Wednesday, April 29, 2009
22 april
no, it's not that i'm the most contented. it's that i'm so busy i dont have time to think properly. i keep having these little moments of lightening-bug revelation, and watching them drown in the sand-dune currents of my inextricable busyness. but that's how i like it, isn't it? busy? so that i dont have time to realize how painful life can be?
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
stasis II
stasis roars its nothingness:
and then: the cleansing whip
and sweep of foam:
i have smoked
the sweet blue smoke of love
and taken its Communion:
swallowed mouthful after mouthful
like swimming-pool water,
sweet blackberry mouthfuls of blood.
i should have loved a lightening rod instead;
that burns and rises like a god again.
but i have loved the lightening:
wrestler-of-the-gods,
whose words sparked up like red balloons
to pop in the topless blue sky.
and then: the cleansing whip
and sweep of foam:
i have smoked
the sweet blue smoke of love
and taken its Communion:
swallowed mouthful after mouthful
like swimming-pool water,
sweet blackberry mouthfuls of blood.
i should have loved a lightening rod instead;
that burns and rises like a god again.
but i have loved the lightening:
wrestler-of-the-gods,
whose words sparked up like red balloons
to pop in the topless blue sky.
Sunday, April 19, 2009
ballerina
the ballerina seeps a liquor
brewed from Not Enough.
her feet beat out a Bliss Burnt Blue
fermented from old love.
a carnal itching for the stars
bangs out its bloody beat:
Inebriate of lust, a cold sea
sloshes in her feet.
the ripple, slough of mirrors
muscles rust to aching clean;
trouble crusts and sugars over into
folds of bitter cream.
love bangs and slides and clops away
like marbles on the stair:
the blank stands breached, like lightening's
grabbed her trouble by the hair.
brewed from Not Enough.
her feet beat out a Bliss Burnt Blue
fermented from old love.
a carnal itching for the stars
bangs out its bloody beat:
Inebriate of lust, a cold sea
sloshes in her feet.
the ripple, slough of mirrors
muscles rust to aching clean;
trouble crusts and sugars over into
folds of bitter cream.
love bangs and slides and clops away
like marbles on the stair:
the blank stands breached, like lightening's
grabbed her trouble by the hair.
19 april
Our pride & prejudice is over now. i can now of course return to a normal-esque pattern of sleeping and homework and eating, but there is always that melancholy that accompanies the end of a production. i will miss my people-watching and my people-loving and my people-discovering. and i hope that all the machinery that has begun to whirr in me since moving from molded to molding and molder will not cease to whir, for i am feeling human once again, and wish to stay this way. the heavyness of my dead selves does not press so frequently and i can feel genuinely, actually happy.
I am still fascinated by H. we are too much alike to become very close; we are both the reactionary, and sometimes quite unstably "ourselves". but she strains me, makes me work; i sense her pert social ambition in every perfect molded state and every well-turned phrase. she worries me like a strained muscle. (but, after all, a muscle that i have grown quite fond of and attached to.) but still she is vulnerable in ways that i am vulnerable, and even in our shallow friendship we can use and love each other. me, i am the opposite; my guard is too often down instead of always at sentry. reactions do not meticulously form themselves, they erupt without warning and that is what makes me the way that i am. that is what is making me human.
And J, of course, still itches in my side like some unscratchable malignancy. if i did not see him half so often, and he did not regard me as though i were a lingering unpleasant aftertaste, it would not be quite so disquieting. but as it is he is always present, in his apathy and mild distaste; now blown open as he and i have been to the strange addicting fragrance of loving and worming his way into diverse new hearts. oh it is still every time like a scab is ripped off, but i am conditioning myself to be quite independent.
(for this is my statement to the world, to both the gossip-monging and actually compassionate: He has acted such that nothing he could do at present could possibly hurt or humiliate me more than he already has. I have come to the conclusion that he is incapable of even that vague warmth common to horses; and can only hope that this failure will cause us to, however disparately, grow.)
I am very happy to be once again human. The dead bits are still sore but in my humanness quite tolerable. See, how i regrow bits of my Self like a newly-severed earthworm.
I am still fascinated by H. we are too much alike to become very close; we are both the reactionary, and sometimes quite unstably "ourselves". but she strains me, makes me work; i sense her pert social ambition in every perfect molded state and every well-turned phrase. she worries me like a strained muscle. (but, after all, a muscle that i have grown quite fond of and attached to.) but still she is vulnerable in ways that i am vulnerable, and even in our shallow friendship we can use and love each other. me, i am the opposite; my guard is too often down instead of always at sentry. reactions do not meticulously form themselves, they erupt without warning and that is what makes me the way that i am. that is what is making me human.
And J, of course, still itches in my side like some unscratchable malignancy. if i did not see him half so often, and he did not regard me as though i were a lingering unpleasant aftertaste, it would not be quite so disquieting. but as it is he is always present, in his apathy and mild distaste; now blown open as he and i have been to the strange addicting fragrance of loving and worming his way into diverse new hearts. oh it is still every time like a scab is ripped off, but i am conditioning myself to be quite independent.
(for this is my statement to the world, to both the gossip-monging and actually compassionate: He has acted such that nothing he could do at present could possibly hurt or humiliate me more than he already has. I have come to the conclusion that he is incapable of even that vague warmth common to horses; and can only hope that this failure will cause us to, however disparately, grow.)
I am very happy to be once again human. The dead bits are still sore but in my humanness quite tolerable. See, how i regrow bits of my Self like a newly-severed earthworm.
Sunday, April 12, 2009
12 april
It occurred to me today as i sat on the couch at my grandmother's assisted living. she sat opposite me and Mother, her and Jack; she rubbing little circles with her finger into the back of his hand, he smiling with the cowlike serenity of the domesticated old. Jack is not an unattractive man. his eyes are clear and blue in his old age; his face is creased into the tan satisfied smile of the contentedly deteriorating. they have known each other for two months, and they think that they are going to get married.
It occurred to me as i watched her thumb press its smooth little circles into the back of his hand, unconscious circles of affection that i had pressed so many times as well, that she and I and Mum are all the same. we are one three-generation clump of fatherless men-failing women. every man which has waltzed into the fabric of our lives has ruptured us, has cankered us, has failed us. Drowning in a lack of protection we grow lumps of self-sufficiency, like a tumor; because if we are impregnable we need not be protected and cannot be harmed. if you cannot see me you cannot reject me and i am safe.
But their power is a haunting power and so to our desecrators we always return. we know nothing else. we do not love them, all that love is a Sham; it is their long dominance and our oft-enforced worthlessness that charades around as love. and so we find ourselves handing out chunks of ourselves to passing men, in hopes that one will love us, but never really giving ourselves away. always we nun-tend the important parts in secrecy; our nameless faceless sanctity of Self.
My grandmother talks about Jack all the time. "We're in love," she says euphorically, downing her third cup of morning coffee. Jack creases into a cow smile and sagely remarks, "I love her and she loves me, and as long as that's so nothing else really matters. We're in love with each other." The floor nurses smile patronizingly and whisper, "He's further gone in the head than she is. Leave him alone for a few hours and he won't recall Loretta at all. To his family he only mentions her every now and then, as a friend."
Oh! is not such the way of men? i was of the same serendipitous blindness, and my J samely drifting between lust-love and apathy. i was of the same eagerness to entrust myself to someone, to be handled, to be tamed. (beware of the Tamer, however: one will be nothing more than an object, than untouched skin; and what more is there once you are Tamed?) to fail and be failed by men, for one soured love replaces the last. (and so all is well in an eternity of flawful men and disenchanted women.) one must learn to build oneself up to a Singular state, away from the flaws and the contortions and the dominance of others. there is hope, however, i cannot help but think; and as long as there is hope we will continue to love and to love and to love. such is the way of women that we hand ourselves to men.
It occurred to me as i watched her thumb press its smooth little circles into the back of his hand, unconscious circles of affection that i had pressed so many times as well, that she and I and Mum are all the same. we are one three-generation clump of fatherless men-failing women. every man which has waltzed into the fabric of our lives has ruptured us, has cankered us, has failed us. Drowning in a lack of protection we grow lumps of self-sufficiency, like a tumor; because if we are impregnable we need not be protected and cannot be harmed. if you cannot see me you cannot reject me and i am safe.
But their power is a haunting power and so to our desecrators we always return. we know nothing else. we do not love them, all that love is a Sham; it is their long dominance and our oft-enforced worthlessness that charades around as love. and so we find ourselves handing out chunks of ourselves to passing men, in hopes that one will love us, but never really giving ourselves away. always we nun-tend the important parts in secrecy; our nameless faceless sanctity of Self.
My grandmother talks about Jack all the time. "We're in love," she says euphorically, downing her third cup of morning coffee. Jack creases into a cow smile and sagely remarks, "I love her and she loves me, and as long as that's so nothing else really matters. We're in love with each other." The floor nurses smile patronizingly and whisper, "He's further gone in the head than she is. Leave him alone for a few hours and he won't recall Loretta at all. To his family he only mentions her every now and then, as a friend."
Oh! is not such the way of men? i was of the same serendipitous blindness, and my J samely drifting between lust-love and apathy. i was of the same eagerness to entrust myself to someone, to be handled, to be tamed. (beware of the Tamer, however: one will be nothing more than an object, than untouched skin; and what more is there once you are Tamed?) to fail and be failed by men, for one soured love replaces the last. (and so all is well in an eternity of flawful men and disenchanted women.) one must learn to build oneself up to a Singular state, away from the flaws and the contortions and the dominance of others. there is hope, however, i cannot help but think; and as long as there is hope we will continue to love and to love and to love. such is the way of women that we hand ourselves to men.
Saturday, April 11, 2009
11 april
i keep saying: my life reads like a cheap novel. but that is because cheap novels do not merely appear, they are milked out of life's little pores; everything in them happens and is happening and has happened. only sometimes it is slightly more well-worded.
what if you could build up a past for yourself that never happened? if nobody would ever know? what if you could arrange all those little unchangeables into something attractive and cohesive? what if you lied?
or, even more frightening, what if you started to believe them yourself?
i wonder sometimes with people, when they tell themselves so much that they are something, whether they don't start to believe and become it. when they build a cage of Identity around themselves, not allowing themselves to breathe, to grow; there is no room to expand and Become. there is no moving past what Is, which is certainly safe; but perhaps safety shouldn't be the highest concern. there's a human out there that you're supposed to become, and if you contort your unstoppable growth around those safe same walls it will warp you, like a tumor. and one day the walls will collapse and you with them, reduced to a shell; you will see the person that you were supposed to be and you will want it, but you will be one tangled mass of knots of skin, unchangeably shaped around the person you once willed yourself to be.
are you willing to carry that bundle forever? the corpse of your fraudulent youth, and all the selves you've sacrificed?
what if you could build up a past for yourself that never happened? if nobody would ever know? what if you could arrange all those little unchangeables into something attractive and cohesive? what if you lied?
or, even more frightening, what if you started to believe them yourself?
i wonder sometimes with people, when they tell themselves so much that they are something, whether they don't start to believe and become it. when they build a cage of Identity around themselves, not allowing themselves to breathe, to grow; there is no room to expand and Become. there is no moving past what Is, which is certainly safe; but perhaps safety shouldn't be the highest concern. there's a human out there that you're supposed to become, and if you contort your unstoppable growth around those safe same walls it will warp you, like a tumor. and one day the walls will collapse and you with them, reduced to a shell; you will see the person that you were supposed to be and you will want it, but you will be one tangled mass of knots of skin, unchangeably shaped around the person you once willed yourself to be.
are you willing to carry that bundle forever? the corpse of your fraudulent youth, and all the selves you've sacrificed?
Thursday, April 9, 2009
april 9 1/2
Mmm. The world drips warming shades of springtime and i smell strongly of grass clippings. This is a womb of sorts, this happiness that swells and grows like an unborn baby, soon to be thrust away into a world of ice. i am joyful, be my witnesses: i am blessed, blessed, blessed. (an old hymn flattens like an old balloon: i scratch i sing i tap my new tattoo.)
9 april
rolled around on kitchen floors;
tied my tongue in pretty bows with yours.
and now we pass: and just like glass
i see through you; you see through me
like i'm not there.
...and i am blind; i cannot find the heart
i gave to you.
-Glass, Ingrid Michaelson.
(was i so dull when you kissed me for twenty minutes in a parking garage? but that was not me; i was a piece of skin, a pretty empty shell. and we acquiesed. so i was only untouched skin?)
i want to crawl back into my bed of sin.
i want to burn the sheets that smell of your skin...
still want to hold you and kiss behind your ears,
but i recount the countless tears that i lost for you.
i promise: starting now i'll never know your name.
starting now i'll never feel the same.
starting now i wish you never came into my world.
-Starting Now, Ingrid Michaelson.
There are so many people in the world. there are so many wicked wonderful dangerous beautiful apathetic fragile emphatic bean-brained people.
i love them. i love humans.
i love warm touching human ripening humans.
tied my tongue in pretty bows with yours.
and now we pass: and just like glass
i see through you; you see through me
like i'm not there.
...and i am blind; i cannot find the heart
i gave to you.
-Glass, Ingrid Michaelson.
(was i so dull when you kissed me for twenty minutes in a parking garage? but that was not me; i was a piece of skin, a pretty empty shell. and we acquiesed. so i was only untouched skin?)
i want to crawl back into my bed of sin.
i want to burn the sheets that smell of your skin...
still want to hold you and kiss behind your ears,
but i recount the countless tears that i lost for you.
i promise: starting now i'll never know your name.
starting now i'll never feel the same.
starting now i wish you never came into my world.
-Starting Now, Ingrid Michaelson.
There are so many people in the world. there are so many wicked wonderful dangerous beautiful apathetic fragile emphatic bean-brained people.
i love them. i love humans.
i love warm touching human ripening humans.
Tuesday, April 7, 2009
8 april
and at the crest of their brute satisfaction
with wonderful gentleness, in affirmation,
they lift their clean calm eyes and they lie down
and love the world.
-Horses Graze by Gwendolyn Brooks
it is grand to be like horses, to be for several seconds purely and lighteningly happy. but one is not content to simply lie and love the world, one wishes that the world would love one back. love, certainly love: but one must never quite lie down. it is perhaps admissible to sit, or for a short time squat; but one is never loved for simply loving.
i no longer cringe for that hypocrisy to settle on my skin. here we are, warbled, knotted, inside-out: this is what humans are: and we are not happy creatures.
with wonderful gentleness, in affirmation,
they lift their clean calm eyes and they lie down
and love the world.
-Horses Graze by Gwendolyn Brooks
it is grand to be like horses, to be for several seconds purely and lighteningly happy. but one is not content to simply lie and love the world, one wishes that the world would love one back. love, certainly love: but one must never quite lie down. it is perhaps admissible to sit, or for a short time squat; but one is never loved for simply loving.
i no longer cringe for that hypocrisy to settle on my skin. here we are, warbled, knotted, inside-out: this is what humans are: and we are not happy creatures.
6 april
isn't it odd how all the clean little quirks we collect to hallow ourselves from Humanity's vague facelessness can be burnt flat in an instant? how all the little knobs and warts and nuances we build up inside ourselves to patch over the great gap in the cosmos can be blazed over by someone in one quick clean second? that one may say: who am i? i sing loudly; i wear Gap sweaters. and in one sharp numb denouncing phrase i am shaved to a dull edge and set on display; identity shrivels in blue volts and smoke.
sometimes i want nothing more than to be tethered to something, to molt individuality like a superfluous skin and bang happily about a harmless blue sky like a yellow balloon.
i have so engrossed myself in your defection as a case study of Man and Disappointment. you are, men are, as ever; it is we who are the blind ones, who do not wish to see. what fatherless girl does not idolize men? do we not worship them, adore them in horror? do we not ineffably trust them, even knowing, haunted by, fascinated by their godlike power to break us? for always they will break us, for always we are found wanting. men! my two men whom i worshipped and then was found empty; gods who have grabbed me by the hair and let fall limp to rot. what is ever enough for you? must every human be always a live wire for you to love them, knee-deep in current and sparking off fire?
i see but you do not see that you will never be satisfied. is anyone ever enough? i am not. i am not enough. you are Enough and you are unhappy and i am not enough and i am happy. i am happy because i am not myself, i am smoked up, recall, into man's blue volts and been patched over with First John and Hebrews and eight o'clock teas. is one's Self not ever enough? no! it is never enough.
sometimes i want nothing more than to be tethered to something, to molt individuality like a superfluous skin and bang happily about a harmless blue sky like a yellow balloon.
i have so engrossed myself in your defection as a case study of Man and Disappointment. you are, men are, as ever; it is we who are the blind ones, who do not wish to see. what fatherless girl does not idolize men? do we not worship them, adore them in horror? do we not ineffably trust them, even knowing, haunted by, fascinated by their godlike power to break us? for always they will break us, for always we are found wanting. men! my two men whom i worshipped and then was found empty; gods who have grabbed me by the hair and let fall limp to rot. what is ever enough for you? must every human be always a live wire for you to love them, knee-deep in current and sparking off fire?
i see but you do not see that you will never be satisfied. is anyone ever enough? i am not. i am not enough. you are Enough and you are unhappy and i am not enough and i am happy. i am happy because i am not myself, i am smoked up, recall, into man's blue volts and been patched over with First John and Hebrews and eight o'clock teas. is one's Self not ever enough? no! it is never enough.
Monday, April 6, 2009
renegade
some god has grabbed me by the hair and
toppled from the sky.
(the
madness,
impenetrable vinegar to love,
all this dements)
my lungs harden whole and light up
like the Cosmos:
from some wrinkle in the universe i hear
love rear its leaden hooves,
hear old words sparking bright and fraudulent
like fresh flourescent lighting on which blind bugs
lurch and smack.
(i am, and i am not;
from time to time i exist and then i do not exist)
silence pins me limb-for-limb
to the vacancy:
look up and you will see feet
dangling from your blankness,
like animal entrails.
you strengthen to a sour note
and ferment:
i crackle in your white volts
like a prophet.
(even i cannot demolish me, no
nor can you. too strong i've grown
in all your manna and your milk)
an old hymn flattens like
an old balloon.
i scratch i sing i tap
my new tattoo.
the petty gods flay justice into hide;
i sugar over in a crust of blood.
and me, i exist.
i am.
toppled from the sky.
(the
madness,
impenetrable vinegar to love,
all this dements)
my lungs harden whole and light up
like the Cosmos:
from some wrinkle in the universe i hear
love rear its leaden hooves,
hear old words sparking bright and fraudulent
like fresh flourescent lighting on which blind bugs
lurch and smack.
(i am, and i am not;
from time to time i exist and then i do not exist)
silence pins me limb-for-limb
to the vacancy:
look up and you will see feet
dangling from your blankness,
like animal entrails.
you strengthen to a sour note
and ferment:
i crackle in your white volts
like a prophet.
(even i cannot demolish me, no
nor can you. too strong i've grown
in all your manna and your milk)
an old hymn flattens like
an old balloon.
i scratch i sing i tap
my new tattoo.
the petty gods flay justice into hide;
i sugar over in a crust of blood.
and me, i exist.
i am.
Saturday, April 4, 2009
4 april
In spite of all the Tiredness a life is passing, and i cannot grab ahold of it with these lethargic fingers. Sleep, sleep. I'd like to give up and lie down. But there is that Always Fight to be Cheerful and Relevant, all these fragile Expectations that each slide sideways as i reach to right another.
Fear is the greatest enemy. And it breeds silence, which births stillborn and screams. I am sometimes silent not because i am Empty, but because i am a singular organism, and not fully of you but of myself. With or without your approval and love I shall not be anything other than what i am. I shall not be like H, beautiful and pert but reaching; fragile ambition in her eyes. I want to call, Fraudulent, your affection is a Sham. In cheer I am made love to and in silence blazed over.
Have all the rest been fooled? But they are all one; they are not so many different people as i am. They do not combat silence with will and spear. Who will you be when you realize that none of Them matter? When you are faced with the unalterable burden of all your sacrificed selves? Will you let yourself saunter away, bashing itself unrecognizeable against the rocks of prestige, until one day it disintegrates, disillusioned? It is a thin frosting of selfishness which sticks us all together; as no one wishes to be alone. There is no peace; there isn't any love. For all the tricks, for all the bells and whistles, it is the loving of people that is the gimmick.
Fear is the greatest enemy. And it breeds silence, which births stillborn and screams. I am sometimes silent not because i am Empty, but because i am a singular organism, and not fully of you but of myself. With or without your approval and love I shall not be anything other than what i am. I shall not be like H, beautiful and pert but reaching; fragile ambition in her eyes. I want to call, Fraudulent, your affection is a Sham. In cheer I am made love to and in silence blazed over.
Have all the rest been fooled? But they are all one; they are not so many different people as i am. They do not combat silence with will and spear. Who will you be when you realize that none of Them matter? When you are faced with the unalterable burden of all your sacrificed selves? Will you let yourself saunter away, bashing itself unrecognizeable against the rocks of prestige, until one day it disintegrates, disillusioned? It is a thin frosting of selfishness which sticks us all together; as no one wishes to be alone. There is no peace; there isn't any love. For all the tricks, for all the bells and whistles, it is the loving of people that is the gimmick.
Notes From: Cambridge Notes & Stone Boy w/ Dolphin
I.
"I can take care of myself." Because when i give, i never really give at all. Always some shrewd miser sits back, hugging the last, the most valuable crown jewel. Always safe, nun-tending her statue. Her winged stone statue with nobody's face.
-SP
Life is a tree with many limbs. Choosing this limb, I crawl out for my bunch of apples. I gather unto me my Winesaps, my Coxes, my Bramleys, my Jonathans. Such as i choose. Or do i choose?
-SP
"I've learned it," the small voice lied. But she hadn't learned her lesson, unless it was the lesson of this limbo where no one got hurt because no one took a name to tie the hurt to like a battered can. Nameless i rise. Nameless and undefiled.
-SP
It might have been Larson, or Oswald, or even Atherton standing there, standing in with the pleasant warmth common to horses. Immortal horses, for one replaced another. And so all was well in an eternity of horses.
-SP (on the Sameness of so many pleasant perfect undesired males)
The milk seared her tongue, but she drank it down. And knew that tomorrow the milk would not pass, all of it, out of her system, extricable as a splinter, but that it would stay to become part of herself, inextricable. And then, slowly, upon this thought, all the linked causes and consequences of her words and acts began to gather in her mind, slowly, like slow-running sores. The circle of teethmarks hung out its ring of blooded roses for her to claim.
-SP
Nothing outside hurt enough to equal the inside mark, a Siamese-twin circle of teethmarks, fit emblem of loss. I lived: that once. And must shoulder the bundle, the burden of my dead selves until I, again, live.
-SP
His bright minted words out of the vast wastage of space: space where, he testified, space where the Miss Minchells, the Hamishes, all the extra Athertons and the unwanted Oswalds of the world went round and round, like rockets, squandering the smoky fuse of their lives in the limbo of unlove. Patching the great gap in the cosmos with four o'clock teas and cumpets and a sticky-sweet paste of lemon curd and marzipan.
-SP
II.
There is no reason for the sudden terror, the feeling of condemnation, except that circumstances all mirror the inner doubt, the inner fear.
-SP
But everybody has the exact same smiling frightened face, with the look that says: "I'm important. If you only get to know me, you will see how important I am. Look into my eyes. Kiss me, and you will see how important I am."
-SP
The others now pass the time, and even so a little away over the boundary, to kisses, and touches, i cry mercy and back away, frozen.
-SP
And then, bitterly, I say: do i love [him]? Or do i use him as an excuse for a noble, lonely, unloving posture, under the perverse label of faith?
-SP (on the morbidly satisfying melodrama of a prolongued broken heart)
They have condemned you for being mad. Just like that. Because the fear is already there, and has been for so long. The fear that all the edges and shapes and colors of the real world that have been built up again so painfully with such a real love can dwindle in a moment of doubt, and "suddenly go out" the way the moon would in the Blake poem.
-SP
I am a woman, and there is no loyalty, even between mother and daughter.
-SP
(To be alone is) so much easier than facing people, than having to look happy, invulnerable, clever.
-SP
But there also is the vampire: the old primale hate: that desire to go around castrating the arrogant ones who become such children at the moment of passion.
-SP
The only perfect love i have is for my brother. Because i cannot love him physically, I shall always love him.
-SP
Who will (have this nonsense); bring me again to be a member of that race which throws snowballs at me, sensing perhaps the rot at which they strike?
-SP
...I refused to go on, knowing i could not be big, refusing to be small.
-SP
...And look, with faith and love, not turning sour and cold and bitter, to help others. this is salvation. To give of love inside. To keep love of life, no matter what, and to give to others. Generously.
-SP
We must be at a low ebb when we are this far into the black: that everyone else, merely because they are "other" is invulnerable. This is a damn lie.
-SP
The image of identity we must daily fight to impress upon the neutral, or hostile, world collapses inward; we feel crushed.
-SP
What the hell is tragedy? I am.
-SP
I am dead to them, even though i once flowered. That is the latent terror, a symptom: it is suddenly either all or nothing; either you break the surface shell into the whistling void or you don't.
-SP
The same horror came with them which comes when the paraphernalia of existance whooshes away and there is just light and dark, day and night, without all the little physical quirks and warts and knobby knuckles that make the fabric of existence: either they were all to me or nothing. No man is all, so, ipso facto, they were nothing. This should not be so.
-SP (on men and relationships; on being partially in love)
Fear is the worst enemy. And does she fear? Assuming humanity, yes. But, like the Hunter, the bone structure and coloring can take it. And hide it. If there is any.
-SP
The fear that my sensibility is dull, inferior, is probably justified, but i am not stupiud, if i am ignorant in many ways. I will tighten up.
-SP
What word blue could get that dazzling drench of blue moonlight on the flat, luminous field of white snow, with the black trees against the sky, each with its particular configuration of branches? I felt shut in, imprisoned, aware that it was fine and shudderingly beautiful, but too gone with pain and aching to respond and become part of it.
-SP
I can't bear to think of this potential for loving and giving growing brown and sere in me.
-SP
What i fear most, i think, is the death of the imagination. When the sky outside is merely pink, and the rooftops merely black: that photographic mind which paradoxically tells the truth, but the worthless truth, about the world... If i sit still and don't do anything, the world goes on beating like a slack drum, without meaning. We must be moving, working, making dreams to run toward; the poverty of live without dreams is too horrible to imagine: it is that kind of madness which is worst.
-SP
"I can take care of myself." Because when i give, i never really give at all. Always some shrewd miser sits back, hugging the last, the most valuable crown jewel. Always safe, nun-tending her statue. Her winged stone statue with nobody's face.
-SP
Life is a tree with many limbs. Choosing this limb, I crawl out for my bunch of apples. I gather unto me my Winesaps, my Coxes, my Bramleys, my Jonathans. Such as i choose. Or do i choose?
-SP
"I've learned it," the small voice lied. But she hadn't learned her lesson, unless it was the lesson of this limbo where no one got hurt because no one took a name to tie the hurt to like a battered can. Nameless i rise. Nameless and undefiled.
-SP
It might have been Larson, or Oswald, or even Atherton standing there, standing in with the pleasant warmth common to horses. Immortal horses, for one replaced another. And so all was well in an eternity of horses.
-SP (on the Sameness of so many pleasant perfect undesired males)
The milk seared her tongue, but she drank it down. And knew that tomorrow the milk would not pass, all of it, out of her system, extricable as a splinter, but that it would stay to become part of herself, inextricable. And then, slowly, upon this thought, all the linked causes and consequences of her words and acts began to gather in her mind, slowly, like slow-running sores. The circle of teethmarks hung out its ring of blooded roses for her to claim.
-SP
Nothing outside hurt enough to equal the inside mark, a Siamese-twin circle of teethmarks, fit emblem of loss. I lived: that once. And must shoulder the bundle, the burden of my dead selves until I, again, live.
-SP
His bright minted words out of the vast wastage of space: space where, he testified, space where the Miss Minchells, the Hamishes, all the extra Athertons and the unwanted Oswalds of the world went round and round, like rockets, squandering the smoky fuse of their lives in the limbo of unlove. Patching the great gap in the cosmos with four o'clock teas and cumpets and a sticky-sweet paste of lemon curd and marzipan.
-SP
II.
There is no reason for the sudden terror, the feeling of condemnation, except that circumstances all mirror the inner doubt, the inner fear.
-SP
But everybody has the exact same smiling frightened face, with the look that says: "I'm important. If you only get to know me, you will see how important I am. Look into my eyes. Kiss me, and you will see how important I am."
-SP
The others now pass the time, and even so a little away over the boundary, to kisses, and touches, i cry mercy and back away, frozen.
-SP
And then, bitterly, I say: do i love [him]? Or do i use him as an excuse for a noble, lonely, unloving posture, under the perverse label of faith?
-SP (on the morbidly satisfying melodrama of a prolongued broken heart)
They have condemned you for being mad. Just like that. Because the fear is already there, and has been for so long. The fear that all the edges and shapes and colors of the real world that have been built up again so painfully with such a real love can dwindle in a moment of doubt, and "suddenly go out" the way the moon would in the Blake poem.
-SP
I am a woman, and there is no loyalty, even between mother and daughter.
-SP
(To be alone is) so much easier than facing people, than having to look happy, invulnerable, clever.
-SP
But there also is the vampire: the old primale hate: that desire to go around castrating the arrogant ones who become such children at the moment of passion.
-SP
The only perfect love i have is for my brother. Because i cannot love him physically, I shall always love him.
-SP
Who will (have this nonsense); bring me again to be a member of that race which throws snowballs at me, sensing perhaps the rot at which they strike?
-SP
...I refused to go on, knowing i could not be big, refusing to be small.
-SP
...And look, with faith and love, not turning sour and cold and bitter, to help others. this is salvation. To give of love inside. To keep love of life, no matter what, and to give to others. Generously.
-SP
We must be at a low ebb when we are this far into the black: that everyone else, merely because they are "other" is invulnerable. This is a damn lie.
-SP
The image of identity we must daily fight to impress upon the neutral, or hostile, world collapses inward; we feel crushed.
-SP
What the hell is tragedy? I am.
-SP
I am dead to them, even though i once flowered. That is the latent terror, a symptom: it is suddenly either all or nothing; either you break the surface shell into the whistling void or you don't.
-SP
The same horror came with them which comes when the paraphernalia of existance whooshes away and there is just light and dark, day and night, without all the little physical quirks and warts and knobby knuckles that make the fabric of existence: either they were all to me or nothing. No man is all, so, ipso facto, they were nothing. This should not be so.
-SP (on men and relationships; on being partially in love)
Fear is the worst enemy. And does she fear? Assuming humanity, yes. But, like the Hunter, the bone structure and coloring can take it. And hide it. If there is any.
-SP
The fear that my sensibility is dull, inferior, is probably justified, but i am not stupiud, if i am ignorant in many ways. I will tighten up.
-SP
What word blue could get that dazzling drench of blue moonlight on the flat, luminous field of white snow, with the black trees against the sky, each with its particular configuration of branches? I felt shut in, imprisoned, aware that it was fine and shudderingly beautiful, but too gone with pain and aching to respond and become part of it.
-SP
I can't bear to think of this potential for loving and giving growing brown and sere in me.
-SP
What i fear most, i think, is the death of the imagination. When the sky outside is merely pink, and the rooftops merely black: that photographic mind which paradoxically tells the truth, but the worthless truth, about the world... If i sit still and don't do anything, the world goes on beating like a slack drum, without meaning. We must be moving, working, making dreams to run toward; the poverty of live without dreams is too horrible to imagine: it is that kind of madness which is worst.
-SP
Thursday, April 2, 2009
dissolution, II
i hang between
our hearts a bald-faced
moon
of silence
and of stars
to balm the scalding
blankness of your
unprescence.
i am and only am
the Stasis to your trampling
stars;
in the wake of your petaling, plaster.
love, having loosed
every white-faced saint into
the sea,
crumples at the shoreline,
gathering starlight to pool
in the hem of her dress.
our hearts a bald-faced
moon
of silence
and of stars
to balm the scalding
blankness of your
unprescence.
i am and only am
the Stasis to your trampling
stars;
in the wake of your petaling, plaster.
love, having loosed
every white-faced saint into
the sea,
crumples at the shoreline,
gathering starlight to pool
in the hem of her dress.
Wednesday, April 1, 2009
1 april
Ha! Humans! they are wonderful, but they are not a Life. one must be warm but impregnable; one must never expect a reciprocal crop of affection. one will sometimes be burned-- but one must never cease to love! it's the cost of all that Right and Worthful love to sometimes be bashed in and wrung out. but how worth it loving is-- how Always, Indomitably worth it!
(for i only realized, yesterday, how really very rarely i am wounded! i have only twice been flamboyantly Unloved, and both by numb selfcentered men-- and once the gentler sort of half-unlove, our Sisterlove that sometimes sours, ricochets in and out of great Love and great Hatred.) what have i to complain of? two unimportant human men and their infinitisemal hearts of concrete! ha! how blessed i am and always was; how Always indubitably happy!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l06M-dsQf3Q
[but let me for one moment be a disenchanted teenager: i am perfectly, perfectly happy except for, yes, he still pisses me off for being being so many different people; for being so plastickly who Everyone Else Wants, who he thinks they will love; for being made of concrete (for you are the fish now, and not i;) for being always & only to me that bizzarely innapropriately insensitive. you do not need to reinforce that you think i am Nothing. please just go away.]
(for i only realized, yesterday, how really very rarely i am wounded! i have only twice been flamboyantly Unloved, and both by numb selfcentered men-- and once the gentler sort of half-unlove, our Sisterlove that sometimes sours, ricochets in and out of great Love and great Hatred.) what have i to complain of? two unimportant human men and their infinitisemal hearts of concrete! ha! how blessed i am and always was; how Always indubitably happy!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l06M-dsQf3Q
[but let me for one moment be a disenchanted teenager: i am perfectly, perfectly happy except for, yes, he still pisses me off for being being so many different people; for being so plastickly who Everyone Else Wants, who he thinks they will love; for being made of concrete (for you are the fish now, and not i;) for being always & only to me that bizzarely innapropriately insensitive. you do not need to reinforce that you think i am Nothing. please just go away.]
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