after the flood

shut up, i love this song.

Wed, 24 Dec 2008 16:41:24 -0500

I just want you for my own, more than you could ever know.

And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by...

Wed, 24 Dec 2008 12:17:32 -0500

And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night. And lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid. And the angel said unto them, ‘Fear not: for behold, I bring unto you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day in the City of David a Savior, which is Christ the Lord. And this shall be a sign unto you; Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger.’ And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host, praising God, and saying, ‘Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.’

That’s what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown.

"I am old. I am fat. I am bald. My toenails have turned strange. I am repulsive. How repulsive? I..."

Fri, 19 Dec 2008 05:36:09 -0500

“I am old. I am fat. I am bald. My toenails have turned strange. I am repulsive. How repulsive? I don’t know for I suffer from a condition called Body Dysmorphic Disorder. I am fat, but am I as fat as I think? My therapist says no, but people lie. I believe others call me Fatty behind my back. Or Fatso. Or, facetiously, Slim. But I also believe this is simply my own perverted form of self-aggrandizement, that no one really talks about me at all. Why would they? What possible interest is an old, bald, fat man to anyone? I am repulsive. I have never lived. I blame myself.”

oh noes, i missed a day of emo spam. but maybe now this inexplicable need to post every single day...

Fri, 19 Dec 2008 03:52:33 -0500

oh noes, i missed a day of emo spam. but maybe now this inexplicable need to post every single day will go away, because half the time i’m just scrolling down my most recent itunes playlist at 11:59 pm trying to find a song that’s not too mortifying and it’s… actually no, i guess most of them have been relevant at least in some part, but still.

also, this wasn’t meant to be something i actually wrote stuff in. damn. but i really don’t think this counts anyway.

And when, in the city in which I love you,
even my most excellent song goes unanswered,
and I mount the scabbed streets,
the long shouts of avenues,
and tunnel sunken night in search of you…

That I negotiate fog, bituminous
rain rining like teeth into the beggar’s tin,
or two men jackaling a third in some alley
weirdly lit by a couch on fire, that I
drag my extinction in search of you…

Past the guarded schoolyards, the boarded-up churches, swastikaed
synagogues, defended houses of worship, past
newspapered windows of tenements, along the violated,
the prosecuted citizenry, throughout this
storied, buttressed, scavenged, policed
city I call home, in which I am a guest…

a bruise, blue
in the muscle, you
impinge upon me.
As bone hugs the ache home, so
I’m vexed to love you, your body

the shape of returns, your hair a torso
of light, your heat
I must have, your opening
I’d eat, each moment
of that soft-finned fruit,
inverted fountain in which I don’t see me.

My tongue remembers your wounded flavor.
The vein in my neck
adores you. A sword
stands up between my hips,
my hidden fleece send forth its scent of human oil.

The shadows under my arms,
I promise, are tender, the shadows
under my face. Do not calculate,
but come, smooth other, rough sister.
Yet, how will you know me

among the captives, my hair grown long,
my blood motley, my ways trespassed upon?
In the uproar, the confusion
of accents and inflections
how will you hear me when I open my mouth?

Look for me, one of the drab population
under fissured edifices, fractured
artifices. Make my various
names flock overhead,
I will follow you.
Hew me to your beauty.

Stack in me the unaccountable fire,
bring on me the iron leaf, but tenderly.
Folded one hundred times and
creased, I’ll not crack.
Threshed to excellence, I’ll achieve you.

but in the city
in which I love you,
no one comes, no one
meets me in the brick clefts;
in the wedged dark,

no finger touches me secretly, no mouth
tastes my flawless salt,
no one wakens the honey in the cells, finds the humming
in the ribs, the rich business in the recesses;
hulls clogged, I continue laden, translated

by exhaustion and time’s appetite, my sleep abandoned
in bus stations and storefront stoops,
my insomnia erected under a sky
cross-hatched by wires, branches,
and black flights of rain. Lewd body of wind

jams me in the passageways, doors slam
like guns going off, a gun goes off, a pie plate spins
past, whizzing its thin tremolo,
a plastic bag, fat with wind, barrels by and slaps
a chain-link fence, wraps it like clung skin.

In the excavated places,
I waited for you, and I did not cry out.
In the derelict rooms, my body needed you,
and there was such flight in my breast.
During the daily assaults, I called to you,

and my voice pursued you,
even backward
to that other city
in which I saw a woman
squat in the street

beside a body,
and fan with a handkerchief flies from its face.
That woman
was not me. And
the corpse

lying there, lying there
so still it seemed with great effort, as though
his whole being was concentrating on the hole
in his forehead, so still
I expected he’d sit up any minute and laugh out loud:

that man was not me;
his wound was his, his death not mine.
and the soldier
who fired the shot, then lit a cigarette:
he was not me.

And the ones I do not see
in cities all over the world,
the ones sitting, standing, lying down, those
in prisons playing checkers with their knocked-out teeth:
they are not me. Some of them are

my age, even my height and weight;
none of them is me.
The woman who is slapped, the man who is kicked,
the ones who don’t survive,
whose names I do not know;

they are not me forever,
the ones who no longer live
in the cities in which
you are not,
the cities in which I looked for you.

The rain stops, the moon
in her breaths appears overhead.
the only sound now is a far flapping.
Over the National Bank, the flag of some republic or other
gallops like water on fire to tear itself away.

If I feel the night
move to disclosures or crescendos,
it’s only because I’m famished
for meaning; the night
merely dissolves.

And your otherness is perfect as my death.
Your otherness exhausts me,
like looking suddenly up from here
to impossible stars fading.
Everything is punished by your absence.

Is prayer, then, the proper attitude
for the mind that longs to be freely blown,
but which gets snagged on the barb
called world, that
tooth-ache, the actual? What prayer

would I build? And to whom?
Where are you
in the cities in which I love you,
the cities daily risen to work and to money,
to the magnificent miles and the gold coasts?

Morning comes to this city vacant of you.
Pages and windows flare, and you are not there.
Someone sweeps his portion of sidewalk,
wakens the drunk, slumped like laundry,
and you are gone.

You are not in the wind
which someone notes in the margins of a book.
You are gone out of the small fires in abandoned lots
where human figures huddle,
each aspiring to its own ghost.

Between brick walls, in a space no wider than my face,
a leafless sapling stands in mud.
In its branches, a nest of raw mouths
gaping and cheeping, scrawny fires that must eat.
My hunger for you is no less than theirs.

At the gates of the city in which I love you,
the sea hauls the sun on its back,
strikes the land, which rebukes it.
what ardor in its sliding heft,
a flameless friction on the rocks.

Like the sea, I am recommended by my orphaning.
Noisy with telegrams not received,
quarrelsome with aliases,
intricate with misguided journeys,
by my expulsions have I come to love you.

Straight from my father’s wrath,
and long from my mother’s womb,
late in this century and on a Wednesday morning,
bearing the mark of one who’s experienced
neither heaven nor hell,

my birthplace vanished, my citizenship earned,
in league with stones of the earth, I
enter, without retreat or help from history,
the days of no day, my earth
of no earth, I re-enter

the city in which I love you.
And I never believed that the multitude
of dreams and many words were vain.

you’re entirely too far away from me

Wed, 17 Dec 2008 23:56:54 -0500

you’re entirely too far away from me

There’s blood in my mouth ‘cause I’ve been...

Wed, 17 Dec 2008 23:54:49 -0500

There’s blood in my mouth ‘cause I’ve been biting my tongue all week. I keep on talking trash but I never say anything. And it’s bad news, baby I’m bad news, I’m just bad news, bad news, bad news. There’s a pretty young thing in front of you, and she’s real pretty and she’s real into you, and then she’s sleeping inside of you. And the talking leads to touching, then touching leads to sex, and then there is no mystery left. And it’s bad news, I don’t blame you, I do the same thing, I get lonely too. And you’re bad news, my friends tell me to leave you, that you’re bad news, bad news, bad news. Baby you’re bad news, I don’t care, I like you.

This is the place where I sit, this is the part where I love you...

Tue, 16 Dec 2008 13:11:29 -0500

This is the place where I sit, this is the part where I love you too much. Is this as hard as it gets? ‘Cause I’m getting tired of pretending I’m tough. I’m here if you want me. I’m yours, you can hold me. I’m empty and aching and tumbling and breaking. This is the place in my heart, this is the place where I’m falling apart. Isn’t this just where we met? And is this the last chance that I’ll ever get? I wish I was lonely instead of just only crystal and see-through and not enough to you.

while you count clouds

Tue, 16 Dec 2008 12:57:18 -0500

while you count clouds

I’m wishing for something I can never have (i am such a...

Mon, 15 Dec 2008 01:24:24 -0500

I’m wishing for something I can never have

(i am such a fool for this boy)

I’m easily misled and you’re standing in my way. My...

Sun, 14 Dec 2008 19:59:59 -0500

I’m easily misled and you’re standing in my way. My words to you are fake, now you are my mistake and I am yours. You’re all I want and nothing more, but that’s not good enough.

(i love you)

Sat, 13 Dec 2008 18:44:00 -0500

And every time I’m close to you, there’s too much I can’t say, and you just walk away.

is it because i’m ugly

Fri, 12 Dec 2008 18:28:41 -0500

is it because i’m ugly

not sure how i feel about tonight just yet.

Fri, 12 Dec 2008 03:58:37 -0500

and, disenchanted, i’m enamoured yet

Nothing takes the taste out of peanut butter quite like unrequited love.

Thu, 11 Dec 2008 02:53:29 -0500

Nothing lasts forever, all good things must end. I’ve memorized that phrase by heart. So tell me, I need to know it: when do the good things start?

Illuminations XII

Wed, 10 Dec 2008 19:27:00 -0500

Quand le monde sera réduit en un seul bois noir pour nos quatre yeux étonnés— en une plage pour deux enfants fidèles— en une maison musicale pour notre claire sympathie— je vous trouverai.

Qu’il n’y ait ici-bas qu’un vieillard seul, calme et beau, entouré d’un luxe inouï— et je suis à vos genoux.

Que j’aie réalisé tous vos souvenirs— que je sois celle qui sais vous garrotter— je vous étoufferai.

Quand nous sommes très forts— qui recule? Très gais— qui tombe de ridicule? Quand nous sommes très méchants— que ferait-on de nous?

Parez-vous, dansez, riez. Je ne pourrai jamais envoyer l’Amour par la fenêtre.

(When the world is reduced to a single dark wood for our two pairs of dazzled eyes— to a beach for two faithful children— to a musical house for our clear understanding— then I shall find you.

Where there is only one man on earth, lonely, peaceful, handsome, living in unsurpassed luxury— then I am at your feet.

When I have realized all your memories— when I am the girl who can tie your hands— then I will stifle you.

When we are very strong— who draws back? Or very happy— who collapses from ridicule? When we are very bad— what can they do to us?

Dress up, dance, laugh. I will never be able to throw love out of the window.)

it’s the season of grace coming out of the void, where a man is...

Tue, 09 Dec 2008 02:06:25 -0500

it’s the season of grace coming out of the void, where a man is saved by a voice in the distance. it’s the season of possible miracle cures, where hope is currency and death is not the last unknown, where time begins to fade and age is welcome home. it’s the season of eyes meeting over the noise and holding fast with sharp realization. it’s the season of cold making warmth a divine intervention. you are safe here, you know now. it’s the season of scars and of wounds in the heart, of feeling the full weight of our burdens. it’s the season of bowing our heads in the wind and knowing we are not alone in fear, not alone in the dark.

don’t forget i love you.