gum and sticks and paste

“the devils will drag me down to their place with their hooks when I die. And then I think: hooks?” -Brothers Karamazov

I don’t really need real things anymore. I just want to paint my mother with the watercolors she gave me three days ago and sit at the table with one million tchotchkes that don’t do anything. I want to read again and know what to do at night. Our old kitchen made me think that’s where the word kitschy came from cause it was a marbled dull grey-green color with grecian style grape wallpaper trim. It had cupboards with laborious locks on them and dust in the freezer. Frozen fucking dust. The couch’s ass prints gave you one perfect option for sitting and the sink was the one that cut the meat of my palm when I was six or seven or eight. The one where I bled and cried and cried and cried. Nobody loves people more than I do here. 

Today writing is a toil and its days like these where I feel that my brain will never cough up salient anecdotes. When have I ever thought of a story? I forget where I read that in India there are people who hang from hooks during festivals. They do it so much that their skin becomes a vessel for the hooks. Oriented around their placement, the surface of the body stretches and acquires perfect holes for hanging people, seraphim acrobats. The dragging is up. It's a skyward invention that disrupts earthliness and suspends the function of feet. The proteins of hell become denatured, and maybe the hooks are a stand in for that thing we call holy. The hooks cut my hand, punctured the bass’ mouth, and sewed bodies into the sky. What does a short circuit of this perfect world look like? 

listless

1. I usually live out of bags

1. bites

2. cough

2. ice is to east coast as banana is to slippery

1. like the right side, something has slipped in my brain which makes writing happen again

3. they say edie and her family and her family and her family

4. and what's that willie nelson song that dad wants played at his funeral?

5. I'm a rather messy and quick eater

1. I eat goat cheese try and flick the crumbs away but they just smear into my clothes

6. kant: what causes laughter is the sudden transformation of a tense expectation into nothing

7. when somebody says something I disagree with but I don’t wanna get into I usually just say “please” as if that would sum up all my thoughts on the subject

8. packing up takes a long time cause beforehand we have to take the cat out on a rehearsal pre-drive so she’ll shit and piss herself in a controlled way

1. sometimes she still shits and pisses during the real thing 

9. now when I come home I act more like a child than I did before I left

10. the sky is a special color right now

1. I can’t capture it with my phone but I try anyway

11. 100% of times I guess that I’m moving in the wrong direction

1. this place should be my north star but my body feels like it’s flowing south

12. going upstate already makes me happier 

13. all I do now is stay up very late talking to my dad

1. he’s finally telling me his life story. 

14. nobody asks me about my horrendous smokers cough

1. I try not to fixate too much on how short my breath has been getting 

15. I’ve started texting with an ex again 

1. he was in my dream the night before he texted me for the first time in a year 

father love

Dad finally told me the truth that I knew somewhere inside. He told me that there are always stories to tell when there are people who need to know and be known and that he was a street kid in another life in Oregon. He wanted to tell me to stay out of the northwest—Eugene, Portland, they’re all the same—but he bit his tongue and let his fingers float over all his old bite marks. He told me I’m smart like him and between the lines we addressed something that’s never said but transiently true, that we are the same, me and him. Broken begets a little less broken, but it also means broken is afraid to break the delicate less broken. Come on now father, you gave me the transcendental south and told me to leave and steel myself for goneness. He taught me my name, he taught me my name. And yes, he also gave me a new one, I gave me a new one, but when you peel back the ovaries housing teeny tiny indeterminate ovaries you see everything is still there. It’s preserved; it’s pickled for the moment we become mortally salient and all the moments after when we realize its degrees of salience. He taught me my name so that I may be scared of old age and not death, become chaos-forward, and think maybe someday I could be the one, which is really the many.

“Funneled through him” is my resistance and my focal point, I chafe against the operative “Him” and become increasingly baffled by its superimposition onto my life. He asks, “can you tell me the universal truth?” and I say, “I’m not looking for that—I want to question what is true, I want to shake the basis of truth. But I’m afraid that won’t create something new.” He responds, “New isn’t an idea, it’s a framework, and it’s a reloving of the old”. I end it, “Well maybe new is the old recapitulated so fine that is grazes us with an intangible feeling that we call new”. We move on, and I remember that I love him and he I am the closest carbon copy of him in the world. He tells me about his duplex in Atlanta and his neighbor who made a million sacrifices to sit on his porch and write. He tells me the reason he and my mom are the only people left still loving each other is because of the million sacrifices they never talk about. “When the hard times come, never do something you can’t take back kid”.

notes app

the iguana will bite those who do not dream

thinking about losing it, high, late

Oh my sweet carolina / he taught me / jenny’s mixing brownies in the lime green room / the trundle bed behind the spiral staircase / a hop or two from the bog / rivers belong / in spaces inside me / hats and walking to the library in the sleet and and and/ self-awareness / killing me now / and the way she’d feed me cookies at lunch time? / the way he passed me a dollar on the basketball court / the curb / the lead / the paint / the coats / the amnesia / the not knowing it but hearing it anyway and being sure / the kicking and the screaming

rumbling story

It’s time to build her character. She likes sleeping alone best but always wishes for people to lie in bed with her when the heat is on. She thinks people stave off the cold so she holds them close when she really wishes there were no people at all. She makes love to all her contradictions, and they manifest in dyslexic fumblings of words and ideologies, changing and opposing each other with the randomness of an instant. She idealizes her city because she knows how to get lost there—how to force a day to slip away with interchangeable showrooms, spit wads, cigarettes, and that great blue whale at the natural history museum. She smiles at that memory because she cried under that whale. She’s too embarrassed to say what about but a man and his daughter watched her lay down and cry and he winked at her and told his daughter “this is the only place in New York where you can lay down”. He meant it to be profound but all our girl could think was how untrue it was. You can lay down anywhere you want to, you can defame your body anywhere you’d like. It's just about hearing that compulsion to lay like some intangible force and following it when it embraces you. She’s not a hedonist and you shouldn’t call her that. She knows true presence is the cultivation of that intangible force and she’s trying to figure out what that means. She’s trying to think up new thoughts even though all the thoughts seem to have been thought up already. 

I think she wants to make her dreams mean something and she lies to other people that they are inherent and resonant. I think she’s a long-time-liar-in-recovery. And yes, there’s an “I” and a “she”, and maybe they’re the same person looking each other in the eye and laughing because they know exactly what the other is going to say before they say it. In unison now—I am most interested in my mirror image, most interested in looking at myself through a new pair of glasses and laughing and laughing and laughing and laughing.

back to chaos again

In bed now after a day of OUT! It was a day of mania around the people who make me manic and solace around those who make me chill. Always this in and out, in to mania and to chill. In and out of what exactly? Chaos—the voluptuous garden from which I’ve built the last six months’ predominant thought spiral. I cannot ignore her presence anymore, she forces my hands to the randomness with which I submit to compulsion or control. But I’m sick of control and I’m sick. I’m sick of being the mother of situation. I wish for once I could be simple sick again, the kind that entailed matzo ball soup or waking up with a crusty right eye. Watching cartoons and eating chicken and rice cause I danced for too long in the rain or went in the pool less than an hour after eating. I wish people would believe me again when I claim illness due to wives’ tale. Omniscient death; Franny wouldn’t explain it to me but I know it to be true. I spend my time living outside the reality of moments shifting into new moments in order to really hold myself inside the knowledge of omniscient death everyday. I wish to hold myself in the knowledge of perpetual chaos. 

Sometimes I get these flashes of thought that embrace my mind with the phrase this moment is holy. Until now I thought that interjection was a part of me imploring me to be present, but now I think it is interchangeable with the true hopelessness of omniscient death. It is the true presence of hopelessness which gives no future to live for and only a nowness with which to catch each moment as it falls, for there is nothing else. All of these things—presence, chaos, hopelessness, entropy, and omniscient death are becoming the same to me. I’m realizing they all point me to the same thing. I just have to figure out what that is.

always screaming into the void

Two nights ago I got home from doing acid and also being drunk. I felt so good there, and I came home from having a lot of good thoughts but god I feel awful now and can’t help but remark on how being around people really staves off the awful of things. And then they leech off to wherever leeching is happening and you can’t find the exit. It’s okay I suppose, but I’d like to know where leeching is happening and also where the exit is. I’m helpless to every form of non-waiting room behavior. Writing is making me feel better, ahh, writing always makes me feel better. 

New line. Good. The hats off and I know exactly what room I’m in but its so dark that I could be anywhere. I could be typing this out of a dumpster in fuck all or wearing some kind of hat and I keep having to touch my hair to remind myself that no, I’m not wearing a fucking beret right now. When I go home at night and watch myself I’m a little here and there.

wake up

There are too many predominant memories from bed. Mom brought me Blueberries for Sal and she sang Pippen. Dad taught me my name and sang about Carolina. I never left my sheets due to the labor associated with exiting the top bunk. My eyes sag and bend towards psychotic activity. 

Last night I couldn’t talk and only cried. It was quick. I checked the clock before and after. I’m a sweet, unruly disciple of the clock. Clocks were enough. Enough was enough. Enough gave me space from my little sister who on this day is six years old where I am twenty. Twenty times I’ll visit her in her sleep tonight. Tonight I'll have three pounds of weed, honeybush, wild angry mustard, and carrots but you can eat queen anne’s lace which is a symbol for sanctuary. Sanctuary is a time when it’s okay to be alone. Alone which is factory settings, the time when I notice trees are people and there’s a big blue whale on top of us, and later maybe I’ll talk about that and people won’t get it unless I put it in a poem. 

Remembering is a far more psychotic act than forgetting. I’ll go dancing tomorrow and while I kick out loud I’ll waltz in my head. I’m so tired but luckily I know a good remedy for that.

before today

I’m writing a letter to him cause for some reason I feel like I’m going to cry right now. Anything to cry and also not cry— check my texts, lean as close as I can to the radiator, and write and write and write because that is what makes my world coherent. I wonder what did this to me, this ailment of writing to sanctify and comprehend my thoughts, this cause and effect. I don’t know how often I experience presence, but I think its a lot less than most people. In the few and far between conversations that truly engage me, I experience it. In the act of writing, the ecstasy of presence washes over me, and although I do not labor to improve my ability to maintain presence, I think I still seek it out. My most nourishing activities are present ones. Sometimes, I think the reason that I can’t make people laugh or uphold conversation is due to the fact that I have never lived in a moment as it occurred. They coalesce and pass me by and I spend each moment catching up on the old ones, and when that gets dull, predicting future ones.