december 14. Vegetable marrow

the transparent part of the sky, the place where everything's been rubbed away, that's the moon. she sleeps beneath it, her face covered with black flowers. the hole in the sky spews sheets of snow. those sea urchin eyes. a halo of ice cream. there's an empty feeling where the lungs should be. she will make a beautiful badger.

day before i’m having teeth pulled. i’ve still got my adolescent teeth; they’re pulling out four of them to make room for new ones. this is the only time where i am ever alone with my father: i’m in the backseat of the car and he’s driving to the liquor store. i’ve got both hands in my mouth, feeling my teeth. i grasp the canines, front and back, trying to gain some physical understanding of their size, more importantly their circumference at the moment they disappear into the gums. because they are not simply pulling my teeth out. i know this. i always kept my ears pricked at the dentist’s office for gory murmurs such as these. they are going to shatter the roots of my teeth. pulverize them, leave fragments, pieces of chalk-colored glass in bloody holes around my head. i’ve been quiet up til now. there is a terror i cannot say. i’ve ascertained that the teeth are enormous, thick as bones. convinced i will die in having these teeth pulled. i start pleading with my da to not make me go, he explodes into a rage and leaves me crying in the car. and i used to have a penchant for those little metal cans of juice. you peeled off a silver ring and drank from a small, rust-flavored slit. bluebird juice. my parents used to bring me one whenever they went to the liquor store. usually grapefruit. my da did not bring me a can of juice that day, or any day after that. i told him i would kill myself before i let anyone smash my gigantic teeth.

there were those few nice moments. i can't remember which ones.

I have to puke my heart out too, spew it up whole along with the rest of the vomit, it's then at last I'll look as if I mean what I'm saying, it won't be just idle words. Well, don't lose hope, keep your mouth open and your stomach turned, perhaps you'll come out with it one of these days.

- - -

december 13. "Blindness and mutilation," she speculated.

humiliated by the things i feel. simply that.

i'm making coffeecake.

sometimes my dreams are so ugly i wake up feeling completely cheated and go right back to sleep, hoping for better luck. this was one such morning: i was pinnochio; i was carrying around this hideous wooden doll, a boy with protruding blue eyes and donkey ears. like a ventriloquist's dummy, but with a mushy groin. i am running from something, maybe my mother. what i want is to have my genitals cut off and placed on a pair of mechanical legs. the final scene takes place in a bathroom, a scene whose motions i've gone through before, in a previous dream or elsewhere: i dash into the bathroom and sit bleeding on the toilet, having forgotten that i'm being chased. at the moment i scramble forward to turn the lock on the door, my mother comes with that repulsive puppet. its eyes rolling around loose inside the hollow head, deafening clicking noises, my mother laughing.

- - -

december 12. The marked

there was a lot of light in the bathwater this morning. i examined my pigment spots.

they used to be more abundant, more prominent. what they’ve grown to be are little more than slightly discolored marks, a splash of white on my left hipbone. but they were everywhere growing up. misshapen splotches ringing my lower abdomen. they were like little pieces of canvas; i used to draw dinosaurs inside them.

i remember my older sister saying no one would ever want to have sex with me, owing to the spots.

it is so time for bed.

- - -

december 11. Impossible to say

out on the street, ice trucks plunging by. i wait for reindeer to guide me home. i have always been sitting here. alone, unblinking, from time to time. nothing has ever changed since i have been here. past happiness in any case gone clean from my memory, assuming it was ever there.

is love the place where one stops vanishing? at night, in winter, listening to the wind saying what it is to be somewhere warm and unglaciated, those low clouds coming down off of existing hills, dragging shadows. what it is to have been what we have been, and sink together, in an unhappiness that has no name.

well i just wouldn't know. but it's a distraction. to be sure.

the bed moves forward on its castors. rails creak, suddenly it lurches towards the window. i look out from my burrow: white skies, clods of dirty fur, a twisting branch and rabbits ascending. i realize i’m cold. the plug on my electric blanket has fallen from its socket. i am absolved, i can stop writing. if you think of the forms and light of other days it is without regret. the body grows fleshier and fleshier.

collie-colored rabbits fly through the air. aimed in the direction of the river, maybe heading towards your house, a whole fleet of them, coming to retrieve a snack.

black rabbits, silver rabbits, palomino rabbits. rabbits drinking clouds. rabbits accompanied by singing saw.

this is sad.

- - -

december 10. Down lobster-laden slopes

a field of bright-eyed belltowers. i have no legs. they’ve been torn off; i must drag myself to the nearest delicacy. with every breath it feels more and more as if spouts of blood are about to come splashing out from my nose. it is so cold. the feathers i get caught in, the clumps and brambles. i slide across the floor to where my donkey has fallen.

cuddly old eeyore doll, his imploding head against my stomach. if only he were a real boy!

the lint and asperities of the flesh. the grey seam along his spine..

i feel very affectionate sometimes but then i think it means i want to tear his stomach open.

i’ve been thinking maybe i could get an extraordinarily long scarf, twenty or forty feet in length, and ride my bicycle down a treacherous slope. the scarf will get tangled in the spokes and i’ll be decapitated instantly. raccoons will eat the teeth out of my head. the blood will never dry.

i can just picture someone slitting me open and all these marbly white sheets falling out. to be done to windy music, almost asleep.

Carrying around all that fat is like having a made-up friend to protect you...

i have often eaten most of my groceries before i even get them home. i should know it’s too cold to be slarfing down gallons of soy delicious, but i don’t. my intestines shivering, packed in ice.

it is so hypnotic, eating with a long ice cream spoon, digging around the edges for something succulent and melty.

i remember once my mom looking at me: "food is not love."

"is too!" big shards of cake clinging to my mouth.

- - -

december 9. putrefying spots and colorless maps of the body

very somber illustration of a moving train without passengers. who lives in the ice city and sends us beautiful packages that we don't deserve.

the dreamer's mouth: wet with stars. i flap my arms and attain a distance of forty or fifty-five feet. i can control direction, but not speed. propelled slowly across the sky. it is as in a basin filled with apples and cold water. it smells this way, and the apples are bouncing off my body like boats.

saint with white feet. a universal invention.

giacometti, his cold fingers forming eyelids. a pale syrup melts over ice. the ashes he must lick off her protruding intestines, like liquid peppermint. does his mouth move at all? is he so unknowable?

what deformed dreams. exit through a reflection in the drain: an empty museum, this long hall with three statues. two of them by a window, faces cast in a diluted light. it is yellow; it must be spring again. warm shadows moving across their eyelids, shadows of cows and horses cropping grass behind the window.

third statue is black, its stomach full of mash.

that is all i could ascertain.

- - -

december 7. The orange toboggan whisking her to certain death

1:33 am, a bright splash of human milk. i wish you could see the sky right now. white with white clouds. a language of snow on the street. feet, birds’ paws. i ride my bicycle through the neighborhood: a single serpentine dividing ice and turrets. these nights are strange, yet somehow lonely, uninspiring. my scarf still wet with spit and exhale.

- - -

december 6. deliver with anointed confidence

The palate is far more revealing than such abstractions as the soul or the mind, which should once and for all be exiled from the language for failing to mean anything.

quiet now the stinking tonsils. the river with its crooked teeth.

i must not know anyone. i’m sure i don’t.

having eaten the effigy, his woolly throat. his linen eyes stitched up with tears.

describe circumstances past and ongoing which are more like the shape and texture of the pain. stomach: tattooed and scented. adam: an abandoned work. looking fixedly at dusty utensils. a wooden spoon, a limb mitten.

years ago, he taught me how to be ashamed of myself for feeling in love. it is still the same. i didn’t forget.

there isn't enough sleep in the world to be gotten.

someone last night suggested that i might be a badger trapped in a girl's body. it coincided with a recent line of thought: that of all the billions of lifeforms to be born into, human was the worst this consciousness could have done. if i had claws and a black snout i would at least know what i was supposed to do with myself, where i should live. the human body is mute, says nothing about purpose. no fins, no wings, no great endurances. none of the senses being particularly suited for anything special. a generic existence, completely meaningless, like that of a fragment of hardened porridge.

- - -

december 5. 1987, cumberland island

the memory is of waking up with my bedsheets in flames. i waited out the night, saw the conflagration of my sleeping sister. a shadow passes over the window: another pelican. the hotel room a box of antique flames. we’re supposed to be leaving the next morning, on a boat, without my parents. they have died in another room. my father’s long black bones.

we are leaving for an island populated by armadillos. wild ponies with hard bellies full of salt. the morning is grey, a sugar-frosted skyline; i’m eating cookies for breakfast, stuffing them in the quilted pockets of my raincoat.

and i have escaped unharmed. countless abrasions on the feet and lungs. a wounded mouth. bits of my burned family in the luggage.

we get back to the hotel and pretend we don’t want to touch each other. i hide behind my hair. chicago, the ferris wheel, all of it on fire. three years wasn’t time enough to forget.

- - -

december 4. Recognition of the flight of time

my heart in the bathtub. all the organs submerged. i duck my head underwater and listen to the amplified clicks, pulses, valves opening and snapping shut. i like bathtime. the wrinkled meat on my hands turning blue.

much like this, except a moth.

it bothers me to fall asleep having heard nothing. there used to be a wind at night, and birds and insects. between it and me the pane, misted and smeared with the filth of years. even snow had a certain sound. i would sit there in the living room, the cold windows breathing on me, through robes and gowns; how snow seemed to come from a dark place just above my head.

the clouds were lower in those days. scudding almost across the ground. i close my eyes. this painting is real or imagined, of yellow fields and dark clouds descending. but beyond the tumult there is a great calm, and a great indifference, never really to be troubled by anything again. animals try to get comfortable the same way, wriggling the spine, lashing out with the feet. in burrows, inside trees, on the sofa. coaxing the vertebrae into the side of a loved one, who is smoking cigarettes, who is watching television. not so much as a pat on the skull. oblivion, i don’t know. the metaphysic energy of never being touched. i turn a little on my side, press my mouth against the pillow, crush the old hairs.

nothing is cozy anymore. i was misled.

- - -

december 3. Have written nothing

honesty of evil thoughts. the simplest explanation would be this. or that. possibly i would lie. or ignore the assumption, i would call him across the street to gaze upon owl-covered doorknobs.

it takes every effort to remember who i've been.

my stupid mouth bleeding. frozen potatoes flying outside the kitchen window. i wish i was with them. i should get hit by a bus while i'm still young.

i decided to start writing things on the internet again. i want a death's head on my gravemarker, and nobody would know that if i died. but now if i die they will come here and read these things and all my wishes will be fulfilled. the internet is very handy that way. although i want to be cremated. could you still please fix me up with a gravestone? it ought to have lichens. and a skull with ornate wings sprouting out of its temples like cabbage leaves. but not a human skull. a moth skull!

i don't know what's wrong with me. very strange circumstances licked my door a few days ago and i can't even write about any of it. except to say i did not obtain proper chapstick, which is why my mouth is bleeding. it's infuriating. how would i live through anything with this body picked up in a lumber room?

maybe there were better days. maybe i was a fool. the nights are all but gone, the certain nights i would come home and invent a moment, through the throat, with a bicycle lamp. it seems like there was much more snow last winter.

good, another failure. i like it. now i get in bed, read a book, will the sun not to rise.

also i wouldn't mind at all if the grave was in a pasture with voles and caterpillars romping across the grass.