May 2012
6 posts
What good are you for if you can't write songs or...
It was as though you had woken up in an old nightmare and you didn’t want to hear a single person tell you that they believe in God. Because it wouldn’t mean what you would have liked it to. He asked who you thought you were with the million pictures of some beautiful boy in your wallet. You had been warned about the chance of having a coffee table thrown at you — the kind with a...
Someone on the bus was wearing cologne that smelled like home.
My eyes were suddenly full with everything that had ever gone wrong.
And that’s all it takes to cry in public.
Seven People
It was hot outside and it was hot inside. I was watching people walk down the street from the window and thinking about how I had nowhere to go. I could have gone somewhere if I wanted to. I could have walked to the tap in the kitchen and turned it on to watch an eager gush of cool water chase itself down the drain. Perhaps that’s why I wasn’t going anywhere. It was hard to leave...
Can good things come in threes? →
This is what I’m going to try to work on for a while, and I would love your support.
Guilty Pleasure
It does not make sense that he listens to the Bay City Rollers. He has a head that’s kept on straight by a level. He keeps his eye on the prize, front and center. Yet in the midst of all this practicality, his weakness is the Bay City Rollers to whom he just hasn’t been able to say ‘bye bye, baby’.
This fall he’s going to Harvard, and although he won’t tell...
Prey
You rose out of the water.
I thought of blooming flowers and how they catch you by surprise.
You bloomed over the lake surface and spread outwards like a net. I spent three days cutting through synapse squares.
I was free on a sparse morning. There was a single wisp of blue in the sky, bleeding through the overcast.
April 2012
5 posts
1 tag
Your skin is paler than ever. I can almost see underneath it everywhere except the crater that is now your eye. Blues, purples and blacks surround your eyelid like a bed of dark jade. Every other inch of skin is like gossamer. It is terrible to be able to see through you, Jack. You and I both know this. So you take a step back and ask me to throw the next punch and then another and another until...
Isn't it a riot?
The eyes meet where you draw the Xs. Mine are looking at the place where the lines cross over each other and everyone else is busy digging for treasure. You made me promise not to disappear again, but here I am disappearing into the center of your Xs. I can’t stop thinking about the place where the lines cross over each other. I know you’ve drawn them only to make placeholders for me,...
Have you ever wondered what would happen if you trapped laughter inside a jar? I imagine it would flutter around in there like a butterfly. I just can’t figure out if you’d hear that rippling sound of delight when you opened up that jar again five days later, five years later, ten years later… or if you’d see two wings folded upon each other flat against the bottom.
I was a wrist watch.
In March they said that he was going through therapy and that it was “your fault” without ever really saying it at all. I wasn’t really sure what had happened. The last thing I remembered was something that happened while I was twelve years old and still wearing an oversized middle school uniform.
I was one of few girls who still looked as though they belonged in the...
Smokeshow
He’s at the bar tossing drinks over his shoulder and the bartender would have half a mind to have him escorted out, but the girls love a show. He looks just like the kind of guy who would write you a song of which only two verses would be about you — the chorus is about some girl that strikes a balance between radio-friendly and risqué. You’re watching him, making snap judgments...
March 2012
10 posts
Jack →
Jack is more popular than anything I have ever written about, so I just wanted to make sure you know where he is if you need to find him.
Garden Hose Girl
I watch you with the dirt in your hair and think about how I would love to take you out back and rinse you nice and clean. You’ve got that curly hair that never lets go of anything. I can see it holding onto bits and pieces of earth from spending the whole day in the fields. We don’t have many of them around here in the city, but it looks like you’ve managed to find any patch of...
You move too quick for comfort.
Maybe it is your fault for loving her.
Yours.
Yes, you.
You, fiddling with the withering strap of your watch, and missing your stop on the subway line. It is your fault for staring through subway compartment windows and not really looking at anything. It’s not as though you don’t know how to look at things. You look at her very carefully. You were watching her only moments ago....
Anonymous asked: You write beautifully! I'm envious x)
1 tag
I did something terrible.
Pour cement into the room where I am waiting, Jack. I opened the door when you had warned me that leaving the window ajar was enough of a risk. But it was so lonely that I could not resist. I let the people in and they insisted on moving all of the furniture around until I was dizzy. Did I tell you that the divan is up against the wall now? It is up against the wall where nobody can ever see its...
Wouldn't you like to know what it is like to be a...
1 tag
Sometimes
Jack, you are the most beautiful thing I know: a spot of activated charcoal at the center of a vial of strychnine; an impossibility. You are the antidote and the poison at the same time — life rolled into the center of death. And you were just brimming with life today. You filled your car with flowers and drove it here. I saw the colours through the windows like an impressionist painting in...
Tangerines
We ate a dinner of only tangerines. You kept saying that you wanted plums too, and I said that it wasn’t the right season for that. Even though I did not know a single thing about the seasons that fruits belong to. We were planning to go to the supermarket tomorrow morning, pulling along some vague dreams of making fruit salad along in our grocery trolley. We were waiting for a knock on the...
A Season
The patio had a sliding glass door. If you left it unlocked on your way out, you could get back in the house making barely a sound. I remember how the door had gripped soft into place as I left it unlocked behind me that night.
I don’t remember what day it had been - it could have been any anonymous summer day. Maybe it’s careless of me to say, but I think the summer looks the same...
2 tags
Everybody's been asking me about you.
In the last half hour before I would have been saved anyway, safe and inside, I found myself knocking on your door. You let me in. I told you about how I had locked myself out of my own house and nobody had been inside to open the door for me. I asked whether you’d let me kill some time in your apartment until I could find some place to be, and you said nothing because you never do. I ended...
February 2012
5 posts
Middle Ground
He said, “Wear blue. It’ll make it better.”
I knew he was laughing at me, but I actually considered it. I thought about it for a long time, but I did not wear blue to the party. I wore an ugly colour that was not blue or green all the way, but sitting somewhere squeamishly in the middle. I wore it, and maybe it was the sickly colour that made me lose my appetite because I did...
Loyalties
blue like the sky is blue absolute motionless but on some days a drawn out gradient resisting itself elongating hesitating
Procedure for the Cultivation of Love
You must dissolve your love in a container. It can be anything: a vial, a glass, or test tube filled with water (or whatever goes down your throat the easiest). You will have to stir it until no trace of it remains — no visible sign of it, no sensation of its grains mixing along with your stirring stick. You must not mix it too quickly; the trick is gradually letting it disappear so that...
What I Do When I Am Not Here →
The Disappearing Act
He wonders how he did not see it in the slant of her shoulders or the hollow of her back. She had always been a slip-through-the-cracks kind of girl, but he never imagined that she would ever sink all the way to the other side. He had seen her walk to the end of numerous corridors, and wondered where each farewell would take her. Nobdy had expected her to evaporate the final time that she looked...
January 2012
1 post
1 tag
Jack, in a nightmare.
I dreamed of a long hospital corridor and you at the other end sitting in a wheelchair crumpled over crippled
“He’s never going to walk again.”
and my head in your lap unable unmoving
December 2011
7 posts
The place where nobody else has been.
It is not as bad as it seems. They fear that you will make me into your hymnbook, your prayer call, and your talisman. But I am none of these things to you. They don’t know that you met me when you were sixteen years old. I was behind the spine of a yellow hardcover volume, and you had searching eyes that drank everything up, so you found me and swallowed. You swallowed, but I took you down...
Just because the fairgrounds are closed in the winter doesn’t mean that you have reason to be blue. Even though the light is white outside and it bleaches the red from your skin, there is no reason to be blue. The summer will come again and a weary old man will be serving cotton candy while the children scream and scream and scream. You will turn into a blur of colour (a smudge on the back...
I didn’t need anybody to teach me anything but they kept my eyes pried wide open. They played paranoia on the film projector and asked me over and over, “Wouldn’t you love to shut your eyes now? Wouldn’t you love to go blind?” And I think that I must have been going blind too. The truth is bright enough to introduce you to absolute blackness if you will let yourself...
1 tag
Visitor (who used to live here)
After the longest absence, there you are, Jack. I see you on my door step as I am leaving for work. Your hair is slicked back and your eyes are bright. You look good, and I tell you this smiling. You look well, Jack. You look like you’ve really been doing well. You tell me that things have been better where you are now, but you came because you had this nagging feeling that something...
8 tags
Conversations With The Real Imagined Boys (6)
“The worst feeling in the world has got to be the one of feeling used.”
“Really? I’d say it’s far worse to feel like you have used someone. It’s just that most people in that position somehow escape feeling their own disgust.”
“Disgust. That’s it. I feel used and it’s disgusting.”
“What would you rather feel...
Double You
You have the key to everything, and you aren’t afraid to wield it just in sight and just out of reach. When I met you, you drove it into my back and wound me up like I was yours — yours to command, yours to send forth. And I went forward like your soldier, feeling like nothing had fit quite like your lock pick in the base of my back. Had I known that you were a master pilot, I would...
Dressed to the nines, but not going anywhere.
It was a problem that we had every weekend. Elise and I would dress up all proper and sit down on the couch (wearing oxfords and all) and think of where we should go that night. We’d exchange suggestions for every type of activity — dinner, dancing, art galleries, films, or any combination of these, but we’d never really be able to pick anything. Usually it was because as soon as...
November 2011
10 posts
1 tag
Jack, do you not love me any longer because you were my rain gutter? My ash tray, my catch-all. I’m asking because I still love you, Jack. And I promise that it isn’t just that I need you (but I do). I’ve tried everything. I went down to the bus stop many times where you had asked me to wait with an umbrella. But now the monsoon is over and my clothes are dry, yet I don’t...
curvesthewords asked: Hello! I'm Erin, pleased to meet you. I got your link from Trish's tumblr & liked what I saw. Are you in the middle of your 365 or have you finished it?
The 52 Hz Whale →
You should look this up.
You were right.
In September, I was at this all-hours diner at the kind of hour where all the people wouldn’t really be there. It was the sort of place where they keep the tabletops clean to make it seem as though it would be alright to eat there, but it really isn’t and all the waitresses know it. I was sitting in one of the booths by myself thinking about how every single place like this chooses red...
Diamonds Are Forever by Arctic Monkeys
For when...
Nobody ever said it, but they were all thinking, “What a charmer! What a charmer!” And what a charmer he was. He was good with introductions and even better with good byes. He feigned love the way the rest of us feign interest (because interest is all we can manage). He taught me that sincerity lies in the pauses rather than the actions — that people will believe the gaps in...
I bet the fall came like a breath of fresh air. Its whistling winds took away the heat of the summer and lifted my heaving body off of you. You must have grown tired of all of the warmth, and all of the days we spent laying in the sun — our just-bathed bodies turning into little puddles of sweat on picnic blankets. You told me that you hated how you could never feel clean in the summer, how...
Speed
We were firecracker riders. I was strapped to you like dynamite. Everything blurred by and in my mind I sent every carousel that I had ever been on spinning a million miles faster than it was built to go. And I pictured an army of children all lined up like tin soldiers until they all shot down slides at the same moment like magnets racing to opposing poles. I put every memory I had managed to...
Hollow,
and hollow, and
hollow, hollow
words
that have holes
bored into them
by tongues that have said them
carelessly
too long,
too often.
Drilled into me
like cylinder bullets
(middle-less)
that sit in the flesh
not piercing through
without substance to push them. Full,
and fuller, and
heavy, heavy
your hand
that has weight
resting on my head
with fingertips that terrace ...
I woke up in a bed of iris flowers that had all of...
And a voice ringing from sky to sky above me that asked me when I became such a faithless girl.
October 2011
1 post
1 tag
Wedges Are For Keeping Windows Open
I’ve become caught in between the window and the window sill — half-in and half-out (like you used to be with everything). The window frame is crushing mine. I can feel my ribs nearing tessellation.
You’re calling over your shoulder to me, “You spread yourself too thin.”
All I can think about is whether or not my ribs could be folded on an angle where they would...
September 2011
5 posts
1 tag
Answering Machine
“I just went by your house, Jack, and you weren’t there. I knocked three times and then on the way down the steps, I tripped and almost fell completely over — but I didn’t. I caught myself mid-fall and I think this is the problem with everything. I feel like none of the words are really coming out the way I want to say them… but Jack…
[silence]
Hey, do you...
This is about as poetic as you can ask me to be.
He is not the type to take a raincheck
A dash of diamonds
And a handful of sunlight bedeck
His eyes like islands
(What if I made him up and feel nothing?
What if I am telling you a good bedtime story?
What if I am telling myself a good bedtime story?)
1 tag
jack, the jig is up, blown up like an atomic bomb like a picture going on the front page of the newspaper
An Attempt at Being Personal
lamarionnettiste:
When Alice went through the looking glass, she left behind her reality and found a new one. I’ve been Alice for far too long, and thought I should climb over to the other side. Most of the time I write about things the way I see them through the prism I’ve built myself as a writer. This blog is going to be the place where I write about things just the way they are. If you’d...
1 tag
His laugh sizzles like something crackling in the pit of a dark pan — a reminder that cooks my ears red: this is the voice that gave birth to me. He drew the outline and I filled myself to the shape, filled it to the brim. He rains words and I race to catch them. If he is the leak then I am the pail where it will come to rest, if he is the siren then I am the sound. I am his loophole and he...