Steady Sailor, or, The Beauty of the Picture You Take, Each Weekday Morning, in Front of a Poster of Tomatoes

 

 

I.

I have just returned from Illinois, Michigan, and the scrape of Ohio. I will return toward the end of the month.

II.

Earlier this evening, I thought of you. It was in the cool, blue light of the apartment you used to live in with the walls that didn’t quite touch the ceiling. Your museum living room. The neighbors that complained about your smoking.

I have a voicemail you sent me on March third of the year you knew me. You had brought a man home from the bar. You didn’t know why. You barely knew what happened. The fear and confusion in your voice is palpable.

Sometimes, I have this odd impulse to send it to you. I don’t know why. I never would, of course, and don’t even know why I still have the voicemail. It was something I held on to for evidence for you, if you ever needed it.  Then, as time went on, I had waited too long to delete it.  Now, with my romance toward archival material, it is too late to destroy it with a clean conscience.  And so, it rests.

III.

I have been reading a lot of research that is fucking me up. It stares me straight in the eyes with its information and blinks only when I do. The curve of its hands hold my jawline and ask me “Didn’t you know this already?”.  I did not. It seems like such an odd Keeper to hand me now, at this point in my life, the keys that unlock the rooms I’ve been trying to get into my entire life.

Behind me, I hear the grumbles of a suspicion only trauma can instill. It makes me smile the smile that sparks a person to defensively ask why I am laughing.

I am not laughing.

I am shining from within in recognition.

I am shining from within in particular love.

You with your hair freshly cut from the barber closest to your work.

You with a microfiber lens cloth dutifully kept deep in your pants pocket.




be well; be loved,


k.

(Photograph by Leslie Zhang for MWMW Studios Fall 2019)

The Same But Opposite

 

 

It has certainly been a while. 

Even when I have been writing here, I have not been writing here. 

Within the last several months, there has been:

Two deaths.

No funerals.

One body.

One box.

One breathtaking Virgo upgrade.

One chance.

Six courses of a Shabbat meal in One hotel room.

Five cities.

Two cities to go.

Twenty nine thousand seven hundred and fifty four gasps. 

Three gifts from One heart in Four days.

Thirteen rows.

Twelve days.

Six flights.

Endless thirst for the depth of conversations One offers.

Two necessary conversations after Fourteen years.  

Four days and two shared beds.

The absence of sound when I need it.

 (pause)

 

I have been thinking on concepts such as cognitive empathy and the beauty of how the boundaries we set allow us to love, appreciate, and feel those without regret. 

I have been pondering the question of how trust is built and its relationship to incremental risk.

My heart has been open, overwhelmed and excited.  

When you know, you know: But it is wild to feel the intervention of unseen and formerly uncertain hands. 

be well; be loved,

k.

 Image: “Deconstruction”. Yang Ling by Jumbo Tsui for V Magazine China May 2023 via Vampite Fitness Tumbrl

On Having Lost All Perspective

 
I've been trying to figure out that middle ground of authenticity and connection mixed with appropriateness when talking to particular people I care about who are in my life about my life. 

In particular- although not exclusively- the challenges I have with this are in conversations with cis straight people who I genuinely like and care about. 

Culturally, sex and perversion is just something more casually talked about in queer contexts.  Not always, but usually.

For this reason, a question of "So what's been going on lately?" is filled with images I filter and sort through in order to find one that feels appropriate. The recent queer sex in a hotel room a few hours out of town seems like an out-of-place topic for this conversation. My mind's fingers fumble over to run along my recent combination-kink of freshly shaven and oiled legs, deep emerald green panties, and butter cookie flavored lip balm. This, too, seems at odds with the context. 

So my mind tries to imagine what would fit with them and I end up thinking of stupid, stereotyping topics such as taxes. 

[Interestingly, I asked a queer friend what he thought he could talk to straight people about and he, too, said taxes. Why does this feel so certain?]

It's not just with cis, straight people of course. 

At this point it could be with anyone.

be well; be loved,

k.

Of Sight and Sound in Fragments

 

Sometimes, lists are the only way to communicate. 

A Morse Code of sorts when one is too bogged down or overwhelmed to jewel together words in order to create a beautiful sentence to lay across your collarbone.  

A list as of late would include:

-You with your penchant for the Midwest, your 1950s barbershop hair and wild eyes.

-The spike of a stiletto shattering your classic Christmas bulbs: Solid red, solid green, solid blue - their silver innards spread across a hardwood floor and the satisfying crunch under my shoe.

-My hand upon my mother's chest in my hometown. The waterlogged nugget of sponge I placed into your mouth. The sandpaper grit in which your tongue stuck to it.  My aim and learned accuracy of getting the morphine exactly and slowly upon those furthest molars: A slow steady short distance down that throat that produced every word I have ever heard you speak.

 

 

(pause)

 

It would also include the observation: It is rare that one hears the sound of a firecracker and hears only a singular pop. 

 

 (pause)

 

 

I have been reading about the art of Sophie Calle (thank you, E.), and thinking about the concept not of "love at first sight", but of the "love at last sight" that Walter Benjamin references in his book Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism. 

 

Love at last sight.  

Tell me of the people and times it makes you think of.

be well; be loved,

k.

Your Pin Cushion Lips and the Red Ribbon of your Tongue

 

 

Recently, I was watching an interview with Marc Jacobs in which he is talking about design sketches and how to communicate via the sketches what you actually want and want achieved. What I liked about it is that it functioned as a beautiful illustration of a pretty solid approach to communication in general. 

Think of the sketch as something that needs to be expressed or information that needs to be shared, and the pattern maker as the recipient of said information. In order for is to be as successful as possible, a lot of different tools and angles can be employed.

He says: 

First of all: It's not always easy to understand what someone means by a sketch [...] I can put something down and, while it's very evident to me what it means and what it represents, it's not always very clear to every pattern maker. So, along with the sketch, any other information- written or spoken- is useful. So sometimes I'll draw something out, which to me is clear, then I'll write above the swatch "I want a narrow jacket with the feeling of a high waist"[...] anything I can do to support that sketch: Any references, whether its a swatch of fabric, whether it's a few written words to indicate what the proportions are or what I'm going for, whether its talking through it with a pattern maker or whether is a photograph or a visual reference based on some of the research I've done. Anything I can do to support that sketch and give a clearer message to the pattern maker that is going to interpret it: That is the most useful thing to do. 

I feel you, Marc.

Different types of communication modes for different brains and different modes of accessing and understanding. 

be well; be loved,

k.

(image: a sketch of a Marc Jacobs 2018 Met Gala custom look)

 

 

As She Lay Dying

 

We sat eating Taco Bell in a parking lot outside of an auto detailing store underneath a weird, Michigan moon.  

My niece, behind the steering wheel, contemplated the best way to eat the Mexican pizza she had ordered without the utensils the drive through guy had skimped out on.

This is what home felt like. A nighttime escape from the house and history that trapped us.

The silence and secrecy afforded by the muffled cave of a parked car; the glow of the streetlamps still standing from my childhood.

 

k. 

(Image: via Tumblr: Nick Farhi - Jugheads In A Blanket Roadside, 2019)

(Title: a nod to the Faulkner novel I've never read, even though my library gave it to all staff for free decades ago.)

Meantime We Shall Express Our Darker Purpose, or, Can You Feel It Through the Glove?

Time and treasure have been unfolding. What and who holds me these days are constant: A well-worn and wooden boat creaking and continuing in the sea against the strength of its slams.

Reality, recently, has been a constant recycling of the first scene in King Lear. 

I was born last and was not able to do the dance required of me to be viewed as a child worthy of the crown they are insulted I have no interest in. 

It is not borne of malice nor resentment.  

Simply a love heftily anchored somewhere between the lands of honesty and sadness.

I love your majesty according to my bond - nor more nor less. 

Save the opulence for my older sisters, right?  

The jewels of our father with wash'd eyes. 

 (pause)

The tides have been interesting as of late. 

That which is sent out to sea; that which washes ashore.

There are those we will let go of forever, surfacing only and reluctantly in our strangest dreams.

Then there are those we are forever tied to - only to resurface as if the strangest dream has been conjured 

right in front of our waking-life eyes.  

be well; be loved,

k.

(via summerbummr Tumblr)

(title: taken from King Lear "Meantime, we shall express our darker purpose")

 

 

The Reason I Remember the Name of the Food of a Cat I Don't Feed

I tried to stay upright for the same number of hours I had felt my heart hurt today. Not in the bad way. But  perhaps in the good.

 

 

Simple meets complex

Over-thinker meets oblivious.

You who listens to love songs, and me who listens to metal.

Me who has the blankets in a mountain, and you who tucks all corners in.

Hand holder meets too-PTSD'ed-out-for-most-PDA.

One of the things I love about you is the way that many of the feelings that you have must be documented, written, and pondered while listening to music. 

I know that particular feelings will be soaked in while in the bathtub of your apartment while your cat barges in, walks the edge of the tub, and almost falls in.

In Smurf terms: When I first met you, I was afraid you were Vanity Smurf. Now I realize you are Poet Smurf, described as "very sensitive and artistic...he spends most of his time wandering in nature to improvise poems about it, and sometimes has trouble finding verses that rhyme. He usually manages to do it through some accident." I don't really know how much more fitting you can get. 

What I love about you is that you are so clear to me. 

I know that when you are angry and hurt, you put your sunglasses on even if they are unnecessary.

I know that if I go to take a picture of you, you will start with your "cool kid with no emotions" face, but you will hear me snickering from behind the camera and, eventually, your lips will spill into the widest grin. (That is the picture that I take.)

I know that you get a sense of safety out of knowing that your cat is okay.

I know the reason you fought so hard to keep him was a form of self-love.

 

So there you are

in your bathtub tonight.

Wrapped inside its porceline arms

while your crooked cat circles you 

like a wobbling

shaky 

shark.

k.

(image: luli sanchez)

The Water I Pour Over Me

 

I recently read a book of love poems written by Bertolt Brecht. 

They were not very good. 

There was one that was okay.

 I will put it, here:

 

When I Left You, Afterwards...

 

When I left you, afterwards

On that great today

I saw nothing, when I began

To see, but gaiety.

 

Since that evening, that hour

You know the one I mean

Livelier is my stride and more

Beautiful this mouth of mine.

Greener are, now that I feel,

Meadow, bush and tree,

The water is more lovely cool

That I pour over me. 

 

 --Bertolt Brecht (I don't know the specific year)

You see what I mean.  It's okay. I like the last two lines.

In other news, I have been having that particular stripe of gender dysphoria, again. That kind that leaves me dressed in roughly a three piece suit, but with my fingers painted a bright, popsicle red-orange and the tiniest strawberry decal on my left index finger. Tie wear and thigh harnesses. 

It is springtime, but there will forever be the quasi-uniformed femmey boy who occupies my genders. 

be well; be loved,

k.

(Image: Pierre Molinier, Sans titre 1960, via fiac tumblr)

(Title: Line of the aforementioned Brecht poem that was okay.)