I'm still here. :)

posted at 4:19 PM

when you are mute
the whole world knows
but no one cares
they just look
when you sit there
full of everything
and unable to explain
what it is like

when you are alone
you have been that way
your whole life
in loud rooms and
happy homes

you sit there
full of everything
and cannot make
the words come out
even to say
how much
you love
them
all

posted at 1:29 AM

silly, I was
to think
we had answers.

There is rain
every year
against my windows.

Why did I think
I'd reasoned it out

Turn off the magic
I can see it from here
the wires.

posted at 12:40 AM

timorous
and telling
we’ve got skies to pull apart, these days
run like arrows,
water to drains,
spilling downward,
lost forever.
If I am terrified
and silent
I’m rivers running
no thought, no action
a still water
too deep for safety.
I touch with blind fingertips
the outer edges of your suffering
and am afraid to read
the liquid lines there—
I cannot bear to think
what it would mean
if I could not understand—
I,
a glass of water,
overfilled,
and you the Baltic Sea.




posted at 10:32 PM

we are not a
we
we are
unrelated satellites
disjointed
an unhealthy parabolic spin around a brutal cetral axis
our little bedroom community
grown small and mean
watching you die is hard.

but I'll tell you what's harder
I'll tell you what's harder






posted at 1:06 PM

my second poem to three men

my body, its the battlefield, shrapnel and
bruises arrayed
you hit me in the stomach to see if I could spit it out and no
no thing came
we refuse, we refuse, we refuse
to give up our dead
I won't go for dead
told you some time ago,
we're both looking for the epic adventures we read in our youth:
found me my dragon to slay and I say,
I'll rage against this
with all the rivers I sent you
marshal all to my command now,
rushing rivers to wash me clean
of bruises and metal:
and I love you, I like you, you told me I won't help you here
won't hand you the gun to your head this time
me and me in a room alone, the girls
fighting over the trigger





posted at 1:10 PM

life, it has dragged me down
and if i'm lookin tall
baby they're just knife-edged heels
i'm tipping over












posted at 12:13 AM

if it can work its way out through my fingers
my hands have been silent since the drugs began,
and before, even
when i was drinking too much.
got your letter full of broken sentences.
tell me to do it for you.
take my hands, draw me out
pull hard on the vein and unstitch me from within
somewhere where i sewed it up tight and lock-stitched
closed within my heart.
tell me to do it for me.
we are, we are
pounding on the inside
and doors closed
please god, please let me come open

and if i should realize it all
and all good things come to fruition
and me in a house on a hill
and find nothing at the end of it, like i've feared
then let it be a nothing i've worked so hard for
so hard and hoped and hard-won

am i waking up, or falling away?




posted at 10:14 AM

two poems...

...each written a few weeks ago.


4:23 a.m., hollywood and nichols canyon

At some point late nite we broke the table in two, the weight of it
and the lines cut deep to something,
a sort of bone-dry breathlessness I’d never been before
I tell you
The raging love of life won't get me on my feet this time
I sit here good and I ain’t moving
You’re so bloody full of lies I can smell it
but I don't care, oh well, whatever--
I'll buy it all.
And if we run and run in circles, well,
I ain’t never tried it, so let me run deeper in this track...


--- --- ---


for cheney

Baby, you’re a hothouse flower,
Raging, tigerclaws and filthy grinning eyes,
a spoiled and growling kind of clawing at the space between our feet--
interstellar and vast, it is and
the poetry of your crumpled and sliding speech patterns mystifies me,
are you some sorta code
you simple little conundrum puppydogeyed sinister and darlin,
I don't trust you any farther than I can throw you, no
I dunno what to make of you but
a painting dripped and violently splattered, running
down my wrists to congeal at my toes, lovely and sublime
musical almost,--
you’ve got the
weirdest ways of saying things--
so lovely
your pretty wicked face,
and me
I'm a sucker







posted at 11:02 PM

disclaimer: I woke up the day after returning from burningman in my home, with these
words bubbling out of my brain--they did not rise from any specific bad
experience (as sometimes I've had people contact me gasping "Are you
ok?!!? Are you ok?!?" after having written things)...altho they do draw
on life experience accumulated over time, yes.

and so.

-------------------------------------------------------------


We will likely meet at a show in the dark and exchange information and
there will be a small taste of something there, like spring when it is
winter or the first ozone smell of fall when it is a choking stifling
summer—the delicate pinprick on the tip of the tongue that senses
sweetness, and flavors the small hanging moments with the idea that you
might not be alone, a newfound treasure hoped for but still always
unexpected, a way of simply feeling less bored, I suppose, when I think
about it very much-—of choosing to place a mantle of hope around one
individual for a brief space of time, settling it around their face like
an aureole, lighting their words and actions with greater meaning than
they would ever truly carry.

Clinging to one another in the dark, a hunger, an unravening of
separation, and he’s saying something loud, he is crying, he is
younger—-they always seem younger even when they are not--and I feel old
old old, and far away from anything that is meaningful or alive—-the
sudden exhaustion as my thighs, the small of my back, go hot and rushing
flushed with a brief abdication of the usual narrative in my head, then
immobile and concrete as if to ward him off or wield a separate
space—and he is triumphant, triumphant, he’s a shining golden boy there,
having fought the good fight and run the trails and brought back the
prize, the one that means nothing to me, nothing at all, alone there in
my cold little headspace, a silent and thinking monitor, reptilian below
the surface----

He will leave or I will leave and it does not matter, and if it does
somehow matter it will only draw hard on the blood for a brief time
while I mourn some absence that really only marks another thing found
wanting in me—-there have become so many and I am tired and worn out on
this endless discovery--

And I do not wish to repeat this, take your goddamned goldenhaired
towers, your cliffs and charging horses and go, go, leave me bereft of
footing on which to stand ten thousand feet above the sea so I can fly.
I need this.






posted at 12:45 AM

prayer at mono lake

alchemize my life,
make of me a creature hot and shining,
a running-fast river,
to catch up the golden glory collecting along the twisting paths here and in the rocks
come tumbling down,
a wild rush of heavy weight and crushing
sublime and terrifying,
exploding into space,
shaking every thousand-year-old tree
on the mountain that arched over us holy and violet,
the light like lions pouring spilling waves on open air,
as I lay on my back and stared at heaven so far far away….






posted at 5:16 PM

now you say
we've got hell to pay
don't worry baby that's okay
I know the boss
-the afghan whigs.



posted at 1:50 PM

~~~


letter to a girl friend

The men in my life, they are all a problem, they all say
“I love you,”

or they say

“I don’t love you,”

and either way it is a problem;

so I ask you,

my golden girl, my handsoff queen, whom I respected the moment I met,

how do you do it,
throw yourself into moments and minutes and magics the kind I could make if maybe
maybe
I could know the way the way
You seam your self off straight,
Not a cut-out from your chest but a diversion of the waterways inwards,
So that no streams shall reach your center
To pollute your happy heart?






posted at 1:42 PM

the value of zero

if nothing is
the quietly growing vacancy of space
interstellar and complete, vast
and broad, whale-wide leagues for millennia,
stars expanding,
old worlds collapsing,
oceans and seas empty and cooling,
if nothing is
at barren altitudes flung so high to the canopy of the stars that the sun would come down,
where wind claws torqued stones to spiraled perfection and makes of plants
silver spikes erected heavenwards at dawn to catch acute-angled light;
if nothing is
the peace we sink to like dry leaves
when all things desert us and we are bereft of
old loves and meanings,
and are instead gravid with lives not yet followed to logical conclusions,
narrations not yet written;
if nothing is
the inestimable value of that Mesopotamian digit,
where our primeval rivers flood over and over to
drown walled gardens, submerge valleys of shadows
and leave behind
nothing
to grow rich and wide with time again and again,
unfurling new worlds like nilotic sails,

then I have nothing to give you, love.
Nothing at all.



~~~



How’s she feeling today
Tired and sick of this place
Red wine is fast
At the lip of your glass saying I’m gonna ruin
Everything
Everything
So it’s better my sweet,
that we hover like bees
‘cause there’s no sure footing
no love I believe.
If you meet me in the night you can covet all you like
But don’t try to stop me—I cling tightly
To this life.
-neko case.



~~~



Thursday, August 7, 2003

we’ve got
time to hold us, immobile, and no way
to live it down;
if I could send you oceans, love, I would but
you’d like it too much and it’s a drowning sort of season these days
you are become
my deep inner terror,
a hazy late-rising sun,
a heavy bitter ring as you speak,
heat buckling the sidewalks,
the interference running lines through the air to bisect my view
my crushed chest
my horses straining their necks to escape—
I try to stick words to you, you know, but
they don’t take


~~~



Sunday July 13 2003:

i would wish i were a cat
to sleep on your wide windowsill and hear the highway,
reminding me
my heart is free and
there are other places to sleep
besides this one



~~



if mountains crumble and I’ve seen them do
then tell me tell me what’s the goddamned point of loving you














posted at 6:12 PM

Recorded to memory live on Jul 03, 2003 01:01 PDT:


Mount Washington



“Wow. You’re doing a lot better than me.”

“Hmm?”

“I’d be all looking at the directions upside-down by now, you know…”

“Oh, yeah. I’m just going down, I guess. You know?”

“Yeah. But I’d be all backwards and like, you know, like ‘eeeftl.’”

“Huh?”

“You know. Backwards.”

“But it would be different. That’s not it...it would be...”

“Oh. Hmm. I dunno.”

“ ’Cause I’m going right.”

“Still.”

“Tfel?”

“Yeah. T...eff...ee...el.”

“Yeah.”

[Turn signal clicking loudly, sleepily. A pause. Nothing. We are
comfortable like that.]

“Yeah. And that would just be worthless. I mean, how stupid is that?”

“haha...heh...[doubling over, spilling out] yeah--”

[engine guns onto 110 south, I align my lights with the lanelines--]

“That would be just a fucking waste of time.”

We laugh the whole drive home, at night, the sky is imperial violet and
black and flat, the stars are invisible, the city lights blanking onto
my retinas like gunshot, flashing past, silent and strung through
distance to register vague and brilliant, brief as we pass like flashing
and the lights so stunning so fast on freeway asphalt----and we’re still
laughing-----there is nothing greater better or more real than this now,
tumbling towards the earth, I’m telling you-----------------------

amen

always the laughter.














posted at 1:46 AM

I have been going to El Coyote for years and years now
over and over,
with so many different people; but
what a lovely trip
this last one was-------------:



for Danielle

6.26.2003

What advice can I give you, she said
over margaritas—
“Just muscle through it” (her face going sideways as though to say she
wasn’t sure that was such great advice)
and that, it stopped me mid-sip, to look up across the shitty faux
Mexican stained glass and drained glasses and heavily salted chips with
guacamole,

and at that moment if I’d been an aerialist she’d have held me safe on
high-wires suspended by her dark eyes staring cross the table—
cos she’s so right, so right:

(and when your knees can’t bend
(--as they don’t so well these days—)
make your will to move you places your legs won’t go:
muscle through
just muscle through--)

“you know,”
she said
“things always work out okay in the end whether you
worry about them or not” and

all your words, darling, from that night
I’d like to tattoo cross the backs of my retinas
to burn them onto my thoughts, a mirrorimage imperative, a command,
backlit by the neverending parade of light and color moving
carousel-like across my face as
days come and fade,
suns slide up and fall down,
over and over, and over and over
Things working out,
Me muscling through,
muddling on and
missing you, and as for me,
consistently burning out to be illuminated again over and over.

(i got me a silver band with a phoenix on it,
had it since eighteen,
and the years confirm its proud propriety of place
upon my ring finger.)

with all love,

voodoo.queen.

---
from this altitude
it will come back to you--
If the Mississippi should wash me away,
Down to New Orleans,
Maybe someday in my dreams
I'd wake feeling the sweat
From the gulf in my mouth...
-sugar (bob mould of husker du)










posted at 12:09 AM

/lingua franca/

sycamore,
xenadrine

(--I’m glorying in it, it’s green grass to roll in, a page of lines to
eat up,--)

the syllabic division,
asymmetric precision
the language-lit engine
in my heart—
you, dear, you set
the tumblers spinning to unlock
what’s set in steel there,
a bone broken to heal tight and inflexible,
needing the words to set it straight
to set it straight
and I will always find lines to cut closer, finer, deeper—
syrah
tarantel
asymptote
parisienne
datura
rectilinear
glassine
…

(true love, it is;
and as they say, you should set it free, so
with each word I liberate it, coming closer to what’s inside of me.)











posted at 12:07 AM

...and i see now,
i see it is all so temporary,
i clutch and grab at stuff like it's my tomorrow, my day after, my lifeline and it
is nothing to you, or is only so much as
your weekend,
your story,
what you did,
who you saw

i am so impossibly hopeful
and stupid...






posted at 12:01 AM

...and i fluctuate so much,
happy and sad and back again and I've been crying out too much
think about you all the time
it's strange and hard to deal--think about you lying there,
and the blankets lie so still
nothing breathes here in the cold.
nothing moves or even smiles
i've been thinking some of suicide,
but there's bars out here for miles
sorry bout the every kiss, every kiss you wasted back--I think the thing they said was true
I'm gonna die alone and sad
-ryan adams.

baker baker, bake me a cake
make me a day, make me
young again
and I wonder, if he's okay
if you see him, say
hi?
-tori amos.






posted at 9:17 PM

i still love you
i am sorry





posted at 9:40 AM

there is nothing greater than this.
nothing dearer
or more real
shine on, love
shine and shine and shine and
shine it on like there's no tomorrow
there is no tomorrow.

i see every bit of you sparking and arcing and
god is in the details, love

when a year ago i abdicated all hope in the desert and shook in the rainstorm i forgot,
now i recall everything
and am restored to the mojave again,
thrown down laughing on the sandy earth that doesn't hurt when i fall in the dark.










posted at 1:51 PM

the essence of cruelty is injustice

how on earth could she not love you,
when you are like this?
so unspeakably lovely and good--
my friend, there is no god.
and what exists in his place is not just.

(...and I feel the pull to make up the indifference,
pale imitation that I am,
I am, I am, I am something of a shadow
tripping 'round your tall feet by your side where you feel she fit so well...)









posted at 1:00 PM

no thing sweeter,
more kind,
than this--
waking up here,
your arm flung over me and
i won't move
for the world;
the wind could wail outside and
dust can claw at the curtained windows:
i would stay safe right here
in wideeyed wonder
silent
i am stunned.

tell me
how to take these things so hard to say, and make them
into little phrases strung together
like something i could pray on,
one line written after another
to transport me somewhere else,
when i cannot explain?
when i cannot say a thing?





posted at 1:57 PM

Oh look. Poetry is dead.

Great. No one told me.



posted at 2:58 PM

my dearest friend--
we are bereft of
any pulling or tugging at the corners of language,
any way I could tie it up for you, kindly and reassuringly,
the way, the way the way I'd like to,
the way you deserve,
the way the way we go around,
strutting and fretting,
and so instead I send you every bargaining prayer I guiltily uttered,
every gusting wave of rage I've ever railed against heaven,
every upward thrust from the earth that stood me stronger under it all,
every maddened and raging moment,
I send you this and more,
a silent warm wind on your nighttime drive south,
ten million stars to guide you home.






posted at 10:35 PM

clichès are clichès for a reason

darlin please don’t…
cry
the apple of my…
eye
everythings comin up roses, roses roses
In our grim cocoon
In our worn out
language












posted at 12:27 AM

the kind of way you while away the hours the hours collapsing days,

i swear to god your rhythm is fucked up girl.








posted at 4:47 PM

it isn't in the water
it isn't in the wrist






posted at 2:25 PM

but it seemed
so
real

i am twenty-eight engines away from you;
now thirty-nine geese pointed south,
and one dumb one heading north
to freeze.

roll me down the hills i can't remember, darlin
down the halls i stumbled thru and dont recall





posted at 5:23 PM

straight-up prose sorta


There are times when I sink very broken down and low in the water.

At these times it is less the absurd blackness and heartbreaking overwhelm I felt in adolescence and more a half-light, a darkness tinged with brown of earth, a sullen silence.

I do not wish so much for death at all. I wish for some sort of escape, of oblivion to myself. Freedom from the confines of my own mind. If you could tie me down within my toes I think I’d be happy, but as it is I can’t escape the incessant terrors, babblings, tumescent rumors and inane obsessions of my own silly skull. My own head. I don’t wish for death or contemplate suicide, unless as a side thought, a means to an end—of escaping myself. The personality has become a prison. Perhaps I could shift it around from the inside, go Picasso and crank things about a bit, rearrange the bars, but I don’t know quite how.

Drugs don’t help as they simply raise the interference broadcasting from within me to a din strong enough to dim the outside world, and the outside world simply is not the problem here; and drinking helped for quite some time, but I’m beginning to see also that it merely dulls me to some bits of myself and magnifies others, raising aches and pains long gone irrelevant within my chest like fingerprints from decade-old crime scenes.

So it is less that I wish to absent myself from the world or from others than I wish to vacation permanently from my own mind. If my ghost came upon a parade of travelers it wouldn’t bother me a bit, as long as I didn’t have to be there myself.

There are times when I see the world I’ve woven securely around me as just my own mind unraveling into loose coils around my person, to hold me in a stiff woolen embrace wherever I go; and I think that I might like to leave all these milling people a bit—even my beloved pup, who’s become so dear to me and is so full of the wonder of the new, I love him so much—I’d like to just be alone in silence. Join a nunnery and leave the space around me born-again, virginal and protected, clear as starlight, lucid and silent. Above all, silent.

This wish to be alone is not accompanied by any of the usual things women go on about—or I assume I should be going on about—when they divest themselves of certain people or certain ways of living—no talk of finding myself, no interest in seeking my inner voice that’s been so silent all these years, no bit about career or personal sovereignty. No Bridget Jones here.

No. I don’t care about work, or my selfhood, or any self-help blather. I just want to bury myself deep into my own chest and lie silent and still.

I have been damaged deeply, and I wish to shrink away now, because now of all times—with the world extending the tantalizing possibility that things might actually, finally be looking up—now of all times I wish to hit the pause button, run and hide, crawl under the bed like I used to do as a child when I was scared and lie very very still, listening to my heartbeat. Here I am safe. Here no one will find me.

I am filled with grief sloshing around tidally. Life has hurt so much, been so hard these past several years. If it really is congealing now, coming into form, it still hurts. I am still angry.
My friend Jen is jetting back and forth between LA and New York, settling into the apartment her dad’s money will buy for her, settling into the job her father’s connections primed her for and her own drive and energy through school and subsequent career trajectories had launched her into.

At least, I guess, there will be a place for me to crash when I whirl my way into New York like a badly spun top, some years from now and still lost.





posted at 1:00 PM

west hills hospital

and the quiet is
deafening
i get this now
transmission after exchange is complete
transfusion after it all went cold
recognitions taking form out of things that perhaps should stay
nebulous and undefined,
indefinite and unnamed,
the way the language bites down hard
on the back of the moments that ticked--ticked--ticked
by in the metered bits drawn out from your pulse
they measured in tin machines and plastic wires, elemental things
torn from the way they should have been left
should have remained
i am so sad, have lost something here
lost something when they put me under
and came up less human
gasping for air
and screaming in here
six years old again
six years old and scared






posted at 5:50 PM

i thought this would be
different,
somehow stupidly i believed
it could have ended better;
now piled and broken and smoke is starting,
and my road is pulling.
i didn't want to leave you this way
didn't want to leave you this way
if i could remember the words that i'd said
i'd take them all back and choke on each breath i didn't deserve to spit them out at you,
drunken and fucked-up,
a hillside at night,
a fall I've forgotten.
(The scars on my knees know things I never will,
a girl I am and and not, a separate life I get when the blood's thinned enough, and
you didn't stop my fall fast enough to prevent them--)
and I can't blame you
I can't blame you.
if there's ever a next time love,
just let me break my damn neck.

i thought this would be
different,
somehow stupidly i believed
it could have ended better;
and now the words scrawled on a table that I followed to find you,
--words always get me--,
our exchange is still cut into the wood, by the computers and the ashtray.
everything will haunt me forever
except the blacked-out memories I deserve to remember.

hey love,
tell me now,
how's it goin on yer edge of hollywood,
the freeway river
rushin in your window with the heavy hanging air;
i look
every time I drive by.





posted at 5:16 PM

dear friends,
new post on the overhaul.

thanks.
-michele.



posted at 1:23 AM

king medicine by Jets to Brazil

know that you'll soon go crazy
just like a whittling stick
hit by the coming daylight
cut up in a quick succession
a pointed confession really
stripped of all your armor
down to your very nature
beneath the haze and vapor gaze

you're such a willing stick to
beckon that wanting knife and
you've been looking for it
the right blade all your life
saying "who's gonna cut me
down to a size that suits me?
is there a worthy sculptor
among all you fine young knives?"

it's enough to make you take your head and put it on a shelf
to cut the heart out of your chest they'll come for that as well
tell me how you do that crazy trick where you walk around asleep
save it for your doctor friend the one who keeps you under lock and key

you'll soon go screaming like a
bargain basement lunatic who's
not so specialized that
they couldn't just replace you
why don't you start crying
for all that you've got left here
why don't you stop dying
before you go and get it right?

now you're selling off the house so you can buy the farm
you cut the heart out of your chest to let the light in through your arm
it's enough to make you take your head and put it in a bag
to cut the teeth out at the pink now there's nothing in the bag

foul weather friend,
you are so dying
an amateur chemist now.
king medicine
when is it perfect?
where is it taking you?

there is no cure
only reprieve
some fleeting joy
posing as balance
nothing is sure
so every four hours
king medicine
this subject loves you







posted at 1:21 AM

the train
you see coming
and can't
dodge

fall backwards
You feel it.






posted at 1:17 AM

congealing, realigning, coming back together, broken pieces flying inward to fit into place, mending the shatters, drawing back into the center the way it's sort of like the morning after, coalescing

and realizing the world did not end

anyone gotta cuppa coffee,
an ephedrine jack-in
to my amnesiac soul



posted at 11:33 AM

read it to yerself rilly fast and you'll hear it like i heard it. yeah that's right

i
think there is thinking there is
some sort of reason that thinking isn't

enough

or
maybe this stop and start and stop and start and stop and start will

kill me off

breaking down
over and over and over and over and over and then then then

building up

i am so tired
i am so fucking goddamn tired someone grab my wrist i'm goin' down down down down again

a slide into staring at the ceiling,
feelin underwater
the cottage-cheese seventies coating
lookin like waves
seen from two hundred feet under
under
under
something.
i think i think i think i'm under something.






posted at 9:20 PM

atlantis

downtown glendale has cinderblock bricks aligned and rigid, bringing walls into shape,
a crystallized mondrian structure cellular and hard to
focus
yr gaze and see right angles and
all the people in this bank are from some other nation,
somewhere I'd consider exotic,
and think lamely of minarets and strong coffee and jeweled lanterns
hanging over places that dont really exist, not really at all

the way each little city and town
decides its story for itself
c'mon chamber of commerce
you know I love a good portrait painted,
you know i love a word with a ring to it,
the way we've all decided we are from the west,
west of what? the world is round

we rush about daily dazed and tired not knowing why,
i grind myself lower and lower in this worn path,
seen etruscan stones the size of boulders forming corners at base of ancient churches
that used to house something else
on mountaintops.
no different, no different than these cinderblocks

meaning nothing, nothing, nothing
sound and fury all
we are so much





posted at 9:15 PM

ms. muffett

it is colder.
i get the air conditioning off the big office to the left.
they don't know i'm going numb in here.
a spider has built
her anthracite home
against the wall, behind the chest of drawers, along the path to my desk.
how did she find her way into such a sterile little upstairs room?
her web is strong and resistant, cracking and snapping
under my fingers: she's a big one, and dangerous.
I'll wear boots tomorrow and root her out.

I kind of wish I didn't have to, though.
she and I, we share the quiet in here.
i click and snap my c.r.t.-bent back
back into shape
with the back of the gray office chair.

I feel pretty alone, I guess.
hey
write me a rhyme, someone
i need a line
to grab onto
someone.
someone.
yeah, i get it--
these things it takes to live well ain't in me.

a spider, it sat down beside her
hey kid she said,
you got a cigarette?
we sat for a bit.
a nice afternoon all in all.
stared at the sunset.




posted at 4:39 PM

i think that these repeated attempts at cleaning my room don't matter all that much

a sharp exhalation through the teeth,
a way to find the time
that isn't there
that isn't there
and won't be found
moving things around as though
as though you might make a magic
to bend your life over and down
the curve of the earth
that isn't there




posted at 3:25 PM

lost in a sea of
bad camera angles




posted at 4:20 PM

I wanna write you
Alaska,
a big sky country,
I could
I could
I wanna write you
a Lascaux




posted at 11:45 AM

my sine wave
is all over the map
i'm a wacked-out seismograph;
and I love it, I love it
absolutely absolvingly,
struggling,
hauling in,
love it.




posted at 2:08 AM

*

Yeah, I know I said on the air.

Mwahahaha.




posted at 4:12 PM

canada sucks

and i find
metaphors fail.
these old turns of words.
you are the dearest thing to me.

the thought that i might someday wake and find you gone,
all prop-ups promises flee from me,
ground beneath the feet so far away,
i can't help but fall like a tree down and down,
an inevitable crash sideways.

robbed of support
and did not know

the earth had gone so far.

love,
it used to be stupid, blind and dumb.
your messy hair and big glasses
now are the only thing i adore.

dear god.
please do not take
the one and only good thing
ever.







posted at 1:26 AM

you remind me of
posessions lost as a child
meant not so much while I had them,
but ever after their loss,
their accidental abandonment at recess or during car trips,
I was brokenhearted and bereft,
imagining them in other arms or lost in gutters,
unloved and lonely,
decaying and never to be recovered.
Cried for weeks, inconsolable, and still do.







posted at 5:51 PM

venice in winter

in winter when it rains our
waters rise, and fill the floor
its spill growing gently across each tesseraic tile,
our silver and golds
melting and shattered,
throwing light at high-flung walls that lean in
over us here, a pool within a room, your mosaic tile,
your byzantine figures belling and expanding,
watermarks and side chapels all,
and do we
see the fractured color glow from below,
as swimmers do beneath a surface,
or is it the same as
smudged clouds in relief across the sky with cerulean and apricot shine,
or are we looking down into it all, as into some sort of rococo lagoon;
echoes skitter and drip here, expanding rings,
an inner-ear outwards to hear the sounds that carry so well;
the city is sinking,
St. Mark's is a slow submerge,
and I am not so sad.
No work of man is made less lovely by the touch of time,
or of earth's slow hungry tug.








posted at 4:43 PM

Goodbye love,
track my arc across the sky,
missing you tonight as every night,
the proof that I was beautiful,
and deserving of lovely things.
To turn a car around for you was no loss,
but it was everything else,
everything else,
and so
we tore me down from the inside,
a lovely destruction,
a church after the bombing-out.
My days these days are measured now in lies.
And regret, drawing back from me like a tide,
has drawn a line across the wrists to mark the time,
A black and dogging thing, that does not leave my side.






posted at 9:40 PM

just say no to hollywood cityhood

When I get drunk
I forget to remember you
So this is the way
I can do it best.
Tell me now
yr three word philosophy,
the way I prophesied
a poem the night i met you
to erase it by daylight,
but damn I knew it then.
Toss me a new line
to remember you by
I wanna go back
I could walk there you know
weaving a line down the sidewalk
there are no words and too many sodium lights
in hollywood
in hollywood
as I'm sure you know well




posted at 9:36 PM

if i break it apart into tiny bits

i
find
my
self
wish
ing
you
would
call
me
up
at
night
soon
i
know
it
aint
right
a
syl
la
bic
div
i
sion
to
break
up
the
wrong
and
make
it
right
cos
each
lit
tle
bit
is
in
no
cu
ous
and
no
one
could
blame
us
ab
solve
me
of
this
with
your
voice
and
hands
a
bap
tism
in
the
ways
we
aren’t
sup
posed
to
go






posted at 9:33 PM

Things that have been lost and cannot be recovered.

Once, I didn’t love you yet, and we were friends,
in that concerned and confusing sort of way
that friends are at first. and now

it is still-born,
aborted,
clotheshangered and cloak and daggered,
a rock-carved figure motionless and stopped midstep,
turned to stone and locked in a burning building going down.

And you were once the dearest thing,
We loved and lived ten thousand miles interstellar in the space of twenty feet;
And now we haven’t one to walk on a moment longer.

In Xanadu did Kublai Khan, kiddo.
Expect a one-word telegram:
Stop.







posted at 11:42 AM

on the poetic devices and visual language of contemporary fine art.

There’s some
thing
about you,
The way there is sunrayshot fog about seashore rocks at morning,
The way there are seethru moths’ wings about candles,
The way you move sideways,
a sort of something said and not,
a space of silence left listing starboards there,
in dawning air,
transparent and so painfully painfully lovely.

and so mute—
I’d buy a crowbar to pull that golden treasure from your throat,
if I did not think it would crush you
with unbearable unbearable
weight.








posted at 12:03 AM

some other old ones I love, posted to this site months ago, that i wanted to "reissue," so to speak:


Wednesday, May 01, 2002
3/28/02

i see your goddamned truck
every time I'm on the freeway
which is at least
twice a day
everyone in LA must own one
I could drive for miles and miles
and not escape your ghost


posted at 12:14 PM





at the grasshopper, thursday (4/2002)

and she says I watch you
go off
taking on water
in ten minutes flat
in your diagonal gaze.
Oh yeah, that, I know, it's
not you love
a bit disconcerting,
the way we go on and I cloud up
divisional and excessive, a quiet tablature
tableing it right there
and you gotta keep talking.
I expand to fill the vacant house,
each clapboard echoing
my gaze, watching
you walk through me
like a ghost.
These cloudburst clouds baby
storming up a brew
I gulp all down
keeps me stable
and diffuse feet on the ground
so pummel me with rain the size of frying pans
I float thru the rooms here and
throw a few books around,
creak the floors
break some dishes and
get you cold
and shaky chilled
sorry
knock me flat, the gun to the head, the shock of light
end this occupation, this permanent vacation
the kind of poltergeist
can't wait for the sun


posted at 12:05 PM




posted at 4:58 PM

Culled from some ancient desktop-kept docs, prolly written about six, seven months ago:




missing you on your westside
how’s your girlfriend
we were friends
how’d that go again?
guess it’s too hard to forgive
maybe I’m just too hard to know


-------------------


throw me a line
I am a mile
of unforgiven earth
I can spell myself,
feed on my own seed
tell myself I’m an a priori
In love with me and no other, a feminist and autonomous,
--that propping up, a way to not fall too far--
but baby
I love you so
your touch, your sweet pain, your silent spaces
isn’t it lovely how you send me
inspire me to places where my words find no purchase
my intonations no love
my connotations no tiny crevasses to put roots down
and oh fine
I am more than this
tell my time
make more into more
you know
I’ve more in store
its the thought that counts
thank god
thank god.


-------------------


How funny it is though
your words don't fail me
nor do mine and yet
id like to say in this thin space of liquor and bloodstream wines
so luscious and gripping
I’d like to straddle you
pin you down, have you beg me
my hands smell sweet
baby come on
come on
come on
come on me you know the way I’d go it's too easy
been this way since I was twelve,
“since I was seventeen”
even better.
I could rhapsodize about your body
but baby
your hearts on my mind
goddamn my weak and torn woman’s soul but
your heart is always on my mind,
cliché or no.


-------------------


Write me drunk honey
I’ll finish up alone my red wine
a shirazi rewrite could be worse
at two am I’ve got too much time,
stretching out the line binding the space between,
my fingers ache
from the wet retyping of my mind’s eye
I’d give you words
you know,
but I think you got em fine on your own,
and I do too
I do too
we’ve miles to go,
pages to plow thru
before we sleep
maddened swilling drunk writers we are,
better or worse
you know I know our way.
you know I’ve come to love you
you know I’ve come to love you
some things are easy to type
so easy oh sweet honey
you dearest darling and still
some things we’ll never say.
Words, when spoken
are somehow too hard to take away.
Learned that the hard way.
But still,
if you prove it to me,
that you’re trustworthy,
I’ll tell you everything someday.









posted at 11:59 AM

I like this poem; and it suits my inscrutable mood, so I'm going to reprint it here.

Kubla Khan
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1798
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.

So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round:
And here were gardens bright with sinuous rills
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.
But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover!

And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced;
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher's flail:
And 'mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
It flung up momently the sacred river.

Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean:
And 'mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war!

The shadow of the dome of pleasure
Floated midway on the waves:
Where was heard the mingled measure
From the fountain and the caves.
It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!

A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw:
It was an Abyssinian maid,
And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Mount Abora.
Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight 't would win me
That with music loud and long,
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome! those caves of ice!

And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.



---------------------------------------------------------------

so come on and look here, now,
look out and this here is the landscape of your life.
give yourself birds' eye sight.

twenty years off from where you are now, there are mountains.
fifteen the rocks underfoot grow to difficult hill country,
where you can lose your way easy.
between here and there are several rivers leading to the sea, with both rapids and wide places and every other metaphorical morphology possible;
there are gentle lands and valleys where you can walk in the shadow of death,
if that is what you like.

there is another side to the mountains, and you have to get there, see, before you travel far enough through even more lands,
even further disances, far enough to fall off the edge,
which, i'm sorry to say (and you know you know its true),
is when you will die;

and where are you now?
where are you now?

triangulate, use that old compass your dad gave you,
and remember what got you and he both out of the woods when you two got lost looking for firewood--
you were nine, and he was late thirty-something, in the woods at yellowstone,
and the trees got closer and closer together the further you walked,
and mom back at the campsite didn't know, she was reading;
and you walked and walked, and it had been much too long now, and dad stopped and stood still,
(you weren't afraid 'cause you were with dad and dad could do anything, but i think now, i think he was worried for you, and he was only thirtynine,
was he afraid?)
and he said, when i was in the war, the moss grew on all the sides of the trees,
so you didn't know which way to go (and there really wasnt one way to go anyways, there was nowhere to go),
but here, but here,
you can see which side its on,
and so we have to go that way;
and after ten minutes
we walked out of forest that had been tagged with signage "dangerous bear territory" (I looked back and saw it as we left, a warning to people entering--)
so think carefully about the things dad taught you,

right and wrong, little girl, and true and false, and love and more love,
and follow the sun.
-m.







posted at 10:09 PM

Monday, September 02, 2002.

people tell me everything's ok, that they understand;


and i smile, and i nod,
to make them feel better,
and i think,
if i could peel my own skin off
i wouldn't be better,
wouldnt be cleaner,
wouldnt be free of gravity
to bend me down and break my waist against the pull of what is underfoot,
underground,
a kind of black hole
no one's had the answer to
since i was six
since i was six.











3:22 AM [+]
...

Sunday, September 01, 2002.



still have the bruises on my arm from where you grabbed me when i fell


i would not get a tattoo, but i might as well


ink into myself the marks others have made upon me in this life,


seeing as how they'll be with me forever anyways,


and there's nothing i'd rather remember forever


than the touch of your hand on my arm,


the touch of other lives upon mine...


posted at 5:12 PM

physics

going
off
stretching out my will at the edges, a widening puddle,
pulled apart to dissapate;
a dissolute
solution,
with no one home here,
a vacancy an unoccupied center;
[nothing worth stayin for, the lack of gravity, no mass];
going off, c'mon, you know
going off to japan, to england, they go off to austin and cyprus and san francisco and
huntington fucking beach,
my intentions scattered,
diffuse all that feeling,
and i can't protest one damn word about it,
'cos we all know
you can't want what you can't have and
the world is round, hence
the law of diffusion:

all things expand
to fill available space.








posted at 4:35 PM

observations at a wedding

don't look so
damn sad love
so breakin on yr way,
your silent glazing distant,
catchin up in things
not yr own,
takin pictures everywhere you go,
as if to capture
the things it is
maybe you miss
maybe i miss
seeing you move stiffy distant
yr eyes glazed on other things.
Don't think I don't know you, there, your
sunshine cheap and priceless
holding tight
things won't hold you





posted at 4:44 PM

what's my shelf life, baby
and how long will i keep
holding on?
how long will you remember me
the leaves i drip, drip drip wither,
shall i go on and on or
run down,
clocklike and tired



posted at 11:39 AM

"...But as we've all come to find out, it takes more than love to keep the poison down.
Life takes you where it goes.
Confiez-moi une journee de silence."
[grant me one day of rest]
-juno.


a love song by the weakerthans:

They're tearing up streets again. They're building a new hotel. The Mayor's out killing kids to keep taxes down, and me and my anger sit folding a paper bird, letting the curtains turn to beating wings. Wish I had a socket-set to dismantle this morning. And just one pair of clean socks. And a photo of you. When you get off work tonight, meet me at the construction site, and we'll write some notes to tape to the heavy machines. Bring your swiss-army knife, and a bottle of something, and I'll bring some spraypaint and a new deck of cards. Hey, I found the safest place to keep all our tenderness. Keep all our bad ideas. Keep all our hope: It's here in the smallest bones, the feet and the inner-ear; it's such an enormous thing, to walk and to listen. I'd like to fall asleep to the beat of you breathing in a room near a truckstop on a highway somewhere. You are a radio. You are an open door. I am a faulty string of blue christmas lights. You swim through frequencies. You let that stranger in. As I'm blinking off, and on, and off again. We've got a lot of time. Or maybe we don't, but I'd like to think so, so let me pretend. These are my favourite chords. I know you like them too. When I get a new guitar, you can have this one, and sing me a lullaby. Sing me the alphabet. Sing me a story I haven't heard yet.







posted at 5:10 PM

scientific study in cause and effect

left you
got sick
couldn't stand
and then
passed on the street
second day of my health,
your words there hangin in the morning air,
remembering everything
i remember everything
20 seconds later
tire went flat
pulled off street
in front of the coffee place i hate
saw you drive by.
i changed my tire alone.



posted at 2:28 PM

its a directional pull
engendered and hauled on over the shoulder
our army corps of engineers
is on the task now yes
diverting rivers
drying seas
but i still feel those waters for you,
they've got my veins
a runnin hard stream into the blood yeah
a jack and whistle blow gun into lungs
to wake me up and
still my soul.
Which ways to go in life?
never was a leaver
now the currents' got my feet and damn
how she pulls a bite a yank deep on the toes
draggin me along
a gypsy hot run it hits my head
then draws me down, red thread tied to wrists
and makin me follow a flute into nowhere, no
id like to stay but oh
who's in charge here
who's in charge?

and me watchin your blank slate breathless, your blue screen, yeah I've seen it, and oh how it makes me sick with nerves brittle shaky and heartachy with loss.








posted at 12:20 AM

I
Would
Ask
You
To
Wait
But you know how it is
That's the wrong thing to say
Isn’t it?
Isn’t it?





posted at 10:10 PM

there are
no
words






posted at 1:47 AM

atlantis

downtown glendale has cinderblock bricks aligned and rigid, bringing walls into shape,
a crystallized mondrian structure cellular and hard to
focus
yr gaze and see right angles and
all the people in this bank are from some other nation,
somewhere I'd consider exotic,
and think lamely of minarets and strong coffee and jeweled lanterns
hanging over places that dont really exist, not really at all

the way each little city and town
decides its story for itself
c'mon chamber of commerce
you know I love a good portrait painted,
you know i love a word with a ring to it,
the way we've all decided we are from the west,
west of what? the world is round

we rush about daily dazed and tired not knowing why,
i grind myself lower and lower in this worn path,
seen etruscan stones the size of boulders forming corners at base of ancient churches
that used to house something else
on mountaintops.
no different, no different than these cinderblocks

meaning nothing, nothing, nothing
sound and fury all
we are so much





posted at 2:08 PM

"to be the one,"
ryan adams
[heartbreaker]

well the pills i got, they ask me let's go out for a while
and the knives up in the kitchen are all too dull to smile
yeah and the sun it tries to warn me,
"boy those wings are made of wax"
while the things i do to kill me,
they just tell me to relax...

but oh cinderella
all dressed up in all your boots and all your charms
i’m not the fellow
to protect you
or to keep you from all your harm

and i don’t know which is worse
to wake up and see the sun,
or to be the one,
be the one that’s gone

and the empty bottle it misses you
yeah and i’m the one that it’s talking to
and with you and i just barely strangers
i’m pretty much just left the fool...
damn don’t the streets look empty though
just wandering round here without you

oh the empty bottle it misses you
and i’m the one it’s talking to
and i don’t know which is worse
to wake up and see the sun,

or to be the one,

be the one that’s gone



posted at 3:59 PM

i would wish
to
dissolve



posted at 1:34 AM

My Aleutian bride,
A study in the ways to manufacture
A life more alluring,
More temperate and fair
Your golden jet black hair
To hang damp across your back sideways,
There, there’s no way to move the sunny silence that stills
With the air in your throat
As you swallow the soft feather words and choke
luxuriantly
And blind.
And if the crow flies over your islands love
Its not in a straight line
No
Your oscillating temperature,
An upswell of ground to find
The earth beneath your feet and proud,
Pulling you down
By ankles











So I’m the queen of silences
Well I've got one for you
Youre the king of inertia
A mathematical conclusion,
You’d like that one,
A simple foregone resolution,
They're kind of the same
But if you ask me by name
I’ll say that you haven’t got one.
I’d say that you haven’t got one.
so fine, there it is, kickin in
raging at you now
A silent inner exercise,
After all,
The coronation went well and I wear it with style,
that title you settled on my forehead,
sinkin down to cover my eyes now
I may never quite forgive you
For telling me you cared.









What is this thing that moves me up and to the keyboard, to medicine, when I'd be so content to be pressed here, down by an equal and opposite force?
We all get it, we all understand the thing that makes you lie down under it like under the wheels of a merciful machine;
But I have no name for what propels me to move limbs and try to climb out of bed and into waking life.
How fascinating our will to go on, how nameless a force, that trope towards the next daylight, how silent an owner,
so stealthy it takes me creeping like a rapist.
The will to live, I think, though,
is still a cruel mistress,
no kinder than death.
I’d like to have no owner at all,
my head all to my own
to lean my life which way I wish.









Teetering tottering across the room
I don’t mind it in this case cos
Im alone and lovely its all so good yeah,
Its all so richly divine
Me in my own world in a word all my makin
I am off on a tangent
A strange and weird angle
Propelled by fleeting feelin,
A sensation, a moment
Distraction from where my itty bitty center
Lies like dry lovely leaves
So pretty
So quick to float away
So goddamn fucking fickle












posted at 2:30 PM

my little bright and dark girl
is there a word in the dictionary
for you




posted at 12:12 PM

spinnin your wheels so fast
look like they're
not moving at all



posted at 12:12 PM

hereafters have not been chosen
the flame will find the oxygen
no sentence yet decided,
just a wide swing tremolo
-son volt.

posted at 5:11 PM

feelin
a bit like a scared shot,
a deer backin off back into the bramble,
send it up like a flare into the night sky over these woods,
imperial violet with your golden glare skittering an arcing armature sideways there--
slanting my face into white-lit illumination,
throwin shadows around.
i'm afraid of everything.






posted at 1:12 PM

yeah, that jam in the low back,
the base of spine
a spire and quick tighten,
a snag to catch on,
quick and tripping,
and i grit my teeth and grin,
reminding me that death's got my number
maybe not so much as others
but more than some,
reminding me to claw through each day like a metal folding chair
slammed square to the jaw and hard
sending the hours spinning.





posted at 4:55 PM

amazing lyrics:

...and i used to be kinda weird about this,
a fear of dependence on a guilty gilt-edged
hedged transcendence that makes us liars
and tense when we look down and realize
that nothing really suspends us--
but it was never just another saturday night,
not with you in attendance

and faces slide by in glowing shadows
like snowbound ghosts that go up and
down in epileptic shivers and negative
radioactive slivers in a landscape of
endless gold glitter and a taste in my
mouth so sweet, yet so bitter--and we
exhaust ourselves trying to get there

so in the end, whatever, we die, we
dissolve, equations unbalanced, riddles
unsolved, and we were never connected
or involved except for the intersections
and crazy mathematics with no time
and no space and no schedule and no
place--and we pass right through it
without a trace

and sometimes the music drifts
through my car on a spring night when
anything is possible and i close my eyes
and i nod my head and i wonder how
you been and i count to a hundred and
ten because you'll alwaye be my hero,
even if i never see you again

-dismemberment plan.




posted at 3:39 PM

and you're so damn eager
for me
to hand all the blame
over
well I'm tellin you
it's mine
and you can't have it



posted at 12:01 PM

and realizing,
realizing
no one's quite on my side here
no one's quite got my back
so i'm off and hittin the road, yes
if no one's quite for me then i'm not for no one
a highway one to take me home
i'll look up those starry eyed ladies
came before me riding their bloomin horses
harder and faster than me
you gals better get some answers
wedged in your mouths
for me,
'cos it's your biology
i got runnin in my hot red veins
you girls have found your old-town homes and i
i need some middling coffee
and your seaside restaurant
to set me straight.





posted at 7:13 PM

so high
its hurting
so wide
the line is drawn
i gotta learn to
stop myself from falling
down so low
-catherine wheel.



posted at 11:54 PM