So Stoked & All Caps Come Easy

[Make word-for-word post of the following, except section beneath dash mark. I already well-edited, girl. Actually, consider including section below dash as well.]

First gasp of synesthesia: you are feeling the sound crawling into your ear canals like a little tentacle off an anemone's friend, like an icicle, (like a Centaurian slug), like the only time this has ever happened before. Is it the beating of your heart reflected into the mind? I want to believe, I want to believe it is the vibrations of the hairs reverberating like guitar strings through your smooth-curved body parts, ringing-fading until you reach gently to silence them against your skin.

Boy, never quite friends, learn to play not because you will display the technical skill of the greater masters; play because your heart is nearly in between it. Play because we are marshmallowed into the same sheets, and my ears clutched with the dulling— but your fingers warmed closer to the fire. You gotta make it catch, let it heat up, keep it crunchy, and smash it sweetly to the boards.

Sweet, do you believe this? This is a metaphor about music, sex, and guitar pickin' roastin' s'mores. I should have resolved to tell you like it is (but deliciously subtle, may have to make do): what I am really here to do for you is fidget my cells in the accidental production of periwinkle light. Light like that is the true light of the universal beings, and all of us but little algorithms employed in its provision.

You are discovering what you are truly good at, girl: you write. you are sound-feeling because you are (bang!) sound to the ground with all the force of gravity behind you. Take this so new-found undiscovered and quick, erase the truth!

—
"Can't Stand It" with Andrew Bird is fantastic. Jesus Christ, thank you Jeff Tweedy for making this be. The city blinks because its eyes open and shut of insomnia! You texted MC P: "Forget anything I might have said about it: you are completely right about how good 'Impossible Germany' is." Put it to the test, though you have no options in the discovery: maybe the loosening of the melodies is what it takes to harmonize at last.

He says that no other song is as good, then, but you say, "This is not true. I will show you." and you'd like to make it "with all my heart", all your heart in these sounds spread so wild like the brown-rice paddies of the post-apocalyptic Midwest, the great arched-roof palaces of Chicago and Saint-Louis and Chicago and Saint-Louis and Chicago rising to rule the land as once did the calls for price and demand. (And that is the last warm-blooded description of Wilco you will ever hear from me.)

How does ringing of "Impossible Germany" compare to characteristic ringing of U2? Ask Mikey, compare, think about it.

Frozen-marshmellow-topping lollypops? Oh my goodness, try it.

Partial fragments of warm-afternoon words in the notepad of your phone. Post them.

Lake Effect

Beautiful Kat Black, spend your January days under the covers. I've jumped towards what feels like springtime but dies in the heart. Count days and I'll come back, because the Stock Exchange is in the lights at night, because the red line will draw you north, because I can feel the pavement frozen cold and it is warm, so warm underground.

I was writing, tapping really, on my way home to leave again. Thirty floors up, there were bankers, tapping and waiting too. There were icicles on the train grates, dripping fingers clinging to the greatest throbbing mechanical beasts of the back-and-forth, city to suburbs on my slow route to the dead zones. There are trains right now, maybe slow in the snow, running in to the city that works.

Downtown is alive, cold and busy, sharp and real like the South won't ever be for me. If I could stay, I would live in a room with low wooden shelves and memorize the north-south streets from west to the lake. If I were a little girl I would crane my neck and try see the top of the Tower (but I do anyway, for nostalgia and vertigo and the few things I can't outgrow). If we could talk about all your dark secrets we could be the best of friends, and if I were an El train, I could open up to the cold, descend to the warmth, and say, "This is Chicago. New Orleans is next."

Where the nose knows, we go, we're already gone

What do you do with a one-off line, when you can't even think of thinking of time? What dizzy listless things are you doing this morning, Mr. D—? Alex, whence will you walk? Have we never woken together, half cherished/half forgotten? Mariah, what does anything I say ever mean? Lamb, won't you want to see me? American livery, will you ferry me safely down? Angel, how does it end?

What's the postmodern gospel? In this life the saccharine sedentary sometimes looks like the other side. I'm melting into the mid-century mehs, hanging on a teaser and waiting on places the Cadillac didn't get you.

There's no phrase to match the lazy-daisy redhead maybes. I will try to hold tight to the cards I've got, hope I can wait for your colors to mirror my missing half. Rorschach imagined rainbow neurosis and I am clinging to the dream, you see! We can be blurry mystics on paper and hold ambiguity on high.

Jen, we can drink and kiss and freeze and cry and steal away, but I will never be your man. I thought it looked like the moon on my pillow, but it was only computer light. If it were emptier, I could empty my heart, and howl into all this cold white tile like I howled in the summer dark.

Musidora

There's a tame status quo holding back the inevitable evaporate. Where did the French develop the frantic sense of vintage delicacy? Where did I come down with it? What is it that's impossibly beautiful about Calvin & Hobbes? Did we all live it out? From whence comes the sound of the entire cosmic chorus, and can anyone determinatively fit it into my headphones? Does a whole string of Ys ask or answer? Do you hear the sparkle, and will it sound as swell on the rockabilly revival?

I'm starting to feel the after-malaise spreading through the social networks, enfeebling and surrealing. Can't I call Alexander and ask to do the day all over again? We could strike all the same poses and dance to the same music, and it would be strange and false and unholy. We could look almost the same, and wrap our lips around our teeth like nothing's changed. The months would be almost invisible on our faces, but the growth rings are set in and some things never peel back.

Sometimes, every day, I want to steal back summer downtown and prove how bad I'm willing to keep the dream alive. Why won't I ever have as much to say as Jonathan Richman? Why can't I throw ahead to the overdone and choose again? Why have I had the same breakdown three times this month at least? Call me up and break me out of back-and-forth living miniature redux. I don't know where you keep yourself, so walk me home & far away and take me where the walls are just words and the floor feels like waiting to dance. Stop adjusting to the anti-glorious! Our chandeliers hang in great loose swags of tulle, you're giving up pretense, and I never passed up any show business in these shoes. Blood and onions smell so much alike it's a wonder a vamp like me can keep anything down.

Dearborn

I want to rewrite your brief career in fiction writing. I'm sucking on my pen and sending you back to September, before you'd slipped into something I can't dissuade you from. I fell through the floor of that tower, once, love, and if I know you've the energy to take down cement with your fingernails, I don't know how to talk you into it.

Up all night with the television on won't erase the strain of suspicion all through your tendons. It seeps in instead, greying matters, seeding nightmare and washing out color. I can't stand the awful morning-after, the bleak and the chill that comes of waking early near someone you haven't loved in too long.

There will always be affection, darling. I'm just a girl and you just were. We're both chasing with the boys nowadays, dropping femme for fatale and rotting our teeth on candy before we realize that someday we'll be too old for this. Like as not I'll be chasing you down again, summer and winter after. There's always a season between ours. We can dream beside each other, but I'll never make the trip and you'll never see as me.

Is there a whole coterie who'd take my being? I'm just sitting alone, in bed, breathing away the stabbing pains in maroon felt boots. The rabbit fur is quiet around my calves and I ought to sleep. Facebook wants me to reconnect with a girl dead more than a century now, but Max's problems are enough to keep anyone up at night.

Home Records

I came up with one ingenious solution too late, one too dim, one for the ages and one only as long as the tape stays sticky. I'd like to say I'm flying across the water because it sure feels like there's a much bigger gulf between here and there, but a corner of Lake Michigan ain't really no beach at all.

I don't care that there's only one song I want to hear when I'm cooking alone, because there's only one song for rainy-afternoon crêpe shop and future Catholic-school dropouts, always the kids the most fun to know. Later on it's going to start flooding and we'll all be knee-deep in New Orleans and a few other places besides, but I'm going to curl in Michael's bed and cry and watch college boys sail a kiddie pool through the street. "Do you consider yourself the, the s-word?" asks the other Michael, Michael I'll get yet. The what? Good God, young man, I'm just a jaded vixen.

That was your word, Mariah, no? Tell them I'm jetting off regardless, north to see clean snow and Paul, lamblike, freshly shorn and too deep in grass. I won't be warm again for months.

I changed my tickets to window seats, so I can lean and peer and watch Orion fade away over the lights of the city. I suppose trains overhead could be so surreal if you're not used to getting off the ground, but I am one of all things and for $2.25 I could go, go to her doorstep right from the terminal end of the blue line. This is how a city is supposed to run, you know: bright in the dark, brave in the cold, square on the grid, tall in the wind.

How is it that we come by our sense of height? Is it the purity of the sun, the balance within our skull, or just the clear sky through the glass?

I don't care 'cause I'm by myself
All the dancers left but I can't dance
So I will stay and clean the mess they left behind
But I dream as I set to scrub all the floors, the walls
I'm thinking of a song or two, a boy, a girl, and a rendezvous
- Belle & Sebastian, "Woman's Realm"

I'm Set Free

I got lost in a fifty-word essay and wandered off in the cold. The hallways are high and white and it's like I'm still waiting to come down. "This is the hardest thing I've done all night," I say, and at this hour all I can really do is opt for economy of gesture over overdisclosure.

No one worries about the cracks in windows here, and the North is finding all my weak spots. I'm clinging to the bees in her hair, but it's still yours and you're gone and the ugly shit avalanche is building up again in my line of sight. I have to step out and freeze up before I can confront anything again.

Now you're pouring tea into your peppered eyes, waiting for the bequests to come through, waiting for the the favor to fall on you. It's part hopeless, particularly quiet, still cold but not as bad as it could be. Someday frugal living will pay you back, but until then lies will set you free.

Twisted purple girl, you're just a pale shade of rrrriolet. Don't you ever dare get the wrong idea. Honey, you'll never really know how to make plain vanilla delicious all the way through.

Here comes two of you
Which one will you choose?
One is black and one is blue,
Don't know just what to do
- The Velvet Underground, "Beginning to See the Light"