for the widows in paradise

RIP sweet canon

2006-09-29T09:44:00.000-05:00

This is the last photo I ever took with my lovely little camera. farewell dear, and godspeed.
our love may have been short-lived, but we sure gave it all we got.

paint pen exclamations

2006-09-20T23:01:00.000-05:00

What is this here?

And they sucked in his skin

like it was cotton.

A bellyful of brightness where

we can set off

tiny metal fires.

I love that cave of death,

with machinations of spindly weeds

and sweet arrogance you can press into

and smell deep.

An endless goblin fascination,

look at what you appear to be.

Hear the shrieking slaughter of

lint machines, churning

on and on and

into groggy dawn from night.

Know the perfect face, and how

we traipse through the day

like it was nothing, with

fingers like the tentacles

of an inane bubble sea.

The small spaces in us

breathe heavier,

lumps in the throats of

transparent bedrooms, watch him

cock his head to clear the sweat

from between us.

What is good taste if not

an artful evasion for the sick of self.

walking, running, viking

2006-09-10T21:30:00.000-05:00

fungus amongus (and where are we to go?)

2006-09-10T21:20:00.000-05:00

le weekend de BFF

2006-09-05T23:45:00.000-05:00

sabine.

2006-08-26T10:48:00.000-05:00

you say my name

like the notes of a keyboard,

bright and simple and like

a child.

we were founded upon

bonfires and sunrises

and searching for a dry spot of ground

to sleep,

blanketed in spider bites and rain drops

and each other.

you helped me see my art

where it always laid in wait,

in space and time,

of only a porch and two weeks.

that smell of smoke and syrupy ink,

spreading, saccharine,

down your arm

and into fingers

made of the blackest rainbows.

such sweet, dark things we are,

demolishing the night

with a derby of dementia and dissonance.

the fall christening of the porch.

2006-08-24T23:43:00.000-05:00

farm party revisited

2006-08-24T23:34:00.000-05:00

attack of the killer cherry tomatoes.
denise.
megan.

farm party

2006-08-24T23:27:00.000-05:00

rufus, the resident hawk.
ding kong, one of my favorite people on earth. i think the clothes explain these feelings. you should also see his ass shake.
ding!

heat and lethargy

2006-08-06T17:50:00.000-05:00

tequila party fridays

2006-08-06T17:43:00.000-05:00

wine party thursdays

2006-08-06T17:37:00.000-05:00

things i find on the ground.

2006-07-29T20:09:00.000-05:00

2006-07-26T14:17:00.000-05:00

2006-07-26T14:11:00.000-05:00

Sunday.

2006-07-24T20:41:00.000-05:00

Hannah Wynne.
shrooms.
jungle adventure!
gorgeous gorges.

Saturday (extremely early, but still saturday).

2006-07-24T20:20:00.000-05:00

crazy light twirler man.
light twirler man turning into a giant squid/jellyfish.
dropping like flies. (seriously, this shit is exhausting! it's a dance epidemic)
me and the hog, advertising for the demolition derby. and i have a mullet. i'm on my way to success!

Friday (cont. again)

2006-07-24T20:12:00.000-05:00

the band Spearhead, around midnight. everyone is stoned here. especially the dude with the insane curly hair.
lighters and lights.
lighters on acid!
second stage, featuring Sim Redmund Band.

Friday (cont.)

2006-07-24T20:07:00.000-05:00

Anne and Joe! so cute.
Arriving at Grassroots Festival. craziness ensues. (that's Janet on the left).
Hannah and Al, the lovely lovebirds.
Hannah, Al, and me, with evil eyes.

Friday.

2006-07-24T19:16:00.000-05:00

Hipster ensemble no. 1
me, comiserating.
me, hipsterizing.
Hipster ensemble no. 2

Thursday.

2006-07-24T19:10:00.000-05:00

Dilmun Hill farm stand!
the Plantations.
(like a fairytale, right?)
Beebe Lake.

afternoon run

2006-07-18T21:14:00.000-05:00

paintings

2006-07-17T19:51:00.000-05:00

(in progress...)

Fred Fest! (cont.)

2006-07-17T19:44:00.000-05:00

denise looking picnic-turesque
hannah!
grapes and cherry we pilfered from the feast remains.
the sunset, as per usual (and beautiful).

Fred Fest!

2006-07-17T19:30:00.000-05:00

Fred Fest. A 3 hour drive to Albany, we drive there and back in one day just to participate in this 4-hour extravaganza. In short, hundreds of Italian people, mostly family of Fred who he doesn't know due to their high rate of population growth, eat themselves silly with prosciutto and corn and potato salad and cupcakes etc etc.

the drive.
random camel on the drive.
fred's cake!
janet!

the fragile

2006-06-27T22:22:00.000-05:00

revisiting winter.

2006-06-24T10:39:00.000-05:00

what dinner looks like when your brother is a marine biologist.

2006-06-24T10:32:00.000-05:00

the appointment (by sabrina)

2006-06-01T21:00:00.000-05:00

"Your appointment is on Friday, May 3rd, at 8 am. Please press 1 to confirm."

Beep.

She had just lost all the weight, and was looking to find vanity in new places. Sixty five pounds of strife and self pity were finally shed. Mirrors and windows were sufficient reminders, but it was only the photograph that would sate her hunger for approval. From whom, she did not know. But it would come from someone, and they would all kiss her newly lacquered toes and sculpted calves and maybe even reach hungrily up her tanned thighs. The manicures and tanning booths were the first of a string of appointments, designed to improve the improved. To improve those worthy of improvement.

The last appointment had arrived, and she knotted off the end of her silken string with a photo. She would find contentment through a lens finder, pride in a shutter. Strutting out into the clear air, the sky would look a little bigger today, and the sun would bronze more fervently. She would fly on black and white film. The arms would show their length and she would find her slender wings.

"Your appointment is on Saturday, May 11th, at 10:30. Please pr…" Her lover would not understand, reaching out to shut off the noise of the beautiful. He turned back into his pillows, unable to get close enough, breath slowing and heating the cottony space surrounding him. The smell of his skin was sweet and soft, but the beard on his face scraped roughly at all in its path. He was exactly this mix of sweet and sour, like whiskey of an origin and quality uncertain. When she walked in, sneering at the lack of mirrors in his room, he sensed but did not move from his cocoon. A lazy arm was stretched over his head, framing the dark curls of his hair like a brooding claim of cherubic mystery. She was tired of seeing him lay there, all limbs and ribbed torso. She hated his natural ability to be gorgeous. Yet this only made her desire him more, as if touching and consuming and loving him would make her new body more real, too. She slid her fingers under the covers, searching for his sides, because there she could find bones untouched by flaw. He swatted and shifted, her unseen silhouette slinking down from his imagination and into his groin. He fought it.

In an instant she was smashing her lips against his chin, cheek, and nose, in the way that people do when they cannot have enough. But for her it was only an urgency to feel a corporeal connection to this stone-cut man below her. She wanted to press through the layers of skin and fat and muscle and let her frame melt away into only the most desirable embrace she had seen in perfume advertisements. The only way to forget the fat was through sex. This was when he saw her as she is, without the cloak of strategic clothing and lights. His eyes were like a wetsuit, tracing and enveloping her form in a sleek foam. She no longer needed the clever angles. She wanted to show it all, tempted almost to peel away her skin to expose the smooth, hard bone underneath. Fully lying on top of him now, she fumbled awkwardly with the attempt at flawless sexuality which humans are rarely able to accomplish. She felt now that humanity was beside the point, anyway. Soon his pants and boxer briefs were pulled past those stubborn heels, clawing at the last piece of his chastity. She removed what little clothing she wore and felt a rush of excitement that comes merely with the act of showing. Needing and having were insignificant, and her arousal began to plummet after he stopped looking, pouncing and pounding into her narrow frame. Touching and sucking her skin was like breathing, but the air was thin and dry. He continued until the wave crashed over his brain, and she felt the triumph inside her. But the inside did not really matter; the outside, conquered, felt alive enough.

She woke up just in time to remember it was his birthday and to ram her head on the bedpost. Her hair was more matted than tousled, and so she dashed out shopping looking somewhat like a wet poodle. The store she was heading toward had shut down, however, due to its lack of appeal for any other day than the annual birthday. Nevertheless, she was determined. Every year he had made it clear that his birthday was to be spent as if it were the last day of his life. Twenty four hours of pure indulgence. It had become a tradition in the family, and she was not about to break the rules of a whole line of hard bodies aching for a brief reprieve. There would be thick cakes and roasts and gallons of liquor. His mother would sit tall with a mink shawl around her neck and a martini in hand, talking about how disgusting olives are and sneering at the fact that the relatives hadn’t shown up. The truth was, of course, that none of them ever showed up; they were alienated years ago by ongoing olive slander and gossip. The family had secrets and deception, just as every other one before it, and his mother was quick to pick up on the custom. She always became hysterical by the end of the night with ludicrous claims of treachery, despite the relaxing effects of the ten drinks she so deftly inhaled. Sometimes she would make one of the children would cry, but this was merely a common externality. The man’s father, on the other hand, sat quietly with hands folded, slumped slightly in his stained easy chair. A stocky, plump man with graying hair that defined the word disheveled, he was no match for the eccentricities of his Chihuahua wife. Still, he often mumbled senselessly to himself at the most perplexing times. Suddenly, everyone in the room, except for the babbling wife, would lean in and scrutinize this grumbling man, listening for some parcel of wisdom that would never appear. They never knew what he said, and he probably didn’t either. He would most likely die mumbling, blinking his cataracts-inflicted eyes one last time, serenaded by the omnipresent screeching of his inebriated wife all around him.

Standing with her eyes all scrunched up in front of the gutted party store, the girl grumbled and started off with an irritated gait. Unfortunately, the intensity of her irritation and the caused her to slam herself into a passerby; she heard the strange crack of skeletons clashing and felt suddenly that fate had taken hold. Looking up slowly as to imitate the movie, she saw a man more gaunt than herself, eyes sparkling with drugs instead of dreams. He was beautiful. He was so so beautiful, even up to the moment that he shot her in the head. Her eyes glistened, too; and then they glazed, and the memories were lost, swimming in a loveless and perfect body. The last appointment was made. And this perfect body was dumped into the ground like all of those before it, improved now only for the worms and the relatives who still look at its pictures.

2006-05-25T21:01:00.000-05:00

2006-05-25T20:35:00.000-05:00

yikes

2006-05-25T20:11:00.000-05:00

oh boy

2006-05-25T20:07:00.000-05:00

2006-05-02T16:18:00.000-05:00

weekend

2006-04-17T22:44:00.000-05:00

theatre

2006-04-17T22:40:00.000-05:00

day: color2

2006-04-03T20:01:00.000-05:00

day: color

2006-04-03T19:59:00.000-05:00

day: b&w

2006-04-03T19:53:00.000-05:00

night

2006-03-27T00:39:00.000-05:00

carcinogenic jellyfish

2006-03-13T21:23:00.000-05:00

thug life!

2006-03-12T23:22:00.000-05:00

men's pocky: not for the faint of heart.

perfect speed

2006-03-12T22:47:00.000-05:00

sexual machinery

2006-03-11T15:29:00.000-05:00

There was a distance. It was more analytical this time around, feeling hard edges for their shape without the softening of love's imagination. Let's put you in a petri dish, and I swear this time I can concentrate on the science. But there was a rush of want, preceded by the knowledge that this would happen because I'm the same as I used to be. But, as much as it draws, it is also a return to a time without you.

drip

2006-03-10T16:03:00.000-05:00

smoke study 2

2006-03-09T13:04:00.000-05:00

smoke & water study

2006-03-09T00:20:00.000-05:00

salted winter road

2006-03-07T15:50:00.000-05:00

You put fingers to your closed lips like you know what’s going to happen. You feel the chapped scales and know what happens, what you’re doing, how this will end. Someone is hit by a car, evoking tears in the eyes of a passerby with a life too beautiful. She’s gorgeous, strutting and sinking into an eyelined and Vicodined existence. She knows that person with the hairline fracture and a bruise like ink stains. Don’t spill your coffee, dear; return your ear buds to their places. Swallow them like round little pills of wonderous wandering lust. She wants a girlish boy who can spread himself over her curled-up form, like ringlets soaked in gin. I won’t be mad if you kick me as hard as you can. I want the smoke but not the cigarette. I want the scar but not the wound. Salt me and kick me with all you’ve got.

frigid forms sell you warmth.

2006-03-07T15:43:00.000-05:00

build.

2006-03-04T20:54:00.000-05:00

youth and lust and a construction site.
it took days to get all the sawdust off.

memory card

2006-02-06T12:17:00.000-05:00

When I feel the heaviest and the most low to the ground, looking out onto the gray and turbulent lake water, I am the most free.
I can imagine the women who has to reach down and capture that grayness, who must live and die in it. I look down from a ledge to that spot, and it pulls me downwards.

I don't think the question is "who am i," but rather, "what can I see."

what is home to you?

2006-01-17T02:06:00.000-05:00

To me, home is the soft shuffling of feet on carpet waking me up in the morning, the sweet cooked smell of pancakes beckoning me downstairs. The smooth yet deliberate voices on NPR welcoming the morning sun. The cold clean floor of the kitchen under my sleepy feet.
Home is the faint smell of eucalyptus outside, intermingling with that gray, dry smell of the low desert shrubs. But the succulents also invite me, pulsating with liquid, gelatinous life and reminding me of the cool wetness still alive in this supposedly dead landscape. The smell of hose water sneaking down sidewalks, even more pungent in the summertime, when the kids can’t resist running through the sprinklers that pepper each neatly trimmed lawn. Leaves falling to their swirling deaths on forgotten cerulean swimming pools. Orange trees catching my eye, inciting more of a memory of a smell than the actual smell itself. The fragile magenta glow of bougainvilleas dancing across a sea of thorny khakis and grays.
Home is the sleek sides of SUV’s, snaking through concrete mazes to reach the oasis of a freeway. Cars driving fast with windows always open, blasting catchy music into the dry and fragrant air of the city around it. Cars barely driving at all, a slow rhythm of back and forward momentum, forever staring into the two red cyclones of plastic light before you.
Home is a bubbling night, full of youthful ignoramus, drowning itself in lights and bony tanned flesh and booze. The beauty of the night only lies in the reflection of streetlights off the asphalt, fashionable bodies stumbling and laughing into the warm winter night, the stars barely visible but watchful.

greatest

2006-01-05T21:14:00.000-05:00

fall in love
fall apart
fall asleep
fall away
feels like fall
on a winter day

s.p. #1

2005-11-28T23:52:00.000-05:00

i'm stuck in the prison
of a life too shining
golden expectations, toiling, mining.
How high should I be climbing?
that damned endless ladder
this sun will soon melt
my waxen wings.
never will you be done, they say,
that's a ladder of dust
and bones and shit and cold hard
bitterness
hear this
i won't sign my soul
to that CEO
to billboards and credit cards
and diamond studded cell phones.
airbrushed flesh reflects in us
our retinas
what's the crime here, folks?
What's the crime?
it's only candy for our eyes.
it only rots our whitened teeth
rows of tombstones blank and bleak.
it only stuffs full our arteries
mmm yes please
more
crackling ropes of hard crimson crud
blood
my blood
your blood.
but blood can't be airbrushed
raw and horrible smears of beauty
Gorgeous candy,
all anorexic lust,
sugar coated rotten crust,
you kill our spirits, our freedom, our lives
candy: rotten rotten!!
it's those who climb the ladders of their minds
who won't be forgotten.

$

2005-11-20T23:58:00.000-05:00

illusions for sale, half price.
hurry cause they're goin fast...

looking

2005-11-15T20:45:00.000-05:00

we spent all of our time looking up at the sky, lying on our backs and each other's bellies. we looked to see what compelled us to be here in the first place. we looked up in hopes of lifting our bodies above the dirt and dead leaves, together and apart and ubiquitous in that cosmic void known only by those without bodies.

new.

2005-11-12T23:16:00.000-05:00

curls around fingers.
smooth back that rust and stare me
straight in the eyelashes.
we forgot to do the wrong thing.
and somehow the right seemed
too much for our departures,
too close for that breach of freedom to split.
but it feels thickly warm and woolen,
and somehow like
the house you built back home.

jack and coke and hate

2005-11-09T00:55:00.000-05:00

card cutting credit and hearts, buses going buzz through dark blue avenues. it's hell out there, they stare. what to do but tilt back your head, swallowing up your words and the putrid shit they've become.

woman

2005-11-06T22:14:00.000-05:00

when do they say "I am woman"?
and when do they say "I am human"?
I look down and see the potential
for calloused hands and swollen stomach.
I look up and see dreams
sprawled out in light blue.
The power in women is connecting,
soil and sky,
blood and stars.
She is steady
and her voice is strong.
because for so long
she has stood tall,
holding the stars in her eyes.

the love is gone.

2005-11-04T08:59:00.000-05:00

i couldn't possibly feel any lower than i do now.

not everything is great

2005-10-31T19:58:00.000-05:00

sometimes, instead of living my life, i wish i could just be sitting here remembering it and looking at all the pictures i took in it. for all eternity, just flipping through pictures and smiling and loving and remembering everything that was great. that would be a wonderful life in itself.

i dare a man to say i'm too young, for i'm gonna try for the sun.

2005-10-31T19:47:00.000-05:00

i have dreams all the time now. i go to bed and sleep and wake up, all the while thinking about you. moments in between moments are all seared with your image, like when you stare at a light and then close your eyes and still see it, pulsing and rainbowy. i’m a half-naked zombie with groggy eyes peering out my doorway to see if you just woke up too. it’s a continuous, consuming cycle; even during those hours of unconsciousness it persists. and lately the dreams are nightmares. they eat me up more and more as time goes on, and my longing increases for something i thought i had forgotten. in these nightmares you’re with someone else instead of me. you touch her like you touch me, you’re showing me you don’t love me anymore. you’re making me know it. and i do. i do know it. so stop it, get out of my head. you can love someone else. just show me something that’s not a dream, or even something that’s not a nightmare.

2005-10-23T20:37:00.000-05:00

if i could be anywhere right now...

2005-10-22T17:07:00.000-05:00

rumble (sick)

2005-10-22T16:31:00.000-05:00

there’s a rumbling underneath my feet, someone walking towards me, or perhaps away; but I can’t see. a rumbling becomes a tingling up my crossed legs, rising. i always sense your presence whenever it makes itself known. but i don’t want to know it so well anymore. it’s too well known, too much of myself. last night i dreamt of it, of us, touching and feeling and knowing every movement along the way.

don’t you know that i am sick of loving someone so much the same as me, too? don’t you think i feel like screaming when, every time you speak, i hear myself in your voice?

i didn’t even have to look up to know you were walking away.

the tingling becomes a bitter ache, and then nausea.

bright gray

2005-10-16T15:54:00.000-05:00

"I can't. It hurts too much." The sky was too bright that day, too piercingly cloudy and gray. But the way the leaves moved without sound drew their eyes outward. She said no to it, turned away, made herself blind and deaf to that dreary rustling. Instead she focused hard on a dead fly laid out on its back on the windowsill. It didn't move. The boy kept looking, though, somehow masochistically curious if his retinas really would be scorched like everyone said they would. And in the window across the way he saw a dark room inhabited only by the glaring, shadowy spines of hundreds of books. He looked away, fearing he was seeing something too intimate for his eyes, even with their burned retinas.

And a spine is indeed one of those body parts that feels intimate despite its exposure. It is sensitive to the touch, the vertebrae go click click click, jutting out in waves from underneath a thin layer of flesh, little rollercoasters for the fingertips. It is vulnerable and central, holding the power and pulling together all of those colorful wires that let the entire body feel. Touching it is feeling the core of a person. And it surrenders itself to you, shivering and vulnerable. The spine of a book holds everything together in the same way, tying together the words in a way that makes sense.

She started coloring a stain on the table with her pencil, enraptured bythe metallic sheen of her furious lines. He turned to kiss her, and did not look or see. Without understanding why, all she wanted was for him to see that little graphite vortex, to press his fingerprints to her spine and smile and look with fresh eyes. But until then, a kiss would still mean nothing but lips pressed, like the pages of a closed book.

a beginning of sorts

2005-09-26T18:30:00.000-05:00

as i sit here the caffeine begins to buzz and lift itself into my brain, and for a second i feel weightless and content. but then, as always, it drops down again, sloshing in my stomach and furtively adding itself to my growing list of addictions. but what is a girl to do? the creation of a paper must result from this chemical high, and all she can think about is how she wishes she were in japan singing karaoke.