15.4.10

cheetohs and tequila

This blog has turned into somewhat of a romantic, sticky, pity tromp through the past couple weeks. I apologize. Times are soggy. I rode the subway home today and I ate cheetohs out of my purse so that no one could see me. Three of my fingers were bright orange as I held onto the escalator. When I got home I had tequila and then I went to pretend to eat dinner and everything tasted like not-tequila. It was not a great day or a great week and for that matter it may have been a rough year, more than I would like to admit, but lets not pretend I have it bad. I have everything that everyone else wants and I only cry because I have allowed it time.

if we keep looking towards the distant horizon, one of us is going to have to say something

I'm sure that this is harder for you than it is for me. You have had to watch and see. My not doing anything, seemingly anyway, is probably especially aggravating. I would imagine that if I were in your shoes, I would surrender any hope and move on, focus on my head being full with other things. You can't know everything though, or as it were, I can't imagine I know everything. If you, just for a moment, were in control, then what would you do? Is it that serious that you need permission? Do you need an authoritative a-okay? I wish it wasn't like this, I wish you could stand behind me whenever you wanted. I wish you could stop touching my face again. Before I knew about this sort of thing, or this instance, I was pretty resistant to it. Then you let me in and showed me how and I felt good again. There is a story where a lady loses someone, so she puts her broken heart in a pouch and carries it with her wherever she goes. Each day it gets heavier and more burdensome. After many months of carrying this pouch she meets a fox in the forest. The fox see's the heart and wants to eat it. So, he tells the lady that he will watch the pouch for her while she rests. The lady thanks him and falls down into a deep sleep next to him. The fox licks his lips and opens the ouch only to discover all the sadness and love in the whole world is in the pouch. He immediately falls in love with the lady and vows to protect her. When the lady wakes up her pouch is beside her, but when she looks inside it, she finds it empty. She searches for her friend the fox and he is nowhere to be seen. After crying just one tear for her heart and the fox she awakes from a seemingly endless dream. From then on, wherever she wanders she feels happy and loved. The lady stays in the forest to be next to her fox memory and the fox is always licking his lips and lusting after her heart. That is a shortened version of our similar story I guess.

14.4.10

little liar girl

I have something to tell you, imagine you being ninety three and me being a little bit younger than that. We are on a porch by the sea, sipping cool mint drinks and imagining ourselves younger. We add words to the conversation that make sense, like 'appropriate' and 'lust' even though we still don't believe those to be good enough excuses.

We both understand that half of the things this recipe called for we are missing. I'll look again, but I'm almost sure we are out of the basics.

Imagine looking back and thinking about it. I do this every time I see your picture. I feel those strange stomach feelings again. Cook me something spicy and warm, I would say, and you would already be getting out a large pan and slicing vegetables. The black dog that is sitting by the door is looking at you the same way I am now, except I am now.

I am a constant observer, a collector. The only alchemy left to try is something unspoken, words will fall short, they will fail. And if they do, I will be left eating your sliced vegetables and feeding the scraps to the dog by the door.

13.4.10



new favorite thing to look at, ahndraya parlato

under the hill by the shiny moonlit stream

Doesn't everything look so pretty in this light?
The river's twisty parts by where the road almost collects the same space,
and travels for a while near its side.
Doesn't everything look so pretty here?
I want to tell everyone, but there is no dialect for this
situation I've dug up
uncovered and drug through the house
across the finest carpets, polished wood, silver untouched
Things for sale, is what it boils down to.
I met a boy across the sea, who told me once just to be,
so taught my lust for him would surely fade.
Girl, you are a plate.

12.4.10

things to love (an evolving list)

sort of in love with her
sweet, sweet jane
why do songwriters do their best to make melancholy the best times, so that when you are actually heartbroken, everything seems so clear. what bastards. where's the sunshine filter?
i heart this painter boy

telephone line

Can't you see me down here looking up?
I've got a letter in my pocket, your name mentioned in it
That I forgot to open. Do you want to pick it apart
bit by bit?
Swallow every syllable in your outstretched lines.
There are some things people think and do that make
no sense, even to patient listener birds like you.
No one confessed about this sunshine run,
no one told me it would be soaked in rum.
Chew, chew, chew off a piece, seemingly simple
instructions from a fake like you.

11.4.10

deeper while I'm digging to get out

The beginning of last time was complicated, yes
soiled because no one had put their foot forward
fast enough to claim aggressor, captor, victim, love

In those old westerns where the mighty herd of cattle
neither leads the hero back home nor betrays him
they just stand their ground and watch, with cow eyes

Somehow, though, I am riding off into the lonely night
riding hard and facing forward and taking the reins
however loosely they might flail in my grip

It is one of those nights, with a black and blue sleeve
cast over the rest of the set, this diegesis speaks
about these little things and nothing new

Given everything is blaring in this light
it still seems hard to understand, and I wish
I was Loretta, because at least I could sing

In that burning, sad way she has a way
with making everything turn into a rodeo
night, blame it on the lover


afternoon spent on the grass

I can hear them play and I think about the summer in Montana. An entire summer spent in the grass with her. Sitting and hoping and crossing our legs and talking about things we never really imagined we'd be old enough to handle. She had a boyfriend. She had two boyfriends. One was a depressed kid with a baseball hat who drove two hours every weekend to see her, but wouldn't move to be with her. The other was a thirty year old going on twenty-one who had started his own business in a trailer home. I hung out with her in the grass and we talked about the future as if one day it would just land upon us. Some of the things we talked about had nothing to do with boys, but most of the time it was about our love for them. As if talking about it would keep everything in control. We bought flowers for our room and we hung up cheap tapestries from India that we had bought in the ceramics store. The store had stacks of fiestaware that went up five stories high. There was dust on everything in the store. The owner was an Egyptian man and I think his wife was there too, but I can't seem to remember what she would have looked like. He was very small and polite, but he always looked like he was waiting to leave the store and the state itself and return to somewhere else. I liked the section of the store that had clearance stuff, not because it was cheaper, everything was cheap, but because it was piles of things that looked as if someone had just found them underneath a bed or behind a couch. I leafed through pamphlets from the 1950's advertising cherries and strawberry wine. There were cheap Chinese shoes, umbrellas with slogans and insignia from conventions, hotpot holders, toy kitchen utensils, mermaid candle holders and bags of flower seeds long since rotted. Someone must have been buyng this stuff. I didn't know what she was doing. She could have done anything she wanted. She knew about the world and how things worked. She knew how to make people laugh or cry and fall in love with her. Instead, she bounced back and forth between boyfriends, sometimes three at a time. No one was good enough for her, and no one was irreplaceable. She sat opposite me on a bench by the river. It was a sunny day, but we still had our sweatshirts on. She told me how her older sister had been to a plastic surgeon to have a lazer hair removal treatment. I asked her if her sister was scared, but she said that her sister had also had affairs and an abortion and three kids, so no she wasn't scared about the lazer treatment. I looked at her and I compared her to her sister, but she was different. She cared about things too much to keep this charade of nonchalance going. That day we bought icecream and she started to cry when she told me about her boss trying to sleep with her. She said that she had wanted to, but she also didn't want to say no and therefore didn't have a choice. I gave her a hug, but I didn't understand what she meant. I was too young to imagine a situation other than black and white. I looked down on her, because I thought she was so in control. One day when she was gone her boyfriend with the baseball hat came to the apartment. He knocked on the door very loudly, he was mad. I peeked out from the blinds and watched his mad face getting impatient. He knocked again and I let him in. He went into her room and shut the door. He spent two hours in her room while I did my homework and made dinner and ate it. When he came out again, he had been crying. He told me that he was leaving and he was tired of waiting for her to come home. I tried to tell him that I thought that was a good idea. When he had gone I looked in her room. There were hundreds of pictures of them on her wall in a heart shape. All of her photo albums were spread across the floor. I didn't want her to see them like that, so I cleaned them up, except for the ones on the wall because I thought that was really something.