Germany

Ive made it from asphalt and then through the skies I've emerged on the German side of things and I was nervous walking off the plane did I make the right choice in coming here? All my demons were there in the waiting hall holding signs up with my different names on them. I walked past, wig shielding my face. Not today guys. But a few still caught on followed me into the day. Not until now, many cigarettes and some drinks later, do i shake them off. No drama, just beat it. Arrived a few hours ago at my new home for some months. Fabian and Anetta are the bee keepers, and they are spry and kind kind. Their words are earnest, eyes and mouths earnest, skin bright. I forgot the way Europeans tend to inhabit their expressions much more than Americans. It's very refreshing to experience spirited mundanity like this. I have a good room here that has wood floors enough for dancing I have my bike with me (I successfully got it across the Atlantic) What friends we have become, my bike and me I know how to take care of it more than ever now New tires, new chain, new dérailleur, new cassette. Fabian is going to teach me about bee keeping and work is very flexible so I can dance and live as I want. This week we are going to set up hives in the city as the linden trees will be blooming His wife anneta does wood block carving/printing so I hope to mooch off her knowledge too. I saw my friend Martin who I haven't seen in two years and there is still a strong bond not to mention a healthy and intriguing tension between our bodies. it was everything to arrive here and have a friend...to not to feel alone. The destructive side of my independence is never far away It is easily provoked If I am alone alone, meaning when I start feel like a placless familyless landless desinfranchised orphan I can get very defensive and reactionary and work myself into weird states. Madness, demigod martyrdom, epic flesh, death dance. So I am glad to be in this place and get a grip on My Shit, because that is what it is. I am glad to be here among all these trees and lakes... to have a spot to swim as the summer thickens. Glad for honey. Glad for my friends. The family I do actually have. On my way over here I thought of you all so much and wanted to turn back and quit all the questions. But now that I am here I know this will be good, and you all will appreciate the changes it will bring over me. Love from Berlin.

the morning light pours in
ah it's so late that it's early

#500

slavoj zizek i'm calling you to account
even as i am drowning in a pool of your profuse sweating
crouched underneath a podium where you are speechifying
i think
you have made critique your business
so in some sleeping part of your brain
you want the structure to be critiqued to continue to exist
yes?
oh you lucky bastard to wriggle out of the blame like that
you know about fetishized distance
it's not just me that's got it

the dream is to sit in the sun
under a tree
and talk and wonder and puzzle
no
perhaps not
the dream is to sit in the sun
under a tree
and no longer need language

fevruary/2010

you show me yours,

i'll show you mine;

laughing and playing

are the fruits of life

you bring the fork

and i'll bring the knife

we can live on the clouds

we can sleep on soft gauze

just to feel peach fuzz

and dream to touch paws

we know this is it

this bright life is ours

we'll drink in the wind

and we'll supper on stars

stuff from before

stay away speaks the kitchen
stay away speaks the girl with the large orbs running long on the face
you have no power here

untethered to the bounty of human
unkept by many my kind
confused by my own skin,
what keeps me here and makes me even a thing ?
i slink closer to the moon
i wade deeper in the sink
behind me,
my imagination slides down the wall
i make out what it thinks

it is a time-engorged romance
just me myself pulsing on the brink
there is symphony in silence
there is no escaping in this drink
no
not this time
and as the ostentatious grows farther
steps taken away from the prattling parade,
--the yelling need to be heard, the commandments, the unplaced fury of our time--
those subtler forces and the soft of heart come in
the ducks of the pond,
the cat from beneath the couch,
the eternal embrace of my ribcage,
the stars,
the lovers and the poets,
all in search of the space where they will know
we will know
that they are precious.


*******

facebook has got it all wrong
yes we all need recognition
we need reflection
what's going to show us back to ourselves so we know that we exist
but without a surrounding story,
without being led through the mouth of myth
we are dangling diva
we are pretty face without a purpose
when in fact we want to play a role
we want to know our special power
who are we in this scarey, sacred of all times
what stories have called us forth?
awakened us from the grave
why are we here and how can we help?

it bears repeating

I lived here nearly 5 years before I could
meet the middle western day with anything approaching
dignity. it's a place that lets you
understand why the bible is the way it is:
proud people cannot live here.

the land's too flat. ugly, sullent and big it
pounds men down past humbleness. they
stoop at 35 possibly cringing from the heavy and
terrible sky. in country like this there
can be no God but Jahweh.

In the mills and refineries of its south side Chicago
passes its natural gas in flames
bouncing like bunsens from stacks a hundred feet high.
the stench stabs at your eyeballs.
the whole sky green and yellow backdrop for the skeleton
steel of a bombed-out town.

remember the movies in grammar school? The goggled men
doing strong things in
showers of steel-spark? The dark screen cracking light
and the furnace door opening with a
blast of orange like a sunset? or an orange?

it was photographed by a fairy, thrilled as a girl, or
a Nazi who wished there were people
behind that door (hence the remote beauty), but Sievers,
whose old man spent most of his life in there,
remembers a "nigger in a red T-shirt pissing into black sand."

It was 5 years until I could afford to recognise the ferocity.
friends helped me. then I put some
love into my house. finally I found some quiet lakes
and a farm where they let me shoot pheasant.

standing in the boat one night I watched the lake go absolutely flat. smaller than raindrops, and only
here and there, the feeding rings of fish were visible 100 yards away - and the blue gill caught that afternoon
lifted from its northern lake like a tropical! jewel in its ear
belly gold so bright you'd swear he had a
light in there. his colour faded with his life. a small green fish...

all things considered, it's a gentle and undemanding
planet, even here. far gentler
here than any of a dozen other places. the trouble is
always and only with what we build on top of it.

there's nobody else to blame. you can't fix it and you
can't make it go away. It does no good appealing
to some ill-invented Thunderer
brooding over some unimaginable crag.

It's ours. right down to the last small hinge it
all depends for its existence
only and utterly upon our sufferance.

driving back I saw Chicago rising in its gases and I
knew again that never will the
man be made to stand against this pitiless, unparallel
monstrosity. 

it snuffles on the beach of its Great Lake like a
blind, red, rhinoceros.
It's already running us down.

you can't fix it. you can't make it go away.
I don't know what you're going to do about it.
But I know what I'm going to do about it. I'm just
going to walk away from it. 

maybe a small part of it will die if I'm not around.
feeding it anymore.

chicago poem. by lew welch. someday i'll write my own.

someone is always saying that something is on the verge of happening and susan sontag says that's the mark of a feeble mind and i don't know and my god is there a lot of information in the world

lip stain or lipstick
no matter
when we are young
our sentences are always spittle thick
a lot of forelock tugging and hand wringing
has been spilt over the fact that
you can't learn this unless you learn this yourself

baby still loves short skirts and mens' shoes
thick greek yogurt and lace
the same echo laden drums and lyricless scandinavian confections
but she honestly regrets
the drag donned in sped up moments of "that's hilarious"
and
"you should definitely do that"/"totes adorbs"
honestly regrets
dates in hamburger joints
bitterly regrets
the years it took to learn to speak
the spit that flew from between the lips
the obfuscating gurgle of youthful speech
the block at the back of the throat
but does know that she may have slobbered on a lot of things

should princess write a phd thesis on "empiricism and scientific method in the art-making process" or should she become known as the "academy's arsonist, university-owned building firebug, notorious leveler of expensive architectural achievements" in all the papers? should she mummify the lincoln memorial with wheat paste and dollar bills? should she become a buddhist who also welds? can she still join a convent and write for an online publication about tantric sex? should she throw away all her clothes or keep things til they're nothing but dust? what's most affordable these days?

ho hum
sold a worthless bill of goods
and still paying for it on credit
hope you can still run away to europe
and forget the daze you spent here
and all the men arrested on the sidewalks as you stumbled by

On the existence of mythological modern horrors

y'all must know my friend suzy creamcheese
she who got radicalized on gchat
she sleeps on a pile of books and empty takeaway cartons
in a boudoir of her own
someone is slicing themselves up in the other room
she wakes up in the mornings to a sink full of blood
stands over it to brush her teeth
and wipes away the twitching silverfish caught there
goes to work and reads the world on the box
talks through a sour smile

she's rents an oddly empty house, not entirely by design
and most everyone she knows has always been personally in the red
the youth of today dream of debtors prison
long for the honesty of it
the dickensian fantasy lost to the genius of the 21st century
better working and paying than locked in a cell and not paying anything at all
The Purported They said
The Purported They being for all intents and purpose much like the weather
or gravity
pushing and shoving
without being seen

suzy creamcheese has friends
who are the ill and the perverted and the melancholy and the strange
but if everyone is the ill, perverted, melancholy, strange
are they any longer just that?

suzy and her friends saw The Purported They at an open air market
just once
They were there, looking around at the soft limbs and wet tongues
They had huge hands and eyes so dry and crusty they were barely slits to see through
suzy&co saw them
and tried to tell everybody
but no one believed them
so the nice girls and boys creamcheese weren't so sure they had seen anything at all

so suzy creamcheese went home to bed
to watch the silverfish and mice scurry about
and wonder what to wear the next day

______________________________________________________________________________

no one is sure if mr. berringer is real

Ethan: the on stove espresso maker pee-steamed a double shot into mr berringer's lips

10:49 AM moments later, he decided not to go to work, made popcorn, covered it in chocolate sauce, and watched Fight Club on his left monitor, and porn on his right

  thirty minutes later he had a stroke whilst masturbating

10:51 AM me: may we all go out like mr. berringer

  he's a hero

  i heard he once went up to the check out counter at urban outfitters with everything in the store

10:52 AM kissed everyone behind the counter

  swiped his food stamps card

  laughed and ran out again

 Ethan: lol-ing at my desk is becoming an issue

  but this needs to continue

10:54 AM me: he has the largest collection of pens stolen from offices

  (or had he's dead now of course)

  (except he's eternal)

  (and so on)

10:55 AM he made the collection into some sort of teepee

  it was in the whitney biennial

  but then a blogger was like

  "yo that's racist and appropriating"

  so his art career floundered

  (hence spiraling into a porn/popcorn rage blackout)

10:56 AM Ethan: hahahahaha

11:00 AM me: he may or may not have inspired the girl with the dragon tattoo

  he was in sweden for a while

  and he didn't have facebook during that period

 Ethan: oooooh lord

 me: so no one really knows for sure

11:01 AM Ethan: tweets by a group of swedish teenagers rumored to have met the man were unconfirmed by his estate

  one of the boys said "i can totally see his ass crak"

11:02 AM me: an intense upswing in traffic to said teenagers' twitter handles

  led to the adoption of swedish hairstyles among the people of brooklyn

11:03 AM and therefore montana

11:05 AM Ethan: on an unusually sunny february day in midtown manhattan, mr berringer did not go to starbucks. he pressed face to the window, made a lewd gesture, and Skipped away, yanking a young girl by her pony tail and shoving her roughly into a NY Times stand on the wy

  the girl was later discovered to have been a struggling actor, Mr Berringer's neighbor who had once cat-sat for him for a total of an hour and a half.

11:06 AM when asked why mr berringer asked her to do this little somewhat violent circus act

  she simply said "i think he's unhappy. but also $400"

11:11 AM me: when style bloggers are asked to describe mr. berringer's personal style who did not have the pleasure to meet him before he died, they usually say something along the lines of "like I don't know some sort of Swiss Guard slash late 1950s southern mental institution guard slash 14 year old vampire slash deep sea diver"

  also

  "he likes neon"

  and

  "he started the armpit cut out trend"

  "possibly because he sweats so profusely"

  "no one knows"

  or

11:12 AM "is he responsible for translucent pvc nipple panels"

  and

  "i've never seen him in the same room as anna wintour. coincidence, i think not?"

11:13 AM Ethan: ah man

11:14 AM me: he was truly great

 Ethan: so we hear

 me: i met him once

 Ethan: o yea?

11:15 AM me: yeah but i can't tell you about it because he swore me to secrecy

  all i will say is

 Ethan: why did he swear you to secrecy?

 me: well i was pregnant for like 20 minutes

  it was really confusing

would you leave me?

frank,
did the fatty chanteuses make millions off of one single heartbreak in your day too?
did your friends have a thousand word business cards?
[did you ask, what should we call me?]
we both see the special providence in the fall of a pigeon, now don't we?

ffffffffrank, frankie, frankssss, frank frank frank
i'd tattoo your face on my face if it weren't so fucking tacky
can we go at my speed for just a mo, a mo-mo-mo?
i got gum in my hair and rainwater in my shoes
girls like me are so much more fun when we're rich
teach me penniless fun
or do you not know it?

you and me, principesa
will you get on board with my new hardness?
------> will you love my face if i am snarling?
or
alternate scenario:
better yet
you've always known
that someday you would have to sharpen your tongue on the whetstone of my failure but it still seems like tumbling into dog's mouth where you'll find a beehive full of tiny assassins who will whisper "GO BACK GO BACK GO BACK" and still you'll keep on tumbling because if you don't...well things will stay the same and that would be so very very wrong

i've been where you've been monsieur o'hara
am i where you are
the cliff face of goodbye
it is hard to remember that just because a thing ends (or seems to) does not mean it had no worth to begin with
a thing can be eternal if it is repeated
your day
my day
teach me penniless, monastic, friendless fun