How it sinks when you realize that you pity him. You want it to be a line from a song but there aren't songs that hit in there like that anymore, they're few and further and harder and harder to find.

If you're really reading then I don't know how you don't understand. You danced to me for that, it's something I felt so hard, but you don't like me and you don't like me and I can't tell you how I feel because if I did you would never speak to me again. When I haven't got even that much to lose I'm still too scared, and the only mortal terrors I feel now are of running my fingers into the press and of opening my mouth to try. And you bully me into my darkest corner like you're enjoying it, I think maybe you actually do, and then I'm losing sleep and constantly sick and breaking out in rashes and it still fucking hurts and there's no one to tell hardly anything at all.

To all the people who stayed at my house this summer: Jeff, Alison and Sam and Carly, Mariana, Cassidy, Lukas, and finally you Mikey: I couldn't be as generous a friend without friends like all of you, but do I wish I could wish away the jealousy and the pain, I do.

But if you talk and nobody's listening
Then it's almost like being alone.
So it's alright the way you piss and moan
It's alright, the way you piss and moan

Like the time traveler who killed his grandfather, these cycles are bringing me down
We could build a nice life together if we don't kill each other first
Are you just too fucked up to understand me or is it the other way around?
Maybe it's both, and I just don't know which is worse.
- Titus Andronicus, "To Friends Old and New"

Petit mort over easy books

Mostly all immature, one way or another, and when you stop you're looking forward to a time when your emotions don't touch that level anymore, except to wilt in the kind of nostalgia that reminds you how old you were the first time you read Lolita or heard "Anthems for a Seventeen Year-Old Girl." Then you'll need the immature to activate all those fading sympathetic neurons, and maybe that's why people have kids or grow to be old people who go to the park just to see kids and even the emptiest claims to hype and pride in the youth of our great nation today can't quite ring hollow.

(other words from June 12:)
If they all trooped through your house in the summertime, just missing each other, how would it look? Not troubadours nor tourists but the curly-headed and lonely, and if they don't say it they're awake late. Mike Kramer really come down on the Spirit or the Holy Ghost and we'll play their old album in the dark or watch the whole film and dancing until we collapse from not eating and if you smoke then you got me hooked and if we drink let's get fucked and if you're down I'm in the morning then eggs I guess.

It's funny because this is exactly how it is right now. There's more on the next page that sort of falls too fragile. If I do ever think of my audience it's to be afraid of them, this reflex from middle school when I learned not to write straight-up but to layer it all down and reverse and evaporate so you feel this shadow of the sense and only I recall the specific. If you ask I will always try to explain, I say, it's a rule like all my rules everywhere (no changing sentences, no removing posts or comments, never any promotion, only your own photos, exactly accurate timestamps, always come back to write again no matter how long it's been, face up to everything you have ever promised as often as possible and as long as it takes in life do not forget what it has meant to you), but no one does so that's where that leaves us.

Park that car, drop that phone,
Sleep on the floor, dream about me
Park that car, drop that phone,
Sleep on the floor, dream about me
Park that car, drop that phone,
Sleep on the floor, dream about me
- Broken Social Scene, "Anthems for a Seventeen Year-Old Girl"

(I've never much cared for BSS but I think this is like what I want to create in you when you read all my nonsense writing. I'm measuring my life by these really small adjustments, moving from one bedroom in my apartment to another and working through one stack of albums to review. It occurs to me that I've always written about music and to music, and that if I've never known it's because I haven't been reading about music. I want to pore over the greatest future epigraphs of contemporary albums, stay up late at my desk absorbing rock'n'roll writing as if it were the great modern genre. It's already too late, spiraling in on itself into a pinacle of pretension and redundancy, but then so am I.)

Disjoint diptych

On my first night in here:
And so I'm listening to The Suburbs in the summer again, because this is how it feels when the room is empty and smells of carpet cleaner. But what are you doing sitting in the center of the floor alone? they could ask. I'm writing, I'll lie, and if you aren't you could think about it. I live on the second floor and I haven't been down in a day and a half, as if I live pacing a stage or inside of an ant farm or on some future planet with high-rises to its core. I'm doing nothing and learning all the things you learn eavesdropping, that the dog next door only knows commands in French, that Kara is explaining who Phillip Glass is as she's hooking up all the audio cables (FR, FL, RL, RR, all on golden gossamer wiring that looks like the nineteen-fifties). I'm considering views, not planning ahead much beyond this week point five.

And my first night sleeping here:
Two now, I feel embarassingly like a child counting down, developing an obsessive tic like I'm comsumating something no one knows exists, like I'm going to be lying facedown and turning around and seeing you and hastening my death a little each time. For times when everything seems meaningful (what does it say about you that I read the first sentence and jumped to the end to ruin the inevitable sarcastic twist?), for times when I can't stop writing about writing, can't stop writing about can't stop waiting, the one in the form of the other over and over til I don't want to think about it. Sometimes like I'm living in syrup everything swoops in so heavy, and I don't know if we're down or drowned.

YOU'RE LITTLE REDI 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.

(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)

Cold up in your iceberg life (11/28)

What fog do you breathe in your otherlung, what proof are you printing from?


It's big and clean, sparkling, space for the industrial-education annual dance and floor-cleanser demonstration. Your Coke, crying on the table, and your face in the table, and a fourth face, the ugly reflection. Cold props.

You're sitting in the front of this row and there's no one ahead of you, so CHANGE. I want to write history to have at it, but I'm revisiting the past in the present tense.

Hall door like the phone ringing, months on and you're praying. It's Alex, it will be short. It is Alex, strangely, with a new number you can call to lie in bed and talk from the hips. "From what I know of the things I cannot tell you."

Shake it like an eight ball for a different answer. Girl got the feeling, feeling like you've just been where disaster strikes, where there's before and after and then.

But I forgot the day that I got the balls to say
That although sincere, if you were here
I'd spit on you and call you Murphy's Law
- Alex, "Aristotle Stuttered"

Undercover November-lovers

Empty facilitator, fuzz-faced fuzz band, out in the sun as late as you can. It's dark before dinner, like you'd go home in winter and the lights are out outside but you're eating in.

Second seat forever, camera hands, but I didn't take what I should have. Little things that never could send me home have me back in the van, off to endless office parks and cheating in apartment lots.

I want to feel what you're feeling, and how close and how long and how far gone. I want so far out of this town, so high off the rise, so low and slow. I want to grind it back 'til no one had to decide. But I'm crying like I can't breathe, and too afraid to sleep, crushed out with kids who never came with.

When Cassidy comes back I'm going to reregret all over again. We'll wake up with ego like the Apollo Belvedere, then hooker's breakfast and sharing the shower. We're lovin' in a haze of smoke, nectar in our hands, always washing the sheets. In dreams I'm sure I'm everything you say.

November, December, watch the water wear out the paint. I won't even last. If I could write to you all the lines would be thin and chipped. If you wrote me, I'd write you right back.

Lie down in our external lung,
like sleeping in Ophelia's arms,
as once she was held before
they changed her name and
  if you could cradle
  your friends as babes
would you know them now?

Here comes my baby, here she comes now,
And it comes as no surprise to me, with another guy
Here comes my baby, here she comes now,
Walking with a love, with a love that's all so fine,
Never could be mine, no matter how I try
- Cat Stevens, "Here Comes My Baby"