eavesdripdrop

steam still rising from the pan (from our feet, from his hair, from the warm compost in the frosty air).

always a series of hallways, like the ones in all my dreams, every glimpsed or eavesdropped moment framed in layers of doorways and corners and long, searching glances from one room to the next (and another).

poker-faced jokes and rererepeated names. coconuts and apples and melons gleaned from a dumpster in the snow, slush in the streets and car wheels sliding through the mist. when the music fades out between songs and i hear a slice of you, singing in the other room, eyes closed, head down, fingers hesitantly strumming.

cabin fever

in the wintertime, things fall apart. (they disperse and reconverge, incessantly.) the painfully obvious precarity of everything. all my loving heart scattered in crumpled bits, one here for her sweet eyes, one there for the way he grabs my wrists, and you a whole heap of haunted scraps like snowdrifts gathered against my door.

output

yeah, and once we hurled handfuls of packed snow at each other till our knees were soaked and yr nose bled, but now mine is just bloody all the time.

lately i talk about things like they're a crossroads, or an impasse, dead air while we pass the time looking the other way, beer can in hand, pretending to forget. sometimes i'd rather dance all night. sometimes i'd rather ride bikes for hours, find the smoothest, newest asphalt in the city and pedal through the cool, empty, finally quieting night. it has to be silence, or beats as loud as we can make them. it has to be stillness, or giddy flailing limbs. they said i was a stolid dancer. he said i was enraged, that one night, so long ago, but it takes more than that. i'm an expert at about-faces and stiff backbones, at making the wrong expressions and deja vu conversations and throwing you off.

i need to find an answer or a story besides "oh, nothing really...", but right now what i seem to live for is dumpstered furniture, dumpstered food, spraypainting pictures to put on the walls. finding errands as far from home as possible so that buying groceries takes house on my bike, on new or forgotten streets, so my toes get cold and my ears burn and my legs feel alive again. my new hobby is homemaking, but i think anything that involves "making" should be alright.

(what does anyone "do" with a college degree ?)