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(originally uploaded by bullish1974.)

nothing comes as sudden as melancholy, much like the sound of harmonicas trapped in the throat of old jazz singers. the silence sputters. the silence wheezes. the silence won’t do.

sixty three

i take a bus journey from the suburbs to the center of town (fuck number coding scheme), the fertile fields of learning and comfort. the aquarium sky has a qualitative tension not yet released by the end of the working day.

the bus is all awkward hands and shadowed visuals, the throw of a streetlight and the burst of cold that arrives with new passengers. the dull vibration becomes us.

—-o—-oOo—-o—-

[notes on physical contact]

1. a small man next to me keeps touching my inner thigh with his suitcase.
2. an old lady opposite is breathing the same air as her friend; it is as though their lips are touching.
3. a taller, gaunt man lets his hand linger upon that of a disconsolate office worker’s.
4. without realizing, a sullen youth is probing an old man’s hair with his fingertips.
5. i can’t stop staring at the folds of skin, just above the belt, of that lady.

—-o—-oOo—-o—-

the dull vibration becomes us. the windows are steaming up.

i can see you.

you don’t know who you are. but you are someone who made me cry by reminding me of someone who made me cry. your face suggests circumstance way beyond the obvious chronology. you are the realization of loss, the progression through meaningless symptoms and into rallying surges of feeling, a pleasure unto the unknown, the beautiful distance so far ahead of itself that it no longer becomes a distance.

i think i love you and your drifting landmarks more than the world. i think.

today’s intoxicants

1. fractured cobalt sky; a lot still to be done.
2. our lives played out like nursery rhymes, read by all and full of dirty, laden symbols.
3. conscious effort to not speak of it, to repress the thing (that is, to make the thing as quick as a word).
4. regretful sex–none of it.
5. quiet rage, building from the inside, destroying what we didn’t know.
6. dissatisfaction with the reduction of emotion to clear and succinct phrases. despite the attempted periphrasis and coagulation of specifics, the meaning still presents itself to me as relevant and sharp-felt as a clot in a vessel.
7. noisy neighbours, damn it.

miss of the season

you’d say it was you, missing me.
but i’d vote for
me, missing you.

speakeasy

a word formed itself from my breath.
the condensation weighed a future,
eagerly purchased a nothing,
blossomed in its own sultry environment,
declared a culture all of its own,
and drifted, humming, into the night.

cat got cream and tongue

treacherous life has stolen all my time and money. will rescue soon with deftly placed words and a resumed friendship or two. call all the guards. potency is the regard of the dreamer these days.

xerox

i’m copying you
already. a loneliness
annoyed at a flask
i disappear into the words
you’re hearing
my heart has been asked
to send around faster.
the terms are gone.
can you see me when i stand up
and look around?
some signals
have ladders next to them
is something i won’t be.
i will go into the dark
only if you’re willing to laugh,
a universal staring.

under the weather

i am bound up with illness, there seems to be nothing wrong with this.

i have known illness previously, in times of lost sleep and broken thoughts, the cascade of disillusion where friends fall like dominos, one after the other. i have seen friends dragged into themselves by ambition and pursuit, falling through their own lives. relatives have flown away on wings of solitude and fanciful regrets, thinking that they are coming back when, in fact, every strained sinew drags them further into the skies. medical men wrap them in cures and acronyms, taping bandages to their eyes, the television sings of the modern way and no one likes to ask.

these are the times that, although we have a bed at home, we sleep in the park.