24 Hour Collaboration: Part I

[Breaking from the norm with a longer piece. This was the product of a collaboration with Allison. We had only/exactly 24 hours to have a finished product, so this is it. I'm trying not to go bonkers over all of the editing/changes I want to do with the writing. In any case...

Instructions: Open another tab on your window, go to this site. Have good headphones. Press play. You can have it playing before you read this, while you read this, or afterwards. It is meant to be in conjunction with this piece.--k.]


(pause)





























I am ready to believe that the sensations I derived from natural fornication were much the same as those known to normal big males consorting with their normal big mates in that routine rhythm which shakes the world. The trouble was that those gentlemen had not, and I had, caught glimpses of an incomparably more poignant bliss. – V.N.



Ah, Maurice. You were always so impossible. The fiber on the surface of that black water. How I would stare into it at night and wait for you to emerge from behind me in its reflection. Your scent of lilac and dirt. It was my hand that slapped your pretty face. The puff of powder that scattered from it when I did. But there were other times. Surely, you remember. There will forever be a link between you and my brother, and it disgusts me. It has nothing to do with your genitals.

That night amongst the trees when I met you, the light was a syrup of a particular green. A spoiled emerald of sickness and unnatural things: kidnappings and crime scenes. You materialized. You wore the garb of another time although when, exactly, was unnameable. It was part of your charm.

You, with your tailored lines and your wrist grip tight. Eyes of silver moving water: liquid mercury spilled upon fallen fir; the slightly sexual fear of being lost in the woods.

(pause)

It was a strange relationship, existing only within the reflection of mirrored surfaces although mirrors, themselves, proved fruitless. I would practice for hours to train my body to interact with yours-which I could only see behind me while looking just past myself in lakes, in windows, and in the filth I would pour out just to see you. I would learn how to arch in order to reach back, to touch you, to go against my instinct and move in a direction opposite than that which my brain had intuited me. Over time and with turbulent patience, it became second nature. What I could not see of you, I could feel, and this was more than enough in its sensation.

Saint Sebastian,
How your perverse arrows left us craving
the exact moment
of puncture
Sucking our tongues in savor as we imagine
arrow
after arrow
all the while
body bound to a tree
and still, you stood your ground.

Maurice would stand behind me, attentive in the way one is at night- uncertain of what surrounds them. He would not be touching me, but I could feel the warmth of his fingertips just beside the pulse of my neck. There was a tempt that he enjoyed. He never knew exactly how to tell me what it was that he wanted, and for this I would spend nights with my fingers on the insides of his arms reading the inverse of the Braille that ran through his veins. There was a way his blood would scream, and for me, it unrolled the song of a thousand sirens.

I would awake sometimes at night, a perfumed envelope slipped under my pillow. I would press it to my face, intoxicated with its scent, and descend back into velvet folds of sleep. When finally, I awoke, I would have its mark on my flesh for hours: the ribbed-shell pattern of his communique.

Oh Maurice, with your feline-like cheekbones and sideways moving eyes, how were you able to see me amidst all the shadows cast to hide me?


There is a silence that rocks me
a breathing
Saint Sebastian will look at you
plainly
to see what it is you are proud of
and what it is you are not willing to hide.

Every time I would see you in the reflection of the water, every time you managed to slide up next to me as I gazed, I could hear the sound of a heavy, metal vault being closed. The finality of sound. The zipping up of that long, black bag; the closing of a mouth.

I wanted only to see you. Face to face, and fully looking into your eyes.

The temper one has when an alarm is sounding is the inability to be calm. Each strike of sound grates deeper into the furthest tips of the nervous system. Eyes pulsating in the same rhythm- a burning that begins inside the forearms (closest to the elbows), the sides of our faces, and our chests. There are urges that I can’t quite control, but need you know of them? It is the difference between sliding my arm into that of a man, and sliding my arm around the tiny waist of an androgynous creature living just out of reach.

Maurice, I am sorry. When you fell, I meant to catch you. We were dancing: My lad’s front against your gentleman’s waist. Surely, you could feel my intention. Surely you saw my grasp reach into a desperate fist for you just after your quick descend.

I meant to catch you. There is always that one look, a shift, that pulls us from such a moment of ecstasy, into a final dawn. Our eyes met without surface for the first time.

(pause)

There are times now, when looking into the puddles of the most scum-filled allies, that I sense him. Swear I see him slip away from behind me. I turn to look him full in the face, and there is nothing. [Perhaps a rat- that sleek animal that reminds us that something is willing to eat our waste, and disease us in the same movement. Such strange influence these creatures have.].

At times I feel him breathing into both my ears at the same time, and it is only this that alerts me to what is not possible.

















.

Elegant Movements in the Dark

Tonight marks one night closer to Devil's Night*, and a small handful of days closer to Day of the Dead. This page of the calendar has always proven to be stitched with bad deeds (although, 'artless vandal' as they may appear to the external eye, some of these acts constitute as flirting).

Amidst the fires and mischief, the glass separating the living from the dead thins, and it is always this time of year that dreams flicker visits from characters and entities whom have long since seen their last performance.

Perhaps I welcome it this year.

More than most.

There is something more amply certain under my feet, and thus, I feel the ability to lean. As one does when receiving communion, or a secret: such confidential information passed from between parted lips. It is such laced breath that fills the ink-spill sky of these last October nights that usher in November.

What is it that we shall see drop from the silhouettes of branches as we walk, and what fingers will brush the softness of our cheeks as we sleep? The visitors of the next few nights (who arrive and depart in the fashion of an antique camera flash) arrange themselves in answer. Lean in so that you may hear them: Such beauty displayed in their disembodied gloves that reach for our chins to push them aside and breathe their stories into our earthly ears.



-k.

*= It wasn't until the past few years after getting confused and offended looks at my mention of it that I realized it was a Detroit specific experience and name http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devil%27s_Night




(photo credit: MaliciousGlamour on Tumblr. Also: General shout out to the brilliance of http://yvonneconstance.tumblr.com/ - if you do not follow Yvonneconstance, you need to begin right now.)

Snickerdoodle Cookies Warming in the Oven, or, How Ever Did That Blood Get on the Floor?

It is October, the month of unanticipated flames of every sort. The change in light is reason enough to be up to no good and with a well-fitted coat, I accept the challenge. Last night was spent making out in the back seat of a parked car on a side street before getting my hair back in place, smoothing the front of my shirt, and slipping into the door of a dimly lit bar just in time to meet a friend I haven't seen in too long a time.

These days I am convinced that the smell of freshly lit matches follows me everywhere, and that my footsteps on the pavement are amplified simply for suspense.

I've been thinking of the perversion of domesticity, lately. I remember years ago some friends of mine made a zine entitled Perverts at Home that I truly loved. It was photographs of the two of them doing pervy things all during the course of a day in a home with all of its homely duties (doing the dishes, making cookies, wearing aprons...). I fear I may be aiming to replicate this in the next few months (which would be problematic, at best), but throwing caution to the pecan-roasted October wind, and simply stated:

Here is to those of us who know there may be more behind the warm cinnamon of a kitchen that tends towards an over-use use of bleach.


k.



Photo credit: LesNeutres on Tumblr

Hypergraphia Upon Parched Tongue

There is a type of creativity, of the sewing together of thoughts with fine wire, that can only occur with no one around. I can hear the slightly angry mumble of the television upstairs, but it is something different than a person being in the same room or just outside the door. It feels good. Long overdue. I can hear the hum of the light in my room, perhaps more clearly now, having just listened to the antique drum machine for about an hour. (It helps me concentrate, but more so, it changes what I am perceiving around me.)

The fall is beginning to lace itself with the fingers of winter, and it is serving only to remind me of the loneliness of my lost jacket. Perhaps it will reappear. I would like very much to be reunited with it: I fear my stubbornness and childish loyalty to hope may leave me cold and sick quite a few more times before the winter is through with us. But we shall see. The autumn leaves have barely turned their frail faces to us, and there is so much more to hope for.




k.



photo credit: maliciousglamour tumblr; photo of Anjelica Huston

Other Way Around*

And in fact wrestling is an open-air spectacle, for what makes the circus or the arena what they are is not the sky (a romantic value suited rather to fashionable occasions), it is the drenching and vertical quality of the flood of light. -Roland Barthes

Oh, Honesty: How does one go about you? Is it the strum of multiple lives with only one who is privy to all of them? Is it the truths that come out in the middle of the night, when filters have slipped and all parties are left with eyes wide with surprise? Oh, I do not know. What my body craves and what my heart and mind know are best (best? such a strange and utterly constructed idea...) are, at times, so different. Can they be fused? Perhaps I don't want them to be: these lives that I live like mirror shards in a clothes dryer.

(But why do particular shards feel like such strange drag?)

Ah, for it is, my child, for it is: And it only becomes a questionable honesty when the flood of Barthes's light exposes to reveal who actually knows that the dress-up is going on.




(insert the sudden, metallic sound of a large number of lights being shut off at the same time here)


k.

Artwork: The Lady on the Horse by Alfred Kubin. Currently reading Kubin's "The Other Side" as suggested by Joaquín.
*= Ode to the lyrics of the Rites of Spring song by the same name

Study Station Justification

I've been watching Ninas Mal under the premise of improving my auditory Spanish comprehension. The truth is, Ninas Mal is a soap opera set in Columbia that is on the MTV Spanish channel, Tres, and has stupidly catchy pop music and hot women in incredible amounts of lip gloss complaining about their lives. (See picture above for three of the characters. Adela, in the middle, is my favorite character.) The plot is thinly veiled porn, basically: A handful of rich girls do bad things that wind them up in front of a judge that sends them to a charm school run by a strict older house mother. Hair pulling, alliances between the girls that last roughly half an episode , a developing lesbian plot between two of the girls (not just for show!), eye rolls, and of course the forever winning combination of sleepovers with shirt-and-panties-as-pajamas, nighttime escapes, and revenge in the form of cotton candy pink nails gripping a crowbar and having at people's windshields.

In other words: Bone City. Putting my boner to the side, however, it really does trick me into paying insane amounts of attention to know exactly what is going on and helps reinforce verb conjugation and usage.

In other words: Double Bone City.

this is the main video played at the end of each show. I would pay to be the nerd in this video.



k.

B.F. Skinner's Misunderstood Tenderness, or, Just Because I'm Dressed Like a Hot Dog Doesn't Mean I'm Not a Lady Gaga Impersonator

The woman I live with, who together with a friend of mine have an almost-three-year-old, is failing at politely hiding she is bothered that her son calls me "Da Da". He does not call his father 'Da Da'. I've watched over the few months I've lived here while she sits, frozen-smiled, trying to encourage the boy to say "Mama" (as if talking to her), or "Daddy" as if talking to the father. But, without fail, he will come to my bedroom door and announce "Da Da" until I come out. "That's right..can you say Mama??" she says, slightly stressed out. Staring at me he points and proclaims "Da Da".

(pause)

The beauty of their expert eyes for apparitions : children are able to see things invisible to others.



-k.







photo credit: Weegee, who was a crime scene photographer in the 40s and 50s. Entitled "Their First Murder". It's a candid shot of the crowd- mostly kids- that gathered around a murder scene before the cops had arrived. http://www.getty.edu/art/gettyguide/artObjectDetails?artobj=61129