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.