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:

inelasticity

this is what i have in my head when i close my eyes: the world spinning faster and faster, us lying stiller and stiller, the inevitability of losing yr gaze. catastrophic bodies in the back of our minds. the mythos of the vegetation deity, assaulting language itself with hardened candle wax sculptures and jack-in-the-box resolutions. i want white noise over everything so we can only speak with our tongues intertwined. i want granite affirmations, sanguine recompense.

...

because my tremorous appetite is my undoing everytime, but maybe last night i downed enough whiskey to keep the cold from cutting through to my fingers, to my heart. hypocritical blue skies and wind that bites my teeth; we open jaws on shoulder blades and wink down the fronts of dresses till the moment has passed. pull her out by the heels, fling her to the initiations of the howling skies. i could drown in these enfolding arms but i think i'll shuffle my feet and start to dance instead.



fuck your face party:

this is how i take notes.

tragically vague understatement -
radical realignments,
well-worn products of extended borrowing
from one demarcated zone to another,
shifting boundaries,
infinite borrowings.
when all i can remember is skin:
delicious sex theory &
scratches on marble;
memory is of the muscles.
that she is ruddy, fleet, and strong;
that sometimes there is nothing left but
these mossy incantations.
to hunt the waterfalls you must
imprison yourself around
the whole fantastic world!
household motions, &
telling tales about the sun.

back to school

back to school, and it's been a week of going to class and working at the library and conversations with so many forgotten friends...this weekend was a potluck at the circus house to celebrate larken's visit to chicago, and all the lovely lively magical souls brought together for it. yesterday a big box of squishy tomatoes at food not bombs brought me flashbacks of canadian sunsets, and lindsay and i put on cat stevens and aprons and chopped and spiced it all into spaghetti sauce to share with margey and jeff and circled around the kitchen table till we biked off to that basement show - crooked teeth, young nervous eyes, colorful xylophones and toppling microphones; fiddles and banjos and using my bike seat as a bottle opener. the two minneapolis bands finally came up to tell me they'd been staring at me all night cuz i look just like their friend laura. i stayed till i got too cold and too sleepy to sit on that concrete floor anymore, refusing cigarettes and riding shivering home.

as for today, well, it's been a day of good deeds.


December Critical Mass:





New Year's Eve:

all these songs are sung on roadtrips.

i'm daydreaming about banjos, typewriters, and vegan ice cream while i sweat over a mixtape and try to rub this dryness from my eyes. last night was an adventure involving bicycles, thai food, giant rats, backdoors, anarchists and jokers, red wine, grass, tired tramping feet, phone calls, spilt champagne, and pancakes. photographic evidence to follow shortly.

so by the way, over winter break i clocked in 6183 miles on greyhound buses, traveling from chicago to portland; then eastward roads got snowed out so instead of returning i went to LA, Vegas, and finally to North Carolina where my little sister smuggled me indoors so i could surprise the family, sitting on the couch christmas morning with a bow on my front. best christmas ever, no gifts, no melodrama - meals and booze and boardgames, real conversations with everyone. now my brother's off hiking in israel, my sister's been accepted to college, and i'm back where i belong in my apartment.

(portland involved all sorts of nice re-encounters with all sorts of beautiful souls; birthday parties, bar shows, rekindling not-so-old flames. north carolina involved a lovely night of drinking and singing and spooning with my ladies. both towns tug on my heart so hard, so hard, pulling me into whirlwind wistful imaginings. i could have such an interesting life in so many different places and it kind of pains me to think that i can't have them all at once. i fall in love, so in love, with the taste of the air and the shape of the streets and the people, oh the people, everywhere i go.)

back in chicago. school starts this week. i need to find another job.

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.