I am not dead, I did not die. Tomorrow, like every day, I shall begin life anew. Free of an old chimera, but without guidance– pure, innocent, perhaps even divine– if only I’d met the eye of a warm, brown, four-footed creature, whose heart raced as he ran because he was in an unusual situation, at an unusual time, for unusual reasons.

1.18am: I step out of the garage into the parking lot, and take a look around in full moonlight. Everything is still, I am totally alone. I cover my mouth with my hand.

Scene 8

Current mood: exhausted

Scene 8: In the Bath
Today I experimented with the best way to hold water in my hands, so that if, perhaps, I find myself in a situation in which I must leave an injured or ailing lover behind in search of that which he so desperately needs to recover but that can only be found an unknown distance away, I might know how to bring to him the greatest possible amount of it. I held my hands in all sorts of configurations, believing that there must be a position by which the water would not quickly drain through my fingers; but there were none as good as the traditional method of cupping the hands together turned up and tilted at a certain angle so that most of the water would remain collected in the palms. Even so, it is not likely I would be able to return that unknown distance before the water would seep out completely between the two hands where they are held tightly together, or through the space created by the joints of my thumbs as they are curved in this way. This would not do. I considered the shape of the ear instead: if I held my head sideways… (the water would have to be flowing as if from a faucet…) an ear could hold a certain amount… if he would have the strength to hold his lips to the rim of this tiny cup… Certainly this was a desperate consideration, but it was the one through which the obvious and ideal solution was able to reveal itself, as if it had been until then only obscured by panic: my mouth, I can fill it up and shut it tight. I could close my mouth indefinitely, hold it in—all of it. Nothing will be lost if I can just keep my mouth closed. And when I make it back over that certain distance, I’ll then be blessed with the experience of holding my lover’s head in my hands (which are now free to perform this movement) and, bringing my mouth carefully to his, he would be revived by such an exchange—filled, as it is, with the very substance necessary for the existence of every living thing.

Minneapolis 05.04.07 llh:(trl)Currently reading:
Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham

Scene 7

Scene 7: “Oblivion owns me, death alone loves me.”
I arrived by train in Moss, just south of the capitol on Oslofjorden, slightly after the first crack of dawn. He was walking quickly along the platform, a late summer morning dressed just the same as he was the previous fall when I’d met him back home. I let go of my belongings and ran to meet him with arms outstretched. I felt ridiculous, but it seemed like the right thing to do; he understood completely: we had not seen each other for three months. During this time, he was making a lot of money living in the capitol city as a journalist for one of the national papers. He took me home to his parents, who were just sitting down to breakfast before work. Mor was a grade school administrator, and far was a labour organizer. The brother, referred to by the other family members as “the capitalist,” was visiting on holiday from a post in Denmark. Before the day was through, I would be accused by my kjæreste of being secretly attracted to and more in love with the brother than I was with him, and that I’d just travelled 4,500 miles to see him again demonstrated nothing. We had a rousing political debate over breakfast, this family and I, in two languages—and despite my effort to obey a sense of modesty and good manners, I expressed myself passionately in opposition to the capitalist’s views. My normally outspoken man observed quietly. He was suspicious. Mother, however, was impressed, and decided I was worthy of her more radical son’s intention to marry me. I was, at the time, completely unaware that I was being submitted to such an examination, and it wasn’t until he proposed in the fall that I discovered what it meant that she had begun to knit me a sweater. After the family members had all left the house, we were in his childhood bedroom. By 8.30 in the morning, we’d napped, I’d seen baby pictures from a shoebox in the closet, and I’m sure we must have made love—we hadn’t seen each other for three months. I sat on the floor against the wall, looking at him on the bed asking me what I wanted to do next. I didn’t care. “I don’t care,” I said. I was just happy to see him after all this time. “I’m just happy to see you after all this time,” I said. He was dissatisfied. For the last three months, he’d been looking at his native land, his hometown, his capitol city, with new eyes. My beautiful, simple, stupid, ignorant eyes. There was a great storehouse of information in his mind he was waiting a long time to share with me—and I sat there, on the floor, against the wall, and I looked at him on the bed after we must have made love and said, “I don’t care, I’m just happy to see you again after all this time.” He was suspicious and dissatisfied. By 8.30 in the morning, he was angry with me. We hadn’t seen each other for three months. Some years later a work of his authorship will be accepted for preservation in the Library of Congress. He had thought about something that summer which he wrote about it in the fall. After ten years, I still have not dared to read what that something might have been.

Minneapolis 07.06.07  llh:tef

Currently watching:
Såsom i en Spegel
Through a Glass Darkly (1961)

Scene 6

Scene 6: A Shallow Pool
It has not actually ever been a mystery to me why he has always fought looking at me directly. So again we began circling the room in-step, he glancing quickly out of the corner of his eye, taking mental photographs in polaroid for later study, to learn just where to position himself so that we should always be situated limb-for-limb in mirror effect. Perimeters, a reflection, the nearly invisible twine of a trembling marionette. Appositionally he sulks along the walls of this circular room, his sweeping ghostly movements keeping him situated specifically so as to arouse the greatest degree of intimacy without bearing any responsibility for its consequence. He says we are like magnets, and as such, I am required to be drawn without a word of invitation to the bank of one out of ten thousand lakes, but only when the sun glitters upon the surface for a most particular and beautiful moment; we are that poetic, and if I mistake a smoke signal for a cloud, or silence for silence, there is hell to pay. I’m tiring. I just want to close my eyes and lay down awhile with his arms around me. I want to quit this 24-hour dance marathon; I want to go somewhere I’m not being taken by this endless running on a fragile, imbalanced, squeaking hamster wheel. Help me, doctor, I think I’m an opheliac– please tell me there’s a cure. “Do you not know, that across his window there is a pond, and across this pond there is a willow tree from which to fall? Have you not yet learned that by use of elevated language he has disguised this pond as a lake, and when he told all but you that he was sure you would be there, the only valid interpretation of what was left unsaid is that one of you had to be willing to die. He is that poetic, but are you?” Once more, for old times’ sake, I come away from the outside wall and step toward him into the center of our room, shattering his carefully controlled movements, tearing the strings that guide us limb-for-limb. He is going to punish me for this. I lay down with lifeless hands and deadened eyes, and when he feels sure that I have drowned, he wrenches himself from the sly edges of his private dreams, unfastens his clothing, and fucks me most profoundly.

Found October 2007, Minneapolis llh:trl
First: 06.28.07
Final: 01.02.08 

a bedtime story

Current mood: try, try again

There is a suicide-in-waiting occurring on the sidewalk just outside my slightly open window. You see, it is near summertime, so I risk inviting to the screen the exposed penises of suburban men who take on the responsibility of teaching one of us here that this is what men are, and the other of us here that this is what women are for. Two weeks ago, a friend found a pizza cutter under the window behind the bush; those two I chased off before they got in to my kitchen. But that was what happened two weeks ago. Tonight, what we have instead is an endless string of coarse words from a hoarsed voice that is fighting for its dignity, and losing it at the same time. “How dare you…” she says, and, “… I have always…!” and, further, “How can you say…?!” There is no responding voice, the men are always silent in these matters. His hands in his pockets, taking advantage of her rage to inconspicuously remind himself of the existence of his testicles. He doesn’t care, his rolling eyes say as he follows traffic on its way to a better Friday night. She shouts, he checks a new text message. He has no edgewise he’d like to get in. Perhaps tomorrow when he wants to get laid again. Her small purse on a skinny string flings about as her grievances are aired to the universe, look at her, isn’t that such a passionately feminine gesture? I think I kind of despise her. She isn’t getting back in this car, his unmoving ass says as he smushes it up against the driver’s side window. “I have never…” and, “Why can’t you just for once…!” and, further, “[unintelligible]?!” until we have contact. The precious vehicle has been stricken, 1-2-scream-sob-choke, scream-sob-choke, scream-sob-choke and heaving shoulders counting off the most painful moments of her life. And I imagine myself, it wouldn’t take but a few steps, entering into the night in wordless approach and turning her toward me, wrapping my arms around her shoulders, petting her hair, and absorbing her grief like a sponge. Maybe I love her in this moment. “Shh-sh, please, don’t even think of it, shh, live for now, live for now…” I feel like an unkind, perhaps even bad person for remaining in my place, but they are talking calmly now, and I can hear him too.

Scene 5

Scene 5: In Expectation of a Letter
The pages are slightly foxed and honey-coloured and the characters are pressed down hard and dark into the paper so that the words can be felt with fingertips. A black, heavy, noisy, iron machine made this sturdy object full of delicate sentiments one hundred and seventy-five years ago. I have had the book fifteen years, and while there are four sets of initials or names penciled in on the paste-down and fly-leaves, I still haven’t decided whether my name placed among them would disgrace this precious thing. Only O. J. Radusch, in 1895, had the confidence to set his name in ink, and opposite the woodcut illustration of the author himself, who, on page forty-six, said this:
 
 
The hour draws nigh, a few brief days will close,
To me, this little scene of joys and woes;
Each knell of Time now warns me to resign
Shades where Hope, Peace and Friendship all were mine;
Hope, that could vary like the rainbow’s hue,
And gild their pinions as the moments flew;
Peace, that reflection never frown’d away,
By dreams of ill to cloud some future day;
Friendship, whose truth let childhood only tell;
Alas ! they love not long, who love so well.

– Byron, excerpt, 1805

 
While the one I love recedes slowly through the dark-blue deep, I behold these words with eyes that mourn, yet cannot weep.

Minneapolis 05.13.07  llh:trl

Scene 4

Current mood: disappointed 

Scene 4: A Self-Sainted Man
There is a man who scuttles cyclically around his neighbourhood feeding on scraps thrown to him by characters of both well-meaning and ill-ambitioned dispositions. He fills his belly shamelessly with the kinder offerings, and, thus satisfied, snuffs his nose and bares his teeth. When a rancid taste enlivens his otherwise insensitive tongue, he pricks up his ears and dances in an effort to solicit better fare. “Oh isn’t he cute,” say passersby with dismissive pats to the head. “Someone should take him home.” It is clear no one wants full responsibility for this indiscriminate animal which carries his tail between his legs. “Pity,” said one woman. “Everyone deserves a companion.” To her he gave his best performance, and with dark, wet eyes and shaking hindquarters he whimpered, “My lady, I have followed you around these streets from one autumn to another. Don’t bad dogs deserve a chance to be good?” He could smell it on her that she possessed an honest belief that there is no such thing as a bad dog, so when he dared her to take him in, she conceded with a sense of duty to care for him. After a short while, the man came to learn that, though it may be often bitten, her providing, petting hand would not come to be withdrawn. One might say it was her generosity itself that taught him to become more aggressive, so there was little solicitude in the shaking heads toward the unfortunate event occurring one day whereupon the man went straight for the throat. The woman collapsed to the ground, bleeding just like a human being. Her effluence gave off a sickening odour, but more offensive still was that in such posture, with tear-stained cheeks she insisted even so, “There is no such thing as a bad dog.” Before trotting away in search of new trashbins, the man paused to lift a leg and soak the woman’s wound with a hot urination. “Costumed in righteousness,” said an observer to this scene, “fools taken in by fools, humility is a two-headed beast.”

Minneapolis 03.03/05.12.07 llh:ics
 
Currently reading:
The Seventeen Traditions by Ralph Nader