calling a series of private activities a "secret life" makes it sound so...i don't know, interesting, i guess. a secret life isn't necessarily interesting. it's just a life you don't tell other people about. maybe you're ashamed of it, but maybe it's just something you don't speak of. maybe it's something you're a little ashamed of but mostly just don't speak of.



on other (or similar) fronts, i kind of want to die. i don't know how cherubino did it. i hurt all over. i can now understand that the power of fiction is, not necessarily to transcend, but just to take us out of these sorts of moments, sometimes by putting us further into them. i've experienced longing, but not like this...hopelessness, but not like this. in some ways it isn't even that bad--i know everything's for the best, and it's not like i've run out of hope, and it's not like i had firm expectations that are now being dashed. it's just a different variety of longing and hopelessness. and when looked at from that angle, it's kind of interesting, even--it gains a certain sort of savor, if you see what i mean. i'm like, "hunh, experience!"



and meanwhile everything even slightly below the skin is pulsing with something akin to pain, and the skin itself feels new to the touch.



why would anyone want to get involved with me? look at how i look at things. look how bizarre and clinical i am, and how i tell unnecessary details about myself as if the world were a cave and my body and i the sole dwellers in it. look at how i see everything as splitting apart and coming back together nothing more than a mess--a beautiful mess usually, when one looks closely enough, but still a freaking mess.



look at these eyes, and the way i see out of them, and the way they latch on to someone as if he or she is a star that can look back at me... who wants to be a star? it's a stupid and terrible thing to ask of anyone. i'm sure laura didn't want to be laura, and beatrice had no desire to be beatrice. i don' t want to be anyone else's star; why do i make others mine? god, i'm sorry, for feeling this way. really. it's an imposition, and it's wrong, and--



i wish

you would look back at me.

i apologize for this wish.

mizuch ado about nothizzle

i'm sorry i'm expounding instead of writing in this thing currently. yes, o nonexistent reader, to you i plead for forgiveness. yea verily i say unto you, um, well, i guess two things:

1. writing stuff you know something about but not writing it as you know it--or, writing something you don't know anything about and learning it through writing. this, i think, could be an outline to "poetic" "process," provided that the two strands are understood as two aspects (possibly two functions) of the same thing. both "poetic" and "process" are in quotes above because i don't know crap about anything, especially not poetry (as may be more than evident). you have to give me a break, though. those "poems" below are first drafts. why put first drafts online? i think it's something about the exposure, actually--honesty in anonymity isn't very high risk, but that means that i can be more and more honest in an effort to rise to the challenge of being unknown. the answers to these questions are flowing very easily tonight, and should probably not be over-trusted.

2. i shouldn't be believing what i seem to be believing. i think about things that may or may not have happened earlier, and i melt--my hands start shaking at the wrists, and it's like the reversal of a volcano, the feeling, a swoop, like a bird landing on its prey or a vacuum sucking up the cieling. but of course said things may not have happened, and i'll just end up making myself a turban out of my brain again if i believe in them (sorry, that wasn't racist, or at least wasn't meant to be--what i mean is that the sensation of believing in these things, when i know i ought to know i'm wrong, feels like what i imagine it would feel like to wrap one's own brain into a turban). i've imagined wrongly before. i have. i did so as early as the beginning of this week. why won't my stupid self listen to itself??

yeah, there's an easy answer to that one: because it feels too good to believe. sometimes i dream about things that i hope will happen; sometimes i dream about things because i don't dare to hope they'll happen. these things i can't stop myself believing in are from that second category of dreams.

i'm pitiful, but i don't want pity.

another symptom of things i shouldn't be believing in but am for now (only for now, only for tonight): i don't remember anything about what my feet were doing. it's flat-out bizarre. i assume they were on the ground. calculations of most available probabilities would seem to point in that direction. of course i don't know crap about probability calculation, except that if you do enough logarithms you can make a fern, just like thomasina thought before she burned down.

ah, the metaphor is apt.

unfortunately i don't think it counts as a metaphor...nor, now that i think about it, is it really all that apt. what the hell's "apt," anyway? this may end very very poorly.

the best part is, that tomorrow i won't feel this way. in the grand tradition of making hell week a little more hellacious for myself, i've contracted a crush on someone who may or may not know i'm alive as such. "why am i such an idiot," and "who do i think i'm kidding," are two very good questions to come out of the situation as it now stands in my head, but i think the question that's most to the point is "how the heck do i keep a lid on things?"

i have a feeling of blank and somewhat terrifying inevitability about this one, like it's speeding toward a...well, beginning. this feeling too will probably be gone tomorrow, but right now, always provided he knows i exist, it's a sense that something is closer to happening than something's been before for me (way to construct a sentence there). it's probably not. but just for the moment, you know, let me dream... yes, in my branched velvet gown, i play with my--with some rich jewel. ahem. ANYWAY.

and of course i have to write this down, because whenever anything happens i write it down.

my sense that whatever happens shouldn't have any reference to whether i want it to or not is, i think, not unjustified. i mean, i have so much. getting what i want would be the extremity of overkill. i think that makes sense. also it's a bad idea to want stuff, i think. that's not so much the voice of chronic disappointment as it is the voice of eternal possibility: wanting gets one caught up in the simulacrum, when the actual thing is more painful, sweeter, just plain more interesting. what it is is that when you expect nothing, you have an opportunity to expect everything. which is pretty exciting. i mean, the possibility, however slight, that various godzilla flicks are truthful depictions of actual monsters is like that well in the desert in the little prince, if you see what i mean, the well in the desert, or the laugh in the stars...the rose in the cosmos...the lamb in a box (1. i put my lamb in a box. 2. i open the box. i don't know how the rest of that goes)...the taming of the fox... an actual jointure of theory and feeling, always exciting. anyway.

anyway. i'm not going to go toward it--him, taming, roses, laughs, godzilla, lambs--but i'm going to do my best not to run away, either. i should give blank inevitability a chance. kind of like peace, in the song, but significantly different in other ways.

acrostic II

sometimes i look up into the night

and get dizzy.

thinking of where you may be.

that smile i don't know.

drop,

words,

is this what

you mean?

do you continue

gambling

on meaning?

seismic shifts felt

like the line

of alpine ridge

of teeth

of fireblasted hills:

words i love you.

make my heart your own.

call it across the inanimate water and

call it again.  name each pulse,

that behind the ear 

that at the ankle.

tell me my body

part by part and

thus remake me

in your mouth.

take even my fingers

from me.

take even the curve

of my neck.

take away 

even the shadow

of my blood

in its vein.

i broke down in east saint louis

for tom waits

we discover strength in pain.

for in the heart that bleeds is found the blood that gives us best.

in every bloom is the flesh of the dead thing that made up the ground.

this is what it means to dig.

this is what it means to take shovel and break the earth.

that the seed may foster its loveliness, the breathless press of its promise.

taste the air: it is sepulchral with love.

for in every breath we find our heart mimicks itself as if linear, as if parallel, as if married within itself, secretly.

but instead it twists like a knot, rising against itself.

like hands, for no reason.

or like eyes, tying themselves in together.

together like pulse we are and always shall be each other.

and if our devotions frighten it is because they are flesh.

this is why i am strong.

i am a double knot.  with love.  

fingers, rub raw, and wrists, take impress will or no:

i am love itself.

emulata

second day:

wash off 

the accustomed black cake

and find red mouth

underneath,

translucent like

gills, and

pink shape.

for if we are fish

we recreate the 

water.

and when we are

werewolves

our lycanthropy

revolves 

the moon

and as leaves we

turn

momentous red.

to trade sex

for pain is

to remake teeth

new and

retongue prophets,

to make paper

tongue stone

as promised.  the dart of an eye

like

fish

silvered

in a pond:

the teeth a crack.

like water to water

love to love runs back.

shrinktage: horror movie part 7 "rusted scopophile and prom princess"

for my consideration: saffron deluge for the skirt and the bodice made out of locust-colored velvet, velvet in excess of color.  she tastes her teeth with the tip of pinked

tongue.  in the mirror she smiles like constellation.

and here i am for her i love.

i am here to sniff for what she leaves.

collecting hairs off the floor when she is gone:

the smell of aquanet

presses against back-eyelids

like empurpled devotion, rich almost to poison--

i see her in

the strands of

the hilton carpet,

as if 

she 

a veronica

formed

from out

her very presence.  hhhhhh

heliotropic patterning against inward eyelid and tinly shingle pattern on the eardrum slur, arpeggiate, 

alpine collation of breaths, rough-edged against the ground and i hit and hit the floor i hit the floor there is a music to it.

there is a music

to it, oh god.  taste that sweet music

like blood in the irrigate mouth.