down in me

one. i am three years old and there is a big party with loads of people and my grandmother and my mother love dancing so they are dancing and laughing and happy. maybe it is a family party. lots of people and i am too little. all i see is legs. i look for my mother literally to hide in her skirts and she’s wearing this blinding gold and diamond bracelet and a gold seventies dress and i remember everything about the fabric of the dress. it’s not bright gold, it’s gold like shiny dijon mustard, a muted, elegant gold, the tiniest sparkles woven through giving it its polished sheen. my mother’s warm flowery perfume, like blooming yellow roses is all i smell and her dress all i see and i feel safe and happy and beautiful and loved.

two. i don’t know if i remember this so much or more because it’s a yellowing photograph in one of my grandmother’s many albums, but i must be again three or maybe two, my hair is a bowl of golden brown ringlets someone poured atop my head and my eyes are honey wide and glittering and my lips are wetpink and i am sitting with my feet on the bed next to my dad’s big, sunspotty hand and i am chubby in that lovely baby way and i am wearing a soft onesie the color of a babychick, the kind of onesie with the snap buttons and the feet attached with the white vinyl for soles, and the cotton fabric is so warm against me and my dad is looking down at me and he is smiling condescendingly and i feel safe and happy and beautiful and loved.

2010 was a famous year for the cock. it all started in the cold winter months at the year’s start that saw many a handsome penis picked up at the bar or club, taken home and then quickly dispensed of. look. i don’t want to tell you how i’ve lived this life, but it seems to me that the only way to say something is to say something. or say something but mean nothing with which you can never disappoint. and disappointment was the name of the fingers game this year. boys, listen: learn that there are tools on your body other, and learn to use them fruitfully. you guys don’t understand the worth of a steady hand. seriously, bros. dryhumping is a joke until you come from it. but i digress, summer predictably brought the heat and the summer months were a cornucopia of cock. cock in the park, blackcab sessions of cock, cock in twos, cock in threes, black cock! and combinations thereof. autumnal change ushered in a bleaker, cockless period for reasons i believe, of general malaise, a loss of energy and/or excitement for the business of living in a body which necessitates cock so constantly. however, new winter’s blown a second wind and the heady promise of more oozing throbbing cock (oh my god, the language! someone call a paperback mass marketeer!) here’s wishing you a very cockprosperous 2011, from my glossy slick vulva to yours.

everyone is such a complete person all the time, i become confused. my 20-year-old friend is not afraid of life, she speaks of businesses and babies like she owes nothing. i am twelve years older and today i found myself asking her what i should do. of course she didn’t know but my point is that that happened. i don’t remember being 20. i went 17-28 with what i imagine like a large hop, no milestones for me: no school degrees, long marriage no wedding, month after month my eggs going unfertilized. which is lucky because i can’t fathom telling new people how to live. what would i say? ‘wake up for no reason and again tomorrow.’ yesterday i looked at a christmas tree and earnestly thought, ‘huh?’

recommended doing
split an orange
read de beauvoir

I have been wrenching myself in knots, twisting tightly upon the seams of my skin. Not to mention they never notice. Is this okay with people? Do we all walk around with a burning hot stone in the rib, a slosh in the gut, an arrow in the back, an aching heart. Poor babies us. An aching heart, she said, ha ha. An aching heart. What is that, it’s not even a thing people say that means anything anymore to anyone. It’s not like knuckledusters grazing your cheekbones lovingly.

There is a man who will hit you in the face at that precise angle in which you need to be hit. This is a man that is in control of his emotions. When a thing happens this man makes it happen so mostly to your face because your face is the moon that receives the most signals. The next time you open the moon to speak it will hurt just enough for you to think. This man is a great man.

Everyone is dying all around you slowly. No one ever stops dying, everyone is always dying. Its just a matter of how quickly we all go. But really, if you think about the breadth of time it seems absurd to think of longer. Or longing. Or tree leaves and branches and other things that are dying like you. When I think about the air that swirls around me my stomach hurts. Why can’t everything be okay. There are no stories in me, just questions. Lots and lots of questions to which I hate the answers.

I think I know a thing but I am dying. If it is true that lightning will strike a bear while he is bathing in the stream then let it strike me too. I can add ‘she said’ to the end of that to make it seem more something. But that’s just posturing I know. When it hurts this bad it’s best to hold your nose and don’t keep breathing. It is the intake that causes the pain.

If you are no one’s mother, you can never be blamed for what you didn’t do but you will be blamed for having never given birth to a thing that is worth having, like a life, right. Is a life worth having. A life worth having is a life worth doing over and there are no do-overs because this is not like that.

Remember when my parents sent that asshole ahead in front of them to spy us out? He climbed the fence, so monkey he was and sneaked up behind us. What’s that, I said and you smiled and said you didn’t know. It was my parents getting ready to tell you that you’d done enough damage for one weekend, even though they gave us that weekend those bastards. What did they think our hormones would do? That they would sit placidly idle, side by side under a tree. That they would look out into the landscape and see what, cows? Why is everyone who is dying all the time so ridiculous.

I feel really tired and no longer sure how much longer I can go on with all of this living. Big kisses to the clever kid that never grins and big kisses to all you lemonjuice fanatics, I know you’re out there, stroking listlessly the shape of your discontent with a paring knife. There is a man that is dying and we none of us know what to do because we really are meant to do nothing but die with him slowly and a little bit.

And I keep twisting inside. I hurl glass bottles at the wall and care nothing for my sliced up fingers. When I’m stoned, I think of cream cupcakes and those little things that breathe. Everything I do is to cover up another hole, to fill it. Since I can’t stand things that are empty, vessels are there for the filling.

If you just let things come through you, they go through you. The vessel-like metaphors of the body cannot be overstated. You just sit there and you don’t try and things come: mucus, blood, secretions of all sorts. Life is mainly just expulsion.

We are here today because I am acting out my life today.

We are here today for entertainment.

Today we are here because my heart hurts, my heart is in my lungs.

We are here today because that french girl was there and she looked like a french girl.

We are here because it hurts to be somewhere with someone that doesn’t think of you when you’re not looking.

We are here today because I am dulling my senses (<—euphemism) in an effort to be more comical.

Because life’s kind of a joke, right?

We are here today acting out this reality show, sitting attractive but casual on the confessional couch, justifying how we did so poorly during the last challenge, resolving to do at least more comically in the next one.

Because life is a joke that’s actually quite funny but leaves you empty like when you trip over a moccasin and you think ‘who even wears moccasins’ or ‘is that the name for this type of shoe’ and you follow up that thought with something vaguely racist and you do a sad laugh and you keep being alive.

We are here because this is a personal blog and that’s okay being a person is okay and thinking only of yourself is okay and talking about yourself is okay

wanting love and attention is okay

settling for less and thinking you deserve anything and forgiving unforgivable people because you ‘totally understand being human’ and allowing them to use you so you can look at them sometimes because you find so arousing the way their eyes shift about when they are lying which is always is

very much okay.

Because all interpersonal relations are is creative ways of using other bodies to calm your own.

Because skin is so lonely and muscles so tense and nervous systems buzz like bees losing their stingers when injecting your bloodstream with chemicals to make you feel like a kid with nice good parents.

Just trust me on all of this okay I know what I’m saying.

Recommended Reading
I don’t get tired of telling you

I see you and your face is shook tonic water, fizzing, your eyes wet with drunk and I want to love you, I do. I want to brush the lint off your coat and pretend I say nothing but instead I make jokes and I see you, and your teeth you are showing.

and i mean holy what the fuck? i DO NOT RECALL having written a bio which does a mention of my vagina for the three poems now up on >kill author.

i don’t even like the word vagina that much. still, it’s something i would do right? like during one of those “stupors” right? those >ka guys must be pretty amazing/insane to entertain my shit. guys: thank you guys.

[slight blemish on the otherwise impeccable face of my awesomeness: the issue is named after vonnegut and SURPRISE! i have never read slaughterhouse five (cue everyone die). yeah yo, i know: i am a flaneur a poseur and other french-swiped words. is philistine one too? doesn’t sound like it. regardless i am that too. plus a ho. please try to love me anyway. please?]

meanwhile i dedicate the following formula to reynard seifert:

<3 x 1.000.000 x infinity + endoftime²

my story titled amerika as in franz kafka’s amerika reynard lovingly slapped up on titular with some peanut butter. there is no mention of my vagina in that story so read it only if you feel positive and/or neutral feelings towards the lives of hamsters.

what else? think i will give up on poetry soon. i have no idea what i am doing still in life. send suggestions (for either living and/or ending life) to mail [at] downinme [dot] com.

in my aloneness i have often thought about balance re: progress.

experiment
take a giant social issue and put little bear cubs on all sides in a circle and have them tug-of-war every which way. as long as cubs push and cubs pull things will always turn out fine, even for the cubs that get hussied up in clown’s clothes.

i am fine this life is fine.

occasionally i am pleased with this consistent low-level hum of suffering. a pain a pain a pain and then a moment to think: life is this i am this life. pretty cool, right? if i look at it all at once the snowball will flatten my face. so no rules or plans but a consistent little chug-along plug-along and you can blame that shit on the sun. i feel like one thousand and seventy-three pounds of excrement. life is shit i am this shit. but also not, right?

cigarettes
in case you are still worried i remind you that my skin though marked is whole.

orgasm
in conclusion, should anyone have a kind connection of that certain kind, i could use a hit to dull the edges so hit me. up.

recommended reading
pee on water
vasily and chang
anchor book

in your face i do not care for i am happy. and what problem is it of yours if i take a tab or twenty-five, if i hustle in the nights if you are incapable of laughing anyway. a magic mistress misses the distance between herself and the furor of her pursuers. but i am not magic. i am see-through and tired and alone.

and it’s godly when you love everyone you meet. sick sweet when you feel the reflecting flesh and you think this is nice and everyone is good and we will all be happy in caring for each other. forever. when you are soaked up to the shoulders and no one can see you that is a good thing.

meanwhile my bark dries and peels and the promise of fruit is distant in the current. it can be spring or may or june but my pollen has ceased pollinating. i will flower given the energy to grow which may be never. i will invent a secret story and play it as my petals drift.

I HAVE SEVERE SOCIAL ANXIETY AND DEPRESSION, I want to shout. THE ONLY WAY I AM STANDING HERE IS WITH THE HELP OF SOME AMOUNT OF ENTACTOGENS AND ALCOHOL. And there hasn’t been enough alcohol but no one is listening.

The reason I don’t like to sit down is that I’m afraid I might not be able to get up again, that this heavy sad will pin me to the chair forever or maybe not forever but just make it kind of embarrassing and uncomfortable for me to get back up again. Like when running you stop for air and to start again is harder because you’ve lost momentum and your body remembers how it is to not run.

Someone says something and a bouquet of flowers blooming in my chest is choking me and I feel a million things at once that I am not able to separate concretely but on top of all those things is a thin layer, like a dusting or a fog that dulls everything.

I want to engage sincerely and it hurts that what I most want and probably need is what my body physically rejects. That just to speak takes so much energy because I have to simultaneously try to still the pounding of the heart in my ears and behind my eyes and regulate my breath and these simple activities take my focus from you because my nervous system is uncontrollable.

Imagine if we had to consciously breathe and make sure to pump blood all the time to not die, what else would get done.