I’ve been digging through my archives again.

The following is a diary entry from January 8th, 2007. I was 19 years old. 

This weekend, I told someone that I want to spend the rest of my life with him, that I want to bear his children, to wait until he gets home from work at all hours of the night, to see just how much he looks like his father thirty years from now. That I would leave school and move to some new city, that I would work, that I would stay at home, that I would do whatever love asked. But love did not ask. Love, in fact, would rather I did not. And love isn’t so much love as novelty, some memories, a skilled body and a few clever words. And yet I was once the knife that split apart his chest, left him with the breeze from the window in his veins. Perhaps again. Perhaps.

There is a church, abandoned, on the street where I live. I have mentioned it before; it haunts me. On one side, cut stone words pronounce:

DIVINE LOVE ALWAYS HAS MET AND ALWAYS WILL MEET EVERY HUMAN NEED.

On the other, ivy had covered the words, rendered them unreadable. I showed him, turned his crater lake eyes on the leaves, and we said, one day, one night, we would tear the ivy down and see.

The winter has killed the ivy. A strange cross-hatching of dead twigs is all that remains. And today, alone, I stared. I stared until the words were clear through the remnants.

COME UNTO ME ALL THAT LABOR AND ARE HEAVY LADEN– I WILL GIVE YOU REST.

I stood a moment longer with the mud and the graffitti and the broken glass, and as I walked away I called him and gave him my dead twig translation. But he was not there. I had his voice, but not his hand.

Independence is so very disappointing.

Today, now, I remember standing at the ivy, and not the conversation with the man. The church, I believe, still stands, but I have not gone to see it in many years, although the whim has struck me. The man I have not seen in many years, and in a good deal of those years the whim has not struck me. I have caught myself a goodly number of other foolish idols since. I have rent my heart on other wooden porches, made a few more men sick with misheard words.

Times and names and blinking eyes are ever-changing; longing remains the same. 

remembering, vividly, the dreams I had about you seven years ago, and the lust of eight and the poems of two, your vivid eyes and wicked grin filling in the devils of each tale I wrote before I found my footing–

no matter what time or I may do, some people’s names are simply etched inside your bones, their hearts too much of what you grew around to be plucked out of the person you’ve become.

I hope you understand. I cannot imagine you do not. 

turn your fingers into the night. pull.

hook the long, stringy hairs of all your darkest thoughts through each other, try to make something like a scarf, or a carpet, or something that might have some use.

look at the matted thing you hold in your hands; discard it. 

consider all the things around you that you consider “yours” or perhaps “you” [mine, me]; imagine how fragile the boundary that keeps each thing from being any other thing. 

notice the arbitrary way in which I have called some pieces of dirt “my body,” and others “my words,” and also how I have claimed some others as not-of-myself, as of the world, in some way that implied that I was not another collection of scraps in what that world contained.

this is a language of convenience. 

I disintegrate into all neighboring surfaces. 

My mouth, my hands, my cunt, my thoughts–these are are all also small black beetles, shafts of light, a muddied rock, a patch of night sky.

here, do not cry, not because you are not sad, but because you are all things, because you are no things. forget all the languages the world taught you with its racking pains. speak only softly into the night, with sounds the night understands. 

[ shit is pretty dark right now. ]

I wonder, how many times can you say: I wrote this song instead of killing myself, before it loses its luster? Before the postponement is ineffective, the audience insulted? Here, in the face of this excruciating pain, I was only a little unkind to a small number of people? I tell myself this impresses no one. 

This running-myself-into-the-ground, this why-isn’t-this-better, this i-am-ashamed-of-producing-anything-that-is-not-perfect and thus i-am-ashamed-of-producing-anything, it is, at the dark times like these, tangled up in the knowledge that every thing I am doing is, as it is happening, the thing I am doing instead of giving up. the sickest part of my brain gives me her litany: this is what you’re forcing yourself to keep on going for? this? to show someone the scraps of some half-started project? to write some crap essay? to be unkind, needy, and neglectful of the people you love? you tolerate what it is like inside your head in order to be simply mediocre? 

That, she says, is embarrassing. 

Allowing every single action to oscillate between the fuck it all of catatonia and the impossible pressure of this is what I’m staying alive for, so it had better be remarkable, this is not a way to accomplish tasks. this is not a way to get things done. this is not a way to live.

look. today you woke up. you took a shower. you put on clean clothes. you left the house, only an hour after you said you would. you drank coffee. you ate food. you overpaid for both those things, but now’s not the time to beat yourself up about that. you worked on a project. you averted a crisis; others arose. they always will. you didn’t throw yourself off a bridge into highway traffic or the dark waters of the Chicago River. 

you imagine a world where you can drink shandies forever but never get too drunk, and all you have to do is stand in a spotlight in an uncrowded bar, singing Roy Orbison songs into a microphone, all your friends smiling at you from the booths. 

you hang on, because that’s all you can do, forever and ever and ever. 

notes from this long late winter:

The great something to be said for the presence of hands, the letting out of blood, the weighing of voices, dried, the ever inlet of the body, the night.

Their eyes wet like late-night small-town duck ponds, smoke curling upwards, bodies pulsing in quieted machines, all bathed in grocery store moonlight.

-

Let us speak in the bodies of code: one listing sigh, two pulsing wrists, one blossoming eye. 

Let us speak in the rhythms of time– your breath, my ballooning ribcage, faltering and stiff, the membranes of my thoughts of you that cover me.

Slowly tease the teeth from my mouth, play oracle, be kind and deft and murderous in your dispensation of truth.

-

All my letter-writing could not do what your canine tooth accomplished in one aching moment.

-

Let your long blond hair wrap itself around my teeth, shake the sugar castles in our midst with all our quaking limbs. Turn to me on the end of a bridge and say, “Look, the life that we once clung to, slowly slugging its way downstream. And here, we, above the river, gleaming, are.”

-

I held all her steaming sentiment inside my mouth, the wolf I kept there keening. The littlest of girl smiles like a hunter’s horn. I am drooling for a bloodletting, and so the words seep from out my lips, and I don’t know about the changing of the guard but I know a high wall I could throw you over.

I am still here in the belly of the beast:

the sour wine of every ocean’s discard slopping round my banks

the distant call of some strange nation’s fog horn lights.

my teeth grow ever crooked more and I can’t walk these heaving halls without the picture of you in my head

you in the general sense, I guess

making a scattered quiet nest of all the plucked out brow hairs and letters unresponded, perhaps I will sleep easy when all obligations are–not completed but discarded, like a witness name escaped.

imagine here a large white bed of feather down and pleasing textures, a tan prince body in mid-morning sun, steaming cups of tea and dedicated pleasures

I am forever running myself into the ground because I belong in the dirt

perhaps all this is a clever excuse for my disposition, mournful and antic in turns (the hamlet that i was gave no warning to the ophelia i also was)

what music this then that seethes and rages in all my blood

and I am always so cold, and the night too quiet, when I am trying, alone, to sleep. 

I am a pitiful animal of desire. I want your dirt in my mouth. 

and here, vertigo in all my–

I want to learn by feel the shape of all your injuries

assuage the fear that there would ever be an end to all this unremittant code, this indexing of wants. this lettering out of all desires need not cease. I want you I want you I want– the inarticulate fear that my desire is a weapon turned on you. that I add my lust to the litany of abuses the world has laid upon you. but I should like to treat you tender while you bleed.

each part of my delidded eye is drawn to the seductive object. all words collapse with these mazes in the room. I wrap my phantom hair around these pillars, my body tenses in all the spaces between, my god the air the air that hangs heavy damp between.

this keening sound will not stop coming out of me unbidden, it has marked you with a long and foolish knife as one more site, as one more true north to all this desire I cannot control. a flood, a flood. 

meet me at the rooftop table, worn and weather-beaten. hold your hands close to my skin, but do not place them on me. we will quietly imagine setting our bodies to burn in the evening air. 

let my teeth fall out, if only the right words would come forth with them. 

furloughed limbs and dripping fruit, I am falling off the bone. 

I must stop counting gazes. my account will never find itself in black. in obsession I am always the victor. 

the making of marks, the smooth slide of lines. the ape drawing its bars. I have no right to this misery, to mine, to yours, to the blooming out of language from my broken body into time. but I should beg to assuage it. to forgive myself for all this cultish lust. 

I want to get inside your body like you got inside my head. 

Brother, tell me, do you have bad dreams? Do you see them, the Furies and the angry gods? The ones whose voices worm their ways into your head? Sometimes I think the voice you hear must be Apollo. It shattered all your hearing else. He whispers to me, sometimes, late at night, sometimes, just before I fall asleep. The sound as clear as day. And I think that I have begun to dream before I have ceased being awake. But there’s a part of me, there’s a part of me that wonders.

Your mind’s made up, my brother?

Yes, and do not hold me back. There is an avenue down which I go, all shadowed by my father’s prayers, and dark with Furies answering his call. Do these obsequies for me, when I am dead, and Zeus reward you with a brighter way. In life there’s nothing left for you to tender me. Now let me go. Goodbye. 

My destruction as Fate allows. It is spelled out in our polluted blood. I cannot stop the clockworks of Fate. We did not see the darkness rushing towards us, up from the murky water in a car with no plates. The madness rising from our blood like steam. Knife drawn, I have no enemy to turn to. Every bullet I would take for you litters the floor where I lay howling. I am no worthy guardian. I am sibling only to the night’s difficult passing. But still the sound of thunder declares the will of the gods, the sound of breaking glass ringing in our father’s ears, all his sins around him like a blanket. No turning back. No halt in silent march. A little halter in a house of dark deeds. And I fled the ocean, but everybody knows you can’t escape your blood. 

—–

text from an audio sketch I made this week. you can listen to it here; it begins with an old cassette recording of me and my brother playing music as children, skip to about 1:00 in for the more sound art/textual stuff. 

the italicized section (as well as a couple of short phrases throughout) is excerpted from Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus, the scene in which Antigone and her brother, Polyneices, speak for the last time. 

I was feeling very adolescent about something and so I made a mix about it. Here it is for you, Internet. The image is a detail from a self-portrait I made years and years ago using my hair and some Raymond Carver and some other things. 

Neutral Milk Hotel - Sailing Through (demo)

Smog - Came Blue

Nine Inch Nails - La Mer

Mount Eerie with Julie Doiron & Fred Squire - O My Heart

The Velvet Underground - Oh Sweet Nuthin

The Brian Jonestown Massacre - B.S.A.

Joy Division - Disorder

Fiona Apple - Valentine

Set Fire to Flames - when sorrow shoots her darts

Rasputina - Hunter’s Kiss

Patsy Cline - Just Out Of Reach

Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds f/ PJ Harvey - Henry Lee

Silver Jews - We Could Be Looking For The Same Thing

Don Covay - Come See About Me

Mark Lanegan - Consider Me

Songs: Ohia - Captain Badass

that feel when someone you had a one night stand with years ago is now married to the woman he started dating after that, and it’s not that you’re jealous of them specifically or marriage generally, or feel anything but a general goodwill toward someone you never really knew but know even less now, but that you suddenly become very aware of the passing of linear time.

realizing just how long ago it was that I was a girl in a tiled vestibule, that in the time since a particular phone call, republics have risen and fallen. I have risen in and fallen out of love so many times, large, and small. always managing to feel so young and like so much time has passed. 

huh.