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.

frostbite

i'm out riding feverish in search of frostbite to chill my flushed cheeks & slow my racing pulse, blowing through red lights & falling forward one foot at a time spinning through these circles of uncertainty. insomniac headrushes & dizzy discomposure. the creeping of icy pinpricks into my bones, & the throbbing of battered earlobes. these meds that clear my sinuses & clog my brain, these insinuations of altercation and revenge -

just fill my lungs with shards of inertia, and maybe i'll find it in me to come home.


january critical mass: