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"

The farther you're gone, the less he exists / Whatever's wrong with me now was wrong then and wrong since.

I want to multitrack playback, nudge the peaks with fingertips with continuous harmony in amplification. Your little spiral riffin sounds like files unwriting themselves in so many lines of code further faster than me.

Boy boy boys in the band, I could make front row every time. With your failing watch, with your great belts of flags, strode over the heads of us all. This is still the year kissed in by Kodak light and you could make something of it yet.

Do the slow walk deep in the grass, deep in your weekend alone. I can't share it, can't sing it, can't bury it and can't break it. It's such a steep walk, down into sinking ground, and every flat foot feels like lurching forward with your elbows chained behind.

Peace is built in the beams, but if I can hear all your voices through the wall, I'm papering myself into mine. "Le sens que Baudliere décrit — peut-être vous êtes trop jeunes ou trop heuruex pour comprendre," she says, all the in the best, but fuck if l'ennui is the best I can do. Mock me out. Do better or don't care.

Comfort food, what we ate when we were young and thin, before we understood the politics of it. This isn't an obesity epidemic, isn't Internet culture, isn't disorders of self-regulation (acronym, here's lookin' at you). This is social infantilism on the mass scale, we the cadre of play-group mothers slipping over the edge of the next generation. If I'm oatmeal and strawberries, they're going to be chocolate granola-oat bars and strawberry-flavored Pop-Tarts.

"Egoism is art," I'm bluffing. Think it through and compose, abandon it for lack of depth, describe the sensation because there aren't the words. Everything's different now, great until it isn't. I avoid writing to avoid the truth, and do conspiracy theorists believe themselves? Not what they say, I mean; do they really truly believe they themselves are real?

Creepy calm & safe in the suburbs, every house dark and every light bright, big trees and loud cicadas, willow watering the sidewalk, everyone watering the lawn after dark and growing mold between blades.

Road striping coming right up, the view uphill from the silent center lines at four AM. Nothing here even saw Nixon; nothing even needs to now. There is second-growth prairie and fake lake at the end of the street; there is folklore on TV, immigrant scrap-pickers coming for your old machines, the sole stratum of the parking lots, grown men who've never been to the library, fast food head-quarter-pounds and drive up to the window, please.

I read the book in two days and this feels like it will take significantly longer every time I start again. It gets me so glazey and I get guilty and wonder how I'll say anything later when I can barely see now.

Creepy calm & insane, I'll track my hours alone and check mark through the day. Try as I might it's in my life and all kinds of shit crawls between your covers.

Starless and irrational is too soon to sleep, but I dreamt I was brought into confidence and led a whole legion after me. We looked within confidential files, the hall of history, of manipulative marketing and internet dark matter, and I laid in my strings so carefully that, at the first tug, I ran all the way out between the wall and its discoverers. I dreamt on: sophisticated survey techniques, grotesque fetuses or the archaic disgusting destiny, and be grateful you live in a modern age, at least.

She was recruiting me to critique radio as a visual medium, reading me her reasons in a false gesture of disinterest. The sound hit me like the extinguished blackscreen and overthrew the mind's eye, knocked me out until I was looking in on myself living her life. As she's holding the book the text is shrinking, and as she leans it blows up in her face.

Mediocre long form, for Daniel elsewise or. (midnight, June 14)

In the middle of a movie, in the middle of the night. At this point, it’s limping. I can see the script through the scenes. I believe this is a mark of poor acting, more so even than a mark of poor writing. The characters are thirty-somethings and bland. Late twenties, actually. No offense. Being in front of the camera, scripted, on their fifteenth take, wearing near-flawless makeup, is aging them.

The main character is 28. When he finally gets angry, his voice is reedy and unconvincing. He is the marginally more hip character, so he has a satchel. There are mumblecore influences. There are lines like, “You seem weird about this whole thing.” There are road shots. There are so many films I could be describing.

If you could hold the pool in a half-pan

Color pulse of youth energy consumption flows all through the dark, packet by packet, dangling camelback or elephant in a hat, orange and lavender and cream and teal and rust. It's happening between us on the most uncertain terms. In old age, coming on already, we'll wake early to look back on the nights.

If I held my hand up, palm out, moved it towards you. Your palm is opposite polarity, stops mine when close is close enough. Hereby is established the space between us, the cloak you're under when I'm around. It's the same space that divided the center of that room, divides me from what I want to be to you. Well, how scared are you of scared?

I slept an hour maybe, a little pool of dim sieving through my hands, and substituted with a portion, a potion on ice. The surf sound, the analog squelch, squeezes your pathology out of my brain, and the bass line shakes loose the cobwebs, lines up the words, sends them, chugchoochugchoo, blues style. If the train ran beneath my house, if I heard the whistle at night and it was all black and noise and butter-yellow light and the doors were sliding open under me. If it was a sleeper car, tropical canopy and crimson plush, if I could sculpt my dreams and if I could get downtown.

What is it you're hearing from me that you can't say back? Less to say, more to write, and again and again all night. What's this game we only acknowledge acknowledging? Visceral, sly, inverse to daylight? I think you know what I mean, but I just can't say the same for myself. Maybe none of it, maybe nothing. I can't begin to decipher such uncultivated unpredictability. But I know you, I want to know you, I know, you know.

Dear things that just don't work out in the morning: maybe you can beat the rap and maybe you can beat the rain, but you're here today and you can make it again. Quick, say it like a poem so you don't lose the words before you make it to the train. Honey, good words will come back, but not through your fingers and not before the five-ten.

You already wrote how the deco-letter beasts quiver in their stalls, humming and shining to run. How the suits cluster where the doors aren't yet, how the colors of vinyls shift from car to car, how even the commuters flinch at power out on the outbound underway. If I had Buffett's money I couldn't stop it, not while we've got Burlington-Northern-Sante Fe and all these places so far away.

They heard me singing and they told me to stop,
Quit these pretentious things and just punch the clock
These days, my life, I feel it has no purpose,
But late at night the feelings swim to the surface
'Cause on the suburbs the city lights shine,
They're calling at me, "Come and find your kind"

Sometimes I wonder if the world's so small,
Then we can never get away from the sprawl
Living in the sprawl,
Dead shopping malls rise like mountains beyond mountains
And there's no end in sight
I need the darkness, someone please cut the lights.
- Arcade Fire, "Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)"

Meme Scene

We could give up on sleeping.

All the hours you're under — break them. Steal up right now, make tea and take flight. Hot house warms up after dark, and we let things get dirty now, but space makes it clean. Energy in the dark or dimmed out, which is why I can't get up in the day and why I stay up all night.

Give up on decorating, try white walls and letter decals. They'd say

FUTURE
FUTURE
FUTURE

and you'd have to live beneath them. Paint the walls, paint your nails, paint the carpet, paint the windows and shut out the dark. Is that your only criticism, that the light's obvious? This is on film, day for night, and it's three again and I still haven't started.

Give up on eating, give up until you stop bleeding, give up breathing. Speed, captain! The monolith in stereoscope and cathode rays behind your eyes. What happened, just between us and modern? We've treated and cross-processed and cremated and screamed, tryin' to be bad but you don't know how. Stop dressing, stop needing, stop reading. Resurge repeat regurgitate reblog refresh, gotta keep ahead of the truth. The very concept is just a letter, assonance writ large, bigger or they won't see it.

Give up on language and give up on thought. Skim for your favorite anecdote of the crumbling of the West, binary opinion, and watch, it's catching. Give up on process, give up on protest, give up on innocence, give up on nihilism. Resolve to retake control of yourself, reduce everything to the level of distraction, and everything anything over done never again. Give up on gender. Restart before it ends, restate before the lie comes out, reinvent before you're found out. Tune in and turn up and turn up and turn up and turn up and WHAT? DROP WHAT? WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?

Give up, stay up, until the light starts to break — break it, like refrigerated old bread, if you could taste it. It's maybe four, no maybe five, and that light is light and day isn't night — it's too late, and this second wind won't keep. You're leftovers, unshowered, and sugar and water and oh darling and oh daughter! You're exposed, you're used, you're ruined.

Just another apocryphal mess
Never promised them anything less

So come true
These are safe waters
For the first daughter
So I can't see why
You're pushing the pull that you've had
While the rest of the girls go bad
- The New Pornographers, "It's Only Divine Right"

Director commentary, the vainglorious vanity press of video duet

Or is there one girl who does have friends but just can’t bear the thought that she doesn’t have as good a best friend as another? That to me is normal social pain.
- Dr. Michael Thompson, quoted in the New York Times

Misread and more said; little ghost in the body and one in the head. They're tearing up my high school but the streets around bring back the best (oh I was on my way downtown, or to John's, to see Alex, dressed for tonight at 6 this morning, my red bag, the year I turned red, and I fought Alison but we didn't wear shoes or panties and how I loved American history). Everyone I ask describes the opposite, the bellyache horror of cinderblock walls where each was his repressed and small and sad own precursor. I'm an ingrowth or an anachronism, alumnus unconsummated, and they never did send my diploma, so if you were to ask I can't prove it happened.

Jen consults the experts, John the horoscopes, and I turn to sleep-in sabotage. I couldn't feel one finger most of last week and there's something amiss between my throat and my ears; ghost in the body. Ghost in the head? I'm battling bad old nursed habits and all my false hopes for new seasons. This feeling like your muse has left you: you've only abandoned yourself. I think I could live if I could hear Clark Gable's voice in everything, corrosive and delicious. "You didn't do it because you thought about it," he'd say. "You thought about it and you were scared!"

Well, bowl me under, handsome misfits writin' the Internet. Us kids understand each other, and no other girl needs hairspray (and only hairspray) at this hour. I'd break out and walk downtown right now if I could. I was dreaming — boys, girls, dreaming, and now it breaks me up to say. I held utterly false beliefs and I was wronger than I've ever been in my life and I wound up broken-souled and loose-lipped on the thin side of the dividing line between a shrieking Southern nervous breakdown and my own reflection.

Leave me home to come down with the spell of my own sickness. I'm thinking I'll deck the next person who tries to tell me about the Belle & Sebastian show in October. Fuck you. I'm going to be dressed up and passed out, alone in a beautiful city I hate, dreaming of girls somewhere who must be doing the same.

Mary Jo, back with yourself
For company, keep telling yourself you're young
and it'll happen soon
- Belle & Sebastian, "Mary Jo"

You can plumb the depths on voice alone

What's your starting point again? You won't always be this happy. You can't get it so light, so full of tastes you forgot and foul with sugar and temptation. I can't get the good words out or the good deeds done.

I thought I wanted to see this life in chart and graph, tear it up looking for all the laziest inefficiencies. What couldn't I do getting up early enough? Now I wonder what bedevils the greatest, whether they own up to their worst, and who knows about it anyway. The grim and the successful, great editors, are you who want to be? and what's stopping you?

In here somewhere, after a hundred thousand hours of kilobit sound, I want to know if I get to start again. I'm in the mirror every time, gaping at the distortion, then biting in and going to lie down. Stop believing!, or start, or give up entirely. Who can I ask? What makes more happen every day, or must I keep making lists, switching through papers and pens, trying to put novelty in the check marks of self-responsibility? There's no end to the possibilities, and the less it feels like more.

Trying to make every day the last I'm dying, or just — to throw open my old cabinets, slip into all my collage supplies and cut on the edges and plan with my fingers and unscrew the glue and fuck the carpet! Presto, I'm making again, but I'm just tired thinking about it without someone saying, God, how I'd like to see what you used to be able to do. Je m'accuse, the conceited pest, and no one who doesn't already know ever tells me the truth.

Sometimes the image comes in so clear to me, and I can write it out or see it in color, one second only. Sometimes it's right on in a film, and the dream lasts until I have to do laundry, bleach out on the Internet, my hours bleeding through my fingers, washing and washing and washing my hands. I go back to take notes on the costumes, trying on everything in my hopeless search for a palette to stick to, but it's just loose knits, sensitive lighting, and the face of an ingénue I'll never be.

In the future I'd like to dress in the comforts of my academic discipline, to tour a facility I will devote myself within; to own a leather-trim weekender, to pack light; to write always like I can sometimes.

Love, your old feral beauty (January 17, apparently)

Girl right now, we are sitting in exact opposition to four-squared walls. I want you to seam-rip you out of your chambray, bottom to top, with the exactitude of a tailor and the trembling quick of an opening scene. Let me suck off your sick polish and stop combing your hair, we'll comma just be space a revision of the rules they set up to make these things more difficult.

I have the world through Venetian blinds and life under beveled glass, and you have the purest hair or the shyest looks. I miss having something up my sleeve for after-school or across the hall, and if you can't be anything then please please oh please you can. It is the shortest trip, I am the only girl, we will the most inseparable broken pieces.

I'm trying harder because I know you're not reading yet. (Hello, beautiful, I hope you know me sooner.) What I'm trying to say: I can't begin to understand why I'm here, except to tell you that this girl knew something, that this girl had the words, had the shoes, had something that got left behind. I'm telling myself every day, but I can't begin to see what it isn't anymore.

What's life like off the clock? Tick-ticking away in blinking ["trials of patience and the pure at heart"? I never finished the sentence, which is why I never published the post. But January is a great month for writing.] The real girl is making mixtapes for the minimum wage, sliding faders or writing or washing dishes at three in the morning, sitting in the bathroom wishing she were good enough for food or friends, androgyny or art.

"In the beginning there was the word, and after that no one else got a word in." — Erik on John

Save the Coast/Love on the Beat (May 8 and sentence a maybe)

If you haven't written up the words, keep a few images. His figure atop the levee, bicycling dandy. Yours, bowing under the branches. "If y'all had my body I'd be heterosexual," Cassidy says. (He'd do it for canary yellow or kelly green.) In the morning, the mottling on the stucco, feather-dappled like Fragonard, and the sheen on the columns.

It's a promise and a dream and the will to hold to it. You've always said you lacked the latter. Darling, dreaming is too easy. You'll be next to him on the bank, light on the refineries shining through thin legs. It won't go to waste and it doesn't matter. Get summer-minded, but remember the fall.

Backdating: April 16

Let your dress sense come back — more than that, cling to it. You're not it, so grow it or make it all up and be glad you still got it. Lend me your headphones, crank the speakers. I can run the radio all night alone, dance behind the control board, turn out the lights and look at all those oranges and greens we'll never touch.

Will we never touch? Will you listen? If I can't make friends, I'll remove myself, and you'll feel only the FM reverberations on your subcutaneous secrets. Hear me from the basement, here now, now I'm leaving. Who's reading?

I wanted you to be more than a check mark, boy, but what can I say now? I wanted to put a song on for you, for you to feel far away, but somebody stole all the Sufjan out the stacks like they all knew that music between us just isn't the same as music out loud, like they knew they could suck a little faith from the air.

My roommate just walked in and told me to turn off the song that was putting these words together for me. What are your demons like, love? Like memories, like medicine, like the Nazgûl? Mine are human form, or the lack of, all of them driving me indoors alone and silent. It's my manifestation of the malaise, the Tulane malaise we live and drink to but can't quite shake. I'd seek help, but we each so live the sickness we've turned opaque.

Sebastian, this is for you to feel which I know you can. Whose blood do you wait for, and how do you know when to give into sunrise? Do you lean on the numbers, but wait for light, image, and colors? Is the world scrubbed bright and awful when you finally step out the darkroom?

What was it like to ride away, to forget the airport décor, to clear out missed calls and go black screen for takeoff? I don't understand, but I do it myself every day. We couldn't very well have talked by then, but I spoke because I know we have something to say to each other, I'm sure we do. Whatever say you, to which I say, "I win you over eventually. It's in the script."

I want to see the photographs we took, you the silent protopro and me racked with the guilt of leaving my SLR untouched all semester. We were sick in bed together, watching films, because I am never going to drink all this tea by myself. We're on your precarious balcony sofa, watching this crazy lightening together, wondering if it's our own signals blinking through the towers on the levee. Drunk bonfire kissing comes later, a mistake between real friends or an extension of everything real friends are supposed to be about. How it could it have happened? You know it hurts to be found out, but not as much as it hurts to get lost.

Pick It Up, Pick It Up

Holy speed of the trumpets, I'm happy, too happy to study, too outrageous to memorize. This time last year I was breaking free; this time this year I'm looking to escape. She's got the worst grating voice and plays no part in folk tradition, lazy what-do-I-care, lazy wordless space-waste — piece of paper and I'm gone, headphones onnn-nn-nnn.

Isabel's wasting time too, taking quizzes, finding out her flaw is "hippie". Girl never! I'm gonna remember what you told me, remember that you for one are not glossy and impossible. Youth of today, remember how goddamn good Simon & Garfunkel were, remember to sing with me when I fly between the terminal abbreviations of some air line been traced on paper.

Continue apace — this is the sound, the place, the breakdown when it comes together again. The words are there, but there's never quite the will. I wish I'd spent all day in bed with friends long before now, but as long as time's closing in we'll have to blow the parish. Little girl in the library can book a ticket to anywhere, but can't remember just what social norms used to be, if we're flirting or making friends.

I love Jesse, but sometime tells me two weeks of New Jersey will be enough for now; New York City, I'll love you hard but you've already let me down. New Orleans, maybe one day you'll be good to me, but sh-sh-Chicawwgo you got what I need even if. Call me back Paul, because talking to Illinoisans is good for the soul. The return to to family life and Baptist ministry is gonna make me pray for hell, but come over when God isn't looking and we'll booze and play records and generally tear it up.

Gee but it's great to be back home
Home is where I want to be.
I've been on the road so long my friend,
And if you came along
I know you couldn't disagree.

It's the same old story,
Everywhere I go,
I get slandered! — libeled!,
I hear words I never heard in the Bible
And I'm on step ahead of the shoe shine,
Two steps away from the county line,
Just trying to keep my customers satisfied,
Satisfied.
- Simon & Garfunkel, "Keep the Customer Satisfied"

I have wondered if we held dawned

Why does history control the present? What's the effect of knowing as I do? How do I break in a new way and make it look easy? Let's get living like it's longer ago, making more happen between the hours as they strike on down by the streetcar line.

I didn't used to write in didactic self-diatribe. If the lines on magazines covers start to sound like what you'd write to yourself, then enrich your visual vocabulary. What you can do a lot more, it's hidden just under the glossies. You've just been internalized by this poor world, so learn it/write it/make it to fight it out.

Mmm, step back. There's value in height, seeing the land lying below. And the lights with your halo rings! —and the stars all agleam! —puts me on an even level with your TV screens. It happens to every light, everywhere. You're walking and your cloth is just with the wind, but the pressure turns and rain brings the tears. Why does the veneer go as soon as I'm alone? These are just spring breakdowns, rainshowered and stormy. I can't wait to go home, to wait for tornados in the unearthly beautiful purple sky.

Lou Reed in Baton Rouge, hey boy, excuse me, why so vi-cious? The speed of light, the ether will wait; swoop me up in all your sunken-chested monologue and privilege and we'll be wildly soft and liquid physical, hair falling in our faces and nails on skin. But listen, Mystery Katie, does me writing the words and intending you mean you know them, somehow? This next thin year maybe I'll really break free, and march on through the Vogue frieze into real art.

How to Write Again (retrospective from a week or two)

"On ne peut penser et écrire qu’assis [one can’t think and write unless one is seated] (Gustave Flaubert). ––Now I’ve got you, you nihilist! Ass-iduity is the sin against the Holy Spirit. Only thoughts that come to you by walking have any value.”
- Nietzsche, bad translation of

Transcend algebra when the variables start to speak of their own volition. You're checking your graph against your class, but you can see the uncertainty in the curves and if you let it go you know you've come to the right conclusions.

Wait for the night to overtake, wait for the moment to feel you coming on, start with the first word you hear and don't leave spaces. Start in and: keep hold of the only ways you'll ever go, use words like they'll never come together in real literature. You're real literature, you're never real, you'll ever be. Friday nights, never ends, changes when you've had long enough already. Nietzche alluded to it, I'm anxiety and walking proof. Walk-walk-walk it, tell me about high ceilings in libraries, buildings you don't believe in, marching bands and circus housing and entertaining the inevitable.

I've aching eyes and throat, wrists and ankles, but it could be my own fault for screaming at the sound and sleeping under the lights. Girl later, I'll write you a manifesto for making friends; girl today, come down and say hey hey, I always wanted to know you. If you've got a bowl of rice and c-o-n-c-e-n-t-r-a-t-i-o-n, I've got what it takes to be better. Time is strong, carry on, carry on. Melt in the lines, switch over the times, tell me when you're out on the other side.