New Home.

http://ledesespoirlamiroir.tumblr.com/

Merry Christmas, I suppose.

There's no care taken when there's no one taking care.

I thought I grew out of the hopeless romanticism.

Illumined, yes. Consider me illumined.
Not to mention this sense of strength and sangha and love so absolute.

Kiss on the knee.

Best of all was probably sitting in your little car in the city parking lot, on the look-out and grinning and eating Turkish almond cookies, sharing common fears and waiting with something more than patience.

Easy.

Even asleep I know it can't be my bed. No Bukowski under the pillow. No sweater sleeves tied up in sheets. Actually, no pillow or sheets.
I wake up and don't know where exactly I am. I can't place anything. It happens in daylight too.

Spent my life trying to make up my mind.

Imagine, I'm catching my breath and it's morning now. I slept all night, I'm getting sleep most every night.
Better than the underground or the silhouette in the window, is a voice on the end of the line.

The very last thing that I'd want to do is say I've been hiting some hard travelling too.

The fever broke with the nightmares so now I'm up and on the road.

Sleep isn't safe.

I force myself awake and it's either the middle of the night or middle of the afternoon. The sun and the moon light things up about the same.



You helped isolate the evil in me.
To overtake or to be overtaken is no easy decision.

Sol, I can't remember Lithuania.

I'm dreaming of being Eloise, face-up on the living room floor with a drink balanced on my chest.
Salinger makes me feel sorry for ever being a kid. I must have made my father so sad.
Good writing will make you too sick to read it.

Penultimate.

Once my mother fell asleep in the driver's seat. My little brother fell asleep in the passenger seat. I stayed awake in the back seat. We almost all died like that, with them up front, and me in back with my eyes open.
I was remembering about it tonight when I saw a car crash and sitting on the curb in the dark not crying.
I couldn't see if he was crying or not, because my eyes have been bad all day. I woke up with them swollen shut.

Hello? Patterns in my mind now moving slow.

I'd give a fortune to your infomercial
if somebody would just take my call.

Forget the air mattress with you.

Everybody mostly asleep on the cement cellar floor, a string of blue lights reflected in my eyes.

Love like a child.

I'm being bad
and I know I would stop myself if I was more awake.
You ask what I'm thinking at the very worst point and I say something that is not a lie--
say something about my hair looking like the girl's from Balto, when she's sick with that cough
and her hair is all out on the pillow.
She's a cartoon but I feel sick, too.
I feel sick about asking you to act like an adult after all that.

I easily could have mistaken it for a sunrise.

The sun was setting on the harbour and I was just waking up, last time I was on an airplane.

Les cauchemars.

A reve si absolutement horrible to wake from that you are sickened by it. To know so intimately all that your own mind can contrive.
Sitting up in the dark, way up.

I like the cool way you look at me.

Everything about you is bringing me misery.

Waiting for mail is torturous.

The numbness started in my fingertips
and I don't care where it ends up.

I get fragments.

Mostly unfinished habits--a tree falling-- a speedometer a constant 20 mph faster than law-- vague fluorescence or partial shadow-- a mast-- hunger-- Edith Piaf echo-- vide, vide, vide-- the untouched box of cigarettes-- blue sheets-- a mouth faster than a mind.

I've seen pretty people disappear like smoke.

A blinding resplendence, so much skin, above the surface and then diving down. I can't get enough of the feeling: water against my ear drums. Precious seconds in which I am stifled and entirely unreal.
With a sense of loss will often come a sense of liberation as well. I lost my bucket of rain and with it the tears.

Lull.

Days have been bright with the same intensity as the sun reflecting off of the glass high rises. And everything is perfectly safe and safely familiar and familiarly quiet.
The smile and sigh, irrational angst, the purity of spirit and all the pleading. All as genuine as the next.
You are still the inky shadow under my eye when I'm awake and so are you.

The debauchery is done.

When I'm begging from now on I'll just promise to be good.

"I arrive...I enter the room...that's when I really start to exist for you... but I existed before that...I had thoughts.. I may have been suffering."

Cha chap chapitre
chapitre huit:
le désespoir.

Awake and asleep have been reversed.
My days consist of fragmented conversations, raw colors, echoing chansons from Jean-Luc Godard films. I hold Pierrot's pen and paint Marianne's lineur onto my eyelids.
And then I can't sleep without a sense of banality.

I can't get far enough away from these dense English memories. I can't even choose the ones I'd like to keep.

Nothing changes but the slightest hues.

Simplification may be my best bet tonight; this is what I learned while in the silence:
It's not so hard to say I love you and mean it.
Real eye contact is fucking scary, the sort that feels like something is being sucked from the back of your heart and makes you uncomfortable breathing. It's the best kind by far.
I should not mix exercise, huger and fatigue. Ever.
I live for male attention. It's what makes me happiest, and I don't think I like that.

I need a little time to level out.

I'll be spending the next four days in silent reflection or hopefully beyond thought, but my sense of memory is already becoming painfully acute. I was warned about this. Last year all this turned out to be my double-edged sword, determining a year's worth of life choices. This year I don't expect much different.

Ask it aloud.

Yesterday when I went to visit my grandfather he was in a medicated daze in his hospital bed, ninety years of uncertain guilt filmed over his eyes. He didn't realize he was whispering. His words are still stuck with me.
What does it take to be a decent human being?

No direction home.

I guess nobody has much to say anymore. I never expected to feel uncomfortable in such an innocent and pure silence. And now so many sounds and none of them voices.
I wonder if you still read this. I know you used to, but I wonder if it's trivial now.
I wish you would point me north.

Every year, another.

After the rain I end up outside
in my silk Hepburn robe
just at dusk, wanting to cry
because the slug on the front steps is so damn ugly.
Then I think to myself,
I'll write about this
and almost change my mind
because I only write when I feel like crying
and now it's just another bad habit.

Like a bridge.

It should be wonderful, to look at something exactly how it is, to let light pour through the lenses of my eyes with a mindless appreciation. Vivid details are vaguely acknowledged, a shiftless dream of anxiety asks how it's suddenly possible to think nothing after trying so hard for all these years.
I wonder how I can stop dreaming about moths and Cadillacs.

I want to trade the game I play for shelter.

It's hard to hold the hand of anyone
who is reaching for the sky just to surrender.

Things that rhyme with echo.

Hey, where'd everybody go?

Don't mind the weather.

I took my brother fishing today. Packed a lunch and sat on the lake shore reading Bukowski. The sun was hot and the wind was cold and strong enough to make a train whistle over the top of my glass soda pop bottle.

And we'll remember this when we are old and ancient.

It would be so easy to drift day to day without thinking. It was never a temptation until now. I remember the dream where your name was Ghost. Now in my dreams I meet my ancestors. They are dismayed when I tell them I don't recognize them.
Before each decision I make, I ask myself, is this the brave thing to do? It's an exhausting way to live.
Then I can't even sleep because that would be self-defeating.

Blue skies are coming.

The idea is not to cause suffering. There are cycles, there is symbiosis, there are deep breaths, but also a bit of an ache to this emptiness.


I don't think that it's the end,
but I know we can't keep going.

Whippoorwill.

I came home wearing a white dress and a scratchy tweed jacket that does not belong anybody. There was Tennessee Williams light in the living room, a gold block transfused with the static blue light I wish didn't belong to our generation.
I recognized "Danny Boy" in Johnny Cash's voice immediately, never had heard it before. But now I hear the cover of "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry", a song I probably heard a hundred times before my first memory, each time on the same old speakers.
Just standing there, I could have cried forever.
And you ask "In a good way or bad?"

The glory, the tragedy.

Yesterday it stormed and my fear was shallow.
I am detached and when I hear my own voice it's all I can do but wonder what can be done to stop its spread. I am the oil spill out on the water, right above the water.

That’s my life, nothing is sacred.

Apple blossoms are probably the most wonderful thing in the world.
Also the anonymous child by the side of the road grinning with her stubby fingers in a peace sign. I don't mind being sick if I can sing along to Bob Dylan and sound the same.

If there's any love in me, don't let it grow.

As I was leaving, someone called my name. I heard them say it twice and didn't turn around. I don't know why I do that.
I can't differentiate between male voices. If it was you, I'd rather not know. I'm sorry.

Well, I fell in love with the world in you.

It doesn't feel good to stay so still on such little sleep. Forget songs, I've got whole conversations stuck in my head. I couldn't count the times you said, "This is painful." And that was all in the longest five minutes of anybody's life.
Today there's a solitary and infinite gap in the dark mass of cloud.
There will be no paradoxical conflict in my life; everything will hold true simultaneously.
Only symbiosis will be missing. Between clavicle and clover.

Fuel For:

I had never seen a car on fire before, save for the movies.
I had never seen a paper crane's wing burn like a wick.

The smoke makes me want to lay low.

I'd Like To Help You Find It If There's Something Better.

It doesn't seem right that someone should fall asleep with a typewriter at the foot of the bed and have such insignificant dreams.
I should be suspended in a gilded, orbed raindrop of regret. Suspended. None of this dense misty guilt.

Somnambulism.

To be earthen, flat on my stomach, heart pressed down, eyelashes tangled in with the rushes, damp soil permeating my pale skin-- what an aspiration.

With Hourly Updates.

i'd be anyone to be by your side (you know, i haven't wished on a star since december)// the reason i ask is because i really would like to kiss you-- i think we should dance:: i love your eye makeup == [i doubt i would have been your friend] "it's been a long time since before i'd been touched, and now i'm getting touched all the time" riviere, vous etes ici? maintenant? && lydia, do you even love me? && i'm living ahead of an echo||||| darling, you should know, i have fantasies about being alone.

Highs in the Sixties.

It's decidedly warm enough to listen to Paul Simon's Graceland album, but perhaps not warm enough to swim.
It was good though, to stand on a rock in the sunlight, reflecting the sunlight, letting the sunlight bring the feeling back into my legs after time spent in the paralyzing cold. Funny that any discomfort should be worth anything. Funny too, that someone should ski by while we were barefoot in bathing suits.

Do As I Say (Not As I Do) And You Might Make Me Proud.

There's hypocrisy in my anger, but what can I say? We're all hypocrites, it's taking the tilt right out of the earth. Watch me hit the wall until my knuckles bruise, then it's your turn.
If I had anything to say, I'd say it. That's not it. Giving and taking care are supposed to happen in moderation. Someone remind me tomorrow when I've already convinced myself otherwise.

Birthday Number Ninety.

I am talking to a stranger. His eyes are silver-lined with age.
"You have to promise me something, you've got to call your grandfather zeyde from now on," he tells me. "He'll like it. It's a term of endearment and he deserves it."
I promise him I will. To prove it I step outside into the rain which gets caught in my throat as I say goodbye to my zeyde, who laughs.

Building Blocks of Light.

You see, I'd like to live inside an Edward Hopper painting. I've already got the distance down, the uneasiness. Just try making eye contact.

A Ball of String.

Perhaps it's pure stupidity, but I felt safer with your hands off the wheel, tracing an imaginary graph,of what I've already forgotten, or maybe light-year apart. Real science is easier to handle if I'm not alone.
Both of you are spectacular, I think. A profound intelligence in a way it too rarely appears.
I should learn to speak coherently. I must always be at an extreme, manic rambling or slipping in a delicate silence.

Staircase.

I felt paralyzed, getting away as fast as I could. I'm talking fight of flight instincts, thoughtless, adrenalined reaction. You knew I was gone before I did.
There's an indifference I can't shake these days. Only my hands shake.

Spill.

I like wearing my mother's muddy boots and my father's old jacket
and feeling the muscles in my back strain while I carry buckets of maple sap across the yard.
That was today.

Polarity.

Why is it that one moment I can be perfectly comfortable alone at night, walking along the neon pipelines of a city feeling infinite and desired and overflowing with such free love, and the next all I can think of is quietly, loyally sitting by someone's side in the warm, aureate room my future builds in my mind?
There is no balance between the extremes in the life I've constructed for myself. It's all angles, or better-- magnets, eternally repelling each other. I can't live between magnets.
Where so much love exists, hate is invited. I just don't want to end up hating myself. Not again.

And It's All Mathematics

So much exposure to a musician had me fascinated. Whether it was the way he paused tentatively with his fingers above the piano keys to mindlessly consider the next piece of the song, always hitting the exact chord afterward, or the number of times his expression could change throughout the duration of one guitar riff.
Furthermore, it was the proximity of such ability that had me, to be so close to a mind that could create music in its subconscious. A mind that didn't control. Although it was a love that I'd never seen so close, between him and the instruments, something he said in conversation really took me, after he'd been playing for hours on end; "He'll go through torture just to get attention...just like me. Why do you think I play guitar? I mean, my fingers hurt."

Up.

And I'm looking up, filling up, oxygen all in my blood. Blood rushing. I feel good tonight, nervous and beautiful and nearly celestial. I could be Venus except I'm alive. I'm alive.
You got it right saying human interaction is like matches, the ignition, the brilliant flame and the inevitability of a burning out. I can feel it still, the heat of the matches. The smoke rises up.

You Know, It's a Funny Thing.

I'm stuck in a 1946 mindset. I don't have much to say; I only want to be quiet and clever and coy like Bogart's co-star. I wish I was called a name like Lucille or Vivian. I'm tired beyond sleep and seeing in color is no good. I'd be happier in black and white. I'd be happier if I could dress up and have someone take me out.
Hope of being saved fades into the glare of late hours. Nobody can actually do anything to help anyone these days, ask around.
There's an uneasiness about tonight that's got my heart going.
There's a darkness about tonight that's got my breath held.

It's Easy Breathing Today, Ladies and Gentlemen.

It would seem that I get everything I want,
(just not all at the same time, not even close.)

But I won't push my luck, won't even think about it again 'til the rain is falling hard against the window panes and seeping, flooding the floor.

Born from Basement Tears

I took my time washing the dishes and cleaning the kitchen, half-mindful, half-listening to a National Geographic program on the television. I worked knowing that if not for you, I wouldn't be in the place I was, physically or more figuratively.
The most important thing is to learn not to be asked, but to do for the sake of what is kind. It's not that hard , you told me.
So much of what we've been is blurred around the edges. I'm so glad that last night I could have an hour in the clear.

As Of Yet, Nameless.

I adore my typewriter.

Dizzy Again.

The world should not be spun by fear. Please don't force me to summarize our conversations into a single-sentenced threat. If I could be brave enough to tell something to your face, world, that would be it. Stop already.
Words like sacrifice and limitation don't do me any good, I'm sorry to say.
I'm sorry to say that I'm the one spinning. Habitual lies, mindful lies, protective lies, useless lies.
Lies are as much protection as the glass windows on the twenty-sixth floor. There could be a falling out, and I could get sucked out from my airplane seat into the night
at thirty-thousand feet.

Window Ledges.

Sitting at a stone-cold window ledge, running down nineteen empty flights of stairs, folding paper cranes, squinting with the sun, cross-legged and flying over the railroad tracks, shivering in the February morning, noon, night.
It felt good to get to know you, both of you. It felt good to laugh.

Somnolence or Turbulence.

If I wake up from a dream and I've opened my eyes and may as well not have in all the darkness--there's no relief. Is it possible that I'm only capable of love in my dreams?
If I wake up, I can only hold on to fragments of it, the frayed edges, rough to the touch and weathered (in my mind, Tibetan prayer flags in slight mountain wind and rain)and somehow burning to the touch: small scale rug-burn.
Tangible memory, along with all my words have been melting onto a single paint palette. I try to think back and get covered in paint. Blue paint, watered down and washed over everything, smudging your sideways eyes.
If I wake up and there is a call for convention anything, let me shut my eyes. Let me protect myself from behind the twists of sheets. Let me overheat with my own guilt until sleep is all I am.

Virtual.

Yesterday I attended a funeral. Or at least I tried.
I was told, and did as I was told, to sit in the church basement in front of a television screen. Mourn from there, while the pallbearer's footsteps could be heard above my head. Sit in my black and my pearls in a folding chair and regard the screen. Squint at it, shift to see past the rows ahead of me. Don't focus on the antenna or the wires or the way speakers work.
If I was disillusioned with technology before, I don't know what I am now.

Rush.

Yesterday the rain got past my clothes and skin. Yesterday the rain seeped into my bloodstream, grey and wintery through my veins. If there was enough rain, no one would ever need tears.

Meadows.

Drove out to the Audubon Sanctuary this afternoon. Each year I spend less and less time there, though as I get older, more and more of my childhood memories are hide-and-go-seek in the woods and tall gold grasses, finding wolf spiders in a patch of wild blueberries.
Nothing looked like the memories, on the edge of the snowy field. The Crocker Maple is dead now, fell a few years ago after standing more than three hundred years. I can remember picnicking beneath it, real young. It feels funny that I should have known anything at the end of such a long life, but I suppose once I did.
As I rounded the corner of the barn, I came face to face with a flock of sheep, who were completely silent, still and seemingly expectant of me. I stared back for a long time. I watched curiosity drown out distrust.
It was the first time that I've ever really gone anywhere by myself. It didn't feel unusual in the slightest.

God, It's Great.

I like the sun in my eyes.
As for today, the word cradle comes to mind. Everything is cast in aureate sadness and it's all because I love.
I love.

Proud to Be in Your Line of Vision.

It's a beautiful thing to recognize part of another person inside yourself. Especially beautiful, when they are beautiful and make you feel beautiful.
I feel beautiful.
It seems like such a rare thing these days, for someone to be able to feel beautiful, to recognize, to admit.
Today was a day unlike any other. I'm so appreciative to everybody I saw, everybody who took the time to smile or say hello. I had lost hope for so many of you. Rarely have I had a more pleasant surprise. I'm in awe of you all.

Are You Feeling Better Now?

We drove into the city and my eyes focused on the foggy window condensation, blurring the lights on the other side of the glass in soft orbs: green, red, gold and the blue moon.

The fireworks were blotted out by their own smoke, which the city light hit like a wall.

There is so much to love about music.

I got kissed, waiting at the corner bus stop, your arms and coat warm around me and my feet numb.

I saw strangers' reflections in the windows; they shot down the streets with the cars in the next lane.

There was so much patience for mistakes in that little chain coffee shop.

The countdown was loud and my eyes were shut.

A beautiful friend had never looked happier, running the crosswalk and holding a hand. Radiant.

Words to "Grace Cathedral Hill"all in my head, spilled out and your answer, my favorite, was yes.