Saturday, October 29, 2011

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.)

Tuesday, October 25, 2011

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

Sunday, October 16, 2011

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

Saturday, October 15, 2011

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 JoaquĆ­n.
*= Ode to the lyrics of the Rites of Spring song by the same name