Preludes

____i. sexuality.
a russian doll i have crowded most of myself into it. watered it.
two parts loneliness, three parts the feel of eyelids on dry lips.
if i unpack it i find cold bedsheets. i find the air as it is every 3am.
its heart is memory ; (her heavy hair fallen on my face)
______(with open, dilated eyes, our mouths kissed in my car)
each beat is the sensation of skin reverberating.

it has incorporated into itself pink bras. yellow couches. white feet. oriental lilies.

three parts of every four are just silent eyes- patient, silent eyes.
__its blood is a two-way-dream: imaginary stilletos , hunger-pangs , every first hello's heavy
__possibility , fantasy's sharp sting; and the quietly fading, peaceful blurring of memory as it picks yesterday's flowers.

it is my abdomen, tensed against lips. muscular contractions resisting. wrists pinned behind heads. humid pants. it is the colour of rum. lip marks on plastic cups. paralysed motion: what is the word for desperation?

half its luggage is saliva cooling on my neck. hairbands lost under beds. navels. elbows. clavicles.
single words orphaned from their sentences, little treasures. broadcast ceaselessly over Sunday brunch and midnight drives home. ambient fossils and little hooks. scraps of our stories, and their eroded contexts.

its parts drift into one another: every humiliation's pivot , every defeat's redemption. it pulsates between minor massacres, the electrcity of pubic hair, squandered futures. unpacked it is notebooks. giftwrap. icecream. distances not even memory can surmount- and the exhausted voices of tired throats trying to cross them over telephones.

an avalanche of our days. a nuclear holocaust in our pocket. blonde hair in sunlight. smiling black holes. venetian lace. gasps. spasms. the immutable seasons of our tinkering humanity.


____ii. prayer.
out of cold hands, through the backalley shortcut, take the train awhile, stand in the sunlight it's worth noticing, three dinners and a breakfast later-
__whatever cards you're still holding, wallets and purses and hands hidden in pockets, waiting the rain out at busstops, medicated and misunderstood, smiling hope into every prayer,

out of flaccid pillows, ignoring the locked entryways, biding time through the backstreets, smoke through sometimes boredom, look both ways before crossing, take your coffee to go and smile at Rolphie,
__despite the din of memory, whispered slanders of heavy ghosts, rest your knees- sit on the parkbench, casually or clumsily, ran or stumbled, look at us, out of calenders and black-holes and broken-backed wheelchairs, have emerged. spat, cursed, prayed and tongue-kissed our way out of our smalltimes, shanty hometowns, mispronounced last names.

out of quiet voices, take the ferry across, pay the man his due early-or-late makes no difference, follow the tracks the maps haven't been redrawn yet, lost coats and broken umbrellas, clinging to the hem of robes or the fumes of purple smoke or pills in your pocket making a noise every step you take, have fabricated a tinkle of happiness to read by through the night-
__whatever cloud you're chasing brother, sister, friend, i hope it is a comforting silence you find. consider the price we have payed: youth and transport, rent and alcoholism, backseat blow-jobs, time, drip-coffee, freshly-shaven made-up high-heeled school-uniformed painted-nails waxed-back, failed and dropped-out-of, punched and talked-out-of, every conceivable insomnia paranoia annorexia...

out of solitary breakfasts we have emerged.
take a step back, my first breath i'm inhaling a rainbow.

[insert emotion here]

Mark Rothko


i can feel it crouched down behind every pill. biding its time. patient. it's the strangest thing, like when you close your eyes and the black changes shape and form and colour... thoughts can do that too- emotions. just tingle across your conscience like shadows. like distant sounds. clouds you don't have to deal with. i can sense motions and activity. it's in there somewhere, just walking around.

on the outside i'm a little hazy. unable to assign words to feelings- unable to discern the feelings themselves. i don't laugh very easily. don't get angry for no reason and shout anymore. moderation is a strange gulp to have drunk. after breakfast i sit on a hillock and watch the ocean for a while. i have books but i don't read them. don't think. sit and sense the sun on my face. sense my legs, under denim, being warmed. occupying my body takes diligence. i try and notice the whitewashed colours. listen to the sounds, they are soo distinct. there is only silence in my head, no distractions... all i have left to do is experience moments. sit inside them and be enveloped in them. interact with them however i can. i try and archive my visceral observations. my senses.

time and space are troublesome concepts for me. constantly shifting and morphing. sometimes minor twitches, othertimes barren infinitudes. i stare at the waves and try to sense time. feel it travelling through me. try to feel it, like nibbly lip-kisses, or grapes beween my fingers, or my skin losing its elasticity. i cannot find a way to record this. it merely passes through my spread fingers. i am not saddened by my failures. at least it doesn't feel like sadness. it is a sort of shadow inside my head. a sort of ripple that's transmitted across the surface of an otherwise still lake. i am removed from these things. it does not feel like a heaviness. it is more like... someone breathing softly- but that is all. having no effect on you whatsoever. merely the sound of someone breathing, to themselves, over there somewhere. somewhere about the place behind a curtain. i see the shadow of these breaths. cloud like things. puffs maybe.

it is hard to write this. it is not interesting to me. thoughts and feelings that don't relate to tangible 'things' are not interesting to me. clarity comforts me. solid geometries. things that make 'sense' and have solutions. i feel robotic, and terribly proud to be. i exist somewhere where misunderstandings are called scalene triangles; and boredom is an obtuse angle. conversations are geometric sequences. hand-holding follows (generally) Maxwell's equations. people exist in this haze of missing self-awareness. i stand apart from them, trying to pick their locks so i can reduce them back into consistent forms. back into constituent shapes. the right things said in the right sequence with the right attitude. calm their insecurities. entice their better natures. whisper a smile unto their face. lock picked. now i can see who this person is underneath the electrical storm.

i am soo tired. (here that is modelled by a classical pendulum).
i find it easy to speak about recision of contract due to breach of essential terms- and impossible to describe first-kisses, or humiliation, or... it's 2am, it feels no different from 4pm. i cannot tell if the room is cold or if it's just me.

disassembly is such a pleasant word.

Sun 4:06 AM

Twine, Kristyn Janae

it's long after the amphetamines have stopped working , the clarity is gone , the silence. i notice the huff of my own breaths, and my heart's less intense , skin doesn't tingle. the fake breasted, cold faced strip club dancers are gone. the girls in the streets, down the mall, with the fake blonde and high-heels. the cold creeps in . mcdonald's wrappers . and cleaners with shaven heads and bushy goatees pressure hosing the sidewalks . the voices have stopped , the thinking ahead and planning the next thing to say. the banter has stopped . the distant eyes , the red eyes , the unhappy looks . the bumps as you walk . the light burps- the gaseous taste of redbull . the frequent, bored escapes to the bathroom where you wash your face and are surprised by the feel of it . the noisy cars are gone , the streets are full of zombies and drunks and stumblers stumbling home . shouting and moving in the cold , their breaths hanging in the air as condensation a few moments . the taste of lips is gone . my fingers smell like women's saliva . in the distant some youths scream under a yellow streetlight . police officers with bored, unhappy faces stroll past . the printed t-shirts move through the cold air. chubby girls with barefeet move along, heels in their hands . the loud sound of men laughing, the pats on the back are gone . the women's hugs, the lips lost in hair, trying to find ears is gone . the feel of bars against your stomach , the thumping noise of sound-systems seems soo far away . my own voice seems so distant, misplaced in the cold somewhere . kicked along like an empty can . the man peeing against the wall is gone . the young boy with the closed eyes, face to pavement spitting out a sickly white , who knows where he is . the blonde guy with the cut on his face , the three girls with the ugly laugh on the streetcorner . the ID cards are put away . the cabs drive too fast , swatting at them like butterfly nets .

i arrive at the water, soaked in moonlight and urine-tinged streetlights . i feel comforted by its sound. repetitive. perennial. the sand must be soo cold right now. consistent rhythm. unwaving like electroclash fashions and the club-of-the-week flyers . i feel defeated. destroyed. like i have lost a great many things. i cannot remember the laughs. i'm scared to speak. i won't dare eat. this is a terrible way to have died.

experiments with calibration: Day 4

____within the grasp of Thy hand Thou holdest the determined measures of all things.
________the Bab


the sound of the beach used to scare me. for the longest time. that subtle pounding seemed precarious. i stare out at it through the windshield. grass, trees, waves, field of blue, continuous line of the horizon, dark clouds. a couple of drops land on my windshield. i stare out, listening to the ocean, while he finishes reading. it's unimportant to listen i think. if you do you do, but if you don't... it's enough that those words are being said. mumbled or whispered or orated out loud. the air changes. the whole universe readjusts and notices you again. two children squeal as they go down the path on their bikes. a few seconds later: two mothers power-walking side by side.

i like the colour of grass on overcast days. i like the colour of everything on overcast days.

it never stops surprising me how these words grow suddenly vast when you feel small(est). how the sounds suddenly become soo intense that even as i mumble breathlessly i struggle to speak. almost cry. how incredible it all seems when you realise you are nothing. when you spent half the night reading about postsynaptic receptors and indirect noradrenaline stimulation and pharmacokinetics. controlled substances. issues with dependence. symptoms and causes and differential diagnoses and tried to imagine your own brain buzzing with these little chemical flies and flickering on and off in the soon-to-be-morning hours as little bursts of electricity kept you functioning. (and you are terrified)

i exhale. lick my lips- my lips are always dry. mouth too. i drink more water than a blue whale. there in the corner, now that i'm sober again i see my old self sitting, slouched against a wall. he looks beat. unshaven. he smiles at me. it is such a tender moment, like seeing an old friend. all is forgotten. him and his bastard self-sabotage. his rambling neurotic blahblahblah. his shaking hands and his phobia of dark rooms and silent nights and wanting to touch every woman's lips. it's like loving everything you hate about your sister. we embrace and i kiss him on the forehead. (and his paranoia. his fixations. narcicissm. his week-long zombie can't-do-anything see-anyone marathons). we stare into each other's eyes and smile. how you been old friend? neglected no doubt. i'm worried about us you know. how we're gonna get through all this, sort it out ya know? he smiles. for once he's the calm one.

____Whatever God hath willed hath been, and that which He hath not willed shall not be.
________the Bab

it never stops surprising me how welcoming these words are. how even after ignoring them for months... rebelling agianst them and pretending they don't exist and turning and walking the other way when you saw them coming, how willing they are to smile at you and take you back. and where else can a small(est) man hide if not there? where else will i and my loud.noisy.self-hating doppelganger go? who will smile at me and hold me and brush aside curtains so i can sit and stare at oceans?

i've only slept three hours. my eyes sting. i think i had two little tins of tuna yesterday. coffee. i have evolved beyond food. beyond sleep. when was it, must have been yesterday (seems soo far away... it is soo far away when you never sleep), i lay on the grass by the lake and stared at the clouds. when the sun finally came out i swooned. delighted. i am soo sensual these days. constantly focussing on what my body is doing. tightenings and dilations and tingles and clarity. i'm keeping a mental journal of the evolving world. also i flipped through a dusty book, read this, and realised how good it is to be human. (whatever the hell that means).


SOME TREES

____These are amazing: each
____Joining a neighbor, as though speech
____Were a still performance.
____Arranging by chance

____To meet as far this morning
____From the world as agreeing
____With it, you and I
____Are suddenly what the trees try

____To tell us we are:
____That their merely being there
____Means something; that soon
____We may touch, love, explain.

____And glad not to have invented
____Such comeliness, we are surrounded:
____A silence already filled with noises,
____A canvas on which emerges

____A chorus of smiles, a winter morning.
____Placed in a puzzling light, and moving,
____Our days put on such reticence
____These accents seem their own defense.

__________John Ashbery

notapoem

phases, sundholmdesign


we are dancing machines. made perfectly for that. engineered so that i can gather your bare feet and ankles in my hands like water and lay them in my lap.

my heart rate can double in 8 seconds. in 30 i can grow wings and fly. i found a dream hidden in a book in the library. also, during a right-turn at midnight, under a yellow streetlight someone maybe had dropped it.

we are falling machines. collapsing from what? to what!. ears pricked for epiphanies, every hair i lose is another monday's worth of life. i'm swapping my body for time. (we are dreaming machines. (eyeslids soo beautiful when we sleep

piano keys feel like skin, and i have lonely fingertips. they are cold, like dipping my fingers in water, or falling into a mirror. what side of what!(?) did i wake up on?- dear You, yes, you there with the brown eyes, my goodness you are a miracle. here the day is constructed with bones. clean. geometric. we are floral-machines, i dream in tulip petal and geranium red. i dream in the kink of the stem.

we are machines that make love. produce it. daily discover it and invent it, rework it relive it, condem it, pardon it, fall into it, slide out of it, kiss the stars of it, hold the hair of it, rub our cheek against the cheek of it and pant our hot breath into its mouth in regular thrusts. we are machines that mine it and save it. dip our memories in it. fade colours and dim songs into it. kiss shoulders and hold the waists of it. scar our hearts for it, slam our heads into midnight walls for it. deliver letters demanding it. obsess with it and snort the powder of what we're left with of it.

time is a box. space another. i can determine everything in vector coordinates at last. i am quantised. (remember when we were the faintest idea inside someone's ear?, (remember when someone first found your name, sitting in a closet or nametag or over a first date i'm sorry but if it's a girl it must be Juliet. Ella. Sophia.

there are no more numbers to count our mistakes with, so i have thrown away the calenders. she has lonely eyes. her hands fidget. sssshhhhh my dear. here we are all equally regardless. if i can smile i can gasp my way out of this smalltime 2am sunday. we are hoping machines. an atomic furnace worth. (i lay on her lap and she plays with my hair before i leave).

here are my dark eyes. here my precocious hands. we are sinking machines. we are sunken cathedrals. we are fallen discoverers. we are nautical miles and light years. we are fossilized stones and precious metals. we are extinguished stars and deleted file-names. we are handwritten letters and neglected toe-nails. we are specks and hated neighbours and delicious cupcakes and bright eyes and undared-to-hope-for yearnings and oh my god we are soo much everything. we are water fights. we are deliverance machines. we are such allwonderfulloveliness.

and when i fell, out of my chest exploded daffodils and harmonicas and Aboriginal Dreamtime and the Caspian Sea.

dextroamphetamine (fun with drugs pt 1)

"what do you mean?"
"mom! it's weird. i used to pay a lot of money and feel really guilty to feel like this, now i get it for free and doctors encourage me to use it."
"you feel guilty?"


____yes. (7pm)
i'm driving home. i shouldn't have said that. yeah. shouldn't have. he did give me an odd look. totally shouldn't have said that. i think he was a bit unhappy. i don't know though. hard to tell. they had been drinking, so... maybe didn't even notice it. oh. damn. you forgot to print that tutorial stuff off. yeahyeah. soon as i get home. also trash is collected tomorrow. empty the bins. really, was it that funny a look? i think so. maybe. also, maybe not. could be anything. crap. dammit. you do this everyday.


____maybe. (8:30pm)
again? why not. i need to test this thing out. get used to it. also i'm tired. exhausted. i've gotten soo thin, i look kinda gross. whatever, who cares. what if cops pull you over again?, they could tell. you're catastrophizing again. she gave you that article to read about spotting 'negative thinking patterns'. right right. no reason for that. maybe i should just stay in. no. why? cause. i'm tired. exhausted. anything could happen. screw it. screw it? totally. another? yes. 2. go. now. water. no thinking, just go. [gulp]


____no. (9:15pm)
i'm staring at the road. red is red. there, in the distance. green now. easy. quiet. how quiet everything is. i slow down, she jumps in. "i want to tell you about how i'm feeling right now."
"ohh-k."
"it's soo quiet."
"here?"
"yes, but also, in my head. it's weird. it's quiet. it's just what it is."
"what iss it?"
"green is green. red is red. i am listening to you. also i am speaking. there is nothing else. everything else is distant. far away. it's the oddest feeling." [it feels like nothing's chasing me]
"that's good right?"
"other things too. my skin's tingling. if you touch me it's pleasant. touch me please."
[she pats my arm and leaves her hand there a little while]
"yes. like that. it's very pleasant. i feel... can i just say this: everything will be ok. did you know that?"
"that everything will be ok?"
"yeah. did you know?"
"oh my god you're soo weird right now."
"yesyes, i know, but, i just feel like... school is school. and... __stuff is stuff. red is red. i'm in this car. i'm listening to you. and i'm formulating my words. that's all that is happening.__ there is nothing else happening. i feel soo... __have you ever taken extasy or anything?"
"No Q!"
"ok. so you have nothing to compare it to. uhm. i love you. i'm resisting this strange urge right now to high-text (as opposed to drunk text) everyone i know and tell them i love them. i love everything.

_______i want to smile at everyone."
"that's great Q... right?"
"i dont' know. at first it felt wrong. like it did when i was younger. and... i only ever did it because of the way it made me feel. __it made me... the person i always wished i was. i loved everyone. i'd do anything for them. i smiled. everything would be ok. life was wonderful. i just wanted to dance and smile and... __just that really."
"so what's the problem?"
"well. at first i was thinking, oh no. i'm high. i don't know how it's happened but the universe has conspired to... get me high."
"aaaand?"
"do you think though, this is what occured to me, i was speaking to my mom, she just wanted to check-in and see how i was feeling with everything, and it occured to me... maybe this is what the rest of the world feels like all the time? like... in their heads it's this quiet. and they're... i'm just soo happy with myself sitting in this chair right now. i'm really happy you're with me. i'm... ok with it. __it's friday. great. whatever. __saturday's tomorrow- we'll deal with it tomorrow. you know?"
"i think so..."
"i'm saying, it's soo hard to judge what 'normal' is. i've only ever been inside my own head. it's noisy there. and everything is a little bit complicated, and problematic. and right now- it's not. and... i'm starting to think, for the first time in a forever long time, maybe this is the person i was always supposed to be. i was supposed to be as calm as i am now. __i'm a great person did you know that?"
[laughs] "Q!, of course you are!"
"i know that now. because right now... i swear,__ i searched within myself, i couldn't find a single bad intention. a single bad thought about any one or any thing. i'm just... i hope everything goes well for everyone. that's all i want. that's what makes me a good person. right now i'm soo happy about that. with it. me."
"this is... i don't know what to say."
"i think it's a problem of standards. what's the standard? i mean, who says what the norm is for normal-in-your-head-volume. no one can measure that."
...
...
"what are you thinking?"
"i'm not. i'm just looking. and absorbing the feeling of... wow"
"what?"
"it's contentment."


____definately not. (1:20am)
i get out my car. it's cold. it's a weird feeling. when i move into cold environments my skin tingles too- like i've been touched all over. i look at the moon. no thoughts. just... this white orb. some stars. this incredible white light. what silence. key in lock. door closes. door opens. lights on. if there are beasts i do not know of them. i see... chairs. carpet. how wonderful my room looks. soo pleasant. i change. the feel of softer fabrics against my skin, i feel suddenly at home. that immediate comfort. i sit. silent. unafraid. silent. silent. silent. my god.
______________________________________________how strange the sound

prayer (a notapoem)

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by
____madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn
____looking for an angry fix,

______Howl, Allen Ginsberg






untitled, sylvain-emmanuel



whatsoever God who makes too few blue roses: could it be that there is a reason for all those nights i tried to sleep bashing my head against the wall to stop the sound of mania (feed.f*ck.stab.murder.write.drink.hate.again.repeat.again.repeatrepeatrepeatrepeat) , for all this life feeling caged and animaled sharpening my teeth against prayer books hating you for alleverything it's your fault you bastard (and remorseless sadness with no (other) reason (but) to be, so that i seethe with anger every 12 minutes if i am left unhugged, and quite the opposite and my jaw tight like a beartrap dry mouth can't say yes or no when asked every time it hits- if you must know, it's like holding back gravity, like jumping off the diving board and willing yourself to suspend- you'd have an easier time stopping time than stopping the motion of my brain pulsates and speaks of itself and eats the little bones of chickens smiling the whole time and mouthing to me when no one else is looking: eff you boy, is there a reason ?

whatsoever God who knows there is nothing true except for gravity, and i feel soo much better knowing i am not terrible to have faught, but lucky to have occasionally won, and no matter what you say i maintain my shadow is darker than yours and bolder, and right in front of my eyes wanders off to join the others and kicks me in my sleep so i wake tight-fisted and contracted muscles in my side hurt and i put a pillow between my knees life feels like bone-on-bone action, is there a reason ? better yet a route off the trail, god dear goodness, dear reason for the unsubstantial misbelief that everything in life is holding me back from some tremendous wonderfulness i can't find touch grasp grapple with in the night as i stumble back to bed for more dreams - whatsoever God, who knows my stomach cramps if i think of breasts and the smell of women and their lips on my hands and their noises and sounds and she was always scared when i put my hand around her neck a f*cking reason _ after all this time ?

(and of course) i collapse after into a (nonerotic) exhaustion, quite unlike anyother thing, like recovering from fever, three times this week i've left the window of my car down i can't sit still can't eatdrink play half a scale on the piano and walk out with the lights on water running what was your name again?, yes i'm sorry yes you did just tell me, where what are we? yes yes collapse and soo tired, see everything as texture, like fabric, reasons for that too, and for creativity and this writing is soo blah blah blah bullshit i hate myself for it stop reading you bastards reasons for that too and if i just fall and disappear maybe on the other side of some needed rainbow (why is there never air, the next rainbow i find i'm going to inhale so my intestines are yellow and red blue green violet whatever) if i disappear maybe on the other side of

just quiet please.
just a moment's worth.