now you see me, no you don't

distorture @ 2009-07-20T22:43:00

2009-07-21T02:43:45Z

I am not a romantic. I’m a reflection of st. peter, the reversed religious dedication of apostates speaking tongues at late night checkout counters, buying time and menthol cigarettes. Be mine, but swear to give nothing more than the dragging cuffs of your crisp white shirts can soak up from the wet ink of your most trite love letters.
In another life I would be frank, caught by circumstance between holocaust and blind, faithless, desperate love. I want you because it feels good, for a change, to have something there, nestled in my palms like a melting cordial, threatened by the sensate press of deception. Before we know it’s here summer is gone and with my skin still damp from the sweat I wish you were man enough to lend me, I wait, shivering in the brilliant light of a sterile room. I hope you never know her better than I. I wish that you drown among the fragile corals with her image indelible upon your eyelids, thinking it has anything to do with me.
Kafka falls from careful ignorance to the soft carpet beneath my feet, as cheap as tomorrow.

distorture @ 2009-07-09T03:33:00

2009-07-09T08:35:26Z

i have made even the hardest of men into putty.
and tomorrow when you remember the prettiest face for miles, you'll be smelling my resignation on your sheets.

distorture @ 2009-06-28T23:20:00

2009-06-29T03:22:56Z

the collections of blood, the chill and the illusion of stillness are all familiar, but it’s the smell that has stuck to my clothing and lingered in my hair, wafting out to thread the sunshine with the most primal black and stifle the soft music of her wind chimes. i think about the peonies, melting in this heat.

distorture @ 2009-01-03T23:25:00

2009-01-04T04:25:57Z

in a cold sweat over forgotten cups of tea we rehearse desperate hand-written pages full of words that claw over other words hoping to find a bit of blank space but inevitably, he falters, the mechanics stutter, the clocks shake the dizziness from their numbers and it’s back to the beginning where our mothers lay pregnant, with curled hair and smiles. all the days of the week are in remembrance of the other pages and my hands cross-reference my sisters’ horseshoe-shaped scars, the soft hairs on my lovers’ knees and the exposed nape of a strange woman’s neck. i miscalculated these distances. he tells me to never forget that these cells beat and swoon full of latent religion, and he says breathe slowly to push the ink-black symbols to the surface. but sometimes it is too much to ask hands with carefully thickened whorls and blind fingers not to dig too deep, grasping for the electricity of your spine, stopping the impulses with our kissing mouths. maybe it was here that i miscalculated, but i don’t think so. i think that we never belong together. and so he ascends and so follow the letters confusing our lady with mata hari and the noise becomes its own prayer, a loneliness calculated on borrowed time.

distorture @ 2008-12-08T15:50:00

2008-12-08T20:58:33Z

my mother is dying of cancer. i've been chaining beedies again.

distorture @ 2008-11-01T23:03:00

2008-11-02T03:05:31Z

i will fill each space with a letter, number or spit. surrounded by relics and indelible adipose sites, these rooms are ghost towns in waiting and i am casually loitering near the ceiling, unwilling to understand. it is real grief that we come as contorted as we are; our perfect long spines crippled and our bodies splayed like hieroglyphics. the memories chanting mantras tucked slyly within the pocket of my cheek are a chinese foot-binding bestowed with painstaking care and all this obsessive detail. i will fill each awkward space with misdirected lust, with the guilt that is only fear of being defrauded, while secretly i have carried her around gingerly like a cracked egg, all these years, dusting and staining the arcs of her cheekbones, the real regret that her kindness has never been my own. i want to resist this, i want to insist on resenting it, but i am still here.

distorture @ 2008-10-19T22:58:00

2008-10-20T03:02:59Z

now that i'm your mistress we can get drunk on the beauty that means nothing and we can suck the marrow from the bones that composed the landscape of our alienation like pimentos from gin-soaked olives -- and we can forget each other when the morning makes our eyelids heavy. when i am here i'm in cairo and you wave across the room, kicking your feet off the great wall. all the lushness in-between two spaces becomes a sticky, salty mixture of simple linear equations that dries in scales on the flat brown stomachs of all the actors lined up naked over the empty page. it's too perfect outside to be desperate, but we don't want from wanting, and if no-one has any particular intentions then it's difficult to say who is responsible for keeping this mass breathing. yet here we are, variable in the same schema. you might say the panic tastes good and i might say, that's the msg. something i love unconditionally is to keep things within my reach.

distorture @ 2008-08-21T00:27:00

2008-08-21T04:45:26Z

this is, personally, a newsprint anecdote transferred to careless elbows everywhere that reads backward by someone in the morning's first elevator as an unparalleled prose piece. or, just as intimately: the directions to mata hari's secret unguent, meant to ease the spine of some dictator's autobiography. this is where the final crease lies in the popart paper dresses of hideously well-known idiot women or the line signed and dotted by your savior -- your delivering doctor, illegibly. this might be my delusion of aneuritic grandeur or perhaps a smattering of your sacred blood hissing tenderly on a too-hot brain. something close enough to kiss two tablets and a paperful of translucent powder that are still right down here, in the pockets of forgotten trousers that slide on like a shed skin, like a memory of what's worst for us. put on your gloves and your dancing shoes because tonight, fortified with lost cataclysms, we go out again. this is personal. and i won't be misunderstood by just anyone.

distorture @ 2008-04-23T16:15:00

2008-04-23T20:15:43Z

reason, the duplicitous bitch that got me here, the cock and balls of florida tucked neatly in its sweaty armpit, downing six pills a day so that i can work seventy hours a week and drink and puff my way through the rest. oh god help me, and i'll be an agnostic again. the truth is, science is all about making shit up. i've been your doctor for years!

I SAVE CIGARETTE BUTTS FOR A POOR GIRL

2008-04-03T04:26:44Z

the darkness is leveled and sometimes 3am is more than a fifth can do to keep the fear crumpled down naked and soft between my lungs. i remember being just as ugly in a city a thousand, three thousand miles away, naked on porches that don’t remember me. the same balmy winds blow pale and the same orange-lit empty streets line the white undersides of my arms, the same lonely winter taste of solicitation bursts in juniper berries across the forgotten papers on my kitchen table. here there’s no telling but you and i know it’s the center of a careful regression that won’t suffer a luxury like: growing soft dust patinas to satisfy the ghosts of a quiet rage or sucking poison from week-old spider bites. i’ve cultured these small ills before so let’s pretend there’s fruit to bear, this time, for the sake of self-salience. just as suddenly as time ticks slow, it’s pouring rain. the spanish moss glows green again, waving slowly from the dark oak trees. how many nights truncated by dawn before it’s long enough, before i’m done simplifying these heavy architectures.

stop going; i know you're gone. this house is too old for your heavy feet to seem soft.

THE FEMINIZATION OF FUCKING

2008-01-30T21:28:54Z

up close we’re just as pretty as we are far away, that nauseating every-thing color blocking the gaps in the sky out countless times together, pitch black canvasses for the walls of dead philosopher’s museums, not as obese as terminal things should be but not quite starved like the past incarnations. a few more shades of you and i’m just about as repulsive as it gets so, together, let’s be that captive audience’s new gaia, as old as the taste of spit and more terrible than absolutely nothing. together, we’ve got self-clotting hearts pinned to our sleeves, the ultimate commodification of empathy to drop like berries in hungry mouths and tomorrow that shit’s absolutely golden, thanks to the evening headlines running through the gutters of our egos. congrats in our meticulous order for making science into an utter unreality, we’ve become irrelevant to ourselves. and yes it’s perspective-perfect, macroscopic, clean-shaven.

just this once, a change of pace, i'll try hating you.

distorture @ 2008-01-07T03:20:00

2008-01-07T08:24:51Z

he’s the taste of terror a soldier without a woman who cares enough to give him a new home has between their blankets and the blind metallic click of fear is not enough to take us away from ourselves anymore.

How much longer, do you think…? We both have our positions. We’ve been set against each other from the beginning. Our positions are casual lies

distorture @ 2007-11-30T01:43:00

2007-11-30T06:47:52Z

palmable, it's something like: i'm so hungry
and i wish i had half the man she is on my plate.

distorture @ 2007-10-09T00:51:00

2007-10-09T04:56:47Z

framing here a pornography of second hand, appropriately gendered background images to what shouldn’t have to be told and that is no-one’s fault in particular but belongs there in the hollow crinkle of dry cleaning plastic, month-old coffee rings and in the beds of all the sluttiest actors. in the evenings the thin clothes smell like salt and the boys have got their extra inch and the girls have got their special toilets and the cripples, they’re free to be unfuckable, scar-smooth skin glowing and chocolate spiders twitching by the dimetap light of intentional self-sabotage. give em some qualifiers and they’ll take the bottle – if they can. it’s tired and we’re ugly but it’s everything that’s right with fear and the gin fills in the gaps tight and pink and warm. we’re right and we’re still warm and the doing of these things frames our blanks with all the best words we ever wanted but didn’t want to be so easy or couldn’t have on their own.

distorture @ 2007-09-27T00:14:00

2007-09-27T04:14:43Z

the failure of any tragedy to finally break my heart, the dirty white lines that can't commit themselves completely to the asphalt, language and its fallible attempts at naming things, creating symbols where there is nothing, connecting and ordering truth into being, i resent all this. i resent how i’ve internalized the standard error between want and need. you cannot prove that you aren’t completely circumstantial. calculate, and generalize. the difference is a terrible thing.

distorture @ 2007-05-15T23:27:00

2007-05-16T06:40:41Z

he and i don’t understand each other. i’ve always found the algorithms superficially lovely, liked to watch the numbers change with the symbols between them, but i can see now that for him there’s a nostalgia far past the meaning captured by words, a nonsense more orderly than the careful turns of a nautilus, a space no-one’s heart or mouth or shooting finger ever misses. the further away, the less lonely. but naturally it’s terrifying. there are two ways to achieve continuity and it’s the vain who can’t pick death, who can't image the complete self-deprivation. someone must change with the symbols, someone must have given the sacrifice its religious significance.

distorture @ 2007-04-12T21:07:00

2007-04-13T04:11:58Z

in winter, a purple mosaic of useless scraping words ankles and spines chapped and restless vicodin weary stomachs churning potions of blood and half chewed sentences. i wish i'd a sister to feed my something special, mouth to paper mouth, an answer begging answer, old-hat nonsense whispered back through the static of the morning radio

urine yellow subway tunnels and vagrant-discarded pigeon carcasses is there any use in it at all, my prince, my prince-ess

once more, with desperation: let's listen, let's let the pressure points from chafing present tenses release our jigsaw bones, make an ugly nonsense picture, call it what it is for once and let nothing be not nearly enough. just once. just as many times as i ask.

distorture @ 2007-04-10T23:37:00

2007-04-11T06:39:01Z

please tell me why we should be anything more than strangers, heartbroken and lonely.

distorture @ 2007-04-04T22:29:00

2007-04-05T05:49:24Z

the rearview mirror paints a backseat portrait of knotted limbs crawling into the vast dark cavern of the car's stomach, and his girlfriend with her long white barbiedoll gams stretched up against the dashboard is still bored, staring out the window, letting her parliament burn itself down, determined once again to ruin his micro opus. now the heroine's plush retro lips on the silverscreen clearly enunciating four-letter words but the grainy voice coming from the speakers is a drunk waits quoting senseless poetic streams of foucault. although the connections are missed in sequence there's still another train, another platform to jump from, and the cliches are working overtime to close the gaps, one-liners crusted prettily around her nostril. later he'll hang the rearview mirror with its miasma of roadkill above their bed and tell her about terrible dreams that aren't uncomfortable enough to be nightmares.

distorture @ 2007-01-31T16:28:00

2007-01-31T22:28:08Z

ignorant cohesion threading the cars together, a line of metal sutures pulled through heavy veins and us, ashamed of our own perfect resemblance, tiny cells jumbling along inside. i would like to say DON'T WORRY when you cringe as i slice my thumb open on a particularly vicious sheet of copier paper; we weren't even made of the same thing until that first idiot took a good look around and opened their fucking mouth.

distorture @ 2007-01-10T00:55:00

2007-01-10T06:55:20Z

i am sick for lack of extremes, gaunt with in-betweens. a mute summer heat in this envious winter. just give me a fist or a kind fucking word. tell me like it is so we can forget the us forever, your graphite meets my eraser, a magnum opus that changed its tune mid-crescendo or page three hundred and twelve, it's something else now, and the truly ugly never relents. i take off my hat once again, bow and apologize, now this is the best part; next; next; next

distorture @ 2006-12-27T11:12:00

2006-12-27T17:12:34Z

the truth is: she's perfect, wrapped in newsprint so used it's soft as an animal hide, a man's thumb smeared across her stomach, headlines racing to the finish of the tip of her nose. she descended from the corner of a closet, mary spat back from her assumption, body and soul and curses and all, a smell of old women stale upon her, a fraying handkerchief and crumbling leather pumps trailing from her fingers, caught in dusty matted hair. when she spoke, our stomachs turned in anxiety; "children," she said, "why do you tremble so?" and her voice unlike anything because so like everything we could imagine, a thousand timbres converging, hidden meanings scoured from beneath the very tips of our fingernails. we looked at each other but could not any of us speak -- the answer obvious, and therefore, unutterable.

distorture @ 2006-12-21T00:20:00

2006-12-21T08:23:22Z

it is no longer quite so arbitrary, not quite how you would have liked; i am not your palm-printed girl. i'm ill-received by winter mornings but somehow still accepted much to the chagrin of predawn siberia. senior alarmist, travesty coordinator, intervention subspecialist in charge of rare and humiliating trans-social phenomena, back stall consulting re-incorporated, titlularly euphemized. not your newspaper-printed girl, categorically that's a negative, a singificant gaping space between insignificant systemic cycles.

distorture @ 2006-12-15T16:18:00

2006-12-16T00:19:07Z

Anne is feeling uncertain

one evening walking home in a rain more like a heavy wet palm slowly fisting her thighs, her face, her throat and rendering her quite unable to make more of a sound than the small thick animal bleat aborted midstroke (another symphony he wouldn’t let unfold), she met the man of her insect dreams, he wore a smell of brown and unwashed paper money and she, she felt acutely absurd in her little dress, a winter white but after labor day she’d considered that morning as she lethargically brushed her hair, it was ridiculous to be wearing it now, at all, superfluous as his thick childs fingers brushed it away like cellophane from a homemade candy, no, more like cobwebs from an en masse rendition of a famous poet’s bust meant to be displayed in a new suburban mansion. and the leaves were wonderfully cool beneath her, as soft as the clouds she never thought looked like anything but themselves when she was a child, how could they be, all that white in all that blue. now the clouds were a thick skin jaundiced by streetlights and as she stared up at them tasting his hand she thought about how sweat had urine in it, and all salt-waste was essentially the same, anyway, so all those times shed sucked her own cut finger or swallowed with longlost boyfriends the action was fundamentally identical. proudly anne had the good sense to flush in embarrassment at the guttural sounds that dropped low from his lips and stung her cheeks pink, to be honest she was too wrapped up in her own vanity and thoughts of her dress to notice the pain until much later, or not much, she looked over at the time as it lay beside her, a shriveled fruit dropped from one of many trees, black and panting and faintly laughing, wrinkled and ugly but somehow adorable in the way that human infants are, a helpless hideous that made her breasts ache in anticipation. alone, she felt lonely. she sat up and slid open her handphone, the unnatural glow obscene enough to make her sick her stomach jarred with all those complex equations of organic matter but she pressed the buttons all the same to call her sister who wasn’t home anyway. hello, claire, it’s me anne, I miss you lately. after that it only took her another ten minutes to get home and she must’ve seemed just fine because though he didn’t really look at her closely her boyfriend said nothing and she sat through dinner saying nothing too, amazed at how hot the wet between her thighs was, almost scalding, a tea to brew in her womb she thought and chewed some dry meat slowly but her jaw kept popping and he turned up the television so as to not go into a apoplexy of annoyance, she knew, and out of boredom she ended up drinking quite a bit too much wine. later he was on top of her and in the mortifying heat of it like she’d once inexplicable burst into tears she couldn’t help laughing a little and choked it back, jealous. he seemed angry but not too bothered, thankfully, and anne of green ennui stared at the stucco ceiling once again unable to make pictures from the patterns no matter how hard she squinted her eyes or let them slide out of focus the pupils like great black flowers opening to an opium dream, a passion thick and dark and clotted welling up within her and her boyfriend gasping with his breath too sweet and his sweat too clean mentioned she was really wet today, but anne wasn’t particularly interested, she was too busy glaring up past him in frustration.

distorture @ 2006-11-13T22:32:00

2006-11-14T06:32:19Z

Sometimes nipping at the arteries in my heels as I trip stupidly over industrial-grade carpet, sometimes sitting mute and patient, panting the smell of skin too much licked, waiting for me to call it back, incestuous. The cracking is all around, distant like terror is divinely so, fissures trembling through half-remembered landscapes, thumbed into pixels in textbooks, breathing webs of fear that spatter on the palm of my hand, in the laundromat or the gas station light glowing alien with marbled patterns like death or more pathetically the wistful pretense of. For days I’ve been noticing that goddamned smell, the noisome food and sweat smell, the viscous sex and blood and anxiety smell, the flawed smell we carry between us, mine most rancid, becoming thicker and damper, my secret dark cloud, my cheap plot twist ending, my miscarriage, my widows and orphans. White flags wave from the shriveled hands of an ancient mistress folding napkins; can she see them, can she unfold me.

I know: this must have become more than tiresome for you.