Night Running, &c

Posted September 29, 2010 in Uncategorized

FUCK this scholarship application. It took an hour’s work to arrange 250 words on TDI, and I have an essay and a half to go. Sitting staring stagnant stuck and stupid, writing is what I do, I can knock out a school paper or blog post in half this time. Stormed outside to chase the rabbits in. Sat in the grass and closed my eyes and tried to clear my head. The Postal Service playing somewhere in the back room of my consciousness. …some idealistic future… Do I even want to go to this college? But four years free… Gods, I don’t want to do all this work. I’m so tired. This cloud in my head, almost solid. I want to go somewhere. Move. Reclaim some of the mental fluidity of 2:30 in the morning, that place where image and sound crossed over and the static on the phone was a desert and your breath a sudden jut of stone and your words a city, buildings sprouting out of the sand, lights contained underground and night–

and night–

My eyes snapped open.

Yeah, it’s late, and I have so much to do but I’ve been trying for hours and I can’t get anything into or out of my head and I’ll only be gone fifteen minutes, twenty at most, twenty-five, thirty, shit, maybe somebody’ll need me for something and call up to my room and I won’t be there but fuckit, I’m already taking off

up the path, tripping blindly over stones, and along the black curve of my driveway and out and a wide turn right,

gold-painted flipflops slapping at the dirt as I sprint down the center of the road. And gods it feels good, to think of nothing but the state of my body and the play of lit windows through the trees. The distant glow of approaching cars. My chest hurts, the space under my ribs, and my head’s far too light and I remember belatedly I lost a pint of blood yesterday. And I keep going, because I’m flying through the night. Because I’m starting to gray out but as long as I’m running that doesn’t bother me, and the headlights, oh, the headlights are beautiful, and I’m stumbling into a ditch because I can’t tell how far away they are and when the truck flashes past I gasp and the breeze of its passage feels like heaven, too brief, too soon. And I’ve overshot my neighbors’ driveway and I can’t seem to walk straight, though it’s hard to tell. So I lie down in the road and listen to the wind in the leaves. Thinking about oxygen. About how blood isn’t really blue. About veins, and lines, and the narrow parallels of limits I live inside. I put my fingers to my throat and find the fragile squirm of my pulse. Above, stars fade in.

Comments

Circe

September 30, 2010 at 22.47

This goes beyond the realm
of angst poetry and transforms
into something
that makes your words
ricochet in my head,
floating images past my retinas
of violet lilies
and
cities built with words,
because your writing is wood:
whorled and twisted and free,
but you shape it.
Your craft of the spoken word,
creating towers and turrets and
citadels
laced with ampersands
in this asylum of yours
where the mad run
loose
with blood-loss and hysteria

and it’s Beautiful.

Usagi

September 30, 2010 at 23.11

laced with ampersands–
like some kind of drug, some
hallucinogen stirred into my coffee,
white powder of punctuation, the power
contained within: to seduce.
because there’s a gravity, a draw,
a pull to the edges of things,
not shadows but what shadows
could be, the shapes and shades,
the shallows and the hollows
of our eyes, lids, hands. skin.
and blood loss is a drug of its own.
not addictive, but I don’t deny
the high. and I inhale
the dark and let it fill
my veins and let myself
fade and smear my edges at
the cross of twigs, the leaves, the fall
and land, the jump! and branches,
yes, this twisted wood, these limbs
we draw in black with nothing else
but reaching on our minds

and fill with words

and yes, it’s Beautiful.

Circe

September 30, 2010 at 23.55

The mist pulls at the soul,
summoning something dark
with those shadows of charcoal.
Drawn to precipices
watch us balance, watch us fall:
churning on empty words
and some ancient scrawl.
Choose your own seduction,
select your own drug
and we're high enough on life,
unplug and
fly.

Sometimes the trees catch us.

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