fades

i am watching political commentary on msnbc because people who know how to make speeches lull me like songs and stories and knowing voices. they're not. but they sound the same.

last spring, my computer broke when i leaned over the keys with a glass of water in my hand. my body poured liquid and my new thing died.

things are things and i know what they mean. they're empty. but the words are not. documents i had written when i was leaving college and my friends and felt new and myself. photo projects. letters to boys and women.

no one inspires like previous selves.

i want 19 year old me- excited for moving and drugs and self anylysis. i want to ingest my ideas about when i thought that adolecence and all its annoyances and neurosis and fear were over.

i'm eating pot brownies from some girl who didn't know how to make butter. they're pure salt.

i don't want to be young. i want to talk to myself. i want to see progress. and it's lost in the water. i can't recollect anything. i want to read my thoughts.

i am pro-choice

When you are a failed suicide everyone wants to ask you why but they don’t because asking why is socially a rude thing to do. Even the hungriest gossipmongers pocket their curiosities and pussyfoot, pussyfoot like toothless cougars. But when you are a failed suicide before you can leave the hospital you must tell why. It’s like a rule or something…

All the doctors in their well rehearsed concern ask you why and then take your why, your point, with all your poetic digressions, and enter the whole of it into the alliterative parade of helplessness and hopelessness.

“You were feeling helpless, right? And hopeless?”

And because the objective was not to land in a hospital you agree and admit,

“Yes, I felt helpless…and hopeless.”

This seems like a betrayal and it hurts. It hurts because it is false. It hurts because you allowed all the nuanced reasons surrounding your point to be shot, blown into a dusty summation made by a porcine doctor named Chloe. It hurts but you need to get out. First and foremost you need to get out. So, you recite the words Chloe, the good little mama bird, fed you. Again and again you hear your baby bird voice on repeat – helpless, hopeless, helpless, hopeless, helpless, hopeless.

There are many doctors.

The second doctor asks, “Why?” Sweat beads on her brow when she asks so exasperated, out of breath, bored by the question or the thought of listening to yet again another long tale of why woe is me when she in her infinite wisdom and sweat knew the answer before asking. She doesn’t even look at you. She keeps her head down at the papers on her desk. Her hand hovers over a box to check. Remember you want to get out. When you told Chloe why, all Chloe did was nod out the words helpless and hopeless, as if in confirmation, yes I agree she said, helpless, hopeless, even though you hadn’t mentioned anything of the sort. You swallowed those words helpless and hopeless because they were your ticket out and you knew this and you were proud to be so quick. You do not bore her, you tell the doctor with the sweaty brow, “I felt helpless and hopeless.” You say it without a stutter and feel like an actress, a great performer, look at me now! You think of that foolish girl from college who called her play absurdist, how you hated her for saying so because nonsensical does not mean absurdist. But what was happening now, this, this was absurdist. “I felt helpless and hopeless.” Such repetition. The sweaty doctor is appeased. She checks her box.

Then there is the third doctor, then the fourth, and the fifth and you see seven doctors of varied degrees, haircuts and ages and they all ask the same question and you tell all of them the same story of helplessness and hopelessness and you are believed. You are free. Freed! But really you’re only free because your insurance ran out.

You go home and when you get there your boyfriend is sleeping with an old girlfriend, so you envision her face on a platter without parsley and with great malice stab at her eyes with your fork. Her eyes pop like grapes spliced at the pupil but you end it here because you’ve dismissed her as pathetic, as a whore, as one to forget because she is not the point. And you fuck him a few more times because he is good and when he repents you dismiss him too, because he is not the point either.

One morning you wake up remembering the point and shiver in tears beneath your sheets. The point is frightening and has nothing to do with neither help nor hope. You shiver for an hour and your pillow is damp so you leave it for the shower and sit there in the porcelain scoop of the tub with the shower raining on you and you hold your knees and do not cry. You drink coffee and take speed because it is good and keeps you going.

You tell the point to the friend you never trusted and she looks at you cross-eyed. You tell your mother and she cries. You go to meetings and tell the point to strangers and they suggest you get a hobby, fill your time, maybe even volunteer, but these have to do with help, with hope, and help and hope are not the point. So, you go home to more shivers and lie in bed and feel like a two year old’s antipode tugging why not on a string.

peak oil

when i call my boyfriend, he tells me about peak oil. i don't try to think about peak oil because i already feel apocalyptic as it is.
so, i'll put the quote he emailed me here so i don't have to think about it and you can all think about it and then forget about it and then it'll be over and none of us will ever think about it again until it's over.

"the mentioned agricultural crisis will only begin to impact us after 2020, and will not become critical until 2050." BUT this doesn't take into account Peak Oil, "which suggest for sustainability, global population will have to be reduced from the current 6.32 billion people42 to 2 billion-a reduction of 68% or over two-thirds. The end of this decade could see spiraling food prices without relief. And the coming decade could see massive starvation on a global level such as never experienced before by the human race."

nothing to speak of

Last night I had this dream: I was trying to get on the MassPike because I had a hemorrhoid and needed to complete this 5K road race to prevent coastal flooding but the woman at the tollbooth wouldn’t let me enter unless she could crunkle up my CharlieCard. I screamed, “You bitch!” Then all these gay guys came about in tie-dye t-shirts, laughing, saying, “What’s the deal? What did you expect? That’s how things are done around here.” So I hijacked a bus heading to Spring Street and ended up at the harbor with this guy I kept calling Siskin who fed me green candies he kept in his pocket. I ran through a cemetery to win the race and everyone else drowned in a puddle. Victorious!

i'll be back soon meg. just in a stagnant period. bleeding heavily for you.

a poem for aids

I am a dog.

last night i saw a movie

To suck out the juice and reduce it to nothing and put it in a mish-mash of order, I’ll offer a useless film review about a Wild Turkey love affair starring this fast paced bald man "ahhing" and "uhhing" and "umming" his way through these wryly hysterical, seldom nonsensical, these forever mind blowing smart banters and quips that he spoke most likely drug riddled but not addled just riddled, never addled, just riddled. Drug riddled. A cigarette holder fixed to his lip. His outfits – fishing vest, Nixon mask, curly wig, a Vegas visor that I feel like calling a “bodega hat,” striped shirt, tinted glasses, blonde wig, grey wig, many Dad-goes-to-Hawaii button up t-shirts (flora not fauna theme here), baby blue powdered shorts cutting off at mid-thigh. At dusk, without a helmet, he speeds down Big Sur on his bike like a villain, a con, an Invincible, flirting with the eye-drying speed he shifts from first to second, from second to third and on up till he hits the edge facing the thing head on. Take me! he says. Take me! But it doesn’t, it won’t, so he will later with a gun. There is Chicago 1968 when he cries. Alongside nude women he types and the women stand about, prance about, their chaches all bush, so seventies, their tits amazing hanging down. And out come the guns to fire at wild boars, typewriters, trees, to fire inside the house and outside the house and sometimes at nothing at all. He is not Good Sally and the Activist team pulling in on their scholarship wagon, he’s not Baby Jane with daddy’s money either. He delivers punches with his balls intoxicated and his heart in flames and so sets politics on fire. In a Cadillac, with an attorney and a tape recorder he goes out looking for the American dream and is asked by a woman at a taco stand, “What is that? The American Dream?” She thinks it’s a nightclub, a psych ward. He eats speed, drops acid, snorts blow off knife blades (Knives out? Yes? Yes!), takes mescaline – two half doses thirty minutes apart, etc., etc. drug culture galore. Pours whiskey after whiskey like a southerner cradling sweet tea, makes me thirst for a soda pop, a whiskey soda pop. He divorces and remarries. Blows off his head with a gun. Ha-ha! Of course! Fire at nothing, fire at it all! Blasts out of a cannon. Fire work display. Ashes to ashes, ahh, what a rush. Life seems so glorious on film.

may

We lounged about. In our rooms, in the lobby with the grand puzzle, in the big room at the end of the tiled hallway where Law & Order re-runs played out on a twenty inch beast that hummed through commercials and flickered during shows. In the bathroom with the spiders and sticky floor, where Charlotte a woman near forty liked to hide behind the toilet bowl and purr, liked flushing her pills down the drain. But never outside. We weren’t allowed outside. Only outside for cigarette breaks – four times a day, the first one at six a.m. Outside taunted us, it haunted me. It sat there poker faced behind five caged windows that lined a wall of the big room. Outside, a massive tree spurting off branches and roots, which rose through the dirt in knotted knolls up and over the cracked stone pathway leading to a rotting red park bench, passed on in its glory without us. It seemed to march. So deliberate, so callous, I thought I would drown. I wanted autumn, I wanted to rake, I wanted to cut my palms raking, I wanted to stick my hands in the soil and come out with a worm. Beyond the massive tree were more trees, a forest of trees. A drained moat. Two wire lawn chairs thrown together, side by side, one rusting at its feet. A ten foot high chain link fence. A trash barrel full of cigarette butts and small paper Dixie cups. A spider that would bite me while I smoked a Newport with a vainglorious heroin addict name Tricia, a bite that’d turn my left calf purple.