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.