journal 07/23/09 (montreal-vancouver)
Brief joys:
The days rolled like dice thru alcoholic, ink-stained squalor, legs thrown around your tiger: all those fabulous sine-waves of hate & love & pleasure. Fighting & making up — that incredible gallop your heart takes up when he suddenly does lean in to put his mouth against yours. At any rate having your mind roar around in long ferocious circles of good & bad ideas, like early toothy warplanes with you defiant, sky-scrapered, feeling magnificent. Ascending factories via the mile-long delicacies of exterior ladders with your arms & back & shoulders burning all the way just to drink the old city & its industry, its river-cleaved sprawl all around you. Plastic trays plied with hot, decent cafeteria meals & you sitting your patched-up ass amongst your bright, joyful friends, immaculate minds often quivering at the canyon-edge of comedown or else some new enticing vision or trouble. Rooms plastered with notes & works & posters. A strengthening of calves from all those beautiful bicycled days turned vivid & gentle thru the dry gold metropolis, a springtime playlist brimming with plucked strings & gladness revolving constantly thru your cochlea. The 4am freedoms & philosophies. Every neighbourhood hewn anew in varying light. The dark allure of railroad tracks, the hunger & thirst for footloose exploration, gentle eloquence, preciousness, kindnesses, brief beautiful exchanged glances. Jumping metro turnstiles, stuffing backpacks full of oranges, the cold creeping up thru the worn-thin soles of our shoes. Unlocked doors & long wholesome talks, knees up on the same windowsills, sunrise painting tree branches in thru the window. Reading Neruda at midnight, Orhan Pamuk over coffee & pain au chocolat, feeling smart & caffeinated & invincible.
The pleasant vapidness of summer, new advantageous markings of bikini crotch & breast, kissing the wind riding shotgun in a good friend’s convertible across that one magnificent bridge, mountains all around. 33rd floor apartments, propping up a certain essential strutting confidence behind a fake I.D., the snap-click of secret photographs & hiding bags in casinos. That particular gin & tonic, bass & synth that slicks the world away from you like that trick of whipping a tablecloth from under a dinner set. A different city, always pretty, always glass-faced, never dirty. Things that shine, things that illuminate the curvature of your frame, things that are automatically decadent. The pleasing momentum of a forest run, sunlight piercing everything. The world wearing the city as a gold bracelet, come sunset — being able to see this thru the sunshowers, climbing up the mount.
Sometimes I just want to forget everything and lean up against you like a dead tree or a denim ad. Sometimes I feel like a terrible creature: confused and compromised, multifaced. You touched my palms and said to me: I can’t feel anything anymore, no joy or depth of sadness; these days, I exist only on a plane of activity and soft anger; I miss it sometimes, the beauty and the hurt; when I say this, do you understand? …
