doing and saying are different but words should move they should move you out of a room where bodies hang on meat hooks over your bed and the entrails brush the pillows and the stain of everything you’ve done becomes a whisper taught to children with mangled limbs and cleft faces
Category Archives: words
brick silent
and the silence is like a brick in his mouth that he can barely chew and she says I’m sick and he tries to ask how long has she been this way but his tongue is stuck on the mortar and she says again I’m sick of this and he tries to fit his fingers between the brick and his lips and she throws off the sheets and looks for her clothes and he imagines she will never find them because he cannot tell her where they are
project snowflake: notes: amanda, ian, breakfast in bed
and she has breakfast in bed with ian the way normal people do with a cinnamon raisin bagel for herself and a wheat one for him. he globs on the cream cheese in a way that makes her laugh and she doesn’t think about the others, she doesn’t think about harry or tom. instead she bites into it, telling ian about her next project, telling ian about the dream she had. he listens and nods and chews, a dab of cream cheese caught in the corner of his lips. suddenly she kisses him there and he kisses her back and the bagels fall onto the bedsheets then fall onto the floor as they tumble over each other.
cut and paste
there’s a man with a pair of scissors and a pile of magazines. he cuts. he cuts out her face and puts it here. cuts off her hands and puts them there. he smokes viciously. he flips through each magazine, frustrated hands. he cuts and pastes on whiteboard an obscene shrine. the eyes most important, seductive and sleek, predator eyes, eyes focusing on prey, eyes without remorse. her body means nothing, interchangeable, always. and beside her, him in a tux, him in speedos, him with a fine hair cut, him cut up and in pieces. him torn from glossy pages, him never as he was. perfect and whole.
sight unseen
my daughter drags me into the living room to show me patterns of shoes she’s made on the coffee table, toe to heel, heel to toe. my son smiles and coos and razzes at me as i walk towards him and he excitedly swats his arms left and right in his bouncy.
does he see me, does she see me, does anybody really see me at all?
what do we really see?
the world in my mind, my mind in the world – Igor Aleksander
we see something, it shows up somewhere, back there, literally in the back of the skull and then filtered through, filtered outward throughout the whole and it registers as something else. we see and do not see. we feel what we see, we think of what we are seeing and it happens so quickly, apparently so effortlessly, it’s transparent. we make meaning all day long. color is a meaning, shape means something, it takes hold: clenched jaws shaking us about.
there is no reality without meaning. constant and pervasive, we are shackled, i am shackled into making meaning out of everything. there is no sitting still.
all that it threatened
i dreamt of an ocean that did not know the trespass of any land, no jetties broke its surface, no island climbed out of its depths, and the sky was a dark and thunderous violet just before nightfall or dawn, and in the distance there was a rumble that growled across the horizon and streaks of lightening shocked everything into a pale white, and i did not know where i was but i looked for signs of my body, some stray limb, some motion, some sense of nausea and i found only a perfect stillness with all that it threatened.
you do not belong in the roar
he says to me, you do not belong here
you do not belong in the roar, where it all began
and where it will all end, your feet should not be buried
in this dirt, cracked fingers not dug into this rock
you should be walking across the lapping of a shore
a crystal blue coolness should be licking your heels
the sun should be tanning your skin with the sea
salt brushing your hair, you should be dreaming
of a better place than this without torture
without this song
making way
and i dance on the back of my ancestors, i dig my toes into their sorrows and their glories, i reach up into the sky of my children and push away every branch that will scratch them, i push away the sun that will blind them, i push away everything that will cage them to the ground
what new horror
she says, there are only so many ways you can wound yourself. a finite set of instruments and places to pierce and gouge, a set number of inches where the skin can be inflected. the real question is, after that, what next? what do you do next? what new travesty do you place yourself in, what new horror do you design for yourself?
and i said, what new horror? a world without pain. to live without any pain at all.
crowded heart
“He sits in a quiet room, with a lock on the door to keep him in.”- Foo Fighters, Friend of a Friend
he sits in a quiet room and the world is all the rage outside it bangs inside the walls of his heart until bursting but it never does and it never grows it never makes room it just grows more crowded and he suffocates even when he opens the windows even when he sticks his head out even when he sticks his legs out and stands on the ledge even when he breathes the clean and sterile scent of winter even when he flies his heart simply has no more room