journal 20/09/09 (montreal)
Sunlight pouring across your skin, your shadow
flat on the wall.
The dawn was breaking the bones of your heart like twigs.
You had not expected this,
the bedroom gone white, the astronomical light
pummeling you in a stream of fists.
You raised your hand to your face as if
to hide it, the pink fingers gone gold as the light
streamed straight to the bone,
as if you were the small room closed in glass
with every speck of dust illuminated.
The light is no mystery,
the mystery is that there is something to keep the light
from passing through.
Richard Siken, Visible World
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, unsharpened, made whole, blessed with slur & impulse & dreadful nonchalance, defined by survival guides, kits filled with mirror & rope, mattresses & two-chord folk songs, cameras falling to the floor. Red wine blooms across t-shirts worn by angel boys inside of whom diamond-stamped pills are unraveling even more diamond-stamped pills. To never be spoon-fed from the same frontal cortex, to encounter an outgrowth of crystalline obstacles & be left with only a soft taste of something — no images. To see the fake dawn, and then the real dawn! Resonance of boots upon the fire escape, true vault of stars spied thru the enclosure, how the wind would eat us all up; searching reflexively for bodies in the traffic, crosses on the mountain, any & all cut-outs of light: that’s the real gist of it…
Too many feelings lately; or maybe just none at all. Thinking about the point at which I ceased to feel ugly, catching light on some perfect western shore. Certain lights cast certain blinds into perpetual dawn, the self adrift in a cyan river. Teeth, tongue, stubble; hands, jaw, mouth. Up & down butter ladders; that arc of jugular preempting continuous small deaths; the immediate gathering of all your hidden filaments about a magnet of pulse. Thinking of a certain slenderness of attack capability, underpinnings of want (& isn’t it always a want). Look at someone the wrong way & I’m thrown up against a wall. Dizzy prey. Isn’t it always about protecting each other from each other. Isn’t it always about killing off your favourite ones.
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1. Allen Ginsberg, Howl (naturally)
