Sunday, July 17, 2011

YOU'RE LITTLE RED
I LIKE YOU IN SMALL BITES
(writing is easy/February to today)

Before the theme: was it a park, or was it regular waste-space land on the edge of the exburb? After, it was a destination advertised aggressively to apathetic drivers of cars gone matte in intervening years and to bickering children in the back who didn't wear seatbelts.

What happened to the little kid who really thought this was the best place on the earth, small face, great plains? When I'm stoned I can get so childlike (it's like I'm in a movie, just now as I type) and feel all these pleasures, of riding my bike through sprinkler mist when it's so humid and turning into the wind down the dead-end street. This is my new purple bike and we're just getting to be friends, and the bike I got as a child on Christmas morning was purple too. That was the most childlike pleasure of all, the kaleidoscope glitter of all your presents on Christmas morning, while it's still dark outside the picture window and sooty on the hearth.

It isn't real in the recreation, isn't how it was when you left this world for sleep. When we break out on the parquet, I can just remember how you founded your thesis on historical conicidence. It isn't how you wrote it, isn't how you recite: in the radical recreation we're all boys and girls, over being red, on cute revolt. In the scientific inevitably the curse is blowing down, and in the deep supersition this side of capitalism we're backing into a corner bitching and reinforcing our previously held opinions.

Boy as we settle into our slips of the tongue, letting our spring fall in wintertime summer. Your little girl, pulling down the curtains around the inverse hanging tent house; see how we spent the Arab Spring in bed and making dinner and leaving each other the house key. How life got simple afterwards, and there isn't anything for me to do but sit in surround sound and hope to pick up shifts. I wanted to see us crunch into each other like crustaceans and now we're living in a modèle réduit. When I dream I dream of dredging for his body with cellophane tape, c'est vraiment dégueulasse, and come over easy to your head full of umlauts.

And as soon as you design the jeans the kids will be smoking dope in them, but if you can catch a hit between the gusts I'd like to take you down to the levee and burn the day's news. I hope your train arrives at night, and we walk home in this cold yellow-gold street holding hands, scared of rustling air conditioners and narrow little alleys between houses where there's room for us both to fit and still feel alone.

Saturday, July 16, 2011

(Shit from last summer, for comparison.)

Midpoint in the year (who's counting?), Daisy in the mid-day (that's me), fire on the mid-ship (how they've changed). I want to spend the summer sewing cloth banners, I want to read and listen to the radio at the same time, to meta-analyze.

Yesterday's the closest comparison we have for today. You need a history with a place to have coincidences. So here's me and Jen tripping out of the doughnut store at some late hour, and it's my oldest love and April. I'd break out and take a walk right now if I could. I will in the morning, but I want to see night at day, or day for night. Dear God, the littlest things remind me of how miserable I was.

Nothing about this song is ever going to get tired for me. I wanna get dressed up — you know what dress — roll up my shoulders, lace my fingers, lace legs, lace bra, start unlacing — I want to own this song like some of us own our high scores. Complain about the air, your godloving clean water and the noise. I couldn't make you give three minutes of your time if I asked, but I'll give it over exponentially for the chance to hear this again and nothing keeps me still like broadcast. (*)

Who's for outdoor theatre? There never was such a time. Weigh in and get out again: the plantain's gone black, the world is chock-full of great movies. I'm reading my way out of prehistory with a dragonfly, baby blue and dusty cherry, smile painted on and chewing so loud I hear when I can't see.

Jen darling, perhaps none of us gave the Midwest a proper chance. There's so much beauty for grassland under the buzz of the greater power lines, for peeking on the city skyline from the top of the trash mountain and dissing Florida with strangers and Cubs fans on the train downtown. Not to go Thoreau, but: maybe the woods heals us of our sins; maybe when we're out we're open to coming in. Hot haze over the highway, I'm eating you up; cold on the bottom of the Earth, I know how you feel too. (†)

My patience is shot. How're you this morning? Straight out the shower, pruney and sulfurous, let's make breakfast.

(*: this paragraph originally referred to "Rumble With the Gang Debs" by Tullycraft
†: this paragraph originally referred to "The Fifty States Song" by Sufjan Stevens)