Transient Stalker

Monday, February 13, 2006

sometimes you are

this.

the shadow you left on my porch today. and with it, my remembrance of who you are and who we were, which curled itself into itself, a loyal thing at its master's feet. i bend down and throw it scraps with a strange nonchalance. there is no one else to judge us here.

how unmistakable you are. the outline of your hands on the ground where you crumpled the soil. the devastation of the sky right under where you stood, where your energy was noncommittal, yet when disturbed, thundered against my walls with just a shrug of your shoulder.

which was what brought me out here, wondering why you stepped forward then faltered, why instead of you there is this. and the many other reasons.

you are everybody's desperate fiction, cutting deeply in the places where nobody feels anymore. the twists and turns of your plot become less easier than the real thing. but don't worry. elsewhere, every i, he, she, it, they loves your bullshit charm and your light and your bottles of absinthe and your secrets and your little-boy desolation and your wounds that we touched and healed with our fingertips together.

(how could we have known enough to hide the affliction of our souls, bandaged but not enough to keep the sighing, prying eyes from ravaging the pieces of our history?)

and this breath of miles between us. i think, living under our skin, are such compulsions. the ones that urge us to take and take in and take of one last time. the ones that the world releases from her sight, the way a constellation lets go of stars.

(hurry. go quickly now. because the lights are coming on in the house of love and he will be looking for me.)

and this, finally.

this.

you and i both.

the open-ending on the porch, where we

Tuesday, February 07, 2006

you make me feel like i wanna be a dumb blonde in a centerfold

you make me feel like a sticky pistil
leaning into her stamen
you make me feel like mr. sunshine himself
you make me feel like splendor
in the grass where we're rolling
damn skippy, baby
you make me feel like the amazon's running
between my thighs
feelin' love, paula cole

you've gotten under my skin. the first thing i write after you go is a lyric from the song i lap-danced for you.

remember how you left me? gasping in awe, lips and legs slightly parted to your memory. i have a feeling that when we talk on the phone tonight, i will tell you, matter-of-factly, as if ordering an apéritif, "do me till i can't breathe." and maybe as an afterthought, "like bunnies. let's do it like bunnies." and you will tell me, gently, to wait until you come home again.

you charm the storied world right out of me. until there is nothing left but this itch i can't quite scratch. this tingling of senses like raw, exposed nerves. this sticky-sweet emptiness that experts on the matter would call LOVE.

love, they say.

but i don't know a love like this.

i do know you, though. i think that's enough. i know the feel of you, the intimacy of you, the fragments of you that stick to me when i sit in bed, in your clothes, playing pretend. i've always played good pretend, but lately, it just isn't as fun anymore. i want us to break into being together, rilke-style, into tiny, shiny pieces. then maybe we could clean up the glorious mess and do it all over again.

and that's it, i suppose. i've no prettified words today. just these for you to do with as you like. because, really, i want you too much to actually want to think straight.

Sunday, January 29, 2006

timeintotime

"i'll meet you," she said. "at the bus stop, one tuesday."

"how would i know?" he asked.

"you'd know. my hair, my eyes, my lips, my skin would make the world fall tenderly around you from two blocks away."

it's been years now, and the books she sent you had long tired themselves out making love with the dust bunnies under your bed. you've called her name more than a few times since, but only ended up waking the ghost of her imagined taste in your mouth. and you curse in english and a smattering of other languages you've picked up along the way. your tavern cursing always made her laugh.

it's six in the morning. time to walk her out of your system again. maybe you'll take that book on hentai she found so gloriously entertaining. you could never get that about her. but okay, you'll take her book out for some fresh air today.

you turn your collar up against the chill of old, familiar things. there's the baptist church. the school. the diner where you could always get them big-ass breakfasts. oh, the avenue with its hint of eternal autumn. and later, further on, the bus stop.

(you're dreading it already.)

"god, but my world is small," you say. and you gently finger the spine of the book in your hand as if it were her spine you were touching.

you don't know how to let go, really. every moment is marked with this and that of her. your best friend, probably with the best of intentions, says earnestly, "go out and fuck, man. i'd fix you up with somebody. you have to let me help you." as if you were some kind of crazy with no common sense to speak of. you don't tell him how you've fucked five different women in three days. all of them drop-dead gorgeous in their respective parts of the world. all of them not her. sure, it helped quiet the demons for a while.

anyway, here's the bus stop. here's where time stands still. for you, it would always be tuesday in these parts.

(bus 21892 boarding.)

and you think, maybe it'll be different today. maybe, you wouldn't let me walk by because you thought it would go nowhere. maybe you would make the world fall tenderly around me from two blocks away. or even from one block away. okay, how about half a block? don't make me grovel, sweetheart. please, don't. i can love you so much better than this.

and damn it, somebody manages to interrupt your sad little monologue. "may i have the time?"

you say, even without looking at your watch, "it's 6:45. well, i could be off for a few minutes or so, but i'm pretty sure that's accurate."

"thanks."

you look away from the beautiful stranger and turn your face up to the sky, that lovely blue suicide poem. you think of how you would lay her down under that sky, how you would take everything of her, how you would die small deaths together. your lower belly stirs with that same old desire. but it's time to go and you've things to do.

"see you around," you say, as your mind moves on to other things. like paperwork and the electric bill and tomorrow's date with anya, or whatever name her mother gave her in slovenia.

you turn away from 6:45, the bus stop, tuesday. and the world, ironic as it is, happens right behind your back—melting into a der blaue reiter kandinksy all around you.

she gave you that book on abstract paintings, too. but then, come to think of it, she never really knew how to move you.

Tuesday, January 24, 2006

the tao of less

let's say you have a house, a car, a fat tabby, a swell-paying nine-to-five, an unbelievably erotic consumerist relationship with PRADA, cable TV, a washboard stomach, an original play in three acts, an espresso machine, a microwaveable lunch from 7-fucking-11. and yet you feel empty. are inclined to feel preachy. you look down the toilet with its annoyingly efficient bidet and you flush half your idealism away. and you say, how about i go back to basics because

less is more.
less is healthy.
less is beautiful.
less will make me thin.
less will make me a better person.

fuck less.

less is a lie your churchgoing mother told you. or if you knew my mother, you would have probably heard it from her.

less is not basic. less is that dilapidated couch with stains of whatever spotting it in places. less is the girl you never bedded, the five-course meal at that ritzy place you never got to eat, the motherfucker you never flipped off at the bar around the corner, the porn you never got to wank off to, the imaginary friend you chose over the love of your goddamn life. spit, rinse, repeat. less is beyond obsolete.

on the other hand, less is the last great melancholy. and the only two good things about that is that it makes catholics guiltier than usual and poetry much more romantic. got a sob story? me, too. let's swap over coffee. then maybe we could, you know, do that thing where people beat around the bush before jumping into bed and end up sobbing a third person's name. how many times did you come? how the fuck should i know? do you see a scoreboard anywhere on me? do you hear me shouting GOAL! every time the proverbial ball sailed through the net?

i'm probably having this pointless conversation with myself at 8:13 in the morning to distract myself from the pain of having to go in for work for the 20th day this year. but if, for a split second, i really wondered why i was having this pointless conversation with myself, i would have realized that provided that i didn't have a house, a car, a fat tabby, a swell-paying nine-to-five, an unbelievably erotic consumerist relationship with PRADA, cable TV, a washboard stomach, an original play in three acts, an espresso machine, a microwaveable lunch from 7-fucking-11, the last thing i would want was

less.

i've three mobile phones, though. and in some places, that would be considered deliberate, gaudy excess with a tinge of unimaginable jackassery.

jesus. i'm feeling much better already.

Friday, January 13, 2006

an intervening space

we've nothing but a few hours from here
.
.
.
.....................................................................to there
.
.
.
the breath of which exhales one-sided expectation while a jackson pollock sunset watches. it's a rip-off, i agree, but let's make do. we've not done this in a while, and i've a love that needs tousling.

let's go to where we imagine the stars would shine the brightest. where we would attract the attention of several lanes of traffic if you took my hands in your hands and put them where you wanted my memory to be.

or, or, or

let's happen right now.

should i straddle you like this and let my hair cover your face like this, wrap my weakness around you like this and grip you tightly by the waist like this? should you put your trembling lips to my throat like this to whisper my name in some odd, groaning fashion like this, suck the heat from off my skin and let it cling to your mouth sweetly like this? i've yet to take leave of this body and misplace my soul through my hips and eyes, my cries and clenched fingers.

and in the seconds that command us, you ask as if the question just occured to you, how can a little girl like you have so much? and i laugh and say that my body was made too small to contain the normal amount.

no, not too small, not too small, just right for the taking, let me arrange you on this bed again, before the city goes under, and i'm leaving on a jet plane, i don't know when i'll be back again.

we move as a patchwork night watches us, hand over mouth, through an open window. i sleep, afterwards, naked and oblivious, as if you would always be there to ward off a cruel world and then wake me up for breakfast.

Monday, January 09, 2006

sojournoir

and she emerged right behind another's shadow

Monday, January 02, 2006

non sequitur: day five

where the end was a long time coming but it comes anyway

the window is big enough. there's a ledge, too, which i believe, has had too many dalliances with the designated jumpers of our time. today, the ghost of a recently concluded memory sits there and i am coaxing him to come back in. he is beautiful. too beautiful. and i am not suspicious enough.

i'm reaching out to him. "come back in, ghost of a recently concluded memory. it's cold out." he is as hazy as a once-upon-a-time sea. and i am the rock he once threw himself against over and over until he was bruised with fragile obsession.

he looks at my hand. then into my eyes. "if i come back in, will you lead me to that bed and take me?" his voice catches. it has the tone of desperation. i invented that tone. it's mine.

no is a two-letter interjection used to indicate a negative response. what part of no is so difficult to understand? it escapes me. but not him.

he hangs his head. one of his buttons is in the wrong buttonhole. to love is to fall victim to folly.

"if you can't take me back, let me go." hot damn. the ghost of a recently concluded memory had a way with words that i would never have.

suddenly, like that august season, he fell gently, along with a whim of wind. whim sounds like an old forty-five playing on a bad phonograph.

i can't help but look over the edge. i see him on the ground, lying in pieces of forgotten warmth and unfulfilled desire. a young girl on a bicycle stops and starts to pick them up, one by one. everyday, all over the world, resolutions are broken. it's tradition, you see. it's tradition to fall victim to folly.

i could have just pushed him, i know. but brave deeds require much, much more of me.

the sky outside reflects who i am at the moment—partly cloudy, or overcast, with a hint of rain. at exactly two o' clock, the world will close in on me. and the end that was almost definitely the end will be a beginning.

the bed invites with a poker face to come play. i shed some skin and pull the sheets all the way to my soul. it will be touch and go for while.

Transient Stalker

30.5.07

to norway on a bicycle

Tour de Force

Big Time Sensuality

Deviations

Backpedaling

Hitchhiker's Guide

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Intimations

Northern Crossing

Yellow Lane

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