i never treated you well
not like you deserved
not anywhere close
i walked the 5 miles from my house to yours and back again. stood in front of the hood of your car in the parking lot. stared. i listened hard. waited. leaned into the rotation of the world and felt a whole lot like falling. i wanted skinned knees and elbows. i wanted to knock. then didn't know how to say i'm sorry. for this. instead, i left the card i kept forgetting to give you, now already a month late, under the wiper-blade. and left.
this morning, i curled up in the window to watch the rain. likely washing all the words away.
day breaks fantastic in my head no clouds hang-overs misunderstandings with old lovers blue sky in which i turn out to be the same self that turned out to be the same self that always leaves us crying in your car in front of the building where now i live alone
the title of the first section of this chapter of my diss where i try to explain how false narratives within american culture screw with identity formation:
the mysterious mind-fuck
Days and days I move. And I want to eat Love. Like fistfuls of butterscotch pudding. Sweet messy gorge the bowl of flush flesh and buried fists in the nape of the neck. The slope canyon shadow of the lower back. I want to spin Love like Time. Until sex with you unravels all the laws of gravity. Not rushing like late for flights at the big bad international terminal. Forget to kiss and push through crowds. Mad to get to the end of it all. My lips remember the shape of your ears. The length of your arms. The taste of the skin of the neck. Until words passing through the part talk you into you. And your name is my name. And I want to talk Love. Like pressing my tongue in your ears. Soft wet valve to valve open. Hot pulsing fluid exchange. These hands searching the hard text of you. Reading out your insides. Crack you open like spines until your words spill themselves out limpid and moaning into me.
i don't remember where i live. so i walk. it feels like the wrong direction. turn. face center. run lines of familiar poetry in my head. it feels like the wrong direction. wander. wander. wander. walking dead in the city. on my desk you drink red wine in a red sweater. i want red. you're smiling at something out of the frame. something imaginary when i made you let me take your picture on my birthday. fire engine tongue disaster. i no longer require you. or the book of spanish love poetry due back at the library tomorrow. Desnatarse, atreverse, estar furioso . . .. dangerous furious cow. now i walk the seven steps it takes to move from your bed to the bathroom where the door unpredictably doesn't talk to me anymore, but i don't arrive at the edge of anything. no bowls cold tiles to fall into. like the smell of your aftershave when it gets caught in the vanilla lotion neck of me. in the middle. block. i count eye lashes and teeth. hinged body of holes. disgusted with her, i hang up on you. i don't answer myself when i call right back. trite self-indulgent answerphone whore. in going we return the outside of the inside over and over again until ass over tea cups we fall and break your great grandmother's china. at the only youth hostel in the city, i carry my seven dollar bottle of cab in a brown paper bag to the roof top. i'll have to wear these clothes again to work tomorrow. night blanket soundless. intertextual mad drunken woman. she gets so high. can't figure out how to get back down.
baby
you were right about me
and the way my words don't work right
even when i know i mean them
all
along
Sometimes reality and fiction get so mixed up in my head that all I can do is drink a glass of displeasurable wine from the neck of a giraffe. Curl my knotted legs into the base of the chair and read over these two measly pages of revision as if they were some kind of accomplishment. Like sucking the tangy salt reside of long forgotten chips from a discarded bag on my desk off my fingertips. The lone memory of the eyes of your face hovering over mine. Vinegar + tongue = your orgasmic breathing face. Press my tongue into the narrow ravine of my own palate. Dream of sleep. Of accomplishment. All I can do now--draw out the word fuck with unnecessary extra vowels. Caught in my throat like wild desperate birds of prey.
[cribbed from late conversation with pig]
In the moving rectangle of afternoon sun, we sit on the couch in my living room. And I dream of snowy picnics--the slow glow of wine. My legs thrown over his like a familiar blanket. With our faces resting on opposite ends, I imagine us as some wild two headed beast with four skinny wooden legs. Our smell, toxic, of vinegar and strong coffee. We're both pretending to read. Instead, I'm remembering to breathe and trying not to think about the texture and weight of his tongue. Into the sun shape, I say, someday I'd really like to live in a house with a doorbell. He pats the top part of my right thigh with most of his palm and four out of five fingers. Twice. You're so strange, he says into the cooling latte on the table. Neither one of us know yet just what means. Afterward we have greedy furious sex on the floor. He decides not to stay for dinner.
I make the mistake of shopping alone. Arm myself in the mall with a gift card and sulk through the hated mall in the early afternoon. I'm no girl when it comes to enjoying shopping. Unless I've got a boy in hand to tell me I'm 'sexy in this' or 'fuckin-a hot in that', then the shopping part of it is not my bag. I always feel stupid and self-conscious in the stores. The sales woman gets me right as I step through the door. I tell her I'm looking for jeans. They don't really have what I want, but the gift card means this is what I'm getting. It's cold and snow outside, and the store is filled with spring. Strappy pastel everywhere. It makes my mostly black and grey wearing brain ache like a decaying tooth. She's asking me my size. I glance down, as if my hips could talk in a language either one of us would understand. I say I'm not sure. I say maybe a 6 or an 8. Her size zero face scans me up and down. Frowns. And I'm sure I've done something wrong. My face fills hot blush. She grabs a handful of 4s in different varieties and says there's no way I'd need a 6. I never knew blondes swilling denim could make me feel so good.
The rest of the bored sales women gathered around the vacant dressing room waiting for me to come out in each different pair. They oooed and commented. Said the pockets were too small. The stitching too bright. Pulled at the waist. Picked favorites. Try those last pair on again with your boots, they said. We like the super low rise dark wash on you, they said. I finally walked out with a new pair of jeans, and the distinct feeling that I should never shop alone.
sick tired and stupid
but still--it's a good day
book contract paperwork received
new much longed for CD arrived (and given as gift)
blueberry muffins
fuckingawesomemayIhavemore coffee
but the best part of it all--
phone call from the soul
i felt like gnashing my teeth and sobbing. like telling someone off. i mean really hurting someone else's feelings. scream at you for always being such a self-satisfying bastard. hurl damaging words until i'd lost control of time and place. until my lungs felt filled with sand and fire. too easy. not the problem. not even a problem. just something lash onto. to scoop out these bucket-fulls of bile. hollow faithless attacks. i'd rather throw lit matches on my naked legs. sear the skin to leave a mark. and pretend it didn't hurt enough to make me make sound. to cry. i'm tough enough. i could scream it. through teeth and clawing fingernails. to the walls of my room. where i sit insane quiet. fumbling with this lit fuse and the slow tick tick until i explode. at 3:30 am i crawled into the window sill. perched and watched the orangey glow hue of white storm breaking day. wrapped the duvet around my naked body. the snow tapping like fingernails at the glass. begging me. raised the glazed box open. let some of me out. let some of you in.
I call his cellular phone. Wait for the part where he says his name. He tells me to 'go ahead and leave a message.' I wait. Whisper in my scared girl voice. i can hear the dead pumpkin's heart beating. it goes whoosh. gush. and pulse pulse. the way bad cds do in the drive. i'm afraid of the kitchen. come home soon. i need your fingers in my ears.
"Peering over your curved sleeping figure, I watched the snow slowly drifting over your shoulders. Maybe it was just an extreme case of dandruff. In any case, I thought it was beautiful."
are you that much of a francophone? he yells standing far too close to be yelling that you think some random words in the language could be some kind of incantation to bring dead matter back to life? we're really fighting now. dropping it all down. it's about the dead hull of a bug disappeared from the carpet a few steps away. the vanishing exoskeleton we've come now, in our tired working moments, to rely on.
There's nothing left to say or do. Roll your name over again on my tongue like wringing hands of a prayer. Palms pressing teeth. Lips silent open. Wrapping myself in the flesh of your name like sheets of skin. The sting of pain dulled by this collection of letters hiding held like a lemon drop under the tongue. The new name of you intersecting the chords of my throat. Tucked like the pressure of a palm in the bend of the knee. Like lips caught in the shadow of a collar bone. Auricle tongue. The static of you plaits my hair. Reduces my mouth phonetic--your name pressed out--pwoar.
he won't understand just like he never understands that i write in patterns like the female orgasm that my logic builds on itself turning and turning in ever increasing circles often requiring pressure and attention to bring the whole act to fruition and even though the journey takes slightly over 40 pages and i have to use my hands and lips eyes and tongue to get to the point where you can finish i get you there building and building until you want to scream into my ear your satisfaction at the spiral i wrapped you up in to some sweet release
your words are like glossy round eyes i want to wrench them from the sockets roll them around in my mouth like cold pretty marbles balanced on my tongue tiny worlds tucked and plucked from inside your head.
Hot-swappable-interfuse tongue connection. Super-long-hyphentated-nonsensical adjective constructions. Forest fires of the flesh. Photographs of your pink, unprotected parts. Salty v-neck sweater.
go go go. pink mouth says to fingers. lips mine butterflies make on your face holes. baby, O. this tongue of my body. youward. switching you. in the mouth of your mouth like a 10-gigabit ethernet network. fuse the go. purr whirr he says when mine clicks his. go go go. i say to the whirr.
james runs full speed into the filing cabinet next to my desk.
the world spins on the squeal of metal and storming paper
he laughs head back like a crazed horse
cracking the dull buzzing sounds of the lights in this room
my cubicle wall comes unhinged
crashes down next to the swamp he's created
i crawl through to where he sits
a rocking knot of head in hands
say his name with a question mark into his hairline with my lips
his secret is safe with me
we lie down in a pile of papers
the staring eyes of our officemates
clutch him against me until he stops crying
