to kyle rayner

sometimes life isn't about what you want or need or the choices you wanted to make but couldn't
it's about what gets thrust upon you
what you aren't expecting
and when everyone doubts you
the average joe
the one no one ever would have chosen
because you aren't brave or fearless
you're just you
it's what you do with that power
the important part
it's what you make of the forces in front of you
the life sitting still, sometimes, right in front of your face
when you didn't think you could
and when you never thought you wanted to
at all

fuck superman.
that scarcemotherfucker
has nothing on you--
and the lessons you've taught me about
resurrection.
resuscitation.
the destruction of your personal history drove you insane.
zero cool.
zero hour.
we all die a little bit
at the hands of fatal forces
in rapid attempts to rewrite history
to our liking
i know what it feels like to become a ghost
in a world someone else has written you into.

we're not sidekicks
you and me
everyday people
full of an affinity
for dual identities
parallel existences
and falling in love
with the enemy
they keep trying to get rid of us
young fast college students
the thirty-six hundred others
but we keep standing guard
costumed
keeping watch
over it all

i used to think that the color of your eyes
would be the death of me
now i know it's something much more serious
and intangible

lately, you make me want to outscream lightning

dear mom,

that space between where the window doesn't quite meet the sill
in the living room
won't stop
i've tried everything
a hundred and twelve pounds of pressure
that gap mocks me
when i sleep
even when i'm not at home
i'm convinced it's sucking out my sanity
nothing fits right
the doors won't close
missing coat pocket
the gargantuan coffee mugs
i've started sleeping under my bed
and holding my breath
as if this life were something lived
under water
and i'm so, so, so, tired of moving.

love,

imogen

She likes to think of him in those early morning hours before the light chases the dull grey out of everything in the apartment. When she's up and dressed and ready to leave for work while he's still folded up in the sheets. Twisted like he's been fighting off something much more serious than morning--than the alarm clock ring. Before starting off for work, she always stands in the doorway of the bedroom and fights against the demon of reaction these moments cause. To wake him. To whisper. To leave without words. To undress and slip back under his warm breath and body. He always moves to her side. His hands reaching in the direction she was an hour or so before. Leaving stings the skin. Every time. More than I ever wanted her to believe. This morning, she places her head into the back of his neck. Sucking in the smells of his skin and hair. Like a just unwrapped bar of soap. And lavender. Kissing a fine line of the story about the way in which she loves him across his neck. His face and eyes. He's clutching her arm. Inaudible noises through the cover of sleep and pillows. And she wonders if he misses her. The way the sheets never forget the smell of him when he's gone.

Back from ice cream. I pour a half glass of scotch into a coffee mug. Two ice cubes. They crack and pop as I move through the house. Throw up once into the recently cleaned toilet. It smells like false orange. Ink jet cartridges. Try to write with the beat of some African song blaring across the distances of these carpet fibers clenched between the toes. Turn it down. Way down. Can't think between these beats. These words in another language from an album called

Missing you

Period.

She looked like a loose piece of string. Across the room. Under the dull buzz of the three sets of Christmas lights around the windows. Dancing around her head like flies in summer. Attractive. Horrible. Like she wouldn't be so slack sitting in the chair. Knees thrown casually together. This lazy head angle. If someone grabbed tightly to the other end. And pulled. A dare. I couldn't stop staring. Between bites of sticky sweet cream from a plastic spoon. Those perfect breasts through the silhouette of a lavender dress -- the color of parts of my hair. Her hair, red. The dark kind that usually only comes on the top of chocolate cakes -- from a bottle. Things we always only later regret. And the perfect way that her boots hit the right spot on her calves. I wondered what it might taste like to kiss her. Maple syrup and grape nuts.

other people's blog links
i found oblivio
via kimimela

There were no black people in my neighborhood. When I was a girl. Just a bunch of dirty kids wearing clothes that belonged to someone else first. That never fit right. Cheap rubber shoes that slipped in the rain. It rained all the time. No mom or no dad. We lived with our grandparents because one or more of our family members over 15 were in jail. Just kids who knew what day to bother standing in line at the food bank, and who would have never thought to make fun of someone on welfare.

There were no black people in my neighborhood. When I was a girl. And my best friend who lived up the street and I used to jump rope behind her house and our brothers used to play rough games in the grass. All of their names started with D, after their father. And there were more of them than I could keep track of. Her father always smelled like cheap alcohol. That's not meta-reflection. I knew it like my own father, who I hadn't seen in several years. Cheap alcohol and gasoline. Sometimes, when no one was watching, the group of us would get together and light fires. We all suffered from a desperate desire to make something burn.

There were no black people in my neighborhood, until the one we all called Pooh-pooh ran into my brother-who then fell a few feet from the elevated yard where we played onto the rocks and concrete below. I remember the group of us crowding around him lying there, shrieking and laughing, like a mob of crazed wild dogs. Our own destruction some necessary fever. Until my grandmother loaded all of us into the car and rushed my older brother and his cracked bloodied face to the emergency room. Where we sat for hours without insurance for them to tie little knots of dark heavy thread near his hairline. Afterward, I used my orange plastic barrette to hold back his hair.

Until the doctor came into the room and asked my grandmother if she wanted to call the police-to press charges. For what?, she asked the man politely. You know how violent these blacks can be, he said, nodding in our direction. There were no black people in my neighborhood.

i just yanked open the third drawer of the nearest file cabinet for no particular reason and found what seems to be a fully functioning intellivision ii. that's crazy-wack-funky, yo.

i was just interviewed by a special agent from the fbi

"don't hold me to these words
'cause to you they could mean anything
to me they are my everything
i need to spin the world

don't hold me to these words"
--Precious, Bernard Butler

i'm going to pour myself some scotch
and you can't stop me

[*i did, actually, accidentally type sex]

i just spent the last 20 minutes debating about and researching whether or not
arm-sinews
is a word

The door always squeaks. The medicine cabinet. She notices it more in the morning. Like the sound of construction outside the window. A dull grinding pain behind the eyes that sometimes strikes more relevant than others. This morning the whine of the hinges feels like a swift punch between her shoulder blades. And she rocks the mirrored door back and forth with two fingers of her left hand. Another on her right hand dripping blood into pools on the counter. Caught the sharp edge of the scissors fishing out an earring from the debris. The red spots collecting into a larger shape. The way rain eventually does on the slick surfaces of a driveway-the stairs on the back porch. Splats against the grey laminate in time now with the aching cabinet door. She can't stop the bleeding. The noise rising from the hinges. Numb to the sound. To the words she might or might not be saying out loud. In her head.

It's time to get up.
She calls.
Get up.

He might or might not hear her from the folds of the loose sheets in the other room. They'd not even taken the time to make the bed. She sticks her finger in her mouth. Sick with the metallic taste of blood stuck against the back of her throat. She watches the light reflecting from the door to the larger mirror where she stands when she forgets she's standing where she is on the floor. Like a gigantic signal lamp. No one answers. Flash. Flash. She hears her neighbor in his apartment. The water on the other side of the wall splashing into his shower. And wonders what he looks like naked. Pictures him taking a shower with all of his clothes on. The awkward way he looks when she passes him in the parking lot. Pants too short. Sweaty even in winter. In her head he's wearing something hideous and unremarkable. Tan. In the shower, she's sure, he looks like a gigantic baboon. All hair and ass.

She flicks the door so it bounces against the opposing mirrored wall. It makes a sound like dropping a quarter into an aluminum sink. Dumb. Metallic and hollow. The silent door open.

was about a search for someone else
that was so many years ago now
and a few blog incarnations later
i'm still looking
my perspective is just
so very different

things will be better back in place.
god damn it, kids.
god fucking damn it.
right now i hate being the person i am.
i hate caring for people so much that i'll pretend that my own feelings don't hurt.
that for years it was okay that he treated me like i was less than human.
that i can understand that he never said he loved me--
because, really, that's implied in any
long
term
relationship.
fuck it.
and fuck that.
i'm tired of feeling bad because other people can't seem to communicate their feelings.
or that i can, but mine are the wrongs ones completely.
because i am
done.
i am who i am and what i am
and i am so okay with that right now
so, so, so, okay with it
that this post, now, even, feels incredibly irrelevant.

but
rants are good sometimes--to clear the mind--to confirm, later, that we did just think what we almost thought we didn't.

sitting here drinking coffee and mildly cleaning my apartment
mostly, i'm watching the heavy sky roll over
turning everything muted
gun metal luster
waiting for my ex to turn up for a weekend visit
during which we'll refer to each other as friends
mostly meaning it
we'll debate about where to sleep
always do
that awkwardness that comes from sharing a bed with someone for longer than ten years
making it seem silly for one of us to take the floor
the couch
makes any other choice unconscionable
we'll hug and laugh
hold hands walking down the street like old friends sometimes do
dish about our lives
his job
the latest crush
and i won't think about how lucky i am to be away from him
it's only for the weekend

the boy's just gone. run to catch a train. gone to see a man. or two. still i'm not there. not any closer. not farther away. just away. you make me feel, he says. this love feels. like eating butterscotch pudding. with my hands.

thanks david
and not just for the new template

placeholder for caius lucius (develop or delete in the morning)

because she said she was nothing or that it might just be better to be nothing but it isn't the truth it's like the old punctuation trick like the thing i wrote awhile back about being able to hear my neighbors having sex in their shower no it isn't about sex it's about something else but i'm too tired to figure out the point to grab hold of both ends of the narrative string and push or tie them into a neat knot and leave the mess for you to figure out woman without her man is nothing like she said before me from the mouth of a man writing for a woman played by a man pretending to be a woman i saw her in cream silk pajamas i'm adding the punctuation now shoving it in maybe where it doesn't belong i don't care sometimes are you listening? silence can be key.

no titular bones to spare

my brain hurts
everywhere
sometimes—
[long stupid desperate full of expletives pause here]
fudding sucks

if anyone wants to give me

around 520.00 U.S. dollars
that'd be great

thanks.

seriously
all of the colors here
are starting to drive me mad

on smashing your own face in

i used to keep a razorblade hidden. for years i knew the placement by approximate degrees. in the light. at night. in various houses along the way. a tool certain of its properties of self-defense. the kind you might perpetrate only on yourself. i never did use it. only looked at those clean edges sometimes. some crazy roadmap reflecting the ways of insanity. until i realized that a real life, one lived with dignity, couldn’t include hiding sharp objects. and motives. i don’t hide so many things anymore.

while switching out the tissue roll in the CR a few days ago, one of the ends of the metal tube sprang off and clanged to the floor. exposing the spring inside. stuck just there, neatly placed in the center of the coils, this straight razor’s edge. same hiding place. this time, it isn’t mine.

today i think i might have figured out

about what and how i'm going to write my disseration
word

i have just now
become obsessed with
this painting
by Rene Borst

[p.s. this also makes me incredibly happy.]

no matter how hard i try

i can't get leonard cohen's i'm your man
out of my head

i think i want all of these posters:
intacto
der krieger und die kaiserin
amelie
secretary
trainspotting