caught a glance in your eyes and fell through the skies.
everything seems to go terribly awry after sundown. goodbye, alex chilton.
"
- appearances may be deceiving -
why, yes, in fact, they are.
standing at the top of cement stairs
peering down
as you (you) and two strangers
glance up
‘are those friends of yours?’
lying on the floor of yr room
staring through the ceiling
as you gently breathe, touch my ear
roll away
‘i think i might go home, okay?’
genuflecting by the pulaski bridge
closing tight
as you swear up and down
about importance, resonance
‘do you really mean it, like, actually and for real?’
curled up as small, far, as possible
ear against the wall
as your fuliginous air expands
leaving only gasps
‘should i stay somewhere else tonite, tomorrow?’
prostrated on the soft tar roof
counting our days
as you wrap up in me
clutch and reposition
‘will it be fun when i’m gone; better?
half-turned, avoiding your space
drowning vision
as you look over to the left
at the ground
‘what have you done that would make me believe?’
- i have no reason to tell any little thing but the truth.
and also, appearances may be deceiving. -
why, yes, in fact, they are.
four amendments
“1. I am a bad dude.
2. I am a bad dude to date.
3. No one can expect anything out of me.
4. I just want to hang out with Emily Stebbins all the time.”
i drove out to the vanderbilt museum just outside of northport, NY on long island. it took us two hours to get there and it was closed. you could see the mismatched tile turrets peeking out over the top of the high stucco walls, but that was all. only a glimpse of the ways that we might have forgotten for a few hours. we found a funny trail off the side of the road and managed to have an okay time, but i couldn’t help feeling achingly failed. it seems that these days everything that i attempt falls apart, even the least imaginative adventure ends in a gravel parking lot and half-hearted apologies; there’s no precision to my emotional praxis.
last night was a mess and today was a mess and i can’t stop drifting off and my stomach drops and i want to say that everyday i feel less sad about something so banal and superficially tragic. it’s just that it only seems to hurt more and i can’t even say that i want anything other than to wallow. it happens every once in awhile that you can’t remember the ways you stopped yourself from tumbling and, instead, you just throw yourself away. my mother sent my best friend a text message today that reads, ‘i am just so worried about emily, she seems so unhappy these days.’ masturbatory bleakness? i guess so and i am sorry about it, believe me.
(Waitin’ Around to Die by Townes Van Zandt)
(Brand-New-Life by Young Marble Giants)
"Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.
After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,
we ourselves flash and yearn,
and moreover my mother told me as a boy
(repeatingly) “Ever to confess you’re bored
means you have no
Inner Resources.” I conclude now I have no
inner resources, because I am heavy bored.
Peoples bore me,
literature bores me, especially great literature,
Henry bores me, with his plights & gripes
as bad as Achilles,
who loves people and valiant art, which bores me.
And the tranquil hills, & gin, look like a drag
and somehow a dog
has taken itself & its tail considerably away
into the mountains or sea or sky, leaving
behind: me, wag."
Dream Song 14, John Berryman
take down my prints, take down my photos, rip up my top tens, take off my pins, pack away that butterfly wing, throw out the crystal, destroy that book, stop wearing the pants i gave you (they don’t even fit). i can’t let my face get raw on the corner of dekalb & wyckoff waiting for you to want to head further southeast.
(“are you taking it all back?” i guess so.)
i swear i don’t care and i swear i never did, okay?
in the last two years, i’ve begun to use david foster wallace as a safety blanket. if i am feeling bad, he coddles that sadness through sentiment with which i viscerally empathize and then says something so hilarious that i sort of stop feeling so down. he alludes to darkness so flippantly that, for me, it becomes less consuming. (i also credit him with showing me the ways that mathematics & logic can be applied to real life in order to make real life more tolerable; voracious problems less affecting.) i wish that someone could have written for him in the way that i sometimes feel he writes for me. the world is horrible, scary, riddled with sadness & addiction, vapid, and cold, but it is also funny, smart, honest, absurd, and comforting. i guess DFW could only so exquisitely articulate this contradiction because he felt it too intimately and it got to be too much. i wish that he wasn’t gone, but more and more i’ve come to understand that certain people are far too sensitive for this life and deciding to no longer endure is a legitimate & individual choice. at the very least, i’ll always be able to surround myself in piles of his words.
(DFW - A Series of Remarks on Kafka’s Funniness from which Not Enough Has Been Removed)
-Gertrude Stein & Alice B. Toklas
