07-23-97
1.Magnetic
our fears grew,
geriatric by the age of ten, swallowing ideas whole.
under the spreading walkway, losing ourselves to the eves
and adams, catch it on the brims of black hats and
under blue overcoats, patchwork,
assembled under the watchful eye
of a leading man; you can't get the part unless you're an honor
thespian...
but take roles small and inconsequential
and play them large, tasting each line as if poison.
in time the magic wears thin so the cracks of nothing
show through like gods and atheists. a script,
written now or never,
followed at best halfway, edited for content and time.
and time
makes cruel marks on an empty sketchpad;
notice the half-erased traces
belonging to the lonely girl in the corner.
and in your way, you sympathize, and when you talk
to her pathologies rising radiant
you walk away feeling cheated;
a detachment shouldn't swallow you whole.
overcast skies. air conditioning blown fresh and urgent
over junkie veins
over your boots, hard on the dust,
while you distract yourself with flattery and
half-imagined writers
and dreams where she said "yes". you wake up.
(you feel as if you must.)
but even three cups of coffee
and mix tapes in your friend's car stereo
can't erase the tape you made under sweaty sheets.
tear out the fiber, swallow magnets whole;
the sounds hold. you've no control over this.
drawn casual on loose-leaf, sketched, you passed notes
between fresh minds and collapsing tables and
styrofoam trays.
maybe read by a traitor, the literal interpretation comes out bold,
lost because you never cared enough
to paint fear on her face.
and she never cared enough
to make a tape of her own. now her mind, blank,
shimmers in new york lights
of early-morning cocaine sickness.
07-14-97
1.i'm feeling very sick and ill today.
2.The Haze
Every day I stare at the end of my shoe until I wake up, gasping,
maybe, understanding the sound.
It's gotten hazy,
like the day you stopped riding the bus to school.
And as the discarded curls
of gray smoke
ride out the window of a gray car
in a town named Gray
under a blood gray sky,
the gray boy colors inside the lines
of blind devotion and belief in dramatics.
A movie he watched once made him feel something,
a simple piano riff
complex in execution, overlayed
with words he'd heard before.
Deja vu jolts of phrases ring true.
In this kind of dead city,
keeping the recording intact. A life
etched out in gray plastic,
like a poorly-made blank tape
imprinted with the sorry strains of an old record,
songs
which come through droning and slow. They're understood
only by engineers of sadness
and the carnival-sideshow magicians of meloncholia.
But back to quotations and emotions
he can't choose to forget.
Filled in circles, his SAT test scores lay
on a shelf somewhere, reminding
of potential unrealized. And repeating,
and repeating,
and plagiarizing himself. "Where
are we FUCKIN goin??"
If you want to see what they feel like, paint it
in terms of nonsense inside jokes,
a lot of fossilized moments. Once he felt pure,
driving her home, and realizing that
despite her guitar-playing boyfriend
she would have kissed him.
Call it purity because
morality copied from the ledgers of marijuana
or anemia
wouldn't let him do it.
You create memory
with connection, and now his music collection
is a scrapbook of days, each CD
opening to:
a night in the car, on the way to see her.
Sitting on piles of dirty clothes, and
"it's OK that it's dark, right?"
Open to:
the thin metallic edginess of LSD
conjuring drama at 4 a.m. The soundtrack.
Open to:
This or that night, this or that girl, this or that
feeling. It IS all artifice and it DOESN'T matter.
And it IS all a waste of time again. And
you can write the script even before it happens.
Feel each event distinct hovering in the future.
Faces and technicalities change, morph, melt,
merge in new patterns but
a die only has six sides. Cast your fate enough
and you see the patterns emerge.
Close a chapter, feel the thirteen.
Wake with your face buried in a pillow
that still smells like her
and will remind you of her for weeks because
you don't even have the motivation
to do laundry.
Everyone knows
they hold this close, in purple fingernails
or under shirts with blue stars,
the knowledge that everything about the past was,
if not beautiful,
at least real. The first impressions
of an unscarred mind;
now he can't conceive of living without diversion.
We call it our medicine, which is the holy sacrament,
the tool of the trade, the consolation
at the end of days, filled with
a job you hate or thoughts that make you shudder.
And have you changed so much,
added lines to your face and let your wardrobe drift
into the land of lazy bohemia?
Or,
as is more likely,
are the pathologies set early on, and now
new carnival masks only make you look uglier.
Day by day it looks more like
shadowy dealings, murder, insanity rising?
But no, nothing like that,
nothing that would go down on film.
Just mediocrity surrounding like the haze
which hides the Appalachian mountains,
obscuring the beauty you remember from
a childhood golden.
07-08-97
1.I'm pretty stupid and I like being vague and dancing around subjects.
2.I've been thinking a lot about useless things lately. Here are some examples:
Deodorant - I use it. You use it. Everyone uses it. But here's the key point: NO ONE NEEDS IT! If no one used it, no one would need it. We all only use it cause everyone has forgotten the way that the human body naturally smells, so we consider it "yucky" when we sweat, even though scientifically speaking the smell of sweat is ATTRACTIVE to the opposite sex. It's called "pheremones". Try reading yer science book someday. So these companies sell us deodorant, and they make us think we "need" it. And it's bad for you, some people are allergic to it, it causes Alzheimer's and probably a few different kinds of cancer. And they love that, cause that means they get to sell us more of their "medicine". If they cause the sickness only they can cure it. You startin to get the picture here?
Medicine - I don't take medicine much. Almost never, in fact. Know why? Cause medicine makes you sick. This is true. The more you rely on medicine to get rid of minor things like colds, the flu, simple infections, etc, the more your body will NEED that medicine to get rid of disease. Your immune system goes really slack and stops fighting off illness as well. I'm generally sick about one day per year, seriously. Know why? Cause I don't rely on their scam. If you let your OWN immune system take care of non-crippling illness, yr immune system will get STRONGER. This is true.
"Precious" Metals - Gold isn't pretty. People only THINK it's pretty because it's "worth" something. Why is it worth something? Cause they TELL us it is. Cause it's "rare". Ooohhhhh Aaaahhhhhh. If you have ever bought a piece of jewelry that cost more than $100, sit yerself down and ask yerself some serious questions. Is a tacky ring on yr finger actually worth the price of 10-100 used CDs? The ring just sits there. CDs entertain you. Is some soft, useless metal around yr neck worth enough money to feed a family of three for a month? Two months? Three months? Are people really so stupid and unimaginative that they can't think of ANYTHING ELSE to blow their excess cash on? And don't even get me started on diamonds...
3.Sleep seems useless, too. I mean, really. We don't sleep to rest... you can rest by just laying down. MAYBE we sleep to "sort out memories" or whatever. MAYBE. But then, how do you explain people who can get by on 2 hours sleep a night? The main reason we sleep is that, if we don't, our bodies send these poisons in that make it so that sleep becomes the most beautiful thought in the world. There have been days when I haven't slept in a day or two, and a friend of mine would call me up and say something like "Hey Jack! Wanna help me smoke this pound of weed and then go see Sonic Youth? I got backstage passes!" and I've said "No, I really need to get some sleep..."
07-07-97
1.That's a lot of sevens.
2.tape loop for a ghost
"have you ever...?"
"no. i haven't."
i can (could) never tell if she's serious (sirius) or ('fraid)
not. i can't ever get a word in (edge)wise. i walked. she can't.
she DOES. well....
"MTV moves too fast..."
carry it through electron-displacement waves of (genius) words
(werds). distill it into dust in moonshine or
s p r e a d i t t h i n
almost (2) thin to read. steal her writing (style).
"would you love me if i was a boy? or if i had no hair."
(you see my memory is immaculate and often phrases stick there,
for years)
"you can't even remember what i'm tryin' to forget."
and heaven knows all you do is TRY around here. it's enough to
drive a man to think. it's enough to
kick yer ass
and force you to think, or, maybe, to come up with the ways and
means (to new orleans). it's a bad moon you shot up with ritalin.
it's the quiet kid who becomes an alcoholic. it's the junkie
prostitute he holds in his arms. it's the frost on the ground at 7
a.m. right before the sun rises. it's the TV shows you forgot to
tape.
"the phone, hanging from his fingers, looks like a dead thing..."
yeah. love can be plastic and glass. and you can cry at stupid
things like old REM songs and yearbook signatures.
"good luck in life, you're going to tear it up."
and you can cry cause you knew a girl once who slept with some
rock star and became a model, but you knew her when she was too shy
to ask you to your face to sign her yearbook so she just left it on
your desk, and you can cry cause john married jane and they had a kid
and when you saw her in the grocery store you didn't even say hi, and
you can cry cause you're too lazy to even call them up anymore.
maybe afraid of what you'll find. another OD, maybe, or even worse,
another college-graduated ready-made clone cause maybe just maybe
they've all thrown away their Smiths posters and sold their Dead
Kennedys records and maybe it's all a joke cause
you're the only one that remembers.
3.there was supposed to be an overriding theme to that writing, but i sorta lost it there near the end. in fact, i ended up talking about stuff that has nothing to do with what the first part was talking about. oh well. deal with it.
4.i can't decide what to name my first album. here's what i have
so far:
I'm Not an Earthling Anymore
I'm Living All Over You
I Am My Own Worst Critic
Gilligan's Atoll
Schubert Dip
All Her Favorite Fruit
Overture to the Dayglow Apocalypse
Icarus
Godsey Comes Alive!