angelskinned's journal

do you feel like i could never find you / do i feel like i'm the only survivor

2008-01-31T04:32:06Z

your face. i can hardly look at it, for so many reasons.

crying so hard for days that my eyes might dissolve.

anger at you for pursuing. confusion over my own desire. trying to solve a problem that i've already called finished.

i arrive at tentative solutions, only to see the inherent hopelessness. i cling to nothing but my already-enacted decision. i i throw that away and cling to all else. i fake myself out, recall us laughing, "we're such drama queens-- can't we just go on living?" but we're not the kind of people who simply go on living.

my new view of things pushes me to meditate even more on the schools, the fucking schools. it will be absolute torture to wait out nine responses. i sent out the last one today, just in time to make the deadline. reading online that they prefer it by december... won't someone offer me a place in the world?

my arrival at this new tentative decision has me imagining us, which terrifies me. jesus, it fucking terrifies me. you have come to terrify me. how can you repeatedly give up so easily, and yet refuse to let me go so insistently?

i recall the therapist, commenting that you (as in, you) would have to get to the point where you don't nit-pick over all the "points" of our relationship, and instead say, "i am with this person, for my life, for now. period." now, when i've cut the cord, you utter those words.

i can't do this.

angelskinned @ 2008-01-25T10:54:00

2008-01-25T15:54:06Z

i dreamed you married someone else and i had to attend the wedding. it made me feel so sick that i woke up crying and gagging. she was short, conservative, feminine, dark olive skin, black hair, very happy. i was wearing white but it was more like a shroud. there was a wedding party table with you and her and all your friends that were once a part of my life before they got slowly phased out as we passed breakup after breakup.

i was sitting at a table alone where i could hear her laughing and kissing you. you were making jokes and gesturing with your hands, hovering about her, as she smiled and brushed her veil back over her hair. every breath i took felt like it would break me. it made me want to absolutely die. fuck these dreams about you are killing me.

"lie with me / stay beside me / don't go"

2008-01-25T04:12:27Z

Did you love well what very soon you left?
Come home and take me in your arms and take
away this stomach ache, headache, heartache.
Never so full, I never was bereft
so utterly. The winter evenings drift
dark to the window. Not one word will make
you, where you are, turn in your day, or wake
from your night toward me. The only gift
I got to keep or give is what I've cried,
floodgates let down to mourning for the dead
chances, for the end of being young,
for everyone I loved who really died.
I drank our one year out in brine instead
of honey from the seasons of your tongue.

Marilyn Hacker

"that it will break your heart / the way things are"

2008-01-25T04:08:11Z

i dreamed about you again. restless flirtation through phones and doorways, your face, sunlit, in three-quarter-view. the red in your stubble, the sharp in your eyes-- never letting anything in until everything has ended.

then the dreams turned sad, endless expansive highways, separate cars. the decision to part from each other ringing through the dream like a big, dark church bell. you drive to georgia. i drive to somewhere hotel. both of us in hotels in this country on the planet earth, somehow devoid of communication (physical metaphor for my embargo on phone calls), plotting ways to show up at each other's anonymous doorsteps, begging to start again.

how long would it take for us to start over? 5 years? 10 years. i miss you like a vicious tattoo that refuses to heal: just when i've fallen asleep and give your pain a rest, i turn on the wrong side in bed and wake to angry searing heart pain.

yeah.

"the girl you know so sick i cannot try"

2008-01-21T06:17:01Z

"Now that you know you can, the city's full
of girls-- just notice them! It's not like pull-
ing teeth to flirt," she said, "or make a date."
It's quite like pulling teeth to masturbate
(I didn't say), and so I don't. My nice

dreams are worse than nightmares. As my eyes
open, I know I am; that instant, feel
you with me, on me, in me, and you're not.
Now that you know

you don't know, fantasies are more like lies.
They don't fit when I try them on for size.
I guess I can, but can't imagine what
I'd do, with whom, tonight. It's much too late
or soon, so what's yours stays yours. it has until
now. That, you know.

-Marilyn Hacker

"to feel this incomplete"

2008-01-21T03:19:04Z

talking with her about holding her friend's baby; how beautiful their marriage is; how much she wants to have her husband's baby: i get that much more lost.

i feel so incredibly lost, at sea; no compass; "the text obscured." i want to feel your lips on my skin; i want to dance every night until i render myself senseless, blanked, here in physical form only; i want my mother to call in and say i won't be making it to my life for the next few months.

watching people fall in love, make mistakes, wish for children-- this veil of grey that binds me against any capacity for ordered thought, except the logic that undoes all my reasoned conclusions, leading me back into your arms.

"he moved like the sunset / god who painted that"

2008-01-19T06:20:55Z

i returned the movie we never watched on new year's and exchanged it for "the hours."

the thought of you interning on that set in nyc

+

those lost (trapped) women in the film

=

i ask myself: what am i doing? not just with(out) you-- not just that sea of bitten-lip, swollen-eyed misery, but the question of my life. the idea that we fail to kill ourselves, to enter back into the void, because we have intimate ties to the meaningless world to which we are so intricately connected, makes me question how i spend my time here.

since i left home, i've spent 3 years making art, 1 year writing fiction and 4 years "doing theory." jessica warned me that the movie was depressing and i replied that as long as it was about writing, i'd be fine. what i do is to make meaning and talk about how meaning gets made. i am about to enter a 5-year-minimum program where i will conduct scholarly, esoteric research that isn't even moderately politically relevant. what is the point of this? i enjoy it. developing intense thoughts enriches my experience of existence by simultaneously complicating and clarifying my surroundings. i guess that's a good motive, yikes. it makes me sound a whole lot like an upper-class woman who paints in expensive clothes to bide the time: edna pontellier without the edge. the only edge i've got, besides the rather incoherent disciplinary transgressions that riddle my academic work, is an unending tattoo on my back and my queer taste in sexual partners.

i seem to have inadvertently lost both the person who lights up my life, and the drive to continue in that life.

what a coincidence.

"dripping with blood and with time and with your advice"

2008-01-16T03:48:36Z

i am so tired of waking up all night every night to your absence. i mean i got used to it these past months since you moved out, but i never really got used to it. i mean my face is tired from the constant grimace that anticipates the next round of tears.

every time i hear your voice it breaks me. breaks me. knowing that you feel: you have finally through all your emotional struggle and fear of commitment come to this point where you think you're "ready." and i pull out, i refuse to go through the cycle one more time. but don't you see that i can't build a life with someone who bolts and leaves when we need to move to a new apartment. i can't build a life with someone whose depression gets the better of them to the degree that they leave me like that.

please: do work, do the work you need to do. find a way to make enough money so you can treat your depression. you need a fucking life counselor, that's what you need... someone to build a gameplan with you and force you to stick with it. i wanted to be that person, but it was too much responsibility because you wouldn't even let me in enough to really help! i know that you have so much on your plate. i know. you just need to get through some of that. so that at least money is going forward instead of backward for you. so that you don't contradict yourself every few months, freak out and then regret your decisions later. baby. i'm so sorry. baby i miss you so much i feel like dying.

i miss talking to you. everytime we talk i lose my mind.

just take it one step at a time. just work through this pain.

i see you on my steps in san francisco - la - chicago - nyc... when in my dreams you take my hand and we try again, after you've worked some stuff out (and me too, i need to work some stuff out too...).

i miss you so much that i don't know anything anymore, except that i made a decision after months of contemplation and i can't go back on it-- not this time. i owe it to us.

"don't rush to be by my side"

2008-01-14T23:40:34Z

how am i supposed to weather this?

how am i supposed to keep from calling you? "how am i supposed to stay away from you?" like angel, you should leave for la, leave me to grieve the empty space you used to fill instead of your streaming presence, which surely must be more difficult by far. my fingers itch for phone-buttons, for the keys of your body, for the music we made together...

your pain amplifies my pain. your tears project my tears. wine puts me to bed at night and fuzzy misery keeps me there in the morning. i think they should outlaw beds in your absence; that's it, no more beds for the lot of you --> make these cold tattooed bones toss and turn on the floor.

i can't return your calls. i bite my nails off, cry my head off, curse your name and masturbate your memory. i can't return your calls-- no more ambiguity, no more disappointment, no more expectation, just: trying to stay away from you. please. please.

you ask why in your message; you knew all the reasons why until you got so blinded by pain again that you fail to recall them. why --> all the reasons you ever came up with before, plus the fact that you did come up with them, and that it prompted you to leave again and again. let sit five minutes and stir for six months of grieving your absence while you laid next to me each saturday night. all the tears and desire in the world won't change the fact that we're not right for each other at this sad, sad time in our lives. so let it be, my darling dearest beast, let it fucking be.

"ten more minutes with you"

2008-01-12T19:05:20Z

the tears were less often and then your voice. i had faked erasure of my brain and then those words.

do others experience loss this deeply? so bad you fear the pain will kill you?

attempting words, i need to resort to textual exorcism-- yet i oscillate between a blank abyss of hysterical tears and attempts at representation that only serve as markers for where you're not. academicize this acaDEMICIZE this-- i need to compartmentalize some piece of this yawning pain so i can breathe. it's so hard to breathe.

layers:

x-mas disaster with her, too painful to even express yet, having to hang up on her because didn't she see i just DIDN'T HAVE anything left for her after dealing with drunk, stoned sad sister and loved, failed man of my sad, sad dreams... i just didn't have anything left, he had just soothed me out of fully dysfunctional panic when my doorbell rang and i could just barely deal. and it hasn't stopped since that night i hung up the phone, it hasn't fucking stopped... now he can't soothe me anymore with anything GOD. i lost my baby i lost my my... my... fuck. theorize this and i'll win the nobel fucking (heart in) piece(s) prize.

+

fear that i will be rejected from every school because i'm just not good enough, not good enough either, i know i'm not, i'll fall apart, to succeed at these impossible, impending tasks before me now... i cannot even see through my tears for five days, how will i ever un-swell my eyes never mind the ink-blood down my back enough to face any world again? i could barely take the stress when he still held me at night, how am i supposed to rend sense from this blurred keyboard, my broken mind, now that he is really gone? how am i supposed to make these deadlines? how am i supposed to be a grown-up when my loss has left me five years old on the porch waiting (wailing) for daddy?how how HOW?

+

i can't stamp it out of my vision, your crying words: "i thought you would say yes." it echoes and echoes and echoes, i wake up at 5 in the morning to hear it echo, tearing through my body, your words: you thought i would say yes. i wanted so many things with you but those hopes got shattered bit by bit, and now i have to call it: over. i have to. i can't. i can't. i know that you love me and you must understand that i need to move on. i can't let you back in my life like that. the email you sent me, you say that i'm a lot, that i'm too much, that everything is about me, that i refuse to compromise. this is a lie, it's not true. i compromised so much for you. i laid myself open to you. i agreed to give it another try knowing that you would leave, knowing that it might shatter. i gave you the benefit of the doubt, i let your fears and needs define our relationship. your email hurt my feelings so much... but maybe that's just me refusing to be flawed. it doesn't matter. it doesn't matter. ughhhhh i wish i could just stop crying.

i want to kiss you i want to call you i want to marry you-- but i can't. i love you so much and it has been so hard for me to watch you be unhappy in so many different facets of your life. i cannot bear to watch you fail with me again, and i cannot bear to miss you any more than i do now. so i'm sorry, baby, i love you so much i want to rip my heart out. i'm sorry, but this is the end. i'll say it again just in case you're reading this, you are this amazing fucking miracle of beautiful brilliance, you lit me up-- but i must move on. and if you really love me (i know you do...), you won't call me or contact me in any way. it will just bring me back to this threshold of infinite pain where i want to die, and i must find my way out of this continuous aching flurry of grief alone.

"if they eat me alive"

2007-12-15T05:41:10Z

i am driven back here. to this space of writing.

after how many months? after i said no more. after you still frequent my bed.

i am driven here out of pain, out of frustration, out of fear. the usual things that compel us to write. in the new apartment, the one i found after you left me in the last one, i sit at my computer driven mad by an insane hissing heater that wakes me up at all hours of the night. in this new place, i have survived a day of crying to the point of wailing. the day of wailing has occurred after months of ambiguous painful love appointments with you. i cannot live like this any longer, but i am terrified of the pain i will incur when i finally excise you from my life.

in the middle of applying to phd programs and grading student essays, i have lost my mind, by which i mean, i feel like i have no mind left. i try to read, to write, to grade, and --poof-- tears-- i want to sleep forever-- not good.

this is not good.

can't i just fast-forward a year to my new life in some new town, when i am finally starting to get through the day without bursting into tears for pain of your absence?

"the center cannot hold"

2007-07-28T16:15:41Z

i didn't mean to see you yesterday. I planned to have left by the time you came by to pack your stuff for the second time in three months.

here is an inventory of what remains:

a french press coffee-maker
a digital recorder
a receipt for auto maintenance
a small box of your office supplies
a box of the fasteners you use for your screenplays
a stapler
a few books, including The Maltese Falcon
a smudge of dirt from where you touched me yesterday as I fled
your hair on the pillowcase
your smell on the sheets
a still-damp towel from your last shower
sheep's cheese in the fridge
dust from your computer
a folder on my desktop containing your files
your emails in my Trash
your letters in the file cabinet
two bruises from making love
two cups with your lip-marks in the sink
chocolate cake
two swiss army knives
the mug your nieces and I made you at color me mine

the note you left
the keys you returned

your fingerprints invisible on doorknobs
the recycling you took out yesterday that still sits in the vestibule
the envelopes you brought me
the arrangement of the bed-clothes
my ears perking up at the imagined sound of the door
the instinctive glance toward the couch when i wake to find you gone
the straining of my ears for the sound of your typing
the straining of my nose for the smell of your coffee
turning the ac until i freeze so you'll be comfortable
sleeping way over on my side of the bed
complete avoidance of one half of the apt

this is a partial inventory.

your name comes to my lips for no apparent reason; it seems to have painfully replaced "um" and "ah." thus: "blood on my teeth when i bite my tongue to speak."

looking at my face in the mirror reminds me of you. eating reminds me of you. sitting reminds me of you. looking reminds me of you. sound reminds me of you. pain reminds me of you. alcohol reminds me of you. the feel of my tongue against the inside of my mouth reminds me of you. sore muscles remind me of you. water reminds me of you.

math does not particularly remind me of you, but any preparation for the gre reminds me of you generally.

this is my life, one second at a time, when it lacks your presence: you are present in every particle of my being: whispering; licking; screaming; laughing; crying; sleeping; waking each moment to your deafening absence.

"when i say you sucked my brain out / the english translation / is 'i am in love with you'

2007-04-04T02:17:26Z

after days of pain, alternating between uncontrollable crying and grief-stricken numbness, we have an amazingly grown-up conversation. i've made my decision, which i tell you: i want you to move in, because after all, how can we make the decision to live a geographically variable life together when we haven't even tried it?

and of course it's more complicated than that. you honestly cannot commit to a one-year trial, even to a three-month trial, where you promise to compromise upcoming opportunities for our relationship. you balk at the very suggestion that we could one day make decisions together; it terrifies you. you warn me again and again that with your beautiful face and brain comes your impressive instability, your directionlessness. and at the end of the day (at least, at the end of this one), i know that if i invite you into my life, i must take you as you are-- like ani says-- "as is."

so many parts of me scream, "you're setting yourself up for failure with this one." so many parts of me sing, "you need to ride this life out with him, wherever and for as long as it takes you both."

so many parts of me.

"springtime is wartime"

2007-04-01T18:59:25Z

the words "i'm leaving" shot to the pit of my stomach and numbed me and set me on fire. i've known for some time now that you'd wander on your way, but the way it gets framed seems absurd-- we obviously love each other and are so fucking good together, so how is it that we are letting circumstance rip us apart?

my brain refuses to work through this cloud of you've-become-a-painful-ghost-ness.

you say: we're not the kind of people to compromise for each other.
you say: we're too unconventional to stabilize.
you say: i'm too strong of a person to muddle my grand plans with your desires.

i say: i fear your tendency to wander; how could that work long-term?
i say: if you stay now, i'll feel like i'm binding you to me.
i say: why can't we say what we want, then pursue it?
i say: i love you.

she says all i have to do is decide what i want, besides you. that i just have to decide whether i want to commit to us: to live together, to plan together, to move together. but even if I answer "yes" to these questions, you may not really want this stuff.

i must first find the truth in myself, and then make you tell me the truth-- no more of this game-playing, i'm so fucking sick of it. we've been programmed by the scared games we've played to protect ourselves from each other. although part of those games stems from indecision.

if we decide for you to move in with me, then you can work part-time to pay half the bills and write. if we want to make it work but you want so badly to leave philly, then we can talk about you moving to nyc, visiting on weekends while you try to figure out what you want to do with the next stretch of your life, besides being with me.

so in a way it's so simple: we both need to decide what we want, and ensure that our decisions are informed by the situation. if our desires coincide, then we stay together. if not, then we must move on.

"don't blush / it's just the wind outside"

2007-01-10T00:38:04Z

i can count on one hand the instances of my being moved to poetry within the last eight years.

my smile lines are deepening, the ones i secretly try to smooth.

of course, the other line, the thought-furrow on my brow, deepens every day too.

akin to eleanor antin's sculpture piece-- through time--

processes of love and thought mark me as i am.

"lays open like a road"

2006-12-19T04:20:26Z

today i bent and cupped my ear to hear a second grade student tell me how her mom died three days after the student's birth. "you might cry," she warned me beforehand, "if i tell you my sad story."

the first injection in my s p i n e leaves me in greater pain than before. my next injection is on wednesday. i'm scared but less than i was before.

today was the last day teaching in the public schools before the break. tomorrow is the first day of my new teaching job, for which i bought fourteen hand mirrors at the dollar store so that we can do "self-portraits in pieces," although now i worry it's too ambitious for the first art seminar. it's kind of crazy that a year ago, i was fully unemployed, and now i hold four teaching jobs simultaneously.

back on the blazing trail of phd prep and research, i'm contemplating taking an intro german course in january (which turns my schedule into chop suey). some have suggested going to germany in the summer for immersion. in the meantime, i'm doing a vocab word a day. i have a list of my favorite schools by program but not by advisor. uc irvine and stonybrook are at the top of the list, but mcgill and nyu are high too. some of the programs are continental philosophy and some are comp lit. i think about the phd, about prepping for it, about the writing sample, about the test, and about the difficulty of achieving any of these items while working as much as i currently do.

we did something in bed last night that you swore people wouldn't believe if you told them.

i like to feel this incomplete / i'm not your baby

2006-10-14T22:15:42Z

in bed. in your arms. on my mother's sofa. in my therapist's bathroom. in the car outside your house. on the phone. in the kitchen while i cook.

no, these are not all the places i fucked my boyfriend this week.

lately i cry so much. lately i hope for so much. lately my heart skips too often. today, well fuck i can't eat can't sleep.

because i'm scared. and i'm in pain. and the cold makes it worse.

because the lady that rear-ended me is being a fucking cunt. because my car repair went over a thousand and i don't make much more than that in a month. because my landlord just refused to renew my lease after i calmly asked him to raise the heat to 68.

because it hurts to sit. and it hurts to stand. and it hurts to go from sitting to standing, to twist in the shower. because the pillow between my legs at night won't stop the ache anymore. and because sometimes it hurts to fuck.

because i've had stabbing pains in my gut all week, before the car lady, before the fucking landlord. but after my doctor lied on the questionnaire and i received all those bills, yes, after that.

because there are so many things that i can't say to so many people. because sometimes i say them anyway and they go unheard (should this ease my heart-ache?).

here's the new plan: marry a rich, emotionally mature woman lawyer who knows what she wants and tells me she loves me. take painkillers all day. crank albums about my ex-girlfriend out more regularly than ani, while getting my phd in comp lit at irvine.

"the hours"

2006-10-02T00:02:42Z

1. my father's voice, cracked from grief.

2. i am kind of a little destroyed, because after all the things i said, and fuck well after some of the things you said, one would think that you could offer some words of comfort. here are two examples that you could have used: "don't worry, i care about you so much," or "i'm scared too, but i feel so intensely for you that my feeling overwhelms the fear." see? if it's the word "love" that's the problem, we can find ways around it. how could you utter the words "you think i don't love you?," have me answer "yes," and then not clarify further? i'm really grateful that you had that conversation with me, but i'm pretty unhappy with the way it left me feeling, which is that basically there is still this gaping chasm where communication should be. i find myself still turning to you, with questioning eyebrows and open lips, before turning away again because i feel not only stupid for formulating concerns, but like i may not get an answer, or reassurance, when i need it most.

but then i am kind of okay, because i remind myself that you are terrified of relationships and are probably also really dysfunctional and that these are obviously the reasons that you can't seem to formulate a sentence in which you express care or love or passion for me. it was just such a sentence that i so desperately needed last night, and then much more this morning.

then, still, i am not okay, because to be with someone that doesn't explicitly comfort me when i render myself so entirely vulnerable is a v. shaky thing.

my brain. i want to erase everything. i don't want to erase a single thing.

"i don't glitter like the stars above / i don't glow like neon alone"

2006-09-25T03:52:11Z

i feel so fucking torn to pieces.

really, there are more than two things. but there are two things:

1. the things i said to you; the courage it took; the undesirable way in which you responded. if i could have disappeared, dropped through the floor; at the same time, i feel happy that at least i was strong enough to say some truth; but really, i feel like a fucking fool, like a target wearing a t-shirt: "oh, oh, pretty please, hurt me! pretty please, fuck me up!"

how could you respond to a laying-bare, like the one i enacted, in the way that you did? in such a way as to refuse me any glimmer of your feelings, but at the same time to confirm all my fears? i am amazed. i don't know what to do. so torn between the urge to be courageously sincere and the instinct that tells me to run, run, run.

2. your death leaves me shredded in tiny ways, like a thousand and one paper cuts that add up to a condition. i feel so happy that we had some correspondence before you died. looking around at the world now, i can feel the air lightened, can feel you leaving the sphere, leaving a you-shaped hole behind. and edging the shadow of that hole is, of course, my father. the instant i heard of your death my impulse was, for the first time in ten years, to pick up the phone and call him.

i am so terrified. the idea of going to the funeral and knowing no-one terrifies me. the idea of honesty terrifies me. the idea of seeing and touching and speaking with my father terrifies me. and the thought that fuck i cannot even write it... ahem.

compared to weathering the expression of intimacy with you, and the seismological history of paternity associated with my grandfather's death, the teaching of my current college course is a snap.

so we're speeding towards that time of year / to the day that marks that you're not here

2006-09-20T15:04:58Z

it came upon me suddenly; a reminder invitation in the mail. a friend of my mom's sending it just to say, "remember? last year at this time i dragged you to this thing; maybe we should go again this year!"

so last year at the beginning of september i went to a quilt show in the suburbs; i was dragged from the house the day after it ended between us; dragged from the house the day that felt like a cruel joke about the end of the world.

sitting here, listening to azure ray, i contemplate the blunt absurdity that so often tinges sorrow. almost like a blunt object to the head, one sits there clutching one's heart, only half-believing the sharp dent in the skull, only half-hearing the blood that drips down into the ears.

i still have the dreams about you, the ones where your mother calls me up sobbing and i drop the phone in my drink in the restaurant in front of all of this other one's friends. i still have this pit of sadness-turned-anger inside me, and every now and then parts of that pit leak out as poison into the world. my reaction to this leakage is again an excess of anger, anger that you still penetrate me in any way, anger that i let you, or at least am unable to stop you. i want to purge every cent of you from my being so that i never again have to feel as cheapened as you rendered me, rendered me through your inability and ineffectuality.

so on this, our anniversary, i find myself contemplating a fragment of the new "you"'s script: a story meant to illustrate the sad limits of love. a couple in "love," the boy falls and is handicapped; the girl breaks it off soon after: voilà the "strength" of love.

but what about people who fall hard and become themselves handicapped through the depth and strength of their love? i loved you so much i could taste it on my own skin. i saw you everywhere i went, in every song, in every cup of tea, and as it was slowly revealed to me that you were, as so many people phrased it, broken in so many ways, i grew to love you more. one can term this a saviour complex; one could term it many things. but for me, my love grew in spite of, or perhaps encompassing, your handicaps, and by dint of the light produced by my faith that we could still carve a life, despite those handicaps.

but eventually your handicaps became you; and a part of my grief-turned-anger consisted of the fact that i still can't sort out which of these two things, your handicaps or you yourself, handicapped me and slowly broke my heart. that breakage seems a harsh reward for struggling so hard to give us a place in which to flourish and continue.

i never let myself be sad about you anymore; i push you from my mind the minute you spring up, simply because i tell myself you don't deserve space in my head or my heart: a kind of emotional evacuation. today, our anniversary, appears to be an exception.

i can't read your mind / i can't find the time / i can't feel the thrill / i don't have the will

2006-08-29T00:56:10Z

tiny explosions inside a child's mind; i drag her up two flights of stairs; she screams for forty minutes; i shake for longer, scars on the wrists.

climbing scales and shapes inside my head, lapping at the sides of my heart like vicious waves: fuck you some lyrics finally:

"choking on the silence / that crops up / on my way into you / into you"

tiny girls and bodies filled with cancer and stories on your sofa that make me wrap my arms inside around myself to keep the darkness from seeping forever back in. body memories of cold beaches and hard floors and the fucking sound in your brain that the blade makes and his cigarette smoke in my eyes unsteady let loose back onto the porch.

i'm tired of people making marks on my body without asking.

into me / "into you"

conversations with you "conversations with dead people" conversations that make my heart and lungs press against the insides of my chest like tomorrow is already here. about to burst with feelings; telling you; un-telling you losing my mind to emotion; please; i do and i do.

something i've only told two people and feel if i can just keep from telling another one, perhaps i can keep reality from finding; from taking; from losing: fuck.

pain. through my spine into my heart where you've taken up residence; from my heart resonating out through my skin, where so many memories of her are lodged, ephemeral consistency of her grace / my being. tiny nails dragged across that skin, scared to go to work another day lest i lose a piece of her she's already forgotten.

"the language of ?"

2006-08-16T00:59:53Z

these plateau-like moments where I hush around, taking stock:

thursday the end of art teaching for the summer; goodbyes to crafting and cross-stitching gaggles of sweet tall amazonian blonde girls who have taken root in my heart.

friday the spinal specialist, and surprise: it's not coccydynia, but a degenerated disc that has been causing months of pain, that has cost me months of work, piling up, fading.

then a girl enters our fantasies, images of us three making love to each other, on/off the bed, my sky-blue walls vibrating erotic, clustering cloud-soft about our hands and hips.

sunday hours spent with your two tiny nieces, watching you handle the children perfectly, more than perfectly. turning over in my head the fact that you don't want any.

today: struggling to write, struggling to create. struggling not to despise myself, my face.

and tomorrow, the first day caring for a nine-year-old autistic girl, in-home care until her new school starts. walk through the doorway into another world; learning another language, possibly several.

tutoring children in writing. prepping for my book arts course. redesigning my website. working on two others freelance. thinking about writing about film. not making rent. applying to five jobs at a time.

oggling the comp lit phd at princeton. perfect scores, three moderns and a classical, oh my!

"fallen woman in a dancing costume"

2006-08-07T02:42:32Z

"A certain light was beginning to dawn dimly within her-- the light which, showing the way, forbids it."

Kate Chopin, The Awakening

"it just sounds more vicious / than i actually mean / i really am soft, yes / tender and sweet

2006-06-17T21:07:35Z

really, i mean the whole thing is about your eyebrows. and the way they moved the other night over dinner, as you struggled to find words to explain to me things we surely must already both know.

it's always about vulnerability (is anything ever about anything else?). and it's about fear.

it's about meeting your friends and almost melting from anticipation anxiety and then enjoying "being yours," i.e. being "with you," in this scary way that feels good and natural and kind of ridiculously like we're just supposed to be together

it's about, when the bouncer at the club won't let me in because he's a total fucking prick (i.e. "just because he can"), my crying in the car on the way home and you kissing the insides of my elbows to soothe me out of it.

it's about your job, and how sometimes i am terrified that i will continue to need more of you as you continue to become less available. which, of course, causes me to resolutely and disfunctionally inner-vow to never really need anyone, including you, like that again.

but whoopsie-daisy: i already do.

"i dreamt we were so beautiful and strong"

2006-04-29T02:17:17Z

there are two parts to it.

1. i am continually shutting myself down, terrified at the thought that i could give you the power to ever hurt me, to ever leave me, to ever not want me. terror leads to paralysis, which leads, in turn, to my self-positing as a cold, casual bee-atch.

2. i am continually opening myself up, performing myself as myself in ____ with someone, opening up to try and make space for teensy pieces of us that join together and float off in wisps and scores across several cities. i lie in bed and think about your browline, think about the slight sag at your mouth-crease, think about the handles that your thighs form just below your ass, perfect for dragging you across the floor. i gaze over the skyline formed by my victorian love-seat, out into wind-tortured green leaves that play light, dancing across my eyes as you take seat in my heart. some days, in spring, under trees, with you, i am actually dazzled by beauty. which is kind of a shocker, when contextualized within the history and structure of the past year.

my heart: light: wind: torture: dance, and this r-r-r-ripping sound that i continually incur, ripping scared now at the possibility of everything with you contrasted with the terror-stricken poverty (reality?) of emotion, of capacity, of capability that constitutes our collective threshold.

what is a limit? i ask my students in class.

the limit is the furthest you can go.