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
project snowflake: notes: tom, when he deals
and when tom negotiates a deal he sees all the angles and plays it cool, plays it like a hand he’s been dealt before and he already knows its outcome. tom never comes unprepared, tom never goes in blind. he’s seen it all before, he’s looked hard and long into the mirror and he knows the man he is and could be. he’s been there, done that. just barely past thirty and he’s beaten the liquor that put his father into the ground, he’s beaten the coke that drove his friends to ruin. he’s risen above it all and he’ll keep rising, keeping plugging along until he doesn’t have to sit at any table to negotiate a deal anymore. he won’t even have to show up. he’ll have someone else do it for him. he’s almost there, but not quite yet.
project snowflake: notes: harry, he's seen
harry’s seen them go from gears and levers to circuits and touch screens and everyone he looks at is a series of controls run amok, a set of frayed wires connected to circuits running for miles bundled up in muscle and flesh with plastered teeth and blunt nails broken. he sees everyone as a series of functions that have been bent by damaged childhood and warped experience, he sees everyone on the verge of rust. and when amanda walks into the room she is just like them, he is just like them, he thinks, we are all like one another, and he’d like to believe that, he’d like to believe he’s just another broken cog in a vast machine. but then amanda suddenly smiles and she tells him there’s no one quite like her in the world, there’s nothing quite like them anywhere to be found.
blood fir
and my mouth is a blanket of fur matted with blood that leaks down the sides, over my chin, dribbling onto my fingers, sticky like the sap of a fir tree and everywhere i put my hands i can’t get rid of it, that stale taste of something having died in there and it’s rotting down my throat and i would choke on it if it didn’t have your name all over it, if i didn’t know your name but i do and i trip over a piece of scrap metal and i scrape my knee, break my arm and i would do it all over again if only to stop the clots from jamming up my lungs to steal your name from me