Sunday, May 29, 2011

Finding a little mundane wonder on a drunk Sunday morn.

5-22-11

9 o'clock wake up, 10 o'clock bleary, sweaty befuddled and jazzed. Use your momentum from the night before to erupt in slow motion from a too-small couch and ride high and drunk on sneakers forgotten to be removed out the front door to lose your bearings

and I found myself strolling down St. Louis at nine o'clock Sunday morning, a street lined with used car lots guarded by steel cable and posted warnings, one of which actually spoke to me to dissuade any notion I had of hopping the cable and wandering around the lot full of squatting orphans, which I had no previous inclination to actually do though the speaking sign ("No trespassing" it repeated, though it also sounded a bit like "You look unhappy", which may have been true though my mood was gleaming) caused me to take a contemptuous pause and wonder if maybe I did want to trespass, check a few odometer readings, kick a few tires.

Walked in a roundabout way to a gas station on Glenstone, purchase a diet soda and a pack of smokes, both to battle the hangover that has yet to set in but is surely nipping at my afterglowing heels. Exploring Cairo Street next, a neighborhood of swinging doors caught in the wind like ghosts.

I Will Will You

New song, just wrote it on Garrett's front porch. Unsure what it means, if anything. Sounds like a huge Centro-Matic rip-off. Hyphen-hyphen. It was supposed to be a feel-gooder, but it reads pretty obnoxiously melodramatic.

I'm tracing these maps in blue and red like a junkie looking for a vein
Holding my head under the waves until I come up with a better plan
Cowards don't run, they sleep in their shit
Will you think me brave when I leave?

I will will you to come

The whole thing's corrupt, doomed from the start
Will you let me know if it's worth my heart?
I got Texas plates and California eyes
Will you be a dear and remind me what's mine?

I will will you to come

So lock me in your sleep, stabbed with your eyes
They're as blue as the day I was born
I drop to my knees, my blood in the dirt
Making mud ever fertile in your arms

I will will you to come

Monday, May 23, 2011

The New Pink is Rattlesnake Pink (unfinished)

I don't know how I ended up outside
All I know is that I can't go back in
And I can't remember what it was I was trying to hide
All I know is that it's shining through my skin

So I turned myself inside out
I set my spine free
And I watched in slither away
And as I bled there in the grass
You know I just had to laugh
When them bones, they looked just like a snake

There's a freedom that I need to find on Hwy 65
Though I may not find it until I am dead and gone
And soaring like an angel on these pink snake entrail wings
Until the sky opens up
And I'm swallowed like a song

And I'll never have the chance to say
I loved you 'til that day
Letting go of all these songs I'll never sing
But I have faith that you'll all know what I mean when I say
That the new pink is rattlesnake pink

These drums are just rattlesnakes
These guitars are constrictors
Wrapping 'round my throat

That body you'll be burying, it long won't have been me

Girls playing tennis in the park.

5-21-11, sunned like a lizard

I woke in a cloudy delirium, beset upon by the oxycontin I ingested the night before at Thor's birthday party. The rest of our friends and loved ones were properly drunk and screaming, tracking foam and wet paper and fervor all over the floors of the cabin rented for just such purposes, while no matter how many glasses of whiskey or vodka I poured myself, I felt sober as the day I was born, though without the necessary wonder and innocence with which to glean any real meaning from the situation. So, drug imbibed, my mood improved though my general appearance remained the sulky same, the only noticeable difference maybe a slight curling-up of my lips as I paced and drooled all over the "hunting lodge" decor.

And so today was began in delirium, remembering vaguely but fondly the car ride back to Springfield, when James and I discussed the loves lighting pale fires in our eyes and stamping around in our wimpy hearts (wimpy as contextual hyperbole, though throbbing and vital in the overflowing nature of their abilities).

Paced around the loft, compulsively bored myself to half-slit eyes staring at internet social networking sites, and then walked across town to a liquor store that would assure me cashing a check from Tennessee would be no problem and could likewise sell me a tallboy that sits beside me now in Phelps Grove Park, that I will drink on an empty stomach before work, attempting to finish the lyrics to a psychedelic song about snakes, and not be fingered as a derelict or pervert for drinking beer in the early afternoon mere yards from screaming school children swinging and leaping on squeaking playground equipment, watched over by pretty young schoolteachers whose fears would no doubt remain unalleviated even if I assure them it was upon their breast my tired eyes had been falling.

Instead I'll watch the girls playing tennis from the muddy shade of this tree, and only after I've finished my song and only while I'm turning the pages of this Gurdjieff I've been meaning to finish, for it seems any more that the truest solace I can reach these beautiful lonely spring days is the printed word in my hands, framed by wet grass and eye-piercing sunlight, a blanket of shade falling like a corona upon my head and shoulders, and is not to be found in a female form that may as well be an automaton, hollow as they may well be despite my efforts to fill them with my own desperate hope, a powerful wish but no more than cotton in their lovely limbs.

Kirbyville, Honestly.

I could write poems and poems about these strutting weekday chickens

I'd rather like to spend a day writing your name, taking care to allow the cursive to choke the blue-lined whites like kudzu, giving myself no room to breathe. Not in any sort of obsessive sense but to hold the page up to my eyes and mouth and treat it as a suffocating mirror, to prove to myself that I've left no room for fresh air and that perhaps your own lovely brand of fatalism is best appropriated and applied in this very context. Wear it like a mask, this obstinate page, and burn it from my face when I'm done, revealing fresh pink life underneath in a tender pink skin.

All of the morbid thoughts of the last few weeks, all of the carefully aligned phrases I've catalogued in my head, waiting for a little serene solitude to transcribe, have drifted into gloomy little harbors to be beached ignored with the next storm. The day is far too pleasant, exiled as I am on my father's farm in Kirbyville, to pay any mind to this last week's binges and battles. I'm alone with fresh air and birdsongs.

5-16-11, a Monday

Monday, May 2, 2011

Considerations.

Stay up, paw through boxes of your own shit, your own useless trinkets and baubles, separate them all into different smaller boxes; Phillies cigar boxes, Vans shoe boxes. Put the small boxes inside the bigger boxes. Fold the flaps shut with a certain short-lived satisfaction, like putting your foot over the burrow of one of those subterranean wasps, knowing you're safe as long as you keep your thick sole on the ground, but tensing to run as soon as those mean little fuckers get a glimpse of sunlight and soft skin.

Drink too much coffee, navigate the tangled memory jungle of your bedroom every fifteen minutes for another piss break. Stare unsteadily at your frowning reflection in the mirror, pick absent-minded at the puckered acne sore just to the left of the soul patch beneath your lower lip thrust forward in an embarrassingly perpetual pout. Think about abstractions of the heart, stretched nearly to its bursting point, at how good it'd feel to pick at the scabs forming in the creases and stretch marks, and then let up on the navel-gazing and reflect on the fact that my heart is no more or less strained than anyone's, and that I should expect no one or nothin' to even give a moment's pause to my singularly strained condition.

I'm not long for this chair, for this room, for this weird green 11 am sunlight displayed before my tired eyes, the white noise of the traffic beyond our magnolia trees. I'm not long for these magnolia trees. I'll be back.

Ah, christ. I could be doing anything but nailbiting and taptaptyping, I could be sleeping or continuing to organize/pack, or I could just sit in the corner and think about all of the upsetting things that caused me to pace away my lazy day, to murmur away my bitter night with eyes shaded by broken spectacles and spooky treetops, eyes underscored by darkening circles and a curious apprehension in regards to my stuttering heart, trembling with cups and cups of black coffee and not a single moment in weeks where I've felt my back relax its manic tension that causes me to trip through each day like a puppet with its strings tangled.

I'll be in the woods soon, and on the water and on the limestone, and under the water and under the Midwestern summer sun, and I will remember that I shan't, for one fucking second, be forced to consider anything I don't feel merits considering.

I haven't the slightest idea what I'm doing.