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[21 Dec 2005|06:04pm] |
How am I doing?
Words no longer come easily to me
flounder helpless as autumn leaves,
little deaths, brightly colored
and dancing.
I wear make-up because it feels like speed
like something that gets me through the day (the white elephant)
I wear make-up so I can hide inside something that is whole
hide what I wake up to,
a face with lines and fissures in it
like the walls of my house, where it has been broken by age
a face like my fathers.
I imagine cremated forests now, forests layered with a soft fine ash
people, morning breath kisses and bruises on shins and things you regret the moment you say them and the most delicate
thumb-nails, tiny and half-moon shaped
or moths, furry antennae, blindness and touch, fluttering lace wings, a silhouette against a light
that disappears as soon as it becomes most perfectly defined.
All of it,
dust.
I dream of waves as well, always of waves,
or at least, the sound of the wind that precedes them, a deafening roar,
and then the intake of breath, a gasping noise,
a finally
a sudden
stillness.
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[19 Dec 2005|03:28am] |
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it's funny how different things are from how they were a year ago. I'm pretty much done categorizing things as good or bad anymore, (I've found for the most part that to categorize is useless, heavy with pretense; time and the space it exists in are graceful lovers, their movements fluid within and around one another, some kind of water themselves-for lack of a better word-too much to even drown in) but what I feel, at least, is that this is better, in some ways, than it was before. I know a lot more than I used to know, but this is mostly because I now know how ridiculously little I actually know, but even that is something, I guess. Sometimes I feel I have far fewer people in my life, but mostly I understand that those I have I actually have now, and they have me; it is not a relationship of reflection, I am no longer something metallic. (But some I still miss, think of most days, when it hits that particular note, a smell or a shade of a color, and here, mostly the streets, always unexpected, that sharp feeling) I feel older, mostly because I no longer flicker on the edge of sadness and something worse, but instead carry inside me something formed, far more profound: such a steady, comforting grief, like the new flesh formed around my hips now, the kind one learns to live with because it means you'll survive. I'm sitting in this chair that I sat in so many of those nights, and in some ways it is familiar, but not like it was, more like finding yourself in a dream you've had once or twice before; quietly it blinks, becomes lucid.
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[19 May 2005|06:54pm] |
i think about these things a lot.
( Read more... )
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[03 May 2005|09:24am] |
o summer. o o summer!
From Blossoms ~ Li-Young Lee
From blossoms comes
this brown paper bag of peaches
we bought from the boy
at the bend in the road where we turned toward
signs painted Peaches.
From laden boughs, from hands,
from sweet fellowship in bins,
comes the nectar at the roadside, succulent
peaches we devour, dusty skins and all,
comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.
O, to take what we love inside,
to carry within us an orchard, to eat
not only the skin, but the shade,
not only the sugar, but the days, to hold
the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into
the round jubilance of peach.
There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background; from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.
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[30 Apr 2005|10:11pm] |
"The Clasp," Sharon Olds
She was four, he was one, it was raining, we had colds,
we had been in the apartment two weeks straight,
I grabbed her to keep her from shoving him over on his
face, again, and when I had her wrist
in my grasp I compressed it, fiercely, for a couple
of seconds, to make an impression on her,
to hurt her, our beloved firstborn, I even almost
savored the stinging sensation of the squeezing,
the expression, into her, of my anger,
"Never, never, again," the righteous
chant accompanying the clasp. It happened very
fast--grab, crush, crush,
crush, release--and at the first extra
force, she swung her head, as if checking
who this was, and looked at me,
and saw me--yes, this was her mom,
her mom was doing this. Her dark,
deeply open eyes took me
in, she knew me, in the shock of the moment
she learned me. This was her mother, one of the
two whom she most loved, the two
who loved her most, near the source of love
was this.
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[30 Apr 2005|10:02pm] |
i think the only people who really like scary movies are people who have never been really scared. if you've ever been really scared, then you don't want to feel anything like that, anything even close to that, ever again.
i hate how now nothing is familiar anymore. i hate how now i don't know what it means to trust people anymore. i hate how now i always feel like what i'm feeling or thinking or care about is different from what everyone else is feeling or thinking or caring about. i hate how now i never feel safe. i hate how now i feel so different from everyone, all the time. i hate how now i know that there are reasons some people smoke cigarettes, how sometimes it's better to be able to control the thing that is killing you slowly, even if that means letting it. i hate how none of you can ever really know what it was like, ever.
i hate how now i know i'll have dreams about that place for the rest of my life.
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[30 Apr 2005|09:06pm] |
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I was sitting in Harvard square, smoking a cigarette and watching the lights in the trees emerge as night slowly came on. I was sitting under the awning because of the rain, but it wasn't bad, not like hard, constant Halifax rain, the kind of rain that makes you wish you were inside, but warm spring making the trees fill out green again, it can be green again, rain. There was a couple sitting near me, arguing in Russian, and I couldn't understand what they were saying, not word-for-word, but I knew the argument too well, I could feel it, the I needed you, I had things that had to get done, but I needed you argument. I was thinking about a lot of things. I was thinking that I remembered that time that we sat in the pit and the music was so loud that you had to lean in to tell me, and I will remember as long as I live how you were close enough for me to feel your eyelashes on my cheek. I was thinking of the time a summer later that you and I sat cross-legged on the bricks and listened to the old man with the accordion play as everyone passed by, how even then I loved you for listening. I was thinking of the two of us playing hacky-sack in the narrow sidewalk beside the garage, getting the hacky-sack stuck in the sign and you asked strangers to help us get it down and I wished I could be as brave as you. I was thinking of the homeless man I passed earlier today, how when I gave him a dollar I felt his hand touch mine and I realized he has been the only person I touched today. I was surprised how smooth it was, how soft. I was thinking how I would give anything for you to be sitting at this table with me, how there is this aching inside of me, and it aches not only for you, but for all of them, for what I have lost, for what I was lucky enough to have, if never long enough. I was thinking of the part of me that I must learn can be alone. I was thinking how much I wanted that couple to stop arguing, for him to take her in his arms and finally tell her how much she means to him, how much he loves her, for them to realize how lucky they are to be together here, how lucky they are just to touch.
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[21 Apr 2005|04:45pm] |
Jacky:
Because some mornings i wake up next to him with the sunlight falling across our two legs intertwined in the warm sheets and i don't want to move him because he is sleeping so quietly beside me with his heavy breaths like when you're little and they always sound like they won't quite make it so i watch, just to make sure of him, or the days i'm thinking of walking down the streets of boston with you this summer, wrecking havoc on newbury st. or maybe just enjoying the combination of cigarettes and bare feet and green grass and blue skies on the common, talking of a revolution that is already is motion while children play in the sprinklers nearby, or when we were standing at the top of the empty construction site, the building that by fall will be full of people but for now is just us two of us, and i can feel the pull from all sides, like being at the center of a storm, the pull that used to overwhelm me before, that she was lost to, but for once all i can think about is how beautiful seeing the lights of halifax with you is, or when i think of how someday i might push pass vendors and streetcarts on the crowded roads of Nepal, the mountains all purple and burning, rising from the low clouds, or the sounds of my footsteps on white marble as i wander the louvre, or music and light and people's voices pouring into the narrow alleyway in Buenos Aires. All of this makes me so glad that I'm not seventeen, that none of us are anymore, that we got to see that there is more than that, than seventeen and brookine and high school. There was pain, and there still will be more, more than we'll probably think we can take, but we will, because you're here and I'm here, we made it. And I am so glad, glad because I will see you soon and it is spring and there can be love and there is still so much to do, still so much to see.
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[17 Apr 2005|07:53pm] |
Jimmy Kimmel talking live on national television to a group of US soldiers in Iraq:
"If there was one thing we could send you to help you out, that would make things better over there, what would that be?"
US soldier: "A plane ticket!"
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[16 Apr 2005|08:35pm] |
"Anarchism, then really stands for the liberation of the human mind from the dominion of religion, the liberation of the human body from the dominion of property, liberation from the shackles and restraint of government. Anarchism stands for a social order based on the free grouping of individuals for the purpose of producing real social wealth, an order that will guarantee to every human being free access to the earth and full enjoyment of the necessities of life, according to individual desires, tastes and inclinations."
-Emma Goldman
"The radical feminist perspective is almost pure anarchism. The basic theory postulates the nuclear family as the basis for all authoritarian systems. The lesson the child learns, from father to teacher to boss to God, is to OBEY the great anonymous voice of Authority. To graduate from childhood to adulthood is become a full-fledged automaton, incapable of questioning or even thinking clearly. We pass into middle-America believing everything we are told and numbly accepting the destruction of life all around us."
"Anarchists don't deny the necessity of organization: they only claim that it must come from below, not above, from within rather than from without."
"When we say we are fighting the patriarchy, it isn't always clear to all of us that that means fighting all hierarchy, all leadership, all government, and the very idea of authority itself...Feminism doesn't mean female corporate power or a woman president, it means no corporate power and no presidents. The equal rights amendment will not transform society, it only gives women the "right" to plug into a hierarchical economy. Challenging sexism means challenging all hierarchy--economic, political and personal. And that means an anarcha-feminist revolution."
"The way we live and work changes the way we think and perceive (and vice versa) and when changes in consciousness become changes in action and behavior, the revolution has begun."
From "Anarchism: The feminist Connection" by Peggy Kornegger
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[16 Apr 2005|07:16pm] |
I think this is maybe how my book might begin.
There is so much. To say I don't know where to begin is to say there even is a beginning, that all of this was linear, moved neatly from point A to point B. But it was circular, it was fluid, it was bright as a bare light bulb and damaged you the same way, it was a lucid dream we all lost control of in our own way. It was alive and its breathing was the white noise of our nights.
( Read more... )
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[16 Apr 2005|06:55pm] |
I like to sleep with you.
I like to sleep with you.
The room is still and dark
and warm
The radiator and you breathe steady air beside me.
My hand finds the curve of your side,
and eyes still closed,
you reach back for me
quietly touch where I am most tender, most sore
where, beyond this room and this darkness,
amid the fragility that lies between a single heart beat,
you will never know me.
but somehow
with your hands
with the lightest touch
I am found
And all the while
still
dreaming.
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| "it's cheaper to kill them" |
[31 Mar 2005|05:31pm] |
Suppose, in this place, the occupying guard towers face inwards,
And snipers shoot 13-year-old occupied girls coming from school and then descend the tower to fire their full magazine into her body
Suppose, in this place, the occupied have separate license plates
Designated by color, which prohibit them from traveling freely
Suppose, in this place, the occupying government forces the closure of the occupied schools for as long as three years
And that during those years the amount of the occupied children in the streets increased
As did the number of occupied children murdered by the occupying military.
Suppose, in this place, the occupying government can randomly install lock-downs and curfews on entire towns for days on end,
not allowing the occupied population to leave their homes even for food and water
Suppose, in this place, a child of the occupied population dies every three days
And this has been since the year 2000.
Suppose, in this place, the homes of the occupied population can be bulldozed at a moments notice
To build a park that they are not even allowed to enter.
Suppose, in this place, the walls of occupied schools are full of bullet holes
Suppose, in this place, there are towns where 85% of the water is given to the 400 occupiers, while the remaining 15% is divided among the 120,000 occupied
Suppose, in this place, ambulances from of the occupied population are held at
checkpoints for hours,
Suppose, in this place, literal cages of metal fencing and barbed wire hold the occupied population,
On which is written graffiti that says “it's cheaper to kill them”
Suppose, in this place, 30-foot-high walls and checkpoints separate the occupied people
From their businesses, their fields, their schools, their food markets
Suppose, in this place, all footage taken in the occupied territories is censored
By the occupying government before being released
Suppose, in this place, the U.S. gives 1.7 billions dollars per year
To buy what the occupying military calls "rubber" bullets,
except their core is made of metal.
Suppose this place is ( Read more... )
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[23 Mar 2005|02:09pm] |
The Battle of Algiers is an incredible movie.
1ST JOURNALIST
Mr. Ben M'Hidi ... Don't you think it is
a bit cowardly to use your women's baskets
and handbags to carry explosive devices
that kill so many innocent people?
Ben M'Hidi shrugs his shoulders in his usual manner and smiles a
little.
BEN M'HIDI
And doesn't it seem to you even more
cowardly to drop napalm bombs on unarmed
villages, so that there are a thousand
times more innocent victims? Of course,
if we had your airplanes it would be a lot
easier for us. Give us your bombers, and
you can have our baskets.
2ND JOURNALIST
Mr. Ben M'Hidi ... in your opinion, has
the NLF any chance to beat the French
army?
BEN M'HIDI
In my opinion, the NLF has more chances
of beating the French army than the
French have to change the course of history.
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[20 Mar 2005|10:44pm] |
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i keep having to remember what she said. that sentimentality is just the working off of feelings you don't really have.
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[20 Mar 2005|10:06pm] |
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it's funny how something that was such a storm, furious, roaring winds and tearing the roots of trees from the ground and wetness, tears and blood and sweat, all mixed until the two were one, always one, and raging, raging with the beauty of something you could never get close enough to, because it was beautiful (i don't know if i'll ever touch something so beautiful ever again) it's funny how something that chaotic, that intense, could end with something as simple, with something as quiet, as a small bird dropping from the sky. i caught it in my open palm and kept it, a reminder of the inevitable nature of all things that trust enough to fly.
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[16 Mar 2005|12:41pm] |
if you could, i'd like some feedback on this, because i'm thinking of using it for a competition but i'm not sure if i like it/it makes sense/it's not too melodramatic/teen angsty. thanks.
I, too, Allen, have seen the best minds of my generation destroyed
Not by your madness, your angelheaded hipsters looking for an angry fix,
but by a madness of a different sort
still starving hysterical naked,
but there are no negro streets for them to drag themselves through at dawn,
They do not get so far
they wander instead where there are no angels,
No staggering prophets, no infinite heavens of infinite stars collapsing unnoticed in the blackened recesses of our lungs,
Instead they wander the empty corridors of the heart
Where they see him
and turn the other way.
Because they have been skinned to the melody of breathing
Ringing wet warm in their ears
they let themselves be skinned alive because it sounded like gospel
skinned to the songs of salvation.
And in a dawn the color of upturned wrists,
They awaken from uneasy, guarded sleep and stumble, groping the floor to
Find enough skin to cover the aching rawness
they'll regret for the rest of their lives for allowing to be so easily coaxed from them
They'll make bloody footprints as they leave
Long before he wakes.
They are raging with a grief so seductive
They'll lower their eyelids if you look their way
And they'lll sneak white escape while you sleep naked beside them
Wanting only lucid dreams of an endless, godless blue
And they'll carve out angry red x's in the soft welcoming well between their breasts
So they don't have to say where they felt it first
And in wanting they'll wrap themselves in childhood blankets to miss meteor showers
they weren't on that roof to see
And they'll long for a less immaculate savior, long for him to bleed too
Like they long for a cock so they weren't always the one's getting fucked
They are keeping light bulbs bare
And tip-toeing the shattered mirror on the floor beside the beds
above which they hung out windows and screamed at holy visions of the back of god
until they were pulled inside, unwilling and furious, hatefully clawing at the frame
But still the mirror kept, a dangerous puzzle
shards that they let fester until they cannot be touched
never cleaned because it's too beautiful broken
And they are always
Only
This close.
But I cannot be them
No matter how I want to
Because while I know of viciousness,
of curled naked numb crying mouth-open child knees to your chest no more
I have known such tenderness.
I have known shining skin in warm dark rooms and the taste of sea-salt rising and something all sore and dumb but we do it anyway because
we found it together, this sweet fear
so softly
Like hands at the small of your back
Like rain into water
two bodies, the weight of yours on mine moving together moving as we go through this universe
ever expanding universe that someday will close in on itself,
someday we will be too small to be conceived, too small for any existence,
and there will be nothing
no saints or streetsigns or words for them, but none of this matters,
none of it matters at all
because in the end it will be worth it anyway
Because this is what I've always wanted
Always
Your touch.
And this
This alone is the only hope I have for this world.
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[06 Mar 2005|07:30pm] |
touch
late at night
i long for the hands of god to touch me
like i long for the now lost hands of my mother
to quietly trace secret circles along the steps of my spine
and coax a sleep safe enough from deep within my chest.
your smoothness against my lips is
sweet salty brine and scorched soft sun
skin how i imagine your far-away sea would taste
rising like a long-forgotten,
but somehow still familiar
warmth.
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[04 Mar 2005|03:18pm] |
On February 21st seven civilians -- three of them children -- who were active in the San Jose de Apartado Peace Community in Uraba, Colombia, were assasinated. Among those murdered by the 11th Brigade of the Colombian Army was Luis Eduardo, one of the founders of the community. Also brutally killed were Luis's partner, their 11-year-old son, two other community organizers and their two children, aged a year and six years old. They were killed with machetes by an army we pay for.
On Colombia
by Noam Chomsky
http://www.soaw.org/new/article.php?id=930
you should all read this.
know where your tax dollars are going.
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[28 Feb 2005|02:13am] |
i know what you mean, to be scared of being beautiful sometimes, to want to cut away everything that they think gives them the right to look at you with hands, to be scared of this vulnerability you didn't ask for but everyone can always see, to be scared of loud voices like a child gets scared, always hiding, hiding, to be scared that you never watch them but instead watch them watching you,
to be scared.
sometimes i feel as though the opposite sex is a different species. they feel so foreign.
because i need them to know the difference between touching and grabbing, and very few of them ever do.
but sometimes
sometimes i love how foreign they are
because we are two pieces of the same thing, only you can't always tell right away
but with just us we can make ourselves whole
for a little while, at least.
because it doesn't make me sad that anne sexton says
i am alive where your fingers are
because i am
and it doesn't make me sad when e.e. cummings says
i like my body when it is with your body
because i do.
we were made to fit together
and that is the only hope i have for this world.
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