Dallas, Texas: I hate your
mirrored buildings. I have
broken the hearts of all
of your women and they, in turn,
have broken mine. The ones
you cultivated inside your blooming
desolate, white-washed suburbs
and was it there you taught them
how to file their teeth? that you
taught them how to look so good
in their underwear? They kiss
like apparitions on their
satin bedsheets. They unfasten
the clasps on their bras for you
so you don't stretch out the material.
Dallas, Texas: your borders will never
stop growing and what's worse
is that I will never stop loving your girls. Never
pull my head from their rivers to breathe.
I will stand in their rainstorms
with my head to the sky.
Houston, Texas: I spent six years
of my youth in your arms and all
I remember is your thunderstorms,
the greensky tornado warnings and
the toads who would exit your bayous
to have their ribs flattened by
luxury vehicles across the blackest of
asphalt.
Austin, Texas: I have sat in your
bars and hidden from your beautiful women
behind fistfuls of cigarettes and tumblers
of whiskey. I know that I have been pathetic, but
Please do not scorn me. I will flourish
inside of your streetlamps. Shower me
in the green light of your traffic signals.
I promise, I will redeem myself. Give me a month.
Friday, July 15, 2011
Wednesday, July 13, 2011
Untitled excerpt three
Continued from below. If this is your first time reading, you should probably start on the first of the last three untitled posts (demarcated by a I.). But this should also make sense on its own, more or less.
III.
Drunk by the point that Jen found me in an empty hallway leaning against a closet door, still on the whiskey, more gulping and less sipping now. Why are you hiding from me? extending a hand down, Bakelite bracelets sliding down her thin, thin wrist, as if I just needed a lift up and I would be back at it. Hiding, no, a little bit of a headache. Well, she's in a bit of a pinch. There are two boys here and maybe she's been with both of them recently, a few times, nothing serious, but, well, first of all, they don't know about each other, obviously. Me, an echo: Obviously. And, to make matters worse, let's say they'd both been calling themselves her boyfriend, even though everyone knows she doesn't do boyfriends, and maybe, oh, just maybe there's a chance that she hasn't had the balls--me, snorting, You have been ball-less for as long as I can remember, but the sentence is far too long for a serviceable quip and she rolls on—hasn't had the balls to correct them. Who are they? One bearded, one blond. Go with the beard, I say, but it's an icy stare and I recant. A pinch, yes, sure, but how am I supposed to help? Just come with her, puhleeze, and she reached out her clattering, retroclad arm again. I begrudgingly met her fingertips, and pushed myself up, precariously, against the door. Much more swayed by the liquor than I thought. The floors may as well have belonged to an oceanliner, but I found my footing and let her guide me, her finger tips still joined to mine with an ethereal looseness, remembering but then forgetting to ask where were going. There was nothing to read into moments like these: no flint sparking between the surfaces of our hands, not even during these small instances of synchronization.
We had been together once, nearly two years ago. A shared handle in the garage apartment she was living in at the time, a handful of details that became elusive in the hungover morning. What I remember is the way her neck tasted. Perfume from a handcrafted glass bottle that I admired in her immaculate bathroom, a perfect, thin film of sweat, the gin evaporating through her pores. And how skinny she was, the slightness of her body uncanny. Not unhealthy, not a drug problem, just the way she had always been, endowed with a metabolism faster than God's. I was too careful with her, made self-conscious by my drunken clumsiness, terrified I would punch right through her eggshell frame, those prominent ribs gleaming white in the mottled starlight that crept through the open window. Always silent too. She never made a show of her pleasure, never opened her mouth to give voice to the sensations of her body. Couldn't tip her hand like that, but she showed it to you— she let it be clear through the tremors, the raking fingernails. Those were the only indications Jen could bear to give that she was, in fact, vulnerable: that she could be affected and, even more, that you might be the thing to affect her. Or maybe those were just the select moments in which she couldn't help but reveal herself in such a way, where a display of her humanity was inevitable, where, as her eyes glazed over in orgasm, she was forced to succumb to the idea that her dominion over the world around her was contingent. But, even so, Jen wasn't going to stay—I knew it before the undoing of clasps and buttons and I knew it in the smothering morning light that woke us. She had always been a proximity girl, more at home flitting in the borders of every boy's vision, permanently aloof but still charitable with her long smiles and genial kisses. I couldn't be resentful of the way she spread through the world like wisps of smoke filling evening air. In moments like these, I allowed myself to be called upon, to be steered down kid-crowded hallways into a room filled with pot smoke where these two new lovers sat (oh, God) side by side, blitzed, and watched her enter like they were encountering the numinous. She gripped my arm before we sat down in the circle, hard, as if begging me to anchor her, as if I was the thing only that could keep her from slipping away entirely.
III.
Drunk by the point that Jen found me in an empty hallway leaning against a closet door, still on the whiskey, more gulping and less sipping now. Why are you hiding from me? extending a hand down, Bakelite bracelets sliding down her thin, thin wrist, as if I just needed a lift up and I would be back at it. Hiding, no, a little bit of a headache. Well, she's in a bit of a pinch. There are two boys here and maybe she's been with both of them recently, a few times, nothing serious, but, well, first of all, they don't know about each other, obviously. Me, an echo: Obviously. And, to make matters worse, let's say they'd both been calling themselves her boyfriend, even though everyone knows she doesn't do boyfriends, and maybe, oh, just maybe there's a chance that she hasn't had the balls--me, snorting, You have been ball-less for as long as I can remember, but the sentence is far too long for a serviceable quip and she rolls on—hasn't had the balls to correct them. Who are they? One bearded, one blond. Go with the beard, I say, but it's an icy stare and I recant. A pinch, yes, sure, but how am I supposed to help? Just come with her, puhleeze, and she reached out her clattering, retroclad arm again. I begrudgingly met her fingertips, and pushed myself up, precariously, against the door. Much more swayed by the liquor than I thought. The floors may as well have belonged to an oceanliner, but I found my footing and let her guide me, her finger tips still joined to mine with an ethereal looseness, remembering but then forgetting to ask where were going. There was nothing to read into moments like these: no flint sparking between the surfaces of our hands, not even during these small instances of synchronization.
We had been together once, nearly two years ago. A shared handle in the garage apartment she was living in at the time, a handful of details that became elusive in the hungover morning. What I remember is the way her neck tasted. Perfume from a handcrafted glass bottle that I admired in her immaculate bathroom, a perfect, thin film of sweat, the gin evaporating through her pores. And how skinny she was, the slightness of her body uncanny. Not unhealthy, not a drug problem, just the way she had always been, endowed with a metabolism faster than God's. I was too careful with her, made self-conscious by my drunken clumsiness, terrified I would punch right through her eggshell frame, those prominent ribs gleaming white in the mottled starlight that crept through the open window. Always silent too. She never made a show of her pleasure, never opened her mouth to give voice to the sensations of her body. Couldn't tip her hand like that, but she showed it to you— she let it be clear through the tremors, the raking fingernails. Those were the only indications Jen could bear to give that she was, in fact, vulnerable: that she could be affected and, even more, that you might be the thing to affect her. Or maybe those were just the select moments in which she couldn't help but reveal herself in such a way, where a display of her humanity was inevitable, where, as her eyes glazed over in orgasm, she was forced to succumb to the idea that her dominion over the world around her was contingent. But, even so, Jen wasn't going to stay—I knew it before the undoing of clasps and buttons and I knew it in the smothering morning light that woke us. She had always been a proximity girl, more at home flitting in the borders of every boy's vision, permanently aloof but still charitable with her long smiles and genial kisses. I couldn't be resentful of the way she spread through the world like wisps of smoke filling evening air. In moments like these, I allowed myself to be called upon, to be steered down kid-crowded hallways into a room filled with pot smoke where these two new lovers sat (oh, God) side by side, blitzed, and watched her enter like they were encountering the numinous. She gripped my arm before we sat down in the circle, hard, as if begging me to anchor her, as if I was the thing only that could keep her from slipping away entirely.
Monday, July 11, 2011
Next section of below untitled work
If you haven't read the section below, this won't make much sense.
II.
At the party, I wasn't talking to anybody and Jen was talking to everybody. I stood in the kitchen against the fridge, sipping whiskey purloined from the liquor cabinet in the master bedroom—a bottle worth more than my bank account. No, that was only true pre-inheritance; something I kept forgetting. Remembering it was nausea. Too much to think about, that everything was now reduced to a string of digits on an ATM receipt. Shake it off, bite back the bile—drink the drink. There was no discussion about the morning's events in the sweaty, overpopulated room. The news was the only trace of it, playing on silent when we arrived but turned off an hour in by someone or someone's brother. He put on Stop Making Sense on DVD. Still just ambient noise underneath the throb of the DJ's bass: a shirtless 22 year old streaked with the tattoos of an unfinished liberal arts education. He set up in the living room to rattle the antique furniture, add to the timbre. Just unbelievably bad. Doing long lines of coke off empty LP sleeves in front of everybody, conjuring sickening arrhythmic bursts from the turntables as he mashed Wu-Tang with Madonna. I watched this while Jen whispered in the ear of some guy who might have been her boyfriend: the whole terrible display set against the blue-light background of David Byrne up on the flatscreen, putting his boombox down on that sprawling Hollywood stage. In his billowing gray flannel suit he craned his avian neck to the beat, and I swear, DJ kid, that there was disdain for you laced up in the way he moved. I spent a half an hour crouched in front of the entertainment center replaying “Naive Melody” with my back to everyone else. It didn't matter that I couldn't hear it—the stage swathed in shadows, the switch pulled on that tall bedroom lamp. It was a new Genesis as everything melted into affirmation in the milky yellow light that seeped through the shade. That strange, candle-lit intimacy directed out at the thousands in the crowd (to even more, now, through the membrane of this celluloid reproduction), budded up the skin on my arms with the power it manage to carry, turned all my hair on end. And during the bubbling synth interlude when he began to dance with the lamp, now transfigured into a beautiful woman with model's proportions—towering, rail thin--the motion of his body became alien and hypnotic, something between ballroom and a bull fight, gestures that would be the most graceful thing you laid eyes on in a world with different physics and all I could think the whole time was What could it possible mean to be genuine if not this?
II.
At the party, I wasn't talking to anybody and Jen was talking to everybody. I stood in the kitchen against the fridge, sipping whiskey purloined from the liquor cabinet in the master bedroom—a bottle worth more than my bank account. No, that was only true pre-inheritance; something I kept forgetting. Remembering it was nausea. Too much to think about, that everything was now reduced to a string of digits on an ATM receipt. Shake it off, bite back the bile—drink the drink. There was no discussion about the morning's events in the sweaty, overpopulated room. The news was the only trace of it, playing on silent when we arrived but turned off an hour in by someone or someone's brother. He put on Stop Making Sense on DVD. Still just ambient noise underneath the throb of the DJ's bass: a shirtless 22 year old streaked with the tattoos of an unfinished liberal arts education. He set up in the living room to rattle the antique furniture, add to the timbre. Just unbelievably bad. Doing long lines of coke off empty LP sleeves in front of everybody, conjuring sickening arrhythmic bursts from the turntables as he mashed Wu-Tang with Madonna. I watched this while Jen whispered in the ear of some guy who might have been her boyfriend: the whole terrible display set against the blue-light background of David Byrne up on the flatscreen, putting his boombox down on that sprawling Hollywood stage. In his billowing gray flannel suit he craned his avian neck to the beat, and I swear, DJ kid, that there was disdain for you laced up in the way he moved. I spent a half an hour crouched in front of the entertainment center replaying “Naive Melody” with my back to everyone else. It didn't matter that I couldn't hear it—the stage swathed in shadows, the switch pulled on that tall bedroom lamp. It was a new Genesis as everything melted into affirmation in the milky yellow light that seeped through the shade. That strange, candle-lit intimacy directed out at the thousands in the crowd (to even more, now, through the membrane of this celluloid reproduction), budded up the skin on my arms with the power it manage to carry, turned all my hair on end. And during the bubbling synth interlude when he began to dance with the lamp, now transfigured into a beautiful woman with model's proportions—towering, rail thin--the motion of his body became alien and hypnotic, something between ballroom and a bull fight, gestures that would be the most graceful thing you laid eyes on in a world with different physics and all I could think the whole time was What could it possible mean to be genuine if not this?
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