Seriously,

I can do without your stalking.

 

Thanks.

 

You, I don’t want to talk to you until I can’t help it, and anyway life has started again, so you’re not going to hear from me for a bit. Take care of your finicky lovely self and try sleeping, it actually does a body good. Over breakfast I thought of the way you slouched into my copy of the Sandman, how you plopped out of bed and into the car so you could drive me to Holland V. “What time are you coming home?” you asked, and I was oddly touched again at the unloving, unspecified way you have of caring. I don’t miss you terribly, just acutely, but I miss what hasn’t happened yet, not what happened before, because we were always getting better, getting from frosty to room temperature. Warm even, like the times you spontaneously grab me before remembering your deadlines. The real problem was that time unlike writing runs without punctuation. I don’t want anything more, just the scraps of you lying about for me to sample, nothing signed in blood, just a few months that fade like all months do. 

 

Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron, have you read it yet, you tardy thing?

 

Last night I was so very tired, tired to the roots of a past life. My first instinct was to call P-Andrew so he could tsk at me, tow me home like he’s so good at, then I remembered I’m not supposed to be lazy or a lemming. P-Andrew is very good at preserving me, I think I don’t thank him enough for it.

 

Eyes like nails, I thought, when I looked at it.

Chemistry and other worthwhile happenings

Be random, it’s good for your life.

 

“The sun came in like a pack of orange spaniels

Through the window

Over the ledge

Under the curtain

On their bellies, creeping and bending”

Parachute

Do you think I don’t remember? Lightning in your window, a seizure of blue and purple, forever still and spreadeagled on the apartment buildings by the will of your lens. From a thousand thousand screens away I pried your sight to my eyes, the way one sups on dripping fruit. I’d found your blog before I’d found you (a sleek boy at the museum, skittery and intense), and loved your way of seeing before ever I had seen you. 

 

I said I had a habit of looking at the view from people’s windows, a routine inspection, ethnography of bedrooms. This was a lie; really I faked the obsession the moment we flounced onto your bed so I wouldn’t hurt you with my eyes, my deer in the headlights, didn’t want your blood on my tires. Still you were the one coaxing me, a little bit of bait as you stroked the patch between heel and calf, rustling the comfortable net as you tickled me into your lap, your palpable heated lips, unknown but so very alive, insistent fingers flicking me open so that I lay prone and obedient on the chopping board of the future. As you loved me I thought of the past like data, overwritten in increments on a navy blue bar, pixelated rubbish leaping into pixelated bin. As you left me he unbuttoned your shirt from my torso, without my permission, and I thought of the time someone knocked water over my painting while I sat in disbelief. Afterwards he said I’m sorry, I knew you didn’t want it, but I said it’s fine it’s what I needed, but into the air came more tears in jerks and hiccups like a car stalling, the young driver in a panic, the instructor pretending there are no such things as urgent stoplights.

 

It sounds like blame but you know I chose every moment of it, and hope that you did too.

i wake up with the thunder of your typewriter

I am easily duped by

vegans,

Adam West Batman episodes,

gurkhas,

mixtapes.

 

Funny how your world fills out with tiny clicks and whirrs, how busy evenings fit a beer or two.

 

Stolen Moments

Kim Addonizio

What happened, happened once. So now it’s best
in memory—an orange he sliced: the skin
unbroken, then the knife, the chilled wedge
lifted to my mouth, his mouth, the thin
membrane between us, the exquisite orange,
tongue, orange, my nakedness and his,
the way he pushed me up against the fridge—
Now I get to feel his hands again, the kiss
that didn’t last, but sent some neural twin
flashing wildly through the cortex. Love’s
merciless, the way it travels in 
and keeps emitting light. Beside the stove
we ate an orange. And there were purple flowers
on the table. And we still had hours.

Yes I still miss you.

There’s a pounding in a distant wall, too insistent to be someone’s late night shenanigan but not violent enough to be a break-in.

 

2.42am, I’ve been typing mountains and molehills but haven’t done the work that’s due in the morning. I can’t sleep, I’m not reading. You’ve become the magazine between drawer and sofa, a box in a cupboard under a pile of clothes, a series of texts in my phone with a number that won’t dial. I could say it, loud in the hall of my mind, clear as a stoplight, truncating your daydreams as you’re slipping, sleepy, ever further down the classroom chair– I miss you– and where you are a wasp murmurs or a car collides. Shoes propped on the head of the passenger seat, or speeding up a wall, or at the front door so your toes are naked with mine, I miss you down to your footprints, terminated within the hour they were made but nevertheless always and forever pounded like fossils into the god of the ground, and here I go doggedly sniffing them out, or at least trying to.

experiment #2

Then I realized that the smallest things, that I took upon for fun, to experiment, to prove a point–

 

These almost always sprawled into importance.

 

Take everybody seriously. Sometimes you don’t know what your silence, your furrows, your truncated smile can do.

 

What am I doing? I know too well, I should remember to do only the things I can live with.

doors

open when you lean on them. Lean lean lean.

 

I have a job thanks to the valued opinions of Jin. :) Not any job either, I must say I fairly tingled hearing what I’d get to do.

 

Highly amused by some of the search terms to this blog:

 

special someone blogurl:wordpress.com

dawnisms you got that right.

chinese tiles mahjong?

hamster – be the death of me is that a song?

of love and other demons mosquitoes

big pen nic when rod, shaft, joystick and other euphemisms fail.

hipster seoul

worst things about seoul you won’t read about them here.

laundry mats in seoul

hymen w4m i feel so virginal!

nisa turtles games 

leo drescher !! stalker alert!

shaved armpits

“I checked under your pillow for you already.”

In the car I told your boyfriend I thought everything would be fine, none of my business, but he had a face animated by traces of you. I wasn’t trying to be kind or falsely reassuring, I’m not saying it won’t be difficult, the worst is yet to be if ever it should come. But I think you two are going to be together for a long while yet. You have something special. 

 

It still sounds to me like complacency, resignation, when someone asks me, especially with regard to P-Andrew, “Isn’t it enough that you met someone special? Why didn’t you stay with him?” With regard to Specificboy, “He was special, hold on to him/ He wasn’t that special, you’ll meet someone better.”

 

I’d like to clarify it further. It’s not the specialness of the person in and of themselves, because then we’d be looking at the beloved’s trophy value, a self-contained beauty frozen in the context of the showcase. More critically, it’s the specialness of their effect on you. Without any sound I sit up, starving with the need to better myself, not for him, but in his settling dust, the wake of his jittery ambition. Without irritation I find myself silent where previously I’d have complained. After him, I am entirely fearful but also valiant. He’s a fine thing to look at, unique unto himself, beautiful down to the ridges of his scars. But his value is not in how admirable or rare he is. It’s the effect he’s had on me, so that I’m buying a ticket, merchandise, and setting up my own act to rival his.

 

And I don’t care to own him, perhaps he will never kiss me again. It doesn’t matter. I’ve been compelled to move from here to a worthy future, and that is the holy grail I’m chasing, whose nomadic and turbulent map he marked upon me. And this feat, you silly boy, is quite profound and quite profound indeed is the extent of my affection for you.

in every frame i imagined your silence beside me

Katong Fugue showed tonight, which you don’t know about.

 

I want to love you with a savage singularity, one that is blind to the other pulses, knowing only hunger and motion. Would you let me, if I bury it for now and present it to you still salty with earth when my hair has grown long and my bank balance poorly; if I make it from here to another back-breaking bed with you?

 

This is the me you did not meet but it is true as every sinew and capillary urgently recovering while you sleep, truer than the girl who paused before you touched her, to gather for you what was uncontaminated and alas, clumsy, raw, so fearful, the distrustful girl who looked out your car window and remembered the man who rolled away too fast. Which me would you have wanted? Too bad you don’t get to choose, it’s a package deal. I would, though, impose a baggage limit.

 

You have no idea. You might think of yourself as another obsolete phone number, maybe you did an estimate of the average time I take to flit from one hope to the next.

 

I am probably a receipt in your wallet. But till I am crowded out, I am also a legitimate memory. Recipient of your long steady gaze, promising nothing but not denying either, 5 seconds in a moment you never had before.