today i woke up and ate this. i saw a melting icicle so i'm pretending it's spring. i'm skipping class to hide with everyone else in the beer gardens, then wander downtown and see where i end up. i hope to see more melting icicles. i am a spring optimist born and raised and i'll give winter a happy and drunk fuck you for a day.
post modern anthropologists and other ologists.
every chair in my house has a blanket draped across it's back. an empty space between elbows and knees have shown the drafts which bring a cold i never recalled feeling. achy muscles beneath the scars (right knee and elbow and left hip and shoulder) can bring some solace because you and i can see them, and i can tell you why they hurt. their just damaged cells which heal or healed as best they could. my parents gave me these limbs, my mom's a hippie and my pa was a country boy, i suspect this drops me from your league but didn't you know skinny boys tell no lies? i can shoot a rifle to kill a squirrel and sleep in a rust bucket truck so i don't miss your three a.m. payphone calls. You're a set of frozen lips and bleeding organs tied into a body of a heroin chic and i am not sick i'm just detoxing.
new york city
"probably for every man
there is at least one city that
sooner or later
turns into a girl.
how well or how badly the man
actually knew the girl
doesn't necessarily affect the transformation.
she was there,
and she was the whole city,
and that’s that"
— J.D. Salinger
— J.D. Salinger
elderly
the wrinkles in our palms will have become intertwined like key to lock or mitten to sweater. and even at eighty you'll ask between sighs if we'll feel like this for the rest of our lives. with our noses together i'll whisper "my little one, oh yes. you are my youth and i will breathe your soul forever." but i'll never truly know what my words mean from your perspective.
i would take being lint on your sweater or a snowflake in your hair over any worldly position that exists because our closeness burns my insides. playing hopscotch between your freckles and tracing pictures of us beneath your skin and if my words were confidence i would have no need for poetry. your legs and hips reflect your intelligence which is humbly buried in beautifulness.
in august my father lost his job. cut backs within the company and such. he hid it from me for quiet some time, the sadness of my dog dying and the realization that a week or so before i discovered the girl i loved no longer loved me. he deemed it too hard for a young man to bare, i had only just unpacked. they were considering selling the house, and he had put the motorcycles on the market by the time i found out. that night i climbed to the top of my old community center alone (the very same place where i gathered courage for first dances and kisses and such) and watched the glass beer bottles break one by one between the riverbank's tree trunks. i made some cold calculations about whatever events made that girls heart beat faster and drank away the days that filled in the summers gaps. i was so fucking angry that she wasn't there for me at that moment, and the enormity of my lifespan that would now take place without her loomed in the darkness (as did her ghost in my linens). my family's stress was an unwanted reminder of heartache which, at the time, seemed as real and painful as a gunshot wound to the chest. but a bearable numbness about those months and their events has grown and remains and its strange how things can change (and change again). perhaps for the better.
lets hid between the walls of this old place (it's warm and the ghosts don't seem to mind) under the dripping tap and behind the power sockets until summer comes. we'll sit on the roof when the snow falls and the frost collects on the trees, because those are the nice things about winter but i'll miss when we'd try to scoop the trees reflections out of the lake with our palms. the light still pours in through the windows though, with the right angle we'll be able to pretend its a summer sun and i'll attempt to glimpse whatever matter makes your eyes so green. they way your iris absorbs the light... like the aperture of a camera and so on. the lighter your eye colour the farther north your ancestors lived is what i've heard. we held hands because we had several things in common, like past lives and the four walls of a room when we were teenagers, as well as various addictions that will get us through the next few months. but for now we belong to winter because we belong in the present.
this is harry crosby
this is harry. harry is the godson of j.p. morgan, that is to say harry was very very rich but cared little for high society in early 20th century america. as a young boy, harry boarded at boston's foremost prep school, st. mark's. the teenage harry was being groomed for harvard, but when the united states entered the first world war harry and a few of his schoolmates enlisted and headed for the battlefields of france and belgium. on november 22, 1917, harry was driving a military ambulance transporting several wounded soldiers (including one of his best friends way spaulding) to a medical aid station. his ambulance was torn apart by a german artillery shell that landed 10 feet away, sending shrapnel ripping through the truck and the men inside. miraculously harry was unhurt, and was able to save way's life. for his stoicism and calmness in combat for this incident and many more harry became a decorated war hero. profoundly affected by his experience during the war harry vowed to live life on his own terms and abandoned all pretense of living the expected life of a privileged bostonian. he returned to the states and attended harvard but cared little for the structure of academia and elitist society. he ran on the harvard cross-country team and on the day of a very important race, and harry being next up to run, showed up late and completely hammered. he drove his car out onto the field and raced up along side the other runners telling them to hurry the fuck up and calling them a bunch of daisies. somehow harvard managed to win and at the celebration that evening harry stood up and made a random speech about light and birds, then threw up into the table's flower arrangement and passed out. he was tall, thin, with what was described as the blondest of hair. he wore sharp fitted suits, never wore a hat (a big deal back then), had tattoos on the soles of his feet, and always wore a black carnation in his lapel. he wrote boundless amounts of poetry and published these, along with the works of many other modernist poets in intricate and beautifully designed books under the name black sun press. he lived in france, the states, and traveled the world endlessly. being a full blown bohemian, he would throw parties which lasted days and days involving poets and artists, cocaine, champagne, wild animals and theatrical madness. these would be attended by the likes of hemingway, hart crane, james joyce, t.s. eliot and many more, all of whom were close friends of his. harry wrote and published entire books of poetry for his wife "caresse" and she did the same for him. it was said that they loved each other deeply, but had been with many other people throughout their lives together. harry was described as more of an impression or mood, than of an actual man with a vivid and electrifying personality. he was found in early december of 1929 intertwined in the arms of his lover josephine with a gunshot wound to the temple in what appeared to be a suicide pact. those who knew harry said that it would not have been the dislike of life that caused the suicide but the excitement of what may exist after death. an insanely strange and interesting man.
moving day! the rent is cheap, the building is beautiful, and the location will support further ruckus and shenanigans and things. house warming gifts can include cigarettes, wine, and small hibernating animals. i drank too much last night and now those billion flights of stairs are looking like such a mother fucker.
i do not know much about anything, save for a few historical facts and stories about women. i was a baby boy once. i was kid once too. i spent time as a soldier (although i was quite young) and i spent my entirety on love as well. but now it's all a front and a simple routine. get drunk and write about whatever. get more drunk and write about her. get wasted and fall asleep watching war movies. you shouldn't read these words, let alone take them seriously (with any validity). it's not really who i am but it is sometimes. people are blindsided by life and it's shit (it's not always shit) and things are gone which can never be brought back, love and life and friends and such. i know i am young and this is just silliness (it's late and there were a few beers in the fridge) but i sincerely miss her skin. you'll be sick of these words soon enough if not already. i just miss certain things.
i had let our plants die
when i left in that piece of shit truck
they no longer mattered
day after day i watched them dry up
lean and strain under the stress
of lacking what they needed.
with much pity but little remorse
i ignored them
i remember you watering them
in the mornings
your bra was whatever colour it was
and your hair was whatever colour it was
and all that sentimental shit
that no longer matters
(i don't wish them to either, i suppose)
it was summer
or spring
whatever
it no longer matters
we loved each other then
i think
they still remind me of you
that fucking bamboo one, too.
how i had desperately wanted them to go
gone forever because it no longer mattered.
but their still alive
and i've grown to like their stubbornness
they don't give a shit
because to them you never mattered.
but she was a whore and i like your smile
another new year so lets do some coke and pop some pills, the brandy is in the freezer and the future wouldn't be so bad if it didn't always become the past. i don't want to be friends, in fact, and as i sip my motor oil cup of coffee (its early in the day and i'm still hungover) i fidget and smoke to avoid the memories of when our skin used to touch beneath the bed sheets; because the nights just haven't ever been the same. and a new year has just begun but the whiskey burns as usual (the whiskey is metaphor) and there ain't nothing out there but the sky and the snow and the moon. every one i know wants to fall in love but there are safer things which keep you warm just the same (it's never the same but it will do). i find it strange that when i press my palms against the bedroom wall theres only a few inches of plaster and paint which stop the winter and the cold from swallowing me whole.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)