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february 28. you sat up in your childbed to confront a mirror that gave back everything i want to go to the prairie and lie down and let the snow cover me. i want to die with the clouds and the badgers. in bed at 6 tonight. no particular reason. i dream of the end of life. a drab chill house. the dark colors of georgia after a storm’s passed through. remember my grandmother unable to sleep. at the kitchen table in her lace and bonnetry. she sits on erect and rigid in the deepening gloom, her spine against the spindles. midnight glass of iced tea like fecal water. i lie under the covers holding eeyore against my stomach. last cold warm light of winter shines through the seams of the room. struggling with how i’ll find time for things in the next few days. i arrange the hours, the obligations, the time it takes to travel from one misery to the next.. and some great need swells up inside me. to have empty days again. to make long walks nowhere in particular.. to walk and walk until the hours are lost. approaching dark-fingered trees; looking back and recognizing a place i used to be. was it ever like this? some memory stirs the blankets. i am between dreams. i stare into the dark, listening to the plodding clockery. i could be anywhere. waking up in depressed stupor. ready to live that mood. at 7 o’clock i go outside with hen and the first breath of night is over me. gorgeous night. first feeling of life continuing. i see a place between earth and all the clouds. a bright crescent. a few stars. sky clean and lavishly inky, like after bathing with an octopus. moment filled with beautiful country feelings.. a longing for. i walk past my favorite tree, dark against the still-colorful sky. this view intensely familiar, like a dream i once stumbled through. i know it is a kindred spirit to the tree in gaylord, in august.. that night still tangible. high-spirited falling through the pastures. the sad part of feeling good is having no one to share it with. think how much bigger you could make the world with other people... even the tiniest moments have held a certain kindness, countervailing loneliness. i remember a small touch after being told to buckle up and just about break down in tears. somewhere. it wasn’t a bad winter... and the song said let's be happy, i was happy, it never made me happy before. and the song said don't be lonely, it makes me lonely, i hear it and i'm lonely more and more. where i belong, where i belong.. took hen out at 2am last night and someone on my street was shoveling their sidewalk. i have a dream called the symphony of runaway girls. we play the saw and chase after people with torches and die with ribbons in our hair. boys can come too, if they're pretty. february 27. winter has changed the voice of the world. even the crows have given up calling to each other. i thought of olympia yesterday, how there was so much beauty every time i left my apartment.. following hills into huge parks full of trees and porcupines. sometimes i try to remember what i did in olympia and can’t remember anything. unable to hold on there. persistent feeling of non-presence tonight. sometimes i try with all my might to hear them, to understand, to have it mean something. no. but i get in the car to drive home, and listen to a record that i love.. and i feel there, and the music is like being with someone. and i can’t decide if i’m comforted or frightened by this feeling that books and records are my only friends. i’d like someone to come along.. just someone. i really don’t care. just someone who liked me. the problem seems to be i don’t have anything to say to other people. and people don’t want to be friends with people who don’t want to talk. this, if nothing else, i remember. someone who liked silence and books and peach cobbler and clouds. someone did come along one time. i never asked if he liked peach cobbler. i don’t think that was the point. i stopped caring what the point might’ve been. it was late in the summer and we were lying in his room, and i can’t remember if it was morning or night when he said something about touching me that seemed to imply something else. i’d almost forgotten about this. no wonder. i’m cold. i’m boring myself. i’m going to go read. told of the hoofsteps on rooftop that beckon you when you're alone... certain that late last night, someone came into my room and said my name. it woke me up. i said "what?" in a very i-do-not-want-to-be-awake-right-now sort of voice. it was like being woken up by parents again, which is a thing i'd forgotten about. dreamt of my mouth full of braces and retainers again. a group of 12 year old girls are talking about how there are so many jewish kids at their school. one girl says "maybe they'll turn up the gas," and i start crying. another scene takes place at the grocery store. i'm buying blueberries. i don't have enough money. lay in bed with hen all morning instead of going to school. now i will get some breakfast. february 26. cumulonimbus is a breed of clouds. note to self: obtain candelabra, tree, tree swing. and candles. some appraiser guy just walked through my house. i was sitting in my room typing on the computer. he asked me how much my rent was. "four seventy-five," i said. i paused, then added, "it costs a lot to be alone." i should have that written on my gravestone. february 25. no intercourse, no tobogganing, no admittance. it would be a nice day to have a friend. we could go tobogganing and bake lemon bars and watch the journey of natty gann and have sexual intercourse. well, provided that person had a television set. february 24. it wasn't my life, it was a dream. memories surfacing like whales. the first thing that i know really happened, that i still see sometimes, is the corgi being buried in the woods. it was fall. all brown everywhere. i was standing in the backyard, sense of leaves burning. my dad told me to say goodbye. he put him in a wheelbarrow and went down the red path past the railroad ties. i was four. the woods were full of ghosts. i went to sleep and the bedframe was creaking like boarding a ferry. i felt it put out under my weight. my body had food in it. it was 3 after midnight and i was tired of having dreams about cancer. some nights are like christmas eve without even knowing it. i leaned out over the breath of the river.. i named myself the dark-eyed passenger of sleep. when i walked outside this morning my lawn penguin was up to his teeth in snow. all felt so alive. i opened the store a little late and sat for hours without the lights on. no one came in. i smiled without telling myself to smile. i'd gotten an email from one of my favorite people in the whole world. there is something i wanted to ask your imagination for help with.. the old man who works here came in around noon. i hadn't even put together the morning's deposit yet. "I see... sitting in the dark listening to Low," he remarked. (actually it was not low. it was yo la tengo's very beautiful last record. but i kept it to myself.) february 23. each window too bright tonight. i want to smash all the streetlamps that prevent my bunny from dreaming. seems i have a name: species dysphoria. delightful. february 22. Foot-and-mouth disease, which generally strikes cloven-footed ruminants like sheep, pigs, goats, deer, Satan, and camels, is a wildly contagious viral illness that can be spread through even minimal contact with infected animals, farm equipment or meat. february 21. i know people for years, for a lifetime, and never move any closer. i eat a lot. i doze in chairs. suicide ribbon still tied to the donkey’s tail. some part of me this year prepared itself for a word from someone, and if it came and left we were distracted, already watching a grey passel of clouds congregate in the sky. or we could not believe it meant what we wanted it to, more than anything. we sat in our house like it was a house of ghosts. i suddenly feel resplendent in my rocking chair. it’s almost like halloween. never been so lost at sarah sea. night brings back the clarity of years. sometimes i touch my body; i cannot ascertain where it begins or ends. these deeply felt moments, the infinite moods. i thought i was feeling the world changing. i was only feeling myself. it is the fantasy of the child, and those who are fond of sleep. as though... and through the night. the springtimes needed you. anyone want to buy me a, um, unbirthday present? moment of clarity sitting by the window like warm months when squirrels used to come. accompanying low with rustle of pants against a cardboard box. no one knows where you are, and no one thought you'd ever get that far. for dinner i shall either have soy-boy raviolis or a pizza. may i nibble on your ear? thought someone was being flirtatious until i realized, a few hours later, that this was in response to my comment that i felt like "one of those hollow chocolate bunnies that's just a shell and doesn't taste that good to begin with." can't remember anything. sitting on the floor already late for school. i want to go ride my bicycle. february 20. an elephant can smell a broken
heart up to three miles away trying to hold on he was made with the heart of a cookie. my list of beautiful things:
looking out the window of a silent house late at
night feelings of embarkment, unfoldment horses going to bed my electric blanket my old bicycle escaping through bountiful fields of corn belief that you will someday wake up as a badger instead of a girl (or boy) joseph cornell samuel beckett edward scissorhands "freeing song by reindeer" "engine" remembering insignificant things that suddenly seem to mean the whole world eating breakfast with someone you like "the collector of moments" watching leaves becoming lost to creation ascension of geese descension of clouds dissension of clouds resurgence of memory feeling like the earth is uninhabited
made myself sick and trembly tonight eating
six
doughnuts at one breath. right now i feel on the verge of vomiting, or
crying, or both. can feel it in my wrist. god.. i promise i would try to
talk if you'd let me have someone to talk to. i don't want this anymore.
i probably haven't for years. i don't do anything about it. it "can't
go on," but it will. because i let it. sometimes i pretend the whole of my self is contained in the stomach, where it is warm and protected from the wind. sense of being on the threshold of some spiritual ascension.. very tangible lifting all morning in class, meditation on leaping goose-like from the roof on warm, wavering night. real magic of this months ago on the prairie.. night moving towards perfection, purification. suppressed by horrible feeling of other people as a great heaviness in the midst of one of those extraordinary plunges towards earth. their disbelief. their veils. february
19. disembodied stomach feelings. i imagine lying in a field of spinach. Living in silence, endlessly unfolding, using space without space being taken free rein/free reign? (i'd always thought it was the former until i saw it used in print today.. reign still implies control to me moreso than reins, which should only be used in extreme circumstances such as careening into walls or prickly flocks of bramble trees) persisting sepulchral awareness, a blocking. dead morning/dead afternoon something about childhood for some of the windows. bewildering neverending crises upon crises.. seeing my shoes on the floor and knowing i'll have to step in them and go try to live. repellent. numerous views in sleep of descending trees revealing squirrel and crow nests. memories of backyard wood in atlanta without ever any leaves. very monotone, grey, but always a rising above.. really magnificent dead place filtering sunlight like through brown wings. like memories from entirely different life. such feelings of ever-rustling light and bedraggled sleepiness in the leaves.. it really is like the dream of a previous life from which i have died. She may, in fact, be carrying the shadow in almost every situation she enters. If she voices what she feels, she becomes a threat to everyone, so that she begins to experience herself as a Cassandra. She learns to keep her mouth shut and articulate her thoughts through pen in secret. The real personality is in the writing. This may lead to salvation or destruction. lay in bed for hours this morning until realizing i had ingredients to make a sandwich. february 18. i just spent like two hours looking for a pen pal. didn't find one. not even on the bipolar pen pals site. life is getting too long. i think i should have sexual intercourse. today i ate a loaf of pecan raisin bread, desiccated mangoes, and a chocolate raspberry bar. i drank tangerine juice and vanilla soda. my animal rights group never gets anything accomplished because the only thing we know how to do together is fill our faces with food. vomitous day. might as well be dead when i can't write. i am not a simple salmon, and i was not a simple girl. february 17. feeling very ill. like i'll never be warm again. couldn't set my mind to anything at work today. talked to this old man about what sort of cake would be waiting for us in heaven. carrot cake, i hoped. strawberry shortcake. vegan cheesecake and pulsating pants pie. quiet this morning. dawned clear and colder than before. even my clock's stopped ticking. strong evocation of cold mornings in atlanta, november and december.. reassurance and continuity.. supposed to go stand in a cage. february 16. dream of the salmon maiden nineteenth century fashion to send out funeral announcements accompanied by various pieces of the corpse. for mine, i think, little vials of stomach acid for people to grow sentimental over.. minneapolis is starting to seem like a really stupid place to live. or maybe i just need a sofa. i was thinking that today... that i should have a sofa. an old velvety one with its guts spilling out. i wonder if i would ever sit on it. a new place to read would be nice. i'm sick of reading in bed because i always fall asleep. i have a tendency towards mad fits of napping. sent in my application for scholarship to bennington.. ongoing pipe dream. unaffordable even if. some pipes you see, some pipes you don't. badgers blowing soap bubbles on the brink of february. february
15. "Tell me, whom do you love the most, you enigmatic man? your father, your mother, your sister, or your brother?" "I have neither father, nor mother, nor sister, nor brother." "Your friends?" "There you use a word whose meaning until now has remained to me unknown." "Your fatherland?" "I am unaware in what latitude it lies." "So! Then what do you love, you extraordinary stranger?" "I love clouds... drifting clouds... there... over there... marvelous clouds!" driving hurts. i can't stand anymore the feeling of being propelled forward, it's like my ears are going to gush blood. kind of compulsive night.. went out to mail a letter and ended up spending forty dollars on new books and then to the office for some reason, looking for company i guess. nobody home. constellations move through the night sky like animals spinning on a carrousel... temporarily blind. days without wind, days without sunlight, days without speaking. years. i can feel my bones coming back. large blocks of dark ice like a statuary of swans. no temperature at all today. neither cold nor warm. around the block in my pajamas. february 14. marley tharn has just discovered the joy of eating shoes. i remain cold and indifferent. it is occasionally useful to speak. tonight someone was buying the notebooks of malte laurids brigge and i pointed out that "that is such a great book." the person asked if i'd read a book william gass wrote called reading rilke, which no i had not, which no i hadn't even known of! but thank you so much. i will not hang myself tonight after all. february 13. the trees would hold us like a dark room. the trees would never die. "what kind of adventure should we go on?" "a search for love and pinecones and stomach cancer." stupid gratitude for the frosty bedroom upon arriving home tonight. it wasn’t enough. even better miseries approaching. once, we lay there without moving. but under us all moved, and moved us. maybe it heard the possible tramples in our feet and breaths. drowned in dreams and burning to be gone. i realize now that might suggest i wanted to leash you to the end of a pale blue ribbon. me and my pony better known as the frozen statue of the north went riding one day to a deep wood where we found a frozen mirror. the pony wanted a drink so we fell in; we became an iceberg in a great black sea where there was never any light, only the stars to keep us warm. never knew such silence. zero which isn't a number at all but puts young girls to sleep. past midnight. the earth might be uninhabited. february
12. Winter on Kangaroo Island reluctance to say it. first year of real imperviousness. experiencing a world of emotions that no one else cares about. that no one else is a part of. exhilarating. meaningless. surely the rest of life will be just the same. surely. but with more trees. return and departure. a vocabulary of birds. sometimes i think i would set my house on fire just so it’d smell sort of different. nothing to say now, not a squeak. dream returning to bookstall/ice cream parlor half a mile from the sea. previously visited--the sand, the coast is covered with a to-scale road atlas. navigation occurs as on the surface of a colorful board game. i recognize the place in massachusetts as a reoccurring destination; i have been there in other dreams clamoring for vegan ice cream. this time they have mint chocolate chip which they dish up in an elaborate sort of chalice with extraordinarily long spoons. having arrived already swollen with ice cream, i request a ginger ale. i sit in the parlor for a long time, possibly years; i watch the seasons change. it is eternal daytime and the sky replete with mare’s tails seems to signal a vast insignificance... i crawl out once or twice. i wander around. in the bathroom are huge swinging toilets covered with white feathers like swans. not actually seeing these.. it still seems really grotesque and there’s a vague connection to daycare center near the airport; never being able to sleep with the noise of planes taking off all the time. repellent. eventually being with someone besides the ginger ale. we drive and drive and never see the ocean. february 11. i would drown quickly. rustling between rooms. Take advantage of the lack of cover in fields to watch flocks of lapwings and small golden plovers. Spot two species of partridge, and if you're lucky, hares, who are just beginning their courtship. someone has broken you so utterly. february 10. t let t equal all the trees in the world. please? february 9. out of dreams emerges an improbable body with drowned fingers and eeyore-colored eyes looking up through the ocean. it is small enough to remove from the world.. seeing the silence of two friends.. the sound of which is no sound like a careening phantom ship piloted by the glossary of frozen rain. www.kranky.com is a muffin company, so stop bothering them unless you want food. actually i used to have a kranky records sticker on my car that said "honk if you hate people too". it was nice. absence or presence of love in a given lifetime. the one-note piano now that we’re grieving our fingers will falter our lungs will be leaking all over each other without even speaking we’ll know that it’s over and smile and go greeting whatever comes next my bunny rabbit might break my collarbone, but she will not break my heart. this doesn't make me nearly as happy as it should. i bet beavers could build a geodesic dome. february 8. i’ve become somewhat partial to a non-dairy beverage named almond breeze. it’s haunted. i hear the lost souls of almonds. there’s a picture of some sort of cake on the back of the carton that makes me so hungry. sometimes it’s nice to leave the bedroom. i went to see low tonight and cuddled with the wall. they played a song about airplanes that i'd never heard. now i am cold and lonely and going to bed. accidentally fell asleep in the bath today. february 7. evolving moment after midnight when i want to hear a particular old song. i find the disk and go outside. wash of brightness after the snow. a warmth. a feeling of sloshing through landwash. i play it on the record player in my car, with the doors open and loud enough so it can be heard at a distance, but then it is a soft song to begin with. sadness of comfort of memories. galloping and being able to hear it as many as nine houses away. appreciation for living in quiet, snow-besmirched place. i go back inside and lie on the floor with my feet in the air, head beside loudly ticking alarm clock. sinister thought of sticking mr. anatomy in the snow like a lawn ornament. we came upon a strange place in the deep snow.. the dark blue farmhouse gazing up through infinite overlapping branches... vast voyages of the heart in winter my first girlfriend didn't say much aside from "ice cream!". and then later turned vegan and stopped talking altogether. oh well. nice day of snow and renewal. i feel quite dashing in my new postman pants. galloping across the snow-caked tundra! Humans form a potential "cloud gaggle" and advance with oars. Their movements are stable and unfluttering so as to come rapidly within paddling distance. The moon is out. The grass is feathered. The warm blood around the people hearts invites the geese to drink, to become drunk, to reveal secrets. Those of them standing on the outside have already closed their eyes to the procession. These are young girls, musicians, having robed themselves in the warm clothes and tennis shoes of deceased grandpapa. They are calling to the geese through wooden cones. They try to direct flight elsewhere, motioning with their hands in their pockets. Wind diagrams are rearranged and rotated. Airplane engines are shut off, propellers muted with mattresses, stuffed rabbits, other sleeping implements. The machines fall down and smoke evaporates. For a moment the air is as quiet as it might’ve been a hundred years ago. february 6. day's vacillations between torpor and ecstasy. from the depressed awakening to gradual unfoldment around 3 o'clock. detachment, buoyant feeling. left the house in really agitated state after only twenty minutes in bed trying to recover from entire afternoon of writing.. rather uncomfortable asphyxiated sensation lasting all day. got home much too late in heavy mood and no chance of revival. being around other people like being molested sometimes. i really wish i didn't know anyone. know of anyone, that is. somebody asked me to show them my tattoo for first time tonight.. i didn't have to, but i did. upsetting for reasons unthought about. carrousel was a reference to the past, a purity of desire. in it was the infinite, the impossible. the whirling of heaven and central park. i wait for a day when there is a cleanliness of the spirit. cornell’s carrousel box becomes an unfolding dream. i write at night, to speak of some well-wrought hallucination seen from an attic window smashed and breathing with stars. it contains a moment. the moment lies in february. there is a voyage of the poem before it understands itself. february 5. Flight of polar oxen on the verge
of tears sometimes when i sing at night, i feel others are with me. thoughts of love. overflowing of the dream into real life. i like lobsters. they are quiet, serious, and they know the secrets of the sea. today i got a lobster sewn to my crotch. he is very beautiful, his eyelids stitched with silver thread. when i showed him to my ma she said "I don't think anyone will ever get close enough to tell what that is." "probably not," i said, but i didn't let that get me down. metal rowboats. premonition of oven mitt playing the violin today i bought a bottle of "grouchy and overtired" bubble bath for kids. usually i do not like bubbles in the bath, i like emulsion. however i could not resist the thought of becoming even more grouchy and overtired than i already am. plus it came with a bubble wand. february 4. do you know how to
waltz? let me tell you with the song in my eyes. you are no stranger. lingering impression of previous night’s dream; julian in waste basement standing beneath a bare lightbulb. the moth-like imagery of this. general sense of the room being vacated and waiting for sensor re:engine session at the wrong date or time. also present: jeff mangum and a bathtub. no normally felt feelings of intrusion when i go upstairs. the house seems deserted. more dark and more quiet than is actually possible. kitchen a return to many unslept nights in the old house in atlanta. there are windows above the sink; through them i see snow falling. i climb onto the counter for a better view. splendid feeling of looking out from a dark place like being a raccoon. the front yard’s wintry scene with reemerging kudzu and several birdfeeders. remember the yard was supposedly haunted by chickadees. this reverie interrupted when all at once they return from the pie shop. he says the power was out and they had to climb in through the chimney of a giant oven. i become excited; romantic feelings associated with eating pie in the dark. february 3. shade up slightly, letting a dark room fill its lungs with light. i close one door. i open another. the walls exhale. the room will come alive and tell me things. it has to. there is no one else. my ribs cave in like waves. i try to imagine a world outside. i see a small girl with a lamp and a basket, slipping on the frozen ground, making her way towards the house. she brings the past. windows fall asleep for the first time; the houses begin to dream again. i wander through, past giant tubs full of leftover bathwater, still and dark, like almond milk. i hover over my reflection. angel of death polishing his apples. he looks at me. i am propelled outward by a flood of ghosts. i step off the porch as an illuminated taxi glides to a halt across the street. it stays parked for ten minutes. no one gets in, no one gets out. it is like a ghost ship with lanterns swinging. i lift my eyes. i used to see stars through the trees. the intricate lines in the upper branches spoke between them, making pictures of the constellations. i wanted there to be a message in the sky. the snow brightens. streetlamps explode. plumes of smoke go up and disappear into the firmament. i call back some memory. i let it go. the girl emerges, holding her lantern. from the bottom of the basket flew a huge swan, his delicate body equipped with large wings. he was the most beautiful swan EVER. his feathers were the foliage of stars. he mounted temperature, circled gables. i believe he was carrying newly dead souls to their refuge in the cold crust of the moon. the air smelled like burning marshmallows. tonight i took the voices in my head out for ice cream. they didn't share. every day means less and less. no use pretending. february 2. houseful of rabbits with closed eyes. days waiting. days bruising memories. i woke up hearing this song. it's really for a warmer time.. i know i don't know you i know that we don't think along the same lines but what do i do when i can't reach out through this iron-built bubble of pain your house settled in deep country with acres and a farm and a stream to cleanse me your house with a view of purity overlooks a hillside of green green as your eyes i embrace the moment i'm in love with a dream and toy with ideas that burn deep inside me because a picture is all you are to me a picture is all you'll ever be i know you don't know me a nervous, wordless face brings shade to your light but i want so bad to walk beside you but fall back into a world where i believe i embrace the moment i'm in love with a dream and toy with ideas that burn deep inside me because a picture is all you are to me a picture is all you'll ever be february 1. when it's after dark i lie in bed for a long time, waiting to go under. i put out in the night. buildings on both sides of the river are on fire. your body the world, the watery harbor of sleep. I steal all the light bulbs and hide them like eggs in a basket there in the shade I listen for them to make nests to escape agony and burst waking up to funeral bell, wash of red light on window facing away from the city. january & december & norris & the dreaded biscuits |
