Last night, in my muddied skull,
beer fuzzing in my belly,
I put my hand to your cheek,
asked you for a kiss,
vomited on your shoes.
I wanted a quieter world, something kinder,
people buzzing concentrically around one another,
putting hands to wounds, singing lullabies
in the street,…
hahahahahhehehehehehhohohohohohoh
Very interested in not dying
Very much asking you
To stay
Very concerned with my trashy best friend
From kindergarten who got “meow”
Tattooed above her vagina
Very
Nothing
Not at all
Not even a little.
Feel very stupid
Almost always
Feel very concerned about all the missed opportunities in my life
All the boys I could have fucked but didn’t, mostly.
Nothing inspiring like cliff views or
I don’t know
Flying. Is that a stupid thing to say?
Everything followed by a question.
Once, near the hookah bar, I shouted
and clapped while a shirtless girl
tore a road sign out of the sidewalk
and dragged it past the church, banging,
the metal to the asphalt, and screaming,
the clanging not unlike bells.
I swallowed tear gas so splendidly,
serenely, then ran past the…
ahhhhhhh
Hiding in my bed,
forgetting how to speak,
pushing myself out and into sunlight, unwilling
like a breeze pulling itself through an empty house,
every door slamming shut behind it.
Then, thinking everyone on the bus knows I’m high
but Kate calms me down, smoothes back my hair,
takes my hand, laughs at the guy outside
who dropped his scoop of chocolate
now dripping across his khakied thigh,
his arms up and out like wings
as he flaps the air trying
to get those last few seconds back,
and I want to cry which is not how it should be.
I keep getting these things wrong, too much
too little, bad timing, you need to stop, but
the air tastes like tin and I wish I knew his name
or where he’s going. Kate takes my hand.
The cathedral watches from its place across the street
and its million perches in the apartment windows.
I remember walking in the colored light, across the marble floor
the gentle woman telling us about flying buttresses,
construction through war, tea time and clear views.
The highest point in a city must be the loneliest.
Everything falls away from it.
Now that I am gone, they live on the river.
At night, they cast out for crabs big as dinner plates,
who come in smiling, clinging belly to belly,
and dancing for the pot. My brother is a child
and catches fireflies in JIF jars again. The cities dwindle down
and scatter in tall…
oh god look it
Dead deer litter the tall grasses along VA-460 W,
intestines dashing forth, bulging and ripped,
heaping piles of peach sofas in a junkyard.
You dip and chew, peaceful as a bodhisattva,
and spit out the window, sometimes leaving trails,
green-brown and smelly, across the rear windows.
When we were younger we followed shimmering mucus
chains across rain-dark concrete to find slugs, wriggling
dumb and peaceful. We coaxed them out with beer spoons
and placed them, sucking hard like mewling newborns,
on my knuckles, shoulders, nose. One day
you added salt. Virginia was endless and we were
so young. We pull over, gravel hailing from our tires
into the rack of a big glassy-eyed buck. Pelt ripped,
shiny nose crusted over, black flies big as thumbs
scatter and reform. You pee in the woods
while I look at the deer. You shake yourself off, come back
and tease me for holding deer-funerals in my mind.
You light a cigarette and put on a child-bully’s nasal whine,
Ashes to ashes. You ash in the swarm and smash the butt
into a branch of antler. I decide to move north
tomorrow.
The world once removed
becomes a house of inherited things
that slip through your hands, backwards,
always backwards,
to when they belonged.
In the attic, the gardenias came to us, dream-like
and afraid, the brass bowls darkened
like your glazed eye, and I recalled
your hands in the farmer’s market
lifting a peach like a diamond. We spoke with the twang
of days lazing between noon and sunset, your hands
like an ark that was lost from the start, your shoulders
sloping like Virginia just after rain. We drove to drive.
We were inconsolable, we were going to live
forever. It was unclear where we ended
and everything else began, our bodies
spoke echoes and reflections, your hands held me up
suspended like a question, unclear
how much longer we needed. The whole time,
you were just a ghost of what you had been.
I was taking you through the palace of my mind.
You were stealing all the jewelry
and blaming it on the maid.
ok so going through writing to find something kind of ok to submit to this project (p. cool called thepaperknife actually super excited to be asked) and i found all the random shit i forgot i wrote AND I loVe WHEn I write DRUNK OH MY GOD it’s like i have this spectacular talent to be kind of silly but incredibly depressing truly truly my only good skill
Gallium has 31 protons, melts at 87.57 degrees Fahrenheit
and shines like the sun of the ancient world. Scientists
used to mold the metal into teaspoons and
laugh themselves smaller and smaller into their
starched white lab coats
as their friends stirred silver
into chamomile and lemon.
They tell you it was all oceans and darkness
before the world knew its name, but
it was gallium. Singing silver-white
and soft like a carton of ice cream
forgotten on the counter.
Your father, the inventor,
your father, the cleft-lip, your
father, machines-for-hands
should have known. Known about
gallium and melting points and
dopamine and gamma-amino butyric acid,
and your lack of impulse control.
Our father who cut the universe
from his belly, whose pancreas is heaven
who hates pistachios and Jeopardy, hail!
Hail! Hail! I don’t care, whatever
you like, this is your myth after all, you’re the one
with the smoldering incense, with the oracle-eyes,
the gallium bones, the mouth that can’t stop
vomiting prophesies, who can’t speak
vowels.
This my benediction, this my world of metal oceans, this my myth
with its body against yours: You move slowly
through the world, so unquiet, so restless, so new,
with hands that flutter up then down
like workmen scurrying over invisible mile-high ladders
getting nowhere.
My Icarus, my gallium boy,
you should have known better. Come,
let me take you in my arms
and melt the wax in your wings.
ahahahah just tried writing a bit and it really sucked and then found this that i wrrote awhile a when i was kind of fucked up and seriously its not great but its better than anything else ive written tonight ahahHAHahahAH
My sister curls in and cringes
when anyone mentions
the end of the world
like she has a list
and intends to complete it.
I write half-sentences
on the backs of receipts
and put them in police statements
disguised as poetry.
Yes, he is the one who did it
and this is what he did
and I am very angry about it,
but it was beautiful in the way
a wolf in a dress is beautiful
when you can’t see the fur
or the teeth.
The apocalypse comes every day
somewhere.
i just watched the devil & daniel johnston
I thought I was gonna see this film and be surprised or challenged or excited or inspired or something, but i mostly feel sad and disappointed. He’s a grown man stuck as a child, he’s sick, and maybe it’s the satan/god obsession I can’t tap into because i hate that kind of irrationality or the fact that he endangered/hurt a lot of people and wasn’t held accountable for that (and i get that that’s problematic with mental illness…) or maybe it’s the fact that I don’t think his music is really that amazing (well, some of it is. but some of it’s unbearable. it’s just a sad lonely fucked up guy screaming his delusions on stage and everybody’s fucking clapping and cheering him on and there’s something about that that i hate - like I’ve always believed that no matter how much or how prevalent the connection between mental illness and art may seem - think van gogh, plath, whoever - the mental illness didn’t precede the art - that those two aspects of the artist could always be separated and it seems like for most of johnston that’s all there is - that people are just into the spectacle, the novelty of it). but anyway. I just feel kind of repulsed and sick and sad - and maybe there’s something to be said for a story that can evoke that. but. even if he wants to be on stage i just kind of hate taht there’s an audience for this shit - who want to go watch someone lose their fucking mind and call it genius like that makes it okay. his story is so scary and upsetting and the film tells this fucking heartbreaking, disturbing story and then tries to end on this note of like ” he still believes in true love, he’s getting better kind of, he achieved fame which is all he wanted (and there’s a lot fucked up about that mindset, and i think it’s probably tied up with the sickness - delusions of grandeur and whatnot - but it still makes me sick that that should be art’s end)” but it just feels like such a false positive like fuck that, he still lives at home, he still acts like a little kid, his parents seem like they’re always in intense pain - it’s not the story of an artist, it’s the story of a terrifying mental illness and I don’t think the film specifically tried to glorify that, but I think a lot of his myth does that, idolizes the illness and not the man (and i don’t even think the man deserves that kind of following - maybe it’s not my kind of music, but it’s not transcendental just interesting, and only at a super rudimentary level) but anyway that kind of glorification is so baseless and twisted and-
fuck. just feelin a lot of negative shit about the way i expected myself to respond to this, and the way a lot of people did/have/are. maybe i’m just bitter that i can’t see any beauty in this story when a lot of people have. ah. bed.
