april 27. more braindead than brainwashed

number me among the decadent innocents.

this soy dream stuff arrived on the scene less than a week ago. already i’ve eaten 3 pints and a quart. it is, dare i proclaim, the best vegan ice cream ever invented. better than tofutti. no joking. tofutti is tasty, yes, most delicious indeed, but it isn’t very interesting to eat. its consistency is consistently soft and spongy; i am even tempted to refer to it as "frothy" for some reason. in any case it offers no resistance. it isn’t dense enough, that’s what it is. everyone knows what ice cream is supposed to do - curl up into a hard, frozen ball in the container so you can keep rotating it around and around with your spoon to scrape forth outer layers of succulent meltiness. and eat them! that’s just what soy dream does. precisely what. tofutti can’t do this. nor can rice dream. soy delicious is the only other one i’ve met with the right consistency for globularliness, but it doesn’t taste any good and none of its flavors have anything crunchy in them. this is where soy dream takes the cake. i’ve so far tried strawberry, butter pecan, and mint chocolate chip. they are all very delicious. my dying wish is that someone someday will put vegan ice cream in a rectangular carton with a pull-off strip and weak seams that it’ll sweat through. i have always been enamored with the idea of rectangular ice cream.

the grocery store boy and i had a falling out. it was over matters such as these. i wish i had the chance to apologize. right now. i wish i knew his name so i could call him on the telephone and say i’m sorry. i was there a night a few weeks ago wanting, very badly, a pint of vanilla almond bark.. because sometimes i really like eating ice cream that tastes rancid and curdled and sweet and creamy all at the exact same moment (with almonds!). but i peered through the freezer door only to see an empty shelf where the tofutti once made its home. my feelings sank, as if standing on fishes. and i trudged up to the place where you pay for your groceries, and grocery store boy cried, "what, no muffins?" gosh i like him. i always mumble unhappy thoughts when i come too late and miss the good muffins - they’ve all been snatched up. he listens with a sympathetic face; he consoles me with promises of new days and new muffin opportunities. sometimes he pretends to be a fortune teller and will predict what kinds of vegan muffins they shall bake tomorrow. usually he says peach or raspberry because he knows those are my favorite breeds. i get very excited about that. he once predicted snowflake-flavored muffins. i liked that so much i’ve come up with a plot to get the register to print out receipts that say snowflake-flavored muffins. it would be poetry.

one time i asked him what happened to the zucchini chocolate chip muffins and he said they had gone the way of the passenger pigeon. "which way is that?" i asked, pretending not to know. "heaven," he said somberly, "they’re with jesus now." i looked stricken. "tell jesus to get his mitts off my muffins!" then we hatched a plan to martyr ourselves and become muffin saints so we could go to heaven and swipe all the deceased muffins from off the clouds. that is how i got my secret name: judas iscarrot muffin. my co-op is not a very busy place.

but back to the story at hand!

oh nevermind. i’m making this all up anyway. anyone can see that. i don’t have any friends. not at the grocery store or anywhere else. god i’m dumb.

- - -

april 26.

i've been reading the diary of vaslav nijinsky. it's really good. i wouldn't've thought of it but i saw a puppet production of petrushka a few weeks ago, and there are those lines from frank stanford i always have in my head (because none of you know what you want follow me / because I'm not going anywhere / I'll just bleed so the stars can have something dark to shine in / look at my legs I am the Nijinksy of dreams)

that is what his voice sounded like, except he would tell you he was a bird, and a tree, and tolstoy and jesus. all in the same sentence. i think he was a vegetarian. i still want to learn russian someday.

i feel sick and thirsty and i keep thinking about boats. i wanted a glass of milk today, for the first time in four years. i don't know why. i had a memory of it being the coldest thing in the world.

today we rode up in the hay field. the iodine stung us at the same time.

ok, forget saving animals or writing stories or making a friend or making blackberry cobbler. all i want is for my toilet to flush, completely, every 3 or 4 days. that is my only desire.

- - -

april 25. easter postcards, cloudy eyes

after school today, i went to seward for brownies & a blackberry shake. i sat in the big room with the old piano and everyone else was outside. it made me lonely for the time when music tapes were here. it’s almost been a year but some places in minneapolis are still tinged with their kisses. the warmth makes it that much more tangible - it is honestly a thing i’d forgotten about.

it was june. julian was cold. it was june. i could never live in georgia again. it broke into the sixties today and i sat on my bike on the corner of the street thinking it was all i could handle. deeply disturbed by the thought of it getting any warmer.

i still have dreams about julian every few months. usually he appears at my grandma’s house in milledgeville, moving his belongings in or out - going whichever way i am not. our paths cross as he packs clothes into a steamer. but the perniciousness of saying things out loud, ever - in a dream last night i touched his hair. association with julien donkey-boy and abandoned ghost town inhabited entirely by burros. i think i’m starting to confuse my own symbolisms.

reassuring that i actually felt things later in the day. though i don’t remember what they were.

there is a large hill in the middle of the cemetery with a big statue of jesus on top of it, which is lit up at night... my friends and i used to wander up there in the middle of the night and make-shadow puppets on jesus, clearly visible from the main road.

dream the geometry of a lunar eclipse.

i woke up at eight o'clock and pedaled to the co-op in my nightgown. warm and blue and almost cloudless. i don't know. i try to be thankful. i miss december. well, being overwhelmed by things - it is like being inhabited. you can say something about anything; it all holds such importance. grey water and locusts of snow. you are alive at the same time as it, overemotionalizing. i confuse or mistake this for happiness but it makes no difference, just so long as i feel alive and something, for a second, hinges me to the rest of the world.

or the weather changes nothing. i almost broke up in the car last night thinking about whether i could go to femmes show on thursday and it suddenly had something to do with having never spent any time with my sisters. i really can't explain how stupid this is. triggered by some mention at dinner of the way people greet one another in newfoundland.

- - -

april 24.

i touched the old wound. it was hard. it felt like a claw.

the music was in the other room. the other room was full of birds, trumpets. i stood in front of the mirror pinning up my hair - i said i named myself after a disease.

these are my sisters, anemia and algolagnia (disguised as goslings).

suddenly the room began to fill with smoke. my groin had sprung a leak!

hans brinker skirts disaster with a wad of well-placed roughage and an iceskate to the left temple.

and only weeks before the guns all came and rained on everyone

the bed is a bakery. covers and blankets full of light. we lift our heads to the landscape at more or less the same time.

i dust the sheets with powdered talc and fling myself into them, like a doughnut.

listen! bells with human tongues.

- - -

april 23. vomit grows on vines at night

i could take on the personalities of a thousand different mice..

drinking orange juice makes me feel brainwashed. it really does. i would never, on my own, have thought of buying orange juice, but i saw an orange juice commercial at my parents' house last weekend and've since bought three boxes. and drank them.

mysteriously enough, eating butter pecan ice cream also makes me feel brainwashed.

orange juice! i want orange juice.

orange juice is five dollars.

- - -

april 21.

remember a day like this when a storm was coming and we crawled into the hayloft to be closer to the clouds. you paused on the rung above me - i got a good whiff of your ankles and they smelled like milk. it made me nauseous. i shoved you through.

the light is what holds everything so still. it has weight, a geometry. it hangs like a cloud of heavy bees above the spilt hay. i see bright particles move inside. a palace of white bees coughing dust and chalk.

we waded out, moving our arms instinctively, like paddles. knee-deep we were, as if we’d been hitched there, and the bales stacked around us, above us - bales, lungs, ankles. dry lung of the nettles. it contains mildew and a still white light. it does. it does! you don’t believe me.

donkeys, i whisper. let’s pretend we’re donkeys.

you stare at me with those bakeless eyes. your morning spent in mammary... bells, lungs, nettles. a mouse builds his nest under the hollow of your foot. because you will always be there. you will always be anywhere and everywhere that i am not.

i wonder what it feels like for one ice cube to touch another.

if it is warm once as they melt and sweat themselves into nothing.

you fish candy skulls from your pocket and deposit them in your own skull, by way of the mouth. their features dissolve. we stare at each other. we stay inside ourselves. all silent except for the sound of candy rolling between your teeth. cat eyes and bottles. like the music inside a pitcher of lemonade.

velvetville was nice - the lobsters sought their revenge in the afterlife.

i saw thaddeus. i know he saw me too. i was walking out and he was standing there waiting for his girlfriend. it’s weird - i didn’t even have to look at him to know he was there. and i guess i didn’t want to. i went outside and hurried to my car, but of course he and his dumb girlfriend ended up walking right past me on the sidewalk.. so close i heard his voice. again. i wonder if he still plays swans after the store closes at night. i wonder if he’s still in love with mary timony.

it doesn’t matter so much.. i just hate how nothing people are to each other. this mutual ignoring stuff having grown wearisome.

somewhere in the day, i pause to polish my ears.

It occurs to me that the most accessible currency in the world today is that of waste. I am convinced that waste itself is in most cases the sole result of a lack of imagination.

- - -

april 20.

i think i hold some sort of world record for the number of times i've been called "mealy-mouthed."

my vomiting beard record has arrived!

..along with some nice drawings which certain kids who like certain really wonderful music might appreciate.

time to eat asparagus and take a bath.

today i had the urge for the first time ever to submerge my entire head in a toilet. the basement bathroom is cool and dimly lit, and there's a picture of a jellyfish taped to the door. i went down there and poured iodine all over my hand because i have this huge leaking blister - realized after doing so there was an expiration date on the bottle, 1986.

- - -

april 19.

there are birds who fly through my window like pastry boxes with warm black wings. a candle for the deep water. they have an altitude, liquidity. put stars on his feet. he is very quiet and always sits by my side.

people are bold & happy today. not me. i wake up in my bed and watch the walls for some sort of signal. a reason to move. chocolate pillow stripes. do not count.

lend me your voice, your life. your eyes like dark places where disease has chewed through.

last night i saw a raccoon!

- - -

april 18.

today in holocaust class they made us dance with each other.

i wish my name were shulamith.

- - -

april 17.

powder moth save my page

daydreams about being in the hospital (i always think i have to elicit some sort of pity). remember after we moved to minnesota telling people i had to get cortisone injections in my spine. i made up all these elaborate diseases for myself - it was the only way i could communicate some sort of suffering. i've yet to invent anything better. i haven't been trying very hard.

best friend update:
s: (admiring new shoes, one black, one the color of blueberry yogurt) "did you take your shoes to the cobbler?"
bf: (non-committal laugh)
hurray for friendship! hurray hurray!

regress into the blue language.

- - -

april 16.

mmm. lorca and gingersnaps!

ok, i feel sick.

i want to go hunt for seashells. it's snowing.

- - -

april 14.

i’m staying at my parents’ house to keep chelsea company while they’re out of town. there’s way too much food here. accursed blueberry gingerbread! you hurt me.

so far, besides eating, i’ve hacked up my hair with a really sharp pair of scissors, read don quixote on the roof, and sat here watching the animal channel on mute with isn’t anything playing in the background, repeatedly, i don‘t even want to know for how many hours. it's kind of soothing except every time i walk in the room where the tv is it looks like the lions and zebras are on fire.

when the television in the other room came on by itself, i hoped for a ghost. i bounded down the hallway hoping it would smell like almonds and cough powdered sugar out of its lungs. it turned out hen had just chewed the remote control in half.

driving through the country. people are burning leaves. dogs run around the fire with their tongues out.

stand at the window all morning staring at the sidewalk where my bicycle is hitched. the weather feels like fall in atlanta. i watch people walk past my bike, i watch the "world" move around it. my bicycle seems like the most cognizant thing. it takes on such a meditative pose when motionless; i think it must be remembering its former lives. ancient rest. ancient sense of wander. i've always thought my bicycle had an inner stillness that others did not.

i look into a beacon of light on a windshield across the street even though it hurts my eyes and makes me nauseous. ugh! i want to ride my bike! tired of sitting in this store every weekend..

me and my bicycle, we share a secret language. some tales do not need tongues in order to be told.

so now i'm dreaming about this boy i had a crush on in middle school. last night we were walking home through the leaves, always looking at each other but pretending not to. we were living without parents. something about how he uses the girls' bathroom - i find this attractive. flooded feeling, and horses. i live in an old crumbly place with a green door. i spend a lot of time messing with the lock even though it's very simple. i walk in and the leaves pour through with me. the boy is already there - his lunchbox is sitting at the bottom of the stairs. i put my hand over my left eye and run down the steps and past him; i collapse in the doorway.

(sitting here trying to remember this more clear and bert will not stop talking about starvation-induced doughnut hallucinations)

- - -

april 13.

white walls. high time. bedrails beside me. suddenly, a thought. i wonder what my new friend is doing! maybe he would like to come over and play outside!

the screen door slams behind us and we’re running through other people’s backyards. the owls and the slugs - their eyes touch you in a dream. one or two leaves gather in me; we jump a fence. what visions in the dark of light. your throat! your stocking feet! we collapse under trees. their branches like locked antlers. i remember how, when i was in middle school, i would never get off the bus at my own house. i liked the way it felt to walk down someone else’s driveway, and onto someone else’s front porch.. i did that for three years, telling the bus driver i was in charge of feeding the neighbor’s cat. we’re only here to feed the cats! we screech with laughter. we climb the front steps and breathe on their windows. what was it like to be somebody else? an imperceptible tremor. i take your paw. your fingernails will hatch in the spring. we imagine to cover the ground in this special way.. rapt before the sky. look! clouds! the wind herds them together. they move quickly. i wonder where they’re going. the ocean, i suggest, except it’s still winter. we imagine the cold sand underfoot. every inane thing coming to an end.

then i remembered he was not really my friend. i lay back down. my stomach hurts. the heart starts to sicken itself.

prone in bed. there is always that.

i don't want to go to a show at some smelly bowling alley anyway.

happy 6th un-new year's eve to waste!

- - -

april 12.

if i ever have a boyfriend i think i'll make him wear a nightgown to bed.

hen could barely stand up this morning. she had to go to the vet. pretty much she is ok.. something about the weather exacerbated an old racing injury in her neck. she has to take medicine and NO WALKS for four days.

right now she’s asleep on top twenty mattresses and twenty more eiderdowns.

my last dream this morning was of flying in and out of a geodesic dome. it was in an old building where the hallways were sunken fifty feet below the doors. i liked it there.

so’m going to bennington. i got my own loan. my ma started crying tonight because she doesn’t want me to leave. i brought her a piece of cake to wipe her tears on.

maybe the summer will be long and peaceful.

- - -

april 11.

i had a dream about emily dickinson masturbating with a pair of sugar tongs. there were vultures around her bed.

All you had seen was cloud. So now you hoard it in your heart with the rest.

onwards again with my dear bicycle in the rain. no longer cinched to death in a scarf or crowded with coat and mittens. i love riding my bike. i don't care if i never see the sun again - this is fine, fine stuff.

- - -

april 10.

the rain has caused an unconscious convergence with the past.

all day yesterday i had this notion of "voice syrup" - i wrote it in my notebook and underlined it, then added, "i was born indoors." i kept on thinking about that even when i was trying to go to sleep. i put lots of things in there and maybe they will mean something someday.

it rained tonight. i had to dig my rainjacket out of the closet with a broom - it was buried there from a forgotten time when things could fall from the sky and not be frozen. while i was walking hen, i felt a folded up piece of paper in one of the pockets. there was a story i’d written on it. i read it when i came inside. it made reference to "unintelligible speech syrup."

which doesn’t prove much, except that i think the same things all the time no matter how many months or years may pass. which i already knew.

my rainjacket still has my name and telephone number written in it from when i went to camp. my telephone number was 256 9-buffalo-5. i always thought that was the greatest thing. i didn’t know ANY other kids with buffaloes in their telephone numbers. i still don’t. i know kids with demonic telephone numbers!

buffaloes are better than demons.

i think it’s cute how bennington includes a pre-paid envelope for you to send them your $500 deposit in.

also today i saw my new friend (he was in cuba painting capybaras and cloud rats on the side of a church) and ate pizza and CAKE!

- - -

april 9.

resurrection of december. this weather has me feeling so heavy.

phantom scents lately. sunday night was of the chicken factory. i thought i was smelling the moon. this made sense because i spent the day in a van with our hens - they were rattling their feet against the door; sound familiar from the factory but one they never made aboard the pirate ship. they were happy pirates.

today was like i would be walking through the bookshop and suddenly smell a donkey. for just a moment. and then it was gone.

i will have to start keeping a list of these ghostly smells.

the raisin bran is all gone. i redeemed myself with muffins and a three dollar slice of pie.

- - -

april 8.

i think it is difficult to look at the moon without having a boat to row under it.

boy do i feel sick.

the elephant six orchestra is the adding machine, interpreting the major's "compositions" and instructions to create a world of beards vomiting and birthing.

- - -

april 6.

today i went to a normal grocery store instead of the co-op. there was an old woman in line buying beef and cake mix.

from now on i'm trying to save money. i had raisin bran and lemonade for dinner. i wanted pizza with green olives. it would be better not to eat at all. i hate shitty food.

rain at night. the trees perspire. there's rabbit fur floating through my room like dandelions..

- - -

april 5.

i walked through the rain with one eye.

i lay on the floor playing my accordion.

there were moths in the bellows. weighed down by desire. they couldn't fly.

i saw the dinosaur balance my hip socket on his nose. it looked like the moon. his eyes were full of broken spokes.

hospital.waste.org is my favorite. i think it is lucky.

I, at any rate, catching the mood of the badger, went on my way again with a skip and a hop.

looking through the windows where they were born. amidst the stares of the living. those dark eyes wiped their clay on us.

- - -

april 4.

i undressed him.. his bones were like peeled almonds.

(we used to wake up and type each other our dreams)

we go down to the river. there are men and geese and ropes.

the geese are tying the men to cement blocks.

alone.

i walk under the trees at night and know i don't really want to leave. i wish i could crawl out of this feeling like it was someone else's nightgown.

favorite underpants r.i.p.

- - -

april 3.

The girls were not really suffered from starvation and thirsty.

eventually fell asleep after a few hours of thinking about nothing worthwhile: i plotted a grocery list for tomorrow, dreamt of sharing a sleeping bag with someone (teeth in the soft part of the neck above the collarbone), and thought about rubbing a cheese grater against my stomach. i had a dream with anteaters on the playground. like christmas eve. billy corgan was going to be on the television and he'd grown all his hair back.

now brightly lit 4am. gesture of seagulls flying.

it feels good outside. i wish i had someone to play with. i don't see what i used to.. winter's put its clouds and cataracts in my eyes. other people would have some other vision and make the world that much bigger.

haven't even been able to read since i got back. i lie in bed with the book turned to a page on my chest and stare up at the ceiling, imagining things. i came home and did this and it was worse than usual. i mean it's tangible now. i can't sing; it hurts, it hurts.

sometimes you come so close to saying something you can feel its shape in your mouth.

i sure am thirsty.

it warms. tires the heart. slow blood in shallow water.

got out on bike for first ride to river of the season. today was free mitten day at seward. i got mittens with teeth-picking slits in the palms. they smell like drugs. i had a blackberry shake.

never before this feeling of being alive at the same time as other people. in lawrence, i went to their co-op for dinner that night because the place called herbivores wasn’t there anymore. the person who made my sandwich came to the bright eyes show, which i’d somehow anticipated the moment i saw him. i could see how the dreams made their way rustling like milksnakes at tremendous speed just an inch or two above the ground. well they would go like shadows. under fences and everything when the sky was threatening. very excited feeling of late afternoon; grey and grey and grey.

like correspondence. remember sitting outside during soundcheck and playing saw with the movement of a hand. no one really acknowledged me except a kid who said, "what the fuck? is that a saw?" "better to cut your arms off with," i replied, and offered him cookies from a brown paper sack. i never did finish all those cookies. four dozen of them, with pecans from my grandma’s house.

but i’ve been having dreams about him. i don’t know. these moments did not surge back sharply as such birds starting up from the road.

- - -

april 2.

today i made up a joke. it goes like this:

q. "what do you call not being able to get out of bed?"
a. "prostrate trouble."

i thought it was funny.

life sure is messy when you actually want to be alive.

i still have dreams. bigger than cake. i'm not ready to go rot somewhere.

- - -

april 1.

i want to rub cookies against my bare eyes.

my parents won't co-sign for a student loan and i don't have enough credit to take one myself. "maybe the psychology department at the university of minnesota has a group where you could get some sort of counseling."

ah.

- - -

march
february
january
& december
& norris & the dreaded biscuits