carolina christmas.

i'm a fleet-footed jack-in-the-box wearing a skirt for a dress and catching beads in my hair, taking pictures with a fake cardboard camera and writing love letters to everyone i know.

and these ones who irk me, who charm me, they're all voices that echo from faraway cities like firewood promises and flat-screen memories to taunt me with taut impossibilities - either that, or beautiful tangle-headed fools who only show up late at night to fill the gaps, teeth and nails and tumbling winks till morning. (except you, you like molasses pulling me into saccharine immobility against my will, creeping into my head at inopportune times.)

but you know for once it's nice to avoid all these cursive spiderweb temptations, to come back to a drafty southern house with creaky floorboards and murky faucets and all the food i can eat. these accents are knocking into my brain and i think they've got it right.

i want to be like 5 years old again, climbing trees and skinning knees, immersed in the fairytales in my head. (i was always the hero, dancing in with my magic wand to break heads & break hearts; there was none of this aortic confusion.)

portland, los angeles, las vegas, texas.

in the middle of a week straight on greyhound busses.

back in portland,

mixed feelings.

yellow walls.

some days almost everything feels like deja vu. shivers up my spine for no reason; glances over my shoulder.

i'm headed for the west coast tonight, for slightly warmer temperatures and smaller cities and kindred souls, but this weekend i've been remembering the reasons i stay here too.

i'm trying to choose which songs i'll be putting on repeat over the next three days on the bus, and my knees are beginning to ache in anticipation.

my rainy sleeves and his cheekbones. squeaky guitar strings. half-burned wicks. gravely headphones and giant wooden forks. the reason no one ever really needs a reason.

bruised ears.

soda water cyanide - the sweet taste of
yr carbonated fate. the bubbly anticipation
of fingernails chewed down to the flesh, &
the sound of gentle popping, like
those powder-filled papers we hurl
at each other's feet in the summer.

lisa robertson, respun.

ECLOGUE EIGHT: ROMANCE
Nancy pins them to the glass:

ROARING BOY #1 is skinny and pure as the bitter white heel of a petal. Spent lupins could describe his sense of his mind as a great dusky silky mass. Yet a feeling of being followed had taken his will away. In an age of repudiation he wouls exude sullen indolence and reveal his lace. He could be said to profoundly resent his inability to conrol his desire for an impenitent extrovert. When he closes his eyes he asks: Shall I be sold up? Am I to become a beggar? Shall I take to flight? He is skinny and pure as a calling.

he is skinny and pure as a calling. (his dusky eyes keep pulling me back to his bed in a cycle of multiplicities; he radiates reluctant anger and juts his lips on command, well-versed in taut reenactments. destruction in reverse through the curving lens of a pixelated plastic permutation; all the ways we intertwine to contradict our solitudes; how to compress the air that holds us so firmly apart and upright and over and over it's the same story - is this all we are? warmth in the dark. let me show you my heartbeat / yr breath on my hair / a hint of guilt in the way we slam doors and stumble down rusty stairs of retribution in the morning.)

ROARING BOY #2, boy with the volute heart of a girl, names the faithless toss of an abandoned guess exactitude. He gives his thought with the sinuous rigour of a cut silk garment, lives looking at the sky, waiting for the specificity of a pleasure whose deferral is underwritten by a constriction of memory, the violent stammering of a repressed structure. The planes of his face point to the exquisitely even surface of a late antique life. He has begun by setting aside holy dread. Deferral is his darling.

deferral is his darling. the scent of coffee curling in the air like a song, and he's scribbling / he's waiting / he's recomposing his projections with fingers wrapped tight around my wrist to feign some closure. & he says he only believes in spontaneity & he only believes in chance revelations, but i'm pretty sure he cribbed it all from some hollywood script, darkened theater, dilated pupils, heart racing, scribbling / waiting / recomposing in sharpie on his forearm.

ROARING BOY #3, rather than submitting to the trial of action, wants deeply to possess an opinion, then having possessed, to distribute it with maximum efficiency. Since the spectacle of luxury pleases him in others, he embarks on a gradual (to the point of imperceptibility) inflation of his own verbal style, and a concurrent, almost compensatory, deflation of his person. He is both febrile and decorous: a foolish hooligan of sardonic emphasis.

he is both febrile and decorous: a foolish hooligan of sardonic emphasis. he chews glass just so he can bleed on my tablecloth & flash a toothy red grin. he is in search of nothing and everything, and his every glance feels like a neat construction of redistributed keyboard solos. our masochistic malleabilities; our careful collisions of circumvential derision, again and again. this pretense of indifference and these dangerous games of turquoise revenge. dead batteries are a tragedy of historic proportions.



XEclogue, by Lisa Robertson.

(italics are hers. not is mine.)

i quit!

i regret to inform you that i'm incapable of completing even just one more final paper, cuz every weighty phrase i conjure up to explain these literacies and motivations sends me off on hallucinations of syllables and syntax, ruthless combinations, all the ways we unlearn to express ourselves to make everything as syrupy sweet nonsensical as possible. do you see the problem here? they're requesting clarity, and interpretive wisdom, but i've got revelations of vagueness stuck in my head.

salt stains on my boots.

my skirt is shorter than yr patience.

justifications

you are a little bit of nothing at all.
i am overrun with distractions.
we are for the most part an invention,
nothing but attractively ordered cells.
irrational, and inexplicable, and
inherently false. so there.

watered down.

sometimes i wish i didn't have yr eyes
so i would know i didn't need them
once and for all.
sometimes i wish for dissolution:
cats' knees and fishes' tongues and
bags bigger than the gnawing cavern
of my appetite. these nights of
wet shoulders, pierced perspicacities,
the way it tastes when you lose yr umbrella.
"it" being all the circumvention
i can swallow, "it" being
that overexertion, and those
loose, easy hips. he says i've got
cheeks like no one else, but all i can think about
is how nervous i get when she sees me
staring.



november critical mass:

the big queasy.

stuck out my tongue and i
tasted the sun.
detroit's always sounded like armageddon
to me, so i guess by contrast this place
is a gumdrop - here, at least,
time's moving slowly; here, at least,
the broken houses and cracked grins
can wrap me up in a banana peel embrace
while that fiddler just keeps on playing
magic spell tunes.

tell me that you love me, she says
i need to tell you something; tell me
that you love me.
and everyone's shifting in their seats and everyone
is waiting for calamity. catastrophic
plastic chairs, & frogs
raining from the sky.
absinthe green and fire engine red and
it's all made in kentucky these days.
his disappointed eyebrows.
you know how it goes.
round and round and backwards baseball caps.
do not accept packages from strangers.
venus contracting, let me
take care of yr project. you wonder
why i called, and i wonder
how many lovers' voices i have to hear in one day
before i start to get queasy (all these hearts
i've swallowed are threatening to stick in my throat)
did i ever tell you about that dream?
i hope not, cuz i don't think you'd understand.
i'd just like to be invisible, basking
in the glow of yr warm hands and long limbs,
yr fairy eyes and tangled hair,
slow smiles to make me shiver.

all of you, and all of me, and what's wrong
in the end, with multiplicity?
both coasts are so far away. i see
yr feet jumping up and down behind that airplane
but it's no call for alarm, just a reminder
of all the reasons we close our eyes
when we kiss.

i hate new orleans.

this was supposed to be my vacation without temptations; my two day foray into family space where i never choose to linger; my brief reluctant return to a city i've always found too polarized, too dirty to interest me. so why do i eye the help wanted signs in the windows, why do i smile picturing myself in each house for rent? maybe this time there's a wealth of magical characters drifting into each encounter, and maybe this time, after chicago, everyone is so friendly. maybe this time i've found the right coffee shop full of dirty carnies, and maybe i'm walking so i don't look like a tourist. and maybe with my bike-biased eyes these flat streets are a-calling, so beautiful, so possible, so tempting. dammit, for once this was supposed to be a trip i could return from without regrets and what-ifs. i hate new orleans. no, really.

films about portland.

we spin legs on pedals till one breaks off, and then we limp a little further still. and to tell the truth we forget all about you till the phone rings, but that's not enough to shove you back to the front of this long line of regressors, list of tasks in hand, grinning like fools each time. and it's not enough to force a geography onto this humdrum pulse of mine, but it's enough to make me reconsider. poor broken piles of parts and gears on the living room floor. rainy wet streets and bridges and rivers and all those dresses i used to wear. yr doppelganger walked into my bakery today, fairy eyes and hobo hat and a spine that made me shiver. the stale scent of chain-smokers and the slow creep of yr smile. we are turning into ghosts and reflecting onto everyone but ourselves. i'm turning my back on all these whispers and working real hard for concrete projections instead.




sadie hawkins race:

this is not something

i usually do.

dreaming of a collision & i wake just in time to find myself smashed amidst a static confrontation of voices and curtains and strange bedsheets beneath my cheek, something secret solitary drip drip dripping into my veins, bright lights bleeding into my eyes till i shut them off for the blissfully ignorant embrace of imaginary demolishments instead.

i smell like a rosebush. no, not that part: the ground beneath, warm & earthy & more alive. my hand blooming bruises and my thigh fading dusky purple. i'm high on this ache in my sides and this fever in my eyes; i'm tracing the contours of the way you used to stride across the room, before you slipped into a shuffling pout to match all the rest.

it's rising and it's rising and it's rising, and soon these walls will start crawling. you say let's play hooky and we will enjoy the fall. i don't want to choose just one, that's all i have to say.

fall down.

and i could write a library about cities but i think i'd rather have just one book about how it feels to know only like five people and to be calm and quiet all the time. (sometimes.) cuz you know how we love these giant sprawling contexts and the feel of asphalt spinning under our feet, but i wonder if our whiskey-soaked salutations do more than stick us in line sometimes. what about dirt and grass and sitting still? what about rows of dull (so real) houses with cracking paint and crooked doors and beautiful rainy streets? the scenery blurs anyway when life's such a rush, such a trip. i want to fall backwards and stare at the stars with room to wiggle my toes, with no commitments (no parties!). really mostly i just want to take off these poor tattered shoes for once, ever at all, even when i sleep.

halloweenie

the weather channel.

these days we try and act like we're
mannequins on zip lines -
some things seep into yr skin
with these winter winds, i guess.
i see figures out of the corner of my eye but when i
whirl to find them they vanish
into my own crimson reflections.

no more shortcuts, no more
leaps and bounds and dismissals.
he called me to come taste the sunny day like
a drop of molasses sweet and sharp and slow
but i was on my feet for ten hours
dipping and bowing like
a marionette instead.

i crave this anonymity though i've been
bright-locked and bright-eyed for too many months
and i sort of just want them to stop saying hello.
you know how the city as a mechanosphere of
diagrammatic assemblages
keeps us sliding into each other
in daisy chain circles at night.

we used to marvel at our eyelashes but now i just
fall asleep. did i ask
yr permission or yr name?
please tell me how to drift across
an imposed terrain till i stumble on
my own dragging shoelaces and
crash slam fall into a mouthful of dirt.

these days we try and act like we're unstoppable, unstartable -
mannequins on zip lines but
i think it's time to smash some mirrors
& leap laughing into our seven years' bad luck.

fumbling distractions

i'm not even old enough to drink but i'm too old to drink these days when i lie down and the room starts spinning. let's just ride all night instead till the sun shines vaguely behind this grey sky backdrop and we can jump into crunchy piles of temptation and autumn leaves behind the veggie stand while the one in glasses just shakes his head. i think i've got crumbs in my hair and ice between my toes. i can't believe yr married. i'm ready for new staircases leading nowhere, to landings with locked doors and haunted verticality.

no, like, really, it's night after night of ripped tights and twirling, and it's easy to forget the taste of lined paper, needle in hand. dustbin treasures and yr puppy dog grin in the mirror. we spin gears and back away. (what are you going to be for halloween?) i'm ready for ashtray grimaces and tired feet and endless highways and nothing but bright colors and luck to keep me safe.

eyerolls.

and when i jolt awake in class mumbling in tongues, when i wake from sticky fragments of ludicrous dreams to find myself shivering on a hard wooden chair staring at slides, and outside it's snowing but blue-skied and those staircases are all imploding, and i'm wondering why everyone looks like ghosts with webbed hands and teeth to spare. almost everyone. let's all dress like sailors and sing chanties to these vaulted halls while those young kids drink toasts to our irreverent twisting limbs. you took off yr glasses and i thought you were something new. (but you can't fool me with that combover). shriveled insect guts and the generational divide. transposed sunny days. this codeine keeps me up and this caffeine gets me down, cotton balls and numb fingers and graffiti on the walls. we want to see stars together, fake rippling stars, but my one condition is you must clear me a path through that ketchup delusion we pretend we can't see. (i keep studying my toes, and yr wrapped in a shower curtain whispering lines of whitman to yr windowsills) time to decode, dear, time to unload.