glockenspiel toenails.

i don't know what to do on these days when i can't shut my mouth, trying frantically to clamp my lips or teeth down tight but my wicked tongue keeps getting in the way. this is no excuse. i thought maybe i'd gotten better, but i think it's closer to more extreme, higher highs and lower lows and these swinging arcs of our frustrated paths crossing. intersections are the more dangerous, after all.

that xylophone, i can feel it in my toenails. impatient tongue and cheeks. malicious and comforting belly. the gentle swoop from yr hip to yr waist. painting parties where we'll fling pigments past paper cranes. the intricate reverse origami of how i unfold around you / the world unfolds around us like a map of all the gnawing nudging misgivings and plans of this whole seething confusion.

fingers & words

too many cups of good, strong coffee, and i was happier than necessary about the shape of these grey skies and these beautiful wilting trees.

i like words like careless and wistful and soft. stumbling and fumbling and mournful. giddy, easy, familiar. transience. somnambulance. osculation.

my cut-up hands - my twice-zested thumb, index finger caught in the chain on my bike. other thumb slit open on the plastic packaging of a bar of mango-scented soap. other cuts from nowhere that startle me when they sting unexpectedly. black lines of grease in the folds of my palms. callouses from bikes and knives and espresso machines.

north carolina

blue peaked roofs. that's all i can remember. wobbly tables that quiver with every stroke of my pen. hardware stores just might be my favorite places in the world, especially after mornings spent snooping in bottom drawers for yr stashed love letters, tattered secrets, and every birthday card i ever drew for you.

there's a significance in our friendly obvious gestures. i get so tired of necessarily haughty eyes.

dark leafy greens, brown rice, deep red slices of beet. what could ever be more beautiful?

and the scent of all of our less-than-apprehensive unspoken thoughts. the lingering aroma of memories we'd like to fling at each other just to prove we can. the exhausting dialogues of new again every time, almost. (i can't believe she didn't recognize me, after all those years of muddy riverbanks and faces drawn on chins. i still know the winding road to her house, still remember that narrowly-missed head-on collision that one day.) and the way nothing could ever feel more natural than bikes on small town streets, the easy interludes of stoplights and left turns and weaving across lanes.

i think i was telling the truth when i told them i'd buy the house slowly from them, fill it with summers of lush tomatoes and juicy blackberries, winters of fireplace inertia and all the requisite cozy sweaters we can pile on. i wouldn't mind. really wouldn't.

winter here isn't even cold. winter here is a blissful clear sunny day and wide highways for me to push this heavy old bike along, standing to pedal up slow graceful hills.

vienna airport

vienna nights clinging to my hair and my boot soles. chocolate dissolving on my tongue. (these days i always crave my chocolate darker and darker, my garlic stronger, my blankets softer and more

and when we all go to dark places full of collared shirts and fog machines, when the music gets worse and worse but we just keep on dancing because it recalls those first few weeks and the growing familiarity of all our giddy limbs. (that's when i remember why sometimes it's better to just say yes.)

christmas came three weeks early this year, or so i'm told.

mittens changing into chocolate bars.

pickles changing into mint leaves.

what used to frustrate me about my lacking vocabulary is now a relief of some sort, the comfort of not having time to worry about what i say or to wonder at anyone's reactions because the mere fact of the words coming out in a correct and legible arrangement is a satisfaction enough. sometimes i say things i don't even want to finish, or i don't even need them to understand, and then when they want the end of my sentence or want to respond i'm not sure why we're not just letting it slide away. i hope i've learned more patience for stumbling accents in my own language, too. i want a german-speaking friend in chicago to let me stay in practice. i want to label everything in our house with these words i'd like to keep on my tongue.


i'm kind of scared, is what i mean, to leave this city and this language and all these new ways i was learning to align. i'm going to miss vienna.

earthquakes.

Merve and I are being uncharacteristically talkative this morning - not that we aren't friendly, usually, but more often than not we exchange a few niceties and then retreat to our rooms and our phone calls or our homework or our friends while we eat our meals, if we cross paths at all.

Today I stand over a pan on the stove while she toasts bread and sips tea, and we talk about our studies and our futures and all the Chicagoans' looming departure this weekend. She grimaces, hopes her new roommates will be as polite. I'm surprised to feel so touched that she thinks she will miss us, and I feel guilty for the few times I've muttered under my breath, in my room, about her friends' loud sing-alongs in Turkish late at night, or her frequent and noisy calls home.

We're both a little bit ready to go home, if even for a visit - she says some students she meets feel that they never want to return, forget everything that's good, but she thinks that's not right. I nod. Home is home.

I ask her about Istanbul, tell her that my friend Jared from my university in Chicago has just moved there. She is shocked. Did he choose that? She tells me it is very dangerous, very big, very beautiful. Eighteen million people. This is not a number I can wrap my head around.

I should visit my friend in Istanbul, she tells me. It is full of things to see, big old beautiful buildings, and cheap, of course, cheaper than Vienna and the Euro. It is half Asian and half European. You didn't know that?

No, I shake my head. All I know about Istanbul is a movie I saw once, on a big IMAX screen, about an earthquake there a while ago.

Her face falls a little. Oh, yeah. The earthquake was in 1999. Now it is my turn to be shocked. I had assumed that this, like most other disasters you read about from far away, was enough removed from me and everyone I know that it must have happened twenty, thirty years ago. Or longer. Somewhere untouchable.

I was at the collapse, she says. She shows me her scars, this little one on her knee, that one on her hand, and another that she gestures to beneath her clothes. Her family was not in Istanbul when it happened, she says, but two hours outside, at a marriage. A wedding at her grandmother's house. The house was destroyed; her grandmother and mother were killed.

We are quiet now, my eyes darting between her face and the floor because the things I'm saying I know are meaningless, and probably not even important at this point. I thought it could never happen, she says, I mean, you don't know what an earthquake is. I was fourteen. I knew what an earthquake was, but it is never something that can happen to you.

I think that's what we always think, until it happens to us, I say. I feel insufficient to this conversation; I wish almost that I had a tragedy to offer up in exchange, not to equal hers, and not to make anything better, but just to be able to say in any small way that I understand. We talk about hurricanes, the closest thing we get in my part of the world, and how scarily unpredictable this earth can still be, sending out storms and opening up cracks that can shatter all our confident cities.

Finally I take my plate off to my room to work on the essay I'm struggling to finish, and she gets up to wash her dishes. Have a nice day, she says. Yeah, I say, you too.

sticky fingers.

and now that you've left i just drink bottle after bottle of that pink wine you hate, cut out stencils of rabbits and carrots to spray around this painted city, ride my bike upriver, against the wind, until my fingers are too numb to move. (there is a comfort, too, in these recollections of my solitary self.)

the secret lies in fingers, and in toes.

all i want is to keep falling into the same armchair as you, hips twisted sideways and feet on knees. i want fake eyelashes so i can flutter them and send out warm teasing breezes, when i feel this perishingly full of love for this whole weird beautiful world.

when we paw through dirty piles of treasures at the flea market the harmonicas keep jumping out. when we slip on icy staircases it just means a better view of the sky.

(the air in this room is humming as if yr fingers had just left the strings.)

one more week.

i can't wait to get back to chicago where i can buy veggies at stanley's and falafel at sultan's and drink coffee from my french press and cook in our kitchen and sleep in a bed truly wide enough for two and snuggle up with friends to watch movies and draw pictures to paste on the walls, and eat tortillas again, and good avocadoes, and read books in english, for fun, not for class. food not bombs and working bikes and the relaxation of friends i've known for long enough to love real hard. i'm ready for bike rides down long long flat streets in the freezing cold until my toes hurt, for ridiculous dance parties and sunday morning coffee shops and newspapers. politics i understand.

i'm going to miss vienna's markets and smiles and invitations. i'm really going to miss the punk scenes and bike scenes and all the people who make it all not even into "scenes", just community. i'm going to miss I:DA and EKH and Rupp's and all-night falafel stands and cafes that let you linger for hours. i'm going to miss the way everyone just lets you be. night-rides and critical mass and graffiti. the naschmarkt, tomatoes, mushrooms, extra-strong garlic. all these other countries within a few hours' reach, transportation systems that actually work. everyone i still haven't gotten to know as well as i'd like, but well enough to miss for sure.

the last week creeping towards that inevitable ending is always the worst time of all. leaving bynum, leaving carrboro, leaving portland, leaving chicago each time. this weird anticipation and the forced importance of everything - each time i see you i have to say goodbye for good, just in case. she asked me if i wanted a farewell party and i laughed a no, but now i wish i had a way to pull them all together now for one last time.

i am the queen of nostalgia and anticipation and that strange kind of longing in the pit of my stomach.

metamorphoses

sometimes the air, like my restless metamorphoses.

tendrils sprouting from between my toes, green leafy ones, vines that grow thick and fast and try and wind themselves around any stationary structure nearby.

the ensnarements of wet skies above dry pavements, and the click of metal on my teeth. (bite down again, hard and cold and familiar.)

a lonely italian cheesemaker in an amsterdam basement. a bottle opener to take back to chicago. a handful of american coins. i think we disappointed him with our sleepy eyelids.

webs between my fingers so i can paddle across whatever seas i please.

my hair is growing arms and legs to wave in every direction like fuzzy antennae trying to sense something in the air. (sometimes the air, like my restless metamorphoses.)

shirts without armpits! or necks! pants without zippers! scarves full of holes! everything falling apart just to soften the edges. attempts at new constructions. etch something into my skin like it's wood or maybe just thick sheets of construction paper in every color you can think of.

our obsessive outputs and the ways we try and control them - i want to hear you tiptoe across taut strings again, that faraway glint in yr eyes. i will always be the sheep who bows out and goes off to bake cookies instead. (i burned my eyelashes half off to perfect my asymmetry.)

the air here is conducive to getting out of tune.

woolly

we sing songs through this echoing building, whistle responses to those sneaky ghosts who surround us. we chase each other down cold city sidewalks in the rain yelling angry desperations, collapse finally into nothing but arms and cheekbones and you so close i'll jam my fingers on yr ribcage, joints swollen for days. (tattoos smearing the sheets.)

recall these things: yr bloody nose. the growl of my belly. the shiver of morning.

we'll play board games in dim places with beers taller than our tales. no, really, taller than you'd believe. fifteen cents back! automated! i can't believe they sell those kits. i can't believe what they allow. (you are a whole lot of promises and curiousity and i am a whole mess of indecision.)

we asked him what to do and he told us it gets harder every year. in his eastern carolina brogue, with his austrian wife.

nothing seems ever better than that first night of headbands, winebottles, short shorts and scrawled ink. flashing lights on my waist. cardboard rackets, and kitchen dance parties, and a giddy disregard for their insinuations.

(it's cold for sure but we've got wool enough to wear.)



halloween critical mass:

fickle tickle

i'm fickle. i'm moisture. i'm somewhere between ski goggles and suspenders. i'm a spoonful of indifference. (she tells us: Adiaphora are indifferent things.) i've gone back to drawing people the way i did when i was five years old, all head and legs and navels, big smiles.

enlightenment to wear around yr neck like a scarf. secular and compulsory. are we going to give up this fast and let that skin-pounding trashtalker kick us out of our own home?

the irresolvable differences of our bodies and the ways in which we translate their urges. the yielding legibility of each small curve. maybe the key is just to be as joyously, unstumblingly open as possible.

i've always felt that even the first inkling (of desire) is already the same thing as following through; the decision revolves only around articulation. (you would say self-control.) how to extricate affection and attraction from each other, how to express them without confusing anyone more than necessary. tenderness and distance both.

this time with less regret, with fewer guilty doubts.

sometimes i wonder how and when i got so old, and sometimes instead i realize that all i have is endless time to kill (to fill!). these days i'm falling down a whole lot, scrapes on knees and elbows and i always catch myself on that same fucking left hip, swollen and changing colors every day.

my lungs are filled with all the exhausted inhalation of giddy nights.



it's okay not to be the prettiest girl in the room.

schwein im schwein!

so here's a little uncomplicated truth, some stories for once:

we went to budapest last weekend and it was lovely, but too many late nights and early mornings. bicycles, castles, a sculpture park filled with old soviet statues. underground bars, writing poems onto the walls, cramming around tables much too small, warding off ridiculous advances.

then this wednesday i went for a big wonderful 3-course vegan meal at daniel/ralf/tom's flat, exhausted and full. thursday was a bourbon-fueled nightride involving police encounters, unsteerable choppers, minnesotans, cold toes, skidding in circles around empty fountains, climbing ladders down into theaters, falling to the pavement too many times. friday was a show at flex - danced forever and too late and grabbed a sweet face on the way out. woke up in a small flat across town and got home in time for lunch.

yesterday the flea market, sturm drinking, roaming the streets with the melodica playing behind. backgammon in cozy bars. the tekkno party at the squat and pushing through too many yielding shoulders, the switch to daylight savings time so that we had an extra hour of dancing feet and confusion. (an extra hour to sit outside the station waiting for the u-bahn to start running again.)

i guess all i mean to say is that the last few weeks have worn me out, all these crowds and classes and rainy days. everything feels good. cozy chicago wintertime will be nice to come back to, too.

budapest:

clean slate plates

i can never throw out a jar till its sides are scraped clean.

holler for compensation!

i look at photos of people i haven't seen in months and they always seem too skinny and i worry.

some days all i want is to move back to the south and find a big drafty paintpeeling house with creaking floors and haunted attics and wind that howls through the cracks in the wintertime. and we can grow carrots and rosemary and big luscious tomatoes and invite everyone we know to come live with us and fill up big tables and dig in the dirt and soak up sunshine and grime and a bit of everything till we run through the shade and fall into pine needle embraces.



(can i gather everyone i love all into one place for once, instead of all these scattered bits of our affections spread so far apart?)

bruised

flies circling around the smooth metal. right in front of his house. we're stuffing chocolate bars into our mouths till our fuzzy teeth implode. i don't remember what it is to be full; i need something always on my tongue (in my throat). the bike is one leg and the pole another. i'm missing that blurring, that inseparability. i saw the way they tumbled to the concrete, waving the camera the whole time. i've seen how her eyebrows call to eager hands.

all so easily impressed. i thought you'd understand, but maybe our language barrier was thicker than i knew. i glow when i want to. sometimes i just glower.

the taut tense sinews of you. the amiable acquiescence of me. there's nothing else to know.

he says it has to do with cheerfulness, and i think he has a point, but it'd be nice to eat an apple without bruising my lips. the past sometimes takes us with soft hands.

dirty sheet runaways

whiskey in the morning makes me more pensive than i need to be, perhaps, adding to the confusion of writing letters to no-longer-lovers who i still love more than i know how to put correctly into words. the precisions of our affections spelled out in true but less perilous ways.

after three days away from my bike today i rode fast, faster than the cold or the wind or my nostalgia-seeking eyelids.

consent is a hot topic these days; it keeps coming up. circles under his eyes, and twang missing from my throat.

don't be ashamed.

i dreamed that we found a car and drove till it ran out of gas, pushed it to the side of the road and took off walking down that highway through the desert towards whatever nothing-town we could find. i thought about it while i spun poi in the park under crisp autumn trees, remembering the one who wrote asking me to run away with him to some anonymous motel where we'd fuck all night and sleep all day and leave only for cigarettes and junk food from the gas station across the parking lot. "It's a certain kind of love story and we're a certain kind of people" and i think he was right but what happens when my story involves different kinds, too?

you are fraught with exactly what i don't want to hear.

hibernation

i want some jittery, roaming ink.

draw flowers on wrists and paint cityscapes onto her back and breasts and sides. skies stretching to the chin, and further.

tramp cobbled streets past striped tarps - throw a cover over every peak. rabbits with lances are always the first to fall. we need more damp dark alleys and broken glass. i need more wet leaves and humming hillsides.

one day i'll learn to rest till my alarm goes off, no more of this sabotaged sleep.

i was born to hibernate through chilly afternoons.

zagreb

sometimes my body stretches thinner than i can stand, elbows embedded in asphalt and unfocused eyes towards the streetlights, but i think it's all worth it in the end. a little bittersweet - deep and earthy, almost sharp. night rides where we strap beers to the backs of our bikes and switch places at each stop, hopping back and forth in the cold. circles through fountains just deep enough. divebombs into shrubbery, and endings too abrupt.

i'm as needy as the next. i need someone else to be strong and joyous for me sometimes. the odds aren't in our favor. on the bus to croatia i kept waking up kicking the seat in front of me, jerking in my sleep while i dreamt of sudden collisions and different ways to fall off of my bike. you've practiced too many of them already.

zagreb didn't speak to me, but i hardly gave her a fair chance. we hunched over zines in the midst of a fashion show and tore our eyes away only to marvel at the painted bodies of those girls when they finally unzipped their hoodies.

i tell everyone i meet that i'd stay in vienna longer if only only only i could; lately things have been so nice over here that it's hard to remember where i fit in the midst of all that is chicago.

bright blue

too much bright blue!

the bottles are piling up behind my desk (i'm saving them to build a secret glass ladder to the rooftop, so that when it falls in the wind i can leap to the ground and make mosaics), and this pillbox of crayons is leaving my lips a waxy green, but i still can't seem to think beyond dirt roads and the squint in yr eyes when you wake shivering in the dew.

all these things we write as if to say that a mortal does in fact, in the most literal sense, live only in the moments, simply because we are mortals and thus by definition subject, without warning, to erasure. (a tram barreling down the tracks in an eastern european city, or a car tumbling over and over, near an american coast. trembling fingertips.)

is it actually freedom to loose yrself from that which binds you to this world? the tiniest things expand in ripples. the largest, too.

the eruption of the tambora volcano in 1816 flung ash to the world so that nations faraway lived under darker skies - dust in the streets, red snow, declining crops. the breaks in yr voice flung my plans into disarray. what is there left to say?

lately i'm remembering that winter of spiders growing out of carpets and fortresses with walls begging to be scaled, smoke unfurling over cold beaches at night and the small confines of our cozy mornings.

i can't find my oldmanglasses but maybe that's for the best cuz blurry is always beautiful.

bike film fest im Wien.

gemütlich.

he told me he didn't like canada as much as he expected because the people there weren't as gemütlich as here. not as cozy in their friendships. excited at the outset but scared or unwilling to get as close and comfortable.

what a wonderful word.

let's get cozy.

ich bin's.

words in every language are eluding me. i have everything and nothing to say.

hallo, ich bin's.

i like the way the words flow here. the cadences of yr phrases stretching longer and plunging into each other faster than i could possibly follow.

a lamp hanging from the ceiling ringed with green plastic bottles. wide open spaces. faltering leaves.

sometimes i walk my feet up the wall beside my bed. sometimes i just scribble notes while i listen to you breathe. i can't remember what day it is. i invent and invite these attractions. fucking nervous kneecaps.

(& last night how i walked in and out again so quickly, biting my lip, pedaling downhill fast and away through my own inner pummeling. sometimes crowds are just too much to handle. sometimes tables of friendly unknown faces are the hardest thing i know. i wish anyone here was ready to skip along with me into all these nighttime diversions. i wish all the americans weren't so standoffish, so polite. sometimes i pretend to bite my long thumbnails but really it's all just an act.)

i'm trying to remember i've got more to offer than eyes and hair and endless skin beneath clothes. hungry mouths and tumbling limbs. just to remember how.

and i see solitary girls in cafes with pads of paper and pencils, that half-glazed writers' stare. endless glasses of water and furrowed brows. ready for inspiration.

riesige wiesen.

& the school was footing the bill so we just drowned in flasks of wine and sturm, big heaping platters of meat passed around under my nose while i comforted my grumbling stomach with drink and bread instead. marching through the night to that club where we danced for hours still drunk on vapours while endless eager hands and hips grabbed from behind. too eager. home towards dawn and yr distraught mistrusting words, but everything disappears when we whisper embraces across oceans again.

locked out of my room wandering through the amusement park with a beer in one hand and chocolate in the other, to her room to borrow a book but stayed instead for tea and as many words as we could throw at each other.

basement dorm party of concrete walls and fluorescent lights, over-friendly red-cheeked grins. i'm working on stitching more patience to my eardrums.

that bike party at karl's, and he opened the door in green hat, glitter, feather boa. young blood brass band poster on the wall. some nights just feel more like home, bathtubs full of beer, high ceilings and smoke in the air, sitting on the floor laughing and everyone so friendly even after i open my mouth and my stumbling accent comes out.

sunday afternoon in some park out west following the warm sunshine over the hill, sitting in meadows coaxing sticky tamarinds from their strange twisted husks; cooking dinner and exploring maps in his creaky apartment and when we leaned our heads close over photographs, so close that i could taste his warm familiar cigarette breath on mine, i almost forgot myself. almost.

i spoke german for ten hours straight, so much conversation, and i almost wanted never to lose that momentum. no translations, only words flung out excitedly between us.

but my tired head disagreed. that was exhausting.
i can't imagine a better weekend right now.

class notes

a sense of balance and proportion aesthetically described as "classical"

affekt/affection, music to balance the humours. rhetoric to move the humours - the absurdity of flapping jaws and sounds coming out meaning anything at all.

i'd like to meet someone with a captain planet tattoo.

paptain clanet.

(what are those letter-switching games called? whenever i do them i think of a beekeeper on a westerly coast.)

vulgar discourse, like common people.
to have a repertoire of ideas and terms, quotations.


(these new templates of obscurity, physicality, deep secrets revealed through the vaguest of shattering glimpses.)




the paradox of half and half and half and why wouldn't you just hop over the line? wrestling with the fate that is humanity.

listify

i'm sick of a lot of things. stretched out pants slipping down my legs. cobblestones. bathrooms. the color pink. the possibility of rain. absence. seat cushions. chairs, for that matter. boundaries. computer screens. distances. remixes. mirrors. having to spell out my name.

stringy.

last night i dreamed about long confusing tours of city streets and alleyways, so many new people i was reluctant to befriend. can i go yet? some girl with long skinny weak blonde dreads was my new fourth roommate. possibly. she was also half that other girl, the one with the chlorine neck.

finding a post office on some floor of a maze of a building, dark and dingy, opening to a wide concrete cube, rows of hanging canvas bags for destination and day - i needed to send a letter to belgrade. rough brown envelope. she was looking for a laundry card and i heard her say my name.

lost the rest. half-hearted fucking. rainy skies. woke up and couldn't remember what was real.

dangling keys.

lately, suddenly, vienna's gotten really fucking cool. or partly that i've just gotten used to the fact that you are an ocean away, and so is the city i know by heart. but there's too much of excitement here to overlook it, too. promising, enticing.

friday was critical mass, only a year old here but still getting big and flanked by cops on motorcycles and full of contagious laughter and yells. slapping hands of bemused motorists, grinning at our own missteps. and it ended on a sloping park by some grandiose old buildings, tables of beer and bikes leaning up on trees and i climbed to sit on the wall with evi and tom and watch the tallbike jousting from above, then back down to shiver in the damp grass and drum along on our knees during the fire show. home alone then out till approaching dawn to fling ourselves into the beats and the lights between pulsing walls. you know.

so many nodding smiles.

the next day i biked to bratislava - 3 hours of farmland and riverbanks and bumpy trails, the border guards laughing and waving me on - for a night of bike tricksters, full houses, wine festivals, underground bars, and six people jampackcrammed into a hatchback. strange rolled pancakes, with poppyseeds. bruised hipbones from sleeping on the floor. sweet eyes and tequila breath (gold, with cinnamon and orange).

we had no words in common so instead we just winked and looked away.

a plaque commemorating the first witch burned at the stake in slovakia. a big wandering tour of the city. vain searches for vegan food on sunday.

i left with a good taste in my mouth.

(something about biking home from class or from shows, tearing up these smooth now-familiar paths, wanting to ride fast and forever. or maybe it's this big beautiful punk houses and the way people here seem actually eager to meet each other, to create things, instead of standing back and apart and making sure to wear the right clothes.)

all i know is, all these invitations have me reeling. this is what i want.

yoot.

you really can get drunk on these cloves --- !

stupid consequences catching up with me.

punkt punkt punkt.

pastries made of sharp secret splinters to claw yr tongue. (i hid them in yr cupboard as a breakfast surprise.)

these things feed on sugar and desperation

but garlic-eaters are always friends.

au naturel.

either is okay. neither is a sign.

a hedgehog smaller than my foot, ancient meditations on behavior, self-control. i'd like to bike in nothing but my swim trunks and matching gloves, feel wind and sun and legs spinning, path spinning out beneath me. i'd like to be weirder, prouder. old-timey knickers and a torn scarf around my hair. shoes that cry for tramping.

(we need some more big laughing empty buildings and shattered glass, more quick-change shoulder blades and ladders to the stars. or the treetops. clamber up quick before the leaves start to fall and give us away.) side-splitting like thieves. whole gangs of them, sooty cheeks and sly fingers. rub-a-dub-dub and chilled to the bone. one day i'll learn to play all these songs i'm keeping hidden somewhere in the sinews of my wrists.

and what could be better than sun and skin and sky when i take all my clothes off and eat fresh figs by the river, fall asleep in the grass?

the night bus.

so when i leave my bike at home it takes hours to get back, striding shivering together down long quiet streets, half-paved, and covered in traffic cones. waiting for buses while drunk boys ask for help in german, in english, in that twinkling eyes sort of way that says a whole lot and a whole little all at once. everything's interchangeable, and maybe that's best after all.

(i can't hear the ringing through the music, the ringing in my ears or the ringing on my phone; the music so loud it batters our eardrums and the confetti explodes from yr back and they all strike a pose so we all cheer and laugh and jump into frenzied joyful dances.)

something about riding home past these ferris wheels every day, one two three or is it only two? something about searching desperately for glances just so i can ignore them. i wake up at night startled, singing aloud, fingers digging deep. i wake up in the morning with turquoise patches on my elbows, with smudged ink on the insides of my thighs.

last night we went past the limits of our broken phrases; we ate cold vague delicacies from dirty plates, with squiggly forks, while canadians played reptitive droning songs in the basement below and dogs trotted around bored and happy and the nets hanging from the ceiling could've pulled me in for good, so inviting. maybe that was her, maybe not.

(but saying hello is the hardest part of all.)

numb-dumb drums.

in this city i have no tongue, only meek eyes that trot the sidewalk as if some asphalt answer will come surging up to meet me.

all my syntax coming fumblingly apart, my reluctant stumbling attempts to reach you. (all the things we don't say.)

my tongue exploring my own mouth for lack of yours. the dead air that stretches between us, humming.

i'm not poetic when all i am is fist-gnawingly missing you.

when all i can remember is skin.

pass auf!

things are starting, as usual, to fall into place.

yesterday i biked down the Donauinsel, the island in the middle of the Danube, for miles and miles of rolling hills and sweet Austrians walking their dogs and boys riding their bikes through the water and wildflowers everywhere for me to gather in bunches to stick in my hair, to stick in a jar in my room.

today i bought the best hummus in the world from the Naschmarkt, and then sat in a cafe sipping espresso and writing a short story auf Deutsch about a melancholy baker who comes home one day to find her forgotten bread dough risen to fill her entire house. when i left, i stepped over a lonely yellow rose on the sidewalk, turned back, balanced it on the seat of a bicycle by the wall, and walked off just as a girl came around the corner and found it, quick bright smile on her face.

a blissfully unaware jogger with his ears plugged into an ipod jumped in front of me to cross the bike path, and without thinking i yelled "Pass auf!" - watch out! i'm not sure if the shriek that followed those words out of my mouth was in german or in english, but at least there's something sticking to my tongue the way i want it to.



best of all was when i made it home without taking out my map even once.

wolkig

the clouds outside are flying by faster than i can stand, and the sun flickering through the curtain is off on off on off on again every time i look up. i'd like to go plunge my fingers into some soft dirt, pull gentle weeds up by the roots, watch seeds turn into something real. i'm too far away from everything around me here; i'm too close, too. i'd just like some sort of definition, a map tattooed into my skin so that i can be sure just how far my limbs will stretch.

my feet hurt from late nights of dancing in empty shoes, my eyes from smoke and lights. that street yesterday felt so good, so fast, the momentum carrying me downhill and around pedestrians and cars and pushing my body into relaxation in the familiarity of cyclicity.

maybe it is starting to make sense after all. farmers' markets and chinese groceries where we nod mutely at one another across the counter. cozy vegan restaurants with cheap beer and grinning regulars, board games lining the walls. i miss you all the way down to my toes, but at least there's enough directions for me to point them in to try and forget.

(you should have seen my turkish roommate's face when i told her i don't eat meat, and then, cautiously, keine Tierprodukte, no animal products, also.

uncomfortable silence.)

bored hookers and warmer nights

scrape the last desperate remnants of peanut butter from the jar - they only have one variety here so we shouldn't waste a smidge. chug half a bottle of wine apiece and then attempt to decipher maps in search of more ways to squander money on some brief intoxication. i smell like a little bit of smoke and a little bit of brakeless meandering. i live in the middle of a red light district across the street from a ferris wheel, but don't let that fool you. die strassen sind glitschig. ich bin nicht die beste. alles wird okay.

(scrape the last desperate remnants of peanut butter from the jar; long for an all-night grocery and some non-dairy desserts; schreiben sie bitte ein aufsatz auf deutsch von wistful anarchy und unsere müde zerstörungen.)

my skin is dry without yours nearby.





ja, ich wohne jetzt im Wien.

yes, i live in vienna now.

goodbye/housewarming/album release party

(photos by lindsay.)








an epic watergun battle.

permeation

she writes of these illusory garages,
and sometimes i wonder, too, which
of all these groaning structures
we shove our way through
are closer to the insubstantial

& which instead are built
of pieces solid and knuckle-bruising and real.

like the edges of our blurry cells
bleeding blindly into one another, our bodily
chemistries differing so wildly that
how could we ever have thought
our rhythms would align?

you, & me, & all our anger and adoration
whittled down to the sound of eyelids softly descending.

festival of film

we pushed through that door and up four flights of stairs to art kids, biker hats, and an open bar. eager wandering eyes and everyone gleefully rubbing shoulders as they pass. that tattoo looks stitched on! my girlfriend gets jealous when i dance with boys. look, there's that moustache, and look, there's yr double. if we spike our beer with whiskey it hits our thirsty tongues a little sweeter. (if we water down our whiskey with beer it goes down a little smoother.)

i'll just stand around grabbing beards and taking names, rubbing bellies while we all compare in a circle. did you think i was drunk when i stuck my head through a plant to ask where you were headed? how about when i toppled over in the street, feet still clipped into my pedals, sideways and straight down onto the pavement in the rain?

it's only my second day on these things, you know. (my second night at this place, too, echoes of almost a year ago, but it's looking to shape up about like the last, all giddy toes and dancing hips and new faces to walk me out.)

it's nice to meet neighbors so you never have to find yr own way home.

i miss...

i miss when i could still write, and when i still did write, achingly, unstoppably, rushing home late at night unaware of my legs pumping out fifteen miles and my lids drooping over dry eyes, working out words and phrases and ecstatic syntax in my head, rewriting and rehearsing and repeating again and again until i could get to a pen or a keyboard and solidify it for a while.

now i just seem to get distracted and then fall asleep. and maybe there's something to be said for more of living than recording, but oh! i do miss fulfilling this wordly obsession.

balance

something about the ways we twist and turn, we kick and scream, we flounder blindly upstream. something about the way gentle swinging tunes get our heads to bobbing without even realizing, and the way that my balance has suddenly, startlingly returned, so much so that i rode miles and miles home from work sitting upright with my hands fluttering on my thighs, far from the handlebars.

i remember that night in portland, my brief winter return, after the craft fair and the cheap burrito place with all those bins of spiced carrots and onions, that night when it seemed like a good sign about things, the way that we matched in our short skirts and fannypacks beneath our big messenger bags, our home-knitted legwarmers. (sometimes chicago seems too grey and too loud for my quiet, colorful yearnings; i miss the scruffy dresses and bright optimism i used to clothe myself in, back then when life was damp but endlessly intriguing.)

that night while we pedaled back to someone's house for band practice and i said i'd never been able to ride with no hands, never been able to let go entirely and leave the rest of it up to fate, or gravity, or the intuitive minute inner balancing of my own body, and she told me of a friend who'd finally learned how only when he realized it's not in the thinking about it but in the act of merely doing.

and later, back in chicago on an icy night going home i sat up straight to ease my aching back, raised my hands to rest on my woolly hat, and rode unflinching through the chilly air for blocks before i even realized i'd forgotten to keep my grasp.

i need a bit of urgency in everything, most of the time, but every now and then it's a relief to remember that not everything takes so much drive, so much willpower. maybe the best things of all happen when you forget to pay attention. instinct? or maybe abandon of some sort.

(my fingers pulling notes from the banjo always seem to move better when i stop staring at the strings and let the song carry itself easily along instead)

confetti made of glass shards

goddammit there it goes again.

sometimes i wish things were a little more desperate. i'm way better at dealing with things going wrong than things staying right.

that dented, pummeled carwreck, blinkers flashing, abandoned under the bridge in the dark, it makes me think of you somehow, the beauty and exhalation of yr collisions, the quiet explosions we bobble back and forth, yr dusty shoulders and roadburned thighs.

i love the word collision; i always have. a tom robbins character once said "this is not a relationship we're involved in, you and i, this is a collision." i think that's about right for every encounter. every stranger, every lover, every momentary smile you share on the street - glances and fingertips and even just the edges of our proximities colliding and diverging at dizzying rates.

don't you wish we could pretend to be anything but random?

melting

i don't know what to say but that this structure fits a bit too tight for my liking. i don't know what to do but turn my stubborn mournful back to yr face, again and again, curling into myself in a sulky attempt at revival.

we chopped vegetables into a sweet and spicy magic stew, and watched those fireworks reflect in windows behind the back porch. it seems appropriate that they were hidden behind a building too tall, only visible in these tiny, paned reenactments. you say i'm feeling sympathy pangs but i wonder if it's something a bit more than that. i'm thirsty for new tunes, new hipbones, new streets wide enough and empty enough and smooth enough for my 2 AM journeys; i'm ready for there to be a destination other than home, ever. i heard those drumbeats and flung open the front door ecstatically to the street, only to find they were in the basement after all. does everything really only happen downstairs and inside and every day? whatever happened to my drunken pirate antics, my topless squadron and my endlessly rambling feet?

dammit.

(it's so hot i think my eardrums are melting inside me.)

new doorways

i walked to yr still
& i drank my fill.

i put on the right song, sleepy mournful slow, and suddenly this place felt like home, taking away all my frantic urges to unpack and rearrange. somehow if the tune in the air sounds right, my body relaxes down into itself, and everything else falls into place.

our new place is strange and grimy and damp; it needs some fresh air and bright colors and love. but i think if we fill it with bikes and books and more jars of spices than we can ever use, if we pound some longevity into it with our dancing feet, i think it might taste like home for a while.

lately i'm getting dizzy again when i try and look at the view, reaching points past which i can't project myself. someone asked me why i'm coming back to chicago after vienna, next winter when i'm done with school and this midwestern city will be dark and frozen and lonely, and my usual answer of "i like chicago" didn't seem quite to suffice. i've never been in a place for this achingly long. i can't remember if i want somewhere else more. i'm scared to give it too much of my life and my heart, because then what will i do when i leave? (the assumption that i will leave is what makes it comforting and frightening both.)

in any case, once we can walk through our halls without tripping over boxes and upturned chairs, once we adjust to ourselves and each other, it's going to be wonderful to come home to this place at night.

his skin is gold from the whiskey in his blood.

spilling shards

at work this morning, in the bathroom fleeing dirty dishes and soapsuds and customers asking, miss, do you think i can get a refill?, in the bathroom, door locked, leaning against a wall breathing deeply, i open my eyes and my face in the mirror is old and strange.

i need to get more sleep.

i'm jealously protective of my apartment, snapping at the hipsters who come in to sign their lease while i'm hungover at the kitchen table in my underwear, eating peanut butter from the jar.

some nights our noses lead us in the right directions, and those quiet hopeful gatherings become loud parties where we can eat cookies and curry and sit on the porch till we get too cold, wander inside to get lost and then dance while someone throws baby powder over us in great rolling clouds so the next morning we'll wake groggy and snowy white.

(& some nights we'll walk through pish posh neighborhoods avoiding each other's stupidly welling eyes, lashing out with these painful things we never even mean, or really remember. some nights you dumb-drunk smash glasses in the bedroom, boozy breath on my ear in the morning.)

i was tongue-tied all day till our nighttime countertop exultations.

day job

today they're playing the songs that tug a little embarassingly at my heartstrings, mournful ballads of battleground infusions and whiskey breath demise. and today all the tourists seem to hail from far-off green places with more than a hint of twang; i can't stop staring at my new bike in the corner aching to be ridden but i can't help but picture it tearing through a different set of streets than these indifferent pavements.

she already had something going with her scooter by her side and her sparkly headband askew, but when she hocked a loogie onto michigan avenue she really had me hooked.

my thirsty throat needs more than this, and my trembling toes agree. i'm not really anything but satisfied, but this world keeps whirling a little too fast, and these long hours of elbows on countertops give me far too much space for projections. you know how it is.

& that fucking fiddle gets me every time.

pulse

i would offer you my pulse but honestly it's too erratic these days and always to impose on anyone but myself; i would offer you something else of myself to save you but i'm not sure salvation's what you need.

i rode up the path by the lake yesterday afternoon and watched girls running through a thick blanket of white fuzzy dandelions like wading through snowdrifts in deep chicago winters, or like the way our dog used to leap over the waves of thick tall grass in the pasture behind our house.

i tell too many stories about old jobs and old lives and old places in general; i've an answer for everything and i kind of wish i didn't anymore. i wish more was of the new. how long have days been slipping away so fast, without me even noticing? magical and exciting adventures, the breathless moments that seem the most important of all, are only in these stories, lately.

i need something slow.

willful misreadings.

"justice sells crack, yo" - scrawled across the bathroom wall like someone thinks it's funny, and i'm wearing these glasses that used to clear up my world but now they just make my eyes ache and blur the shapes of those hipsters across the room. i'm uneasy, my jittering stomach and echoing eavesdropping ears trying to keep me from these critical constructions. justice sells crack, yo, and i'm not sure what's just about anything, reading about everyone else's strange childhoods and lost loves and hidden complexities. maybe it's better to be half-blind and tight-eyed, not to fool myself into thinking i can see anything at all. everyone's full of oceans, and tight masses of branches like they've gulped down trees past a sense of regression. (do you remember the first time you looked through lenses, and yr world fell into beautifully harsh new complexities? do you remember the first time you saw pine needles, leaving the optometrist, leaning out the open car window with yr mouth open wide for all the green multiplicity you'd been missing?)

who knew?

that devilish, delicious smile that ravages yr face. sunshine leaking across the greasy carpet. i pretended to know what i was talking about, but all i can handle, really, is less than my own small corner of this world. they keep on saying hello. i keep on making up excuses. mirrors are a mystery, and when i ride that tiny bike with my knees up near my earlobes it feels like a little bit of truth about the infrequency, inadequacy, infertility of submersion.

things don't fit, is all i'm saying, except for all these ripped-up clothes that i've cobbled back together with dental floss and optimism, except for the worn-down groove of a leather saddle and my legs that can't ever quite carry me in a straight line. justice is something in the way i walk into walls, tables, other shoulders. justice is losing track of my own boundaries, of the lines that contain me. i'm leaking out into these streaky fantasies, and yr cutting all yr hair off to get back at me.

spinning hubs

emergency bike surgery and frantic amputations, circuitous narratives of these longlost endearments.

a concentrated, poetic frown while he dines alone with an open book of verses.

vegetarian, of course. handkerchief up for grabs.

half-burned candles, and outdated songs, and i'm opening my door with shorter hair each time, with rolling eyes.

weary introductions, sheepish grins, mountains of blankets softer than anything but

(fluffy white clouds)



an entire jar of jam in one sitting, with a spoon.

screw peanut butter.

skeletal

love letters, missed connections, and uneasy vehicles smoking in the plains somewhere distant. you gnawed my ear black n blue and my frightened doctor tried to diagnose it melanoma, but there's no use counting yr eggs before they're hatched. counting yr books before you've read them.

pretty is kind of a mystery, but for its oh-so-handy appeal. sometimes i want a second shot at every conversation, at every encounter. i want to collect checks from all sides, past and present, so i can spin like a whirligig spewing out payments of my own. i can't believe how old you are, and how young. i can't believe what a tease i am. (cousins agree.)

the skeleton, the sky. the perversion of an ideal that is already, admittedly, by virtue of being an ideal, subject to incompletion.

to flaws.

a toast!

spread yr legs like pages of a book and i'll read you bedtime stories. crawl on softly-bruised knees to the edges of yr own allegorical devices; show me you can pick dandelions with yr toes and i'll subscribe to yr infrequencies once and for all.

i don't know. i'm tired of all these stupid games, but i can't seem to shake free of their intoxicating grip.

maybe the secret is to never step back.

misanthropy

i am the most antisocial person you know. (i'm trying not to know you.) i'm ready for my close-up. i'm drawing in sharpie on my limbs. the more invitations i get, the more likely i am to stay home and bury my head in the sand. can this world be a little smaller please? i get dizzy thinking about the sheer scope of things sometimes, at work when i lean my cheek against a window above a swarming street, above taxis bikes crosswalks carhorns miniature paintings of lives and i get out of breath cuz i can hardly remember my own name anymore.

and after weeks and years of not sleeping we start seeing ghosts out of the corners of our stumbling eyes but still we can't refuse these revelries that appear out of nowhere and sneak their way into our ears - parties where we hide in the basement pulling fuses till the art kids disappear; storefront libations and dancefloor hijacks; glazed sugar desires. she gave me shots of whiskey in line for the bathroom, and someone threw bottles to shatter in the street by uniformed feet. they switched jackets and asked me to climb up to their rooftop, but tonight i favor the smell of saturation.

finals week, finality, finally.

these last few days i've overdone it on stimulation and syntax and lack of sleep; every muscle in my body is jumping and twitching, and i'm losing my trains of thought as fast as i pound them out. but soon i'll be done with this didactic regurgitation, and i'll wish you were here so i could grab into yr hair and smell yr neck and slow everything down just a little, just a bit.

right now i can't remember life without speed and caffeine and insufficiency - everything smells like extremities, and this trip down south to empty ourselves out over yr memory will be a different sort of draining, a different sort of refilling, after all. i'd like to stand on a street corner with a sighing fiddle in my hands and all the sadness and sweetness of the world in my face as i coax a song from squeaky strings, so that maybe that would mean something about the way we'll choose to miss you, could mean as much as dark clothing and tears, as much as a bottle of wine in a bag between my knees. remission, reclusion, reform(ation). re-re-re-vival.

(which one of us is falling into disarray?)

the inexplicability of popcorn.

we're pretending it's spring - these 40 degree days, roaring breezes, melty snow, chirping birds, and the smell of warmth in the air - but it's still too cold for true indecency, and we still have to layer up a bit more than we'd like to.

i'm wearing leggings under my jeans, and something was itching on the back of my thigh, just above my knee. i pull off my pants to change into my pajamas, and a burnt popcorn kernel falls out.

i don't eat popcorn. do we even have popcorn in the house? i've been wearing these clothes all day, but suddenly somehow i've started emitting popcorn.

it reminds me of one time when i was making out with someone who found a quarter stuck to the skin on my back.

strange things are afoot.

much depends on the weather.

laborious spines

i'm craving summertime so badly i can taste it in the back of my throat, stronger even than this retching self-doubt, or these lies i swallow to keep us pretending. these past few weeks i've licked up so much road-salt, my kisses must be like sea urchins, spiny and saline and self-defensive. the sodium deposits on my shoes glitter in reminders of reflective avoidance, and those tiny aching rips in the seat of my jeans are threatening to expand with a vengeance. such perilous incantations. write me a song about these afternoons when i fall into dozing dreams on my feet, swimming in yr tender skin and inhaling the scent of yr neck, opening my eyes to dim stairwells of flickering lights and sudden immediacy. don't bother with lyrics cuz the rhetoric is what binds us every time, shoving unwanted certainties into our dialogues of disposal. you've no reason to believe me.