Waffles and guns

I saw a man; it was one of those brilliantly clear days. He was feeding the pidgeons, but they were not pidgeons, they were seagulls and crows, and they were everywhere, scattered at my feet, also in the morning, many hours later, before the sun had risen: flying against the wind, I held onto my cardboard coffee and the city looked like a film, dirty and cold.

I thought about which songs to sing; I thought about April and tying everything together. It’s been a year since I considered the house with pictures of crying children in the cellar, the Narnia street lamp outside of the kitchen window: since I sat, facing the sun, sharing my cigarettes with other girls, with other worries. I thought about which songs to sing; I still sing the same ones.

There’s seagulls, and crows, and I am somewhere else, and next time, I’ll be somewhere else again.

Does the memory of a dream have the right to be considered memory? Consider your repeated nightmares and the detail in which you remember these compared to the face of the clerk at the shop you visit in person several times in a week. What I remember best is the short, intensely relieved moment, in which I close the eyes that aren’t my eyes, and I am safe, because

this is a dream

Some like to experiment with lucidity: I do not. This is my review of the year that has passed: in this time, I have become inconsistent, my handwriting inhabited by at least three different shapes of an a. This is the work of lucidity. And January and its siblings wrapped themselves inside a sensible black coat, the inside lined with polkadots.

This is what the year has been. This is hardly obfuscation at work. This is a dream.

We’re in the rooms where women come and go and the radio announces, crackled voice of authority, that we’re in a montage scene, a fade-out, a blur. I had forgotten how, many years ago, I sang this song to someone, in a dark room, in a telephone that wasn’t mine. How this song, and that gesture, was one step on the way to finding another: and we were young, and we believed in forevers, and we believed that we would go against the world, together. We did. So many years of talking shit about one another’s love lifes and finding union in anger and misery. Fade-out. Cut.

In the rooms where people wait and wait. Music, music is never the plot, we know this. But it sneaks up on you from previous paragraphs; a cheap storytelling technique, nearly a plot device. Sneaks up on you:

In the rooms where people avoid one another’s glances, the music which tells a story of your past unfolds itself, and you don’t get a warning, and you think if this was visual media you would be unaffected and the effects would merely be there for your audience’s sake, but you are your audience, and you are watching yourself, in the light of the songs that were with you when you learned how to dream.

You wish, even if briefly, that you were less familiar with the storyteller’s tricks and intentions.

This post will be deleted once things fall into place. Upgraded wordpress database (about two years overdue). Deleted old stylesheets. Using temporary one while making other planned changes. Do not be alarmed. (Though I am a slowpoke)

Addendum:
Several deletions, category changes, and edits. Just wrapping left to do.

I would have wanted to ask what it is you dream of, but I was, selfishly, distracted by my own dreams. The time it takes to circle the knots in my head: it’s too long to reasonably pick up a conversation where it trailed off. I could tell you that I think these things (that your words aren’t simply disappearing in the gap), I could, in my blunt manner, tell you all the things I think. This is one of them: I have become too scared to approach those individuals I would most want to know. Shyness is not the reason - rather the opposite: If I trusted your (anyone’s) integrity, I wouldn’t hesitate.

Though, that is not the first thought I would choose to share. It would sound more like good night.

“He says I should try to get to know her. I think it’s silly.”
“I dunno”, I say, turning my head from an endless pile of paragraphs. “I don’t think you should ever get to know anyone, it only makes them more annoying.”

Irritation is an animal which lives
together with Self Pity, in your throat.
They threw Perspective out last night.

Please don’t try to justify your little growl:
You are tired. It’s been a long day.
“Surely, no one can smile all the time.”

Here - this is Proper Conduct’s address.

“Thanks”, I attempted to say, “But I don’t make sense.”

You disconnect and reconnect. How to count detachments when there are no attachments? Five-six-seventeen-six thousand-and-twenty-one - I throw my voice out to anchor myself to my own text, I stumble on keyboards scattered on the floor, this is real, did you ever doubt I was real, there being reality between the lines? Sometimes a scene plays out with all the wrong faces - sometimes, perhaps, it’s all right, it’s okay, just in the wrong places. Sometimes I don’t know what was dream and what was not. Sometimes I forget what words I wanted you to have and which ones you really got. Sometimes, most times, I assume you heard me, yelling at you from across the decade, hours of lecturing sidewalks, and I just wait for you to extract your apologies from the pavement. Can you measure the amount of mercury in my nose? Can you tell how much glue is left underneath your feet?

Thanks, I attempted to say, but-

I carry a notebook now, did I tell you? In which to keep track of all the shiniest stars. In which I write not questions nor answers, no memories or dreams, just sentences to confirm step one and what ought to be step two. It was intended as an anchor. Words, you know, I would believe in the staying power or words, of ballpoint pens, caught-in-fist inkstains. Give a thing a name and it is no longer just a thing. Stars are there for hitching wagons to. Give it words, and it starts to look like a promise. Promises, heavy with integrity, are, ought to be, should very well be, anchors.

What kind of ship needs 54 pages worth of anchors?
Can you find a single apple, or a wagon to keep it in?

“Thanks”, I typed, politely, “but I’m all out of glue.”

The heat sinks into cobblestones and stretches of pavement, clouds over, dusts down, blends with the rotting vegetables changing hands in the street, clouded over, dusted down by the sea.

They call it the city of poets now, on envelope fronts and newspaper stamps. Poets fled this town, I was taught. Poets were imprisoned, their abilities questioned, forgotten about, hushed down. This I was taught, I know, and I watch the large vehicles float by, the faces of these poets smeared out in large print, their names calligraphed and golden.

Sometimes he would come, when she was still much younger than he was, to read to them. He knew about stories. He carried books. This I was told. Sometimes he would try to teach them the words. He chose the words which never had reason to flee, ones never clouded over, dusted down.

“I was creative too.” Shifting feet, dry paintbrushes on canvas landscapes. “Until I laid off the cocaine, y’know.” I know about stories. These I am told.

One lighter patiently changing hands, collecting brief touches, carrying conversations. Future is seeping in, under the clouds, under the dust. We exchange words, these alternate futures and I. The one adjusts her face in a mirror, the second alters her intonation at a telephone. I, the third, the fourth, the fifteenth, find myself speaking their language - considering, at length, whether to be ashamed of this practise, of borrowing a tongue I rid myself of as soon as I knew how to. There is safety in abandoned houses. There is pride in the unchanging. This I was taught.

“How did Noah build all the cages”, the one says, “to keep all the animals in?”

1
I am bad with first lines. I leave those to you,
along with the protagonists’ names and
the scenes they choose to drink in.

From there I seize the paragraphs;
describe one character’s insufficiency,
the scattered punctuation of another.

My talent lies in narrating the endings.

2
Your mouth tastes of routine;
lukewarm drinks, another
glossary of chewed-up nouns.

Our language is effortless -
You choose the vocabulary,
inflections and syntax,

while I wait for you to shut up.