Is this your practice, to build a Technicolour garden around yourself? To whip yourself into crescendo, your arms humming like the wings of small insects? I suppose I have always known that you were bold. I have redeemed the investment of your hands, next time you feel the urge to clap them in prayer you will notice I am holding them. I have taken them as my due price. Kora, Kora, Kora, Kora, Kora, Kora, Kora, Kora, Kora, Kora, Kora, Kora oh how much I sway. When it’s sunny I eat baby carrots on the grass and ponder my size relative to everything else, which sometimes is huge but mostly is small, really tiny, but I don’t mind one bit. See, my throat is loose and willing to abandon its control of my voice. We could sit in silence, if your arms should stop humming. We could pause here motionless with our toes open over the deep, if only your joints would lie still also. See, it’s like this: In Death Valley I led you out of the box of night and you let me have my way with your body. And there, for a while behind the sun soaked wall, perhaps too long, we wept and giggled at the uncertainties. How endless this all is! My chest, you told me, it will only grow weaker from now. It will only ever soften. It will only ever become more remote to everything but itself. My hair, it will thin. My skin will loosen its grip on my jaw. It is written, it is forecast, my heart will sink like a treeless root. It is all true and I don’t care. But you are terrified that your red hair will rust and your eyes shrink. You stand in the side streets expecting your teeth to fall from your lips already fossilized. Why else do I find you collapsed on the floor? Your clock; you think if traced with chalk it will not move. But listen, together we are a gasp in the lungs of time. No one else has heard it, I swear, not one soul. It is lost on everyone but us. But it sings in my ears like a holy metropolis of sound. I have never been so sure! We are perfect and lonely and godforsaken. But know this: I am suffering with your collapse. I am bursting like a star, flirting with the bluebirds of mercy. My elbows are raw. All day your mouth has been making perfect circles. O after O after O and I can’t bear it. If I could I would paint the back of your throat, now that I can imagine it in great detail. It is pink like the world had promised. Loneliness itself, you said, O there is no such thing, only the source of it. A place, a person, perhaps an object. But I am not so sure, I am not so sure at all. Certainty, you said, O there is no such thing, not even in diluted form. O Kora, my silence suggests that we agree. I am as tired as a bedside prayer. I feel older than the basilica of night. O Kora, I assure you that as my lips imitate yours they are not chapped. It would be rude to speak while the body assumes such damage. That clock on the wall, please would you remove it. Take it away and with it what it has witnessed. Be kind and be swift. Then we’ll wrap up gentle in the wind of blues. With the clock gone we’ll light fireworks in the mud huts of the mind and babble like the saints of gossip. We’ll pass our hands over the candle of death and kiss in the smoke. Imagine it; we will celebrate like we used to celebrate, before the long lament of summer, before I broke down before the altar of the city. Just say you will, say you will take it down, say it loud and big and absurd like pain through a telescope.
March 21st & Meredith and I danced like elephants on Los Feliz Boulevard. Elephants can’t jump, nor can they skip, but no matter, we glided with water shoulders, swapping body maps in the dusk of sound. She turned to me & says take me home. I paused, licked my devil teeth & plucked the Jazz from the trees while we walked towards an old car with forty four states worth of soul. I told her home is a half moon stretched thin, a cotton ball. We can chase it milky eyed, if we wish. We can chase it like we would chase buffalo, if we see fit. She nodded. And now we know the edge of noise, we know it is grand & the search is forever. We navigate by matchlight because the fall is deep as the night.
Filed under: Wirewalkers | Tags: Fiction, Los Angeles, Madness, Poetry, Prose
6.
It feels like I grew up in your mother’s kitchen. Summer in my mouth fourteen hours a day and mosquitoes hid behind the paintings. I killed them one by one on hunts that lasted all night. I was always disappointed if you emerged scratching your elbows in the morning. I would sit at the breakfast table defeated with bags under my eyes chewing ferocious air. When we were twelve you were taller than me and it felt so permanent. When we were sixteen I was six foot three and the springs in your bed would howl like an ambulance so we had sex on the floor as to not chase the night from our limbs. By then your elbows were smooth because insects knew not to enter, my reputation had reached the surrounding skies. I left the windows open and we enjoyed the air around our ankles. In Griffith Park we knew all the paths. When the place caught fire one year we cried louder than the coyotes. A friend suggested that if the arsonist was found we should pull out his eyelashes. We gave the idea serious consideration. I tell you this like you don’t already know. Maybe I feel as though you have forgotten. Maybe I feel as though your fingerprints are half hearted. Kora, I want you to exist so much more than this. I want you to wave your arms around in an aboriginal dance explaining what I don’t understand. I want you to bring me your library of hummed compositions and clear a floor on which to shake our knees. Interstate fifteen on the way to Death Valley we got stuck in Vegas traffic and waited with no radio, I heard you sing and you could sing. Three hundred miles of blacktop dreaming of the Devil’s Golf Course and you could sing. The hotels are empty and the schools are empty and the theatres are empty and the body is hollow and you could sing. Paradox after paradox, car after car, you and your drum circle of epiphanies, I have known no better. As a student I have more and more bores and chores but Kora Kora no, it’s not just that. All the engines of Los Angeles have failed because of your silly mood. I don’t know who you are. You should see the freeways frozen like the broken arms of a monster we once knew. A monster with a giant blue heart and a laugh as damp as a cave. I become upset when the trees are not upright. I have exhausted the trampoline springs of summer. I write notes on the bedposts thinking of everyone I’ve ever known, every world I have offered to black holes without permission. The ground splits like a coconut and the skeletons laugh merrily at my gentle mistakes.
Filed under: Poetry
do that thing you do
the dance with the wrong knees
and the wrong eyes
that sends me howling like an ambulance
down highway one
with the wind
trapped between my shoulder blades
Filed under: Poetry
If I had ever wanted honesty
I would have measured the distance
Between our thumbs & asked for it.
Tell me you’ve suffered, if you should want. Tell me
Your heart turns blue in winter. Tell me you love the stage,
The costumes, speeding in the dark.
A lie only hurts when it is colourless. Remember
The mood you were in when you swallowed
The midnight sun, how it felt to balance candles on your collarbone.
1.
Meaning is no longer what I want from you. I want you to walk the wire barefooted. I want you to endanger the atomic leaves and burn the money behind the rose garden. Kora, we predicted it all as children. We would be godless. I am frightened because there is so much silence, and in silence I am restless like an empire. We are waiting like guests on the rooftops. Up here there is nothing but the pause between my body and the wind. But I was never accepted as a monk. I breathe too loudly, too often and my legs are too long. When crossed they form a shape which is neither beautiful nor satisfying. Long ago, let me remember, we drove to Death Valley and slept in a volcano. It was winter and we split our rations in the cold. If I had known the constellations like I do now no doubt there would have been stories with spears and shields. But since I was a boy with a simple heart I was content with the tragedy that you could not come any closer. Forehead to forehead, the impossibility was always enough. But now we are left planning the Great Escape through the holes in the wall. Now we walk like strangers in awkward shoes lonely and liquid on the boulevards. On the balconies, on the balconies, oh everything seems so rosy on the balconies. Listen, listen to this, the universe spilling from my lips like spit.
