Text (#1443)(an instance of Generic Mail Recipient made by kp)A mailing list dedicated to the us and abuse of text. i.e. poetry, prose, and philosophy. Go to location of this object, Mail Distribution Center. MAIL MESSAGES: Date: 1994 Aug 14, 10:42:04 a.m. PST From: Karl (#585) To: *Verse (#1443) Subj: Introduction message Here's a mail recipient dedicated to posting and discussion of poetry written by characters on Dhalgren, or especially relevant to the themes around Dhalgren (Postmodernism, virtual reality, etc.) Date: 1994 Aug 14, 11:17:01 a.m. PST From: Chaos (#1433) To: *Verse (#1443) Subj: Hey You Guevera (by Milton Acorn) Hey You Guevera It isn't fit at a Communist funeral To say there will be none nobler than you - There shall be nobler, as you if you had lived, would have become nobler As nobility will become the property of any person, Born into or soon learned, As nobility will become a simple reflex Buried among emotions which will be nobler still And for which today we have no names.... (uh, I'll type more later) Date: 1994 Aug 22, 01:59:21 p.m. PST From: Karl (#585) To: *Verse (#1443) Subj: CHEESE This is the golden age of porcupines Who travel faster than abs(0) On the painted billboard roadways By re-faced and de-faced adverts In all their two-dimensional glory This is a drive-in movie ontology Through a flash of grey We see the screen sky loom A flashing signal light Reflects pixels in the sun And all machine-men kisses Erect cyborg penises On the Rue d'la Porcupeek Tonight. So viva porcupines in silver motion In their tides of greenest inertia Whose velvetty pink undersides Proceed and remain, always In crash test runways In particle accelerators And fresh-tar freeways Viva all of us trudging east Within the shrinking limits Of our city's dripping thighs Her warm legs of marble and stone Wrapped tight around our praying tongues Her sweating limbs, apart Revealing shafts of sudden light In the softest pink of empty wombs Their upward urging, always Into the faces Of downward lapping dogs Viva electrical sockets All plugged tight By our hangover dreams We're at the Friends and Neighbours Cafe On a heat-wave morning in August Stomach stuck beneath golden fish Brought amid the murky tank Each mouth open wide And their inset eyes All turning mad around and around Looking tight and back at tomorrow And swimming a repeat of yesterday And then in the morning after forever -- repent So tonight viva these police sirens call And viva our late night cigarettes and brandy Viva our crabapples and bayonettes and our barbed wire prison fences erected casually around our houses Long live those knotted ligaments and long live the twisted flesh Our cushions mounted by coffee cups and our Pilsner cans in piles and piles Long live. Because we're wires And because we're electrons And because we're particles in motion Down the streets and alleys And though on the checkerboard we dance It's in living rooms and bedrooms That we porcupines dive into problems Long ago solved by rusty velvet couches And pizza covered coffee tables Long live. And in the yard of Scotland Yard The guard changes daily, still And in the rainy blur Of London's smog The factory whistle cries And houses row on row, revive A steady impulse drives Now, the porcupines emerge And the dens lie empty Again and again, tomorrow. Long live. And on the streets of New York City A United Nations still stands But never stands still It's squarish cornered halls And it's lightbulb coloured windows Still ringing with the constant clatter Of typewriters and telephones Repeat all day the sudden blast In Haiti or Havana heat The mounting pressure Of the sweat Continues. Long live. And somewhere pursued into dark On the streets of Leningrad Tonight In the coolest Vodka winter, still Ragged red flags fly unseen. Their stringy ends torn by rain Their colours blurred by snow and ice And the only sound remaining now Is the final echoes, fading fast Of a Red October drum Heard constantly In the steady flapping Of fabric in the Electric wind. Long live. Date: 1994 Oct 3, 10:27:40 p.m. PST From: Sai (#861) To: *Verse (#1443) Subj: ugh I've always liked this poem...comment or shred me if you feel like it. Satellite Hey, got a light? Bare-bulbed or back lit, blind stare me into a harder hit Evening's score it seems to fit; I'm one - waiting gerry-rigged and red wined out satellite man, you've got some clout you're boot-strap fixed into the main line running down, down burning a hole in your pocket of the night fusing quick for the biggest bite who knows what's wrong? You do it right You're the access throne. pliant webs of gambling tossed in your way you know you've lost life lines to you are chalk. keep it coming, keep it running we've hard-wired your name into our test of the past's poor circuit breaking overhead - close numbered days, no combination you bought a father he's not fit for relation so you break in homes, split to bear your creation your ashes tear at jubilation; Sorry, you just can't bleed if the part's not in stock. You man be a power man Not quite....hit the flint again but you're just a satellite. Thanks. _____________________ some of the rhymes are yucky....just couldn't help myself. that's all, -Sai Date: 1994 Oct 12, 12:55:15 p.m. PST From: Trismegistos (#1457) To: *Text (#1443) Subj: HELL IS VERY REAL It's 1989 and he's on public access, face separating into pink and purple through a cheap videocam, his first time imagining an audience that in his mind swells to millions, then shrinks to a couple of La-Z-Boy 2 AM unemployed losers. He thwacks the Bible hard so the pain makes sweat break out. Basement set, potted plant separating into green and red. Somewhere between the leatherette is the key to hell, the fire, the worm. The audience, blank behind the lens, swells, shrinks, pupillary. "Hell is very real. Oh, yes, Hell is a living. Burning. Real. Place." And it's not the rockribbed faith of his fathers that's saying this, no. Not That Old Time Religion any more. Back in the days when the Bible hymnal and Farmer's Almanac were good enough for a body they didn't even need to SAY things like HELL IS VERY REAL. The words come out and wrap themselves around what's silent in the spaces: a tweedy tract written by a mealy-mouthed Episcopal divine; a felt banner glued together by Sunday-school teens, hung in the vestry, GOD IS LOVE; fucking Godspell and whole-wheat Eucharist and the blessing of the animals and all that seminary shit. Words wrap where they were never needed. A religion is only as uptodate as its latest heresy. Hellfire. "Hey, uh, you're still on, y'now." Mumbles the cameraman, skinny stringyhaired in regulation AV-technician flannel and dungarees. Dead air, he realizes, staring now at the monitor where he's been poised, quivering out of time in overlapping pink and purple. Put it on pause, rewind. Do the shit over. It's 1969 and he's older, wiser now in a backward sort of way, closer to the root of the heresy and wise as a fucking serpent. He can say fuck and shit it's not taking the name of the Lord in vain unless you are a stone pagan who worships fuck and shit haha. He realized that back in 1999 when the apocalypse failed to come. He preaches now among the hippies, him and his Jesus people in their chartreuse micro-bus. He's lived through the 80's, the 70's, seen how the hippies fell prey to Mammon, studied all that shit, read up on Gitlin and Lasch. It may not seem too obvious now in 1969, but Altamont, Manson are making it clear at any moment, boy, if you can worship Satan you can believe in him. Which is really all the preacher needs. These hippies aren't as mellow as their pose, they didn't exactly come of age in Samoa you know, there's some deep void beneath the macrame and serapes and if Eckankar, Reeboks and Macintosh computers can eventually fill it up why not the literal Word of God, the worm that dieth not, why can't flames and a big bronze statue with horns guffawing "SUCKER!!!" fill that void? In deep cover, so deep he's realized there's nothing in the Literal Word of God against getting stoned. He and his bus and his five or six earnest non-sexual tambourine-banging followers descended on the campers at dusk, down the dirt track, past Marin dunes and pines. The code of mellow prevents the campers from getting too upset at the big wooden crosses dangling and the way the chicks and cats let on they don't like to ball. That's how the preacher slips in, under cover of the "hey, cool, no problem," slips in and rams his lightning rod the Literal Word of God up the void of these floppy muppets. Nothing square about it, man, it's just the way things are, and you'd better get with the end-times program now the Establishment's got secular and satanic, they'll cut your hair and you know the Selective Service card is the mark of the beast, you know it man. Eventually the fire's the only light and the joints get rolled and passed around and it's like whoa, cool, you jesus freaks are all right u he heh haw haw. And when everybody's nice and heavy into it and some of his celibate magdalenes are combing through the hair of the grinning recumbent campers he takes a burning stick out the fire and stares at it long and calculated slow begins to speak. "I've seen Satan, man. For real I have seen Satan." Nods, nods, muffled amens. This - guy - is - stone - DEEP. He fixes them all, a rapid-fire eye saccade. Receptive. "Satan is very real, my man, and Hell is the ultimate bummer." And so it goes, following the heresy to its roots, merging, becoming the heresy in order to understand what inside it will survive the literal application of the Word of God, what part of it can remain as cover, as options for getting further back, further deep, leaving behind him rewritten newspaper headlines, saved souls in ripples swelling heaven, a senile Hitler huddling in a bunker as the Japanese airforce bombs Berlin in 1969 for all he knows. It's 1929, the Klan more popular than the Masons, Elks and Rotary put together in the state of Indiana. Hood thrown back in torchlight. "Satan is very real. And as the Literal Word of God tells us, his emissary on Earth is the bloody-handed Jew ..." It's 1849, overlooking Lake Cayuga by moonlight in the New York hills, bowels growling with their load of fruit and dietetic bran crackers. Two ladies in woolens, lacy edges of their divided undergarments garlanding their boot-tops, minds opened by his sound and congenial application of Scripture to the woman question, sit in the wet grass before him. "And then, in my vision, the very innards of the Earth were opened unto me. And I saw there the place described in the Gospels, the place of the wailing and gnashing of teeth, where the worm is not stilled. Yes, Hell is real, good friends; Hell is a very real place ..." It's 1689, and in lace collar and doublet he puffs tobacco from a clay pipe, in the common room of an Antwerp inn; arranging his manuscripts and waiting for Spinoza to walk in the door. "For the property of Infinite Goodness, which followeth a priori from the existence of the Deity (Q.E.D.), is not axiomatically incompatible with the punishment of Sin, conceived as having infinite extension and application to the Soul ..." It's 1369, and he's burning at the stake beneath the northern slope of the Pyrenees; the Cathars who had followed him darken the gallows all around the town square, and it was too early to claim he was only following the Literal Word of God to these fucking Papists. Shit. Just when he was making some real progress at the very root of the heresy, getting these love-children to clean up their act fornication-wise by redoubling the Last Days and Pope = Antichrist rhetoric until the orgasms they had from his preaching, honed to insidious perfection over six hundred sixty and six years, were better than the ones they could give each other. The stake is iron. It probably won't get hot enough to burn through his bonds until he's dead and gone. Shit. Because the heresy doesn't start/stop with the Cathars, the Waldenses and the Albigenses and the Brethren of the Spirit and even the crazy fucking Sufis and Kabbalistic Jews. Oh no. Next millennium you got the Arians and Nestorians and the friggin Monophysites causing grief, and then it takes a while before the Council of Nicaea lays down the law when Christianity isn't even Christianity, and the Word of God isn't even fixed, with all these bullshit Gnostic Gospels you've got to warn people against and these apocryphal stories of Jesus as a child withering the bullies who took his lunch money, and then B.C., man, fucking B.C.... fucking hell as the burlap gown finally catches fire and his toes begin to blacken and peel away, FUCKING HELL, IT'S NOT REAL, NOT REAL, NOT FOR FUCKING REAL ... *** Uh... can you tell I've been reading Burroughs lately? -- Trism the Spam-hound Date: 1994 Oct 26, 07:07:01 p.m. PST From: melusina (#907) To: *Text (#1443) Subj: A dream. I meet my lover in a house that is not mine, with a face e does not know. This house, the one that is not mine, has no mirrors. This is not exactly true: each room of this house contains one small mirror. I can only see one part of myself at a time. When I am inside this house, I don't know what I look like. It amazes me how quickly I forget my own face. The bits of silvered glass in this house are too small to hold me. I am fractured, sliced apart with thin mirror blades, keen edges that reflect their plunder. A cheekbone, a ribcage, my left ankle. The mirror holds my mouth when it is solemn, but not when it smiles. There are no mirrors in this house to show me that I am here. There is a rightness to this, because I dream that this is what my lover has seen, my body in bits and pieces, broken apart and distilled into text. No pictures but words, no bodies but the ones we perform. Now my lover must learn the curves and planes of this body of meat, because the great thumping weight of the presence of this body shatters the fragile web of textual knowledge, the body that my lover knows. There is a strange empiricism at work here. It's the touchable body that is important, takes priority, matters. The undeniable silky rasp of skin on skin, tangible as it is, measurable in pounds of pressure that your fingertips exert on my arm, calling up an electric jolt in my flesh that is measurable on no scale, is ephemeral. You touch my skin, I shiver, you move your hand away. For seconds, perhaps minutes, I am left with the lingering ghost of your fingers on my flesh, but then that too fades and all I have is the memory of you once touching me, but not the sensation that made it memorable. I have no record of the touch, unless you broke the barrier of my skin and left me with a scar, but it is the Touch that is taken for the Real. Is this why my lover's hands trace my skin with a desperation that leaves ripe plum bruises? Testing my outline, flatpalmed hands pressing across my flesh, as if worried that it will melt away into shadow at any second. I watch my lover's hands on my skin, and notice that the outline of me is indistinct. The familiar smoothness of my skin, the softness of hair, is smudged like chalk drawings melting in the rain. I look closer, and discover that my flesh is separated from the air by a series of alphabetic characters. This does not startle me, and I look closer, but I cannot read them. I glow the eerie blue of a computer in a darkened room, and I cannot be sure if these letters have been written on my flesh, or if these letter _are_ my flesh. My lover notices the characters at the same time I do, and hands press harder across my skin, molding ribs, hips, a breast, slow dragging fingers across my jaw and down the line of my neck. The letters act just like skin, bending and yielding under the searching hands, the blue glow suffused with red where the hands have passed. My lover's hands pause just under my sternum, rest for a moment on the soft skin of my abdomen, then suddenly push furiously into the text that my skin has become. I watch in silence, curious to see if this will work, if e can break through to the skin that we both know must be beneath the characters. The pressure increases, I feel the pain of expectation. The letters snap, the fingers plunge through the text, punching a ragged hole in the page of my skin. My lover curls fingers around the edges and peels away the letters. Underneath, a keyboard. My lover looks at me with a face that is a computer screen, fingers flitting across the keys of my organs, QWERTY caress. I reach out and slide my textfingers across the smooth glass of my lover's cheek, look away and see the reflection of my eye in a flash of mirror. Date: 1994 Oct 27, 09:20:02 p.m. PST From: melusina (#907) To: *Text (#1443) Subj: I stand in the shower, too-hot water pouring over my cringing skin, reconstructing my sundered body with a fine and precise pain. I watch my skin redden, and I soap my breasts, my belly, my thighs, marking out a self in scented bubbles. The water defines me with small burning tongues, and for a moment or two I am reassured as the pain reminds me of the limits of my body. This, then, is where I live. Under the rushing water I close my eyes against the yawning gap that threatened to swallow me, the chasm between text and flesh that produces meaning in my virtual world. I am coated in a clear varnish of illusion. The pain tells me that I am undamaged, coherent, safe from the electronic brink that weaves itself around and through the self that I offer it. It did not capture me, has no need to take me by force, because I have swallowed it whole. I gag on the thickness of incomprehension, on the struggle to make sense out of something that slides through and from my fingers, drips onto my keyboard, runs across the computer screen that has become my third eye. When I back away from the glaring swirl of text I bring it with me. I scrub until my skin flames, but it will not rinse away. The world of singlebodies is my Real, but the ghosts twisted together out of gleaming strings of letters haunt the backs of my eyelids, dancing broken and wild. I am drugged, careless in my haste to step through the looking glass of my computer screen, my rush to waltz with these lovely text phantoms. In my mad embrace, my desperate immersion, I lose the boundaries of my body, a sharp edge kisses my skin, and I am watching the oily slickness of fresh blood spill over the edges of a gash in this body's envelope. As I lick the scarlet bloom from my only flesh, I am at the same time moving in a bloodless body, veins of text empty of the necessity of fluid. Where can I find abjection here? I weep for the loss of damage. I once had a fantasy that I took the big knife, the one we use to cut the vegetables, and used it to split myself open from forehead to crotch, peel away the husk that you require for the knowing of me. I knew success through the pain of surrender to the blade. I do not know what to make of this violence that has replaced my escape. It is the bloodless velvet clatter of my fingers sliding across the keys, throwing me mindfirst into the absence of a tangible self. And I dance with beautiful ghosts, and I do not understand how they are you and me and the voice of the computer at once, and I weep for the loss of horror. And so I build that violent gap into my bodies, and they come to you scarred, broken, not pretending for a second to understand how it is that they are themselves and they are the woman shuddering in the shower and they are the reflection of the me that you have painstakingly constructed from the filaments of text and cobwebs that cloud the screen of your mind's eye. Date: 1994 Oct 27, 10:29:22 p.m. PST From: polyhymnia (#905) To: *Text (#1443) Subj: I. no name produces such rush lurching through and out into the articulated world which resides familiar enveloping immeasurable not logic not bodies but yours cycling through a mind driving through a body careening crazily over flesh and flesh that exists in a nowhere that i know Date: 1994 Oct 27, 10:32:30 p.m. PST From: polyhymnia (#905) To: *Text (#1443) Subj: IV. I struggle to locate a you for my body/mind files by which i mean my flesh understands you and your flesh my muscles dance gracefully with you and your movements and my brain follows your thoughts which are always occupying some glittering node on a web which i thought only i could spin this is the one of you that i know and i know this you is only really me and i shudder as i reach for a you that's more present. Date: 1994 Oct 27, 10:41:12 p.m. PST From: polyhymnia (#905) To: *Text (#1443) Subj: VII. there are some things not merely inarticulable not merely outside the scope ' of a language trapped by words not merely of a desire of a desire which fragments of a desire which splinters of a desire which shatters of a desire which crashes we consist of this collision meticulously scored with unthinkable precision like that lyric flight ' gold hammered gold enamelled ' and impervious to erasure drenched and weighty in its intangibility our collision (it alone is ours) erupts violently into thundering silence whose brittle filaments blindly weave a relentless pattern of no consequence. an exercise in disbelief. Date: 1994 Oct 27, 10:51:45 p.m. PST From: polyhymnia (#905) To: *Text (#1443) Subj: VIII. a place where the flesh and the word are categorically severed and we reach out and out to one another slipping lithe and vibrant past articulation stumbling into resonant echoes of some indistinct landscape to blunder through an abundance of signs which include neither key nor map. we give way to some unknown tide and are not disappointed. untangling an elegant duet improvised in a mode with no name composed on a scale without sound we fold into an envelope of dizziness and are left navigating the rim of infinity meticulously generating perpetual modalities. a fugal prison for perfection and intimacy. Date: 1994 Oct 28, 08:28:19 a.m. PST From: Trismegistos (#1457) To: *Text (#1443) Subj: mel & poly's stuff These 2 sets of meditations each bring up evocative, provocative metaphors for e-contact. Me like! Personally, I think that mel's 2 essays are the more intriguing, because the metaphors are arranged in a narrative, deployed around an axis of theme in a way that really grips, emotionally. poly's poems are much 'lighter' in this regard; more abstract, too, playing with concepts rather than images. poly, are you going to fill in the missing roman numerals for us? :) Trism Date: 1994 Oct 29, 05:41:55 p.m. PST From: Patroclus (#78) To: *Text (#1443) Subj: great stuff! Wonderful stuff being posted here! Let's skip the criticism and let everyone just express themselves safely. Date: 1994 Oct 30, 12:21:23 p.m. PST From: Silk (#558) To: *Text (#1443) Subj: wonderful stuff It is mighty gratifying to find such well-wrought works on this moo, quite though it be Silk Date: 1994 Oct 30, 01:04:23 p.m. PST From: caitlin (#1139) To: *Text (#1443) Subj: Watched You Watched you light the cigarette I gave you hands calm sure one quick stroke smell of sulfur fire burning hot bright as you inhaled smoke and heat your face softening as the nicotine settled in smoke streaming from your lips to hang in the space between us Thought of how your hands have touched me remembered the marks you've left with lips tongue fingers teeth envied the cigarette the smoke the match Caught by the slow smile that crawled across your face watched you touch the lit end to the thin skin protecting my heart smell of flesh searing pain Watched you step out your smoke on the ground between us and let you go the lines of your back cold and hard and final Date: 1994 Oct 30, 04:44:48 p.m. PST From: Trismegistos (#1457) To: *Text (#1443) Subj: Poem: BANFIRE Here's something 'Dhalgrenesque' and rather seasonable I wrote a couple of days ago. Happy Samhain! -- trism built a banfire in the cross of streets, with puddled gasoline on stackedup shells, ravaged timbers, burns to ban the traffic on this night of nights. leaves fly through the flames, come out as shocks of sparks. choking smoke obscures the traffic-light, its forlorn changes. maskers, hunters roam the asphalt strips tonight, with Dian's moon to roust them on, take their steel-side prey with sharper arrows, spears set in the roadway. crack the carapace, proceed on foot, it's not for tires to roll the ground tonight. meet the antlered dancers at the burning heart. throw your metal in, to purify, and laugh abandoned at the souls who could not pop their locks and leave their seats, as incandescent sheets and tongues weld their fingers to the wheel, forever. Date: 1994 Oct 30, 06:53:40 p.m. PST From: k.p. (#585) To: *Text (#1443) Subj: yay! I really like the stuff being posted here, especially poly's stuff! Date: 1994 Oct 31, 04:43:35 p.m. PST From: k.p. (#585) To: *Text (#1443) Subj: all the Blue in you are i all the Blue in you are i has move within-without + fly + follow on the tables tho above component pieces (Skie + love) Date: 1994 Nov 1, 10:43:13 a.m. PST From: Amber-Jessica (#277) To: *Text (#1443) Subj: Peace of Mind Vivid ginko green, body animal all, your hair's too shiny, has blood, has aspirin, has evening in it, muddy headstone settles & that summer Miya demanded peace of mind, wondered why she worried, burned her shirt with a cigarette, she leaned when the aerocycles flew like cold stars on a polar field, it's not the field of action, it's a boy thing, get laid, stay cool, learn to compromise a little... We were doing the fucking cherry-picker dance. Lynn was along, she brought gin, we made the field & river flow, it was still too cold to pick those cherries, we got stoned it was wicked windy when we got home, the clouds went dark & we all made it to Kyle's big stn. wagon, bought groceries, twelve-pack, Milk Plus Six, an egg, you put on international girl singers of the 60s, yr diminutive image flared oracular & said you gotta wave goodbye, gotta get in touch, gotta plow the ground, gotta get the car outta the ditch, gotta get a car. Is she good in bed, that Lynn Watkins. Delerious over softball asking could I do anything, did I know anyone in the cemetery, could I, could you get a cheap amp, seagulls circling there veer thru the trees where she sat on the hood, still had gold streaks in her bangs bright & jeans spattered bleach prismatic industries wind wnw 13 mph says WKBW, woodsmoke, Colombo vanilla yogurt, yellow light century, do you look like a lion, impossible blessing of bushes blossoming, the pricker ones with slick black branches, the cost of the greenhouse, cash living, us living earshot of the bus crash. Date: 1994 Nov 1, 10:59:25 a.m. PST From: Amber-Jessica (#277) To: *Text (#1443) Subj: More About Me I know you're exhausted by wishes but it was very nice eating my bagel with your sleepy head on my mind--phooey-- I've just hung up the phone and now I'm thinking how I feel, like some kind of curtain drops or the scenery changes every time such gentle reassurances are mine to offer. It's a sign of trouble, playing alone, destructive and cockeyed, a discrete system known as the "diamond stigma." It's a pillowcase, a bedspread, a blanket chest compressed into rash and bewildering bullshit, I'd like to try this over again, I'm gaping at the wall again, I'm sure there's no interior and I conduct myself abominably the moment it's convenient. This weird spiritual myopia makes me smile inside. The point seems to be that everything is something else. I want this to be a wonderful day but my voice is loud, rushed, unmodulated, and that makes me wonder how I have these "flashes" and regular words as well. I mean that. Moreover, I always slow down and examine what I'm saying in some gloomy circular paradigm where nothing can ever stay put. So I change the subject. No continuity, no struggle. That's a fine attitude if you can express it, but I speak only to those with whom I'm in casual contact, I see the present "as is" and learn to cover it up at all costs. I mold my self around my tools, discreetly. Date: 1994 Nov 1, 07:47:51 p.m. PST From: Silk (#558) To: *Text (#1443) Subj: most recent posts claps - claps clap, clap clap whistles and stomps (that you for the marvelous works) Date: 1994 Nov 1, 07:50:15 p.m. PST From: caitlin (#1139) To: *Text (#1443) Subj: My Lover's Voice My lover's voice fills me with the shimmering light of an infinite variety of stars His softest whispers render me speechless with longing Just to hear him breathe is a pleasure deeper than any I have ever known And when he gasps and says my name so soft on his lips warming the air between us I fall headfirst trailing flames behind me Date: 1994 Nov 2, 09:26:49 a.m. PST From: Eclipse (#538) To: *Text (#1443) Subj: untitled take these, my eyes; i know your beauty when you lay beside me. take these, my ears; your touch tells me you love me. take these, my lips; your kisses cover my body. take this, my voice; you know my passion even without my cries. take this, my body; you know it is already yours. Date: 1994 Nov 2, 09:57:10 a.m. PST From: Eclipse (#538) To: *Text (#1443) Subj: rage against the unit nail me, with my slavery, in-independance, to your ruling walls. tear me down, cowering, with your fury to control searing my stability. your hands make mine take the responsibility you fear to touch. my bloodied stumps scream with pain when you say, "need". unlock my chains as you say, "dye it black; it is on your head". i donate cheap security to you when i tell you of mutual stability. fear quiets behind cautiousness, hiding behind safety, backing off, yet watching you. the trust is not gone. it was never there to begin with. it was not earned. Date: 1994 Nov 2, 10:15:27 a.m. PST From: Trismegistos (#1457) To: *Text (#1443) Subj: Short Vague Flybynight Poem the cross on your belly's the world; your navel the omphalos, keystone for Solomon's temple. Mount Nebo, far Bactria, the gale-ravaged Cymbri are points on your skin, crowns where the bone parts the flesh; cushions where flesh swamps the bone. your tattoo is a signal to aliens, to gods, come and land, teach us, take us away -- as if radiant spacemen would yawn at your natural terrain, with no signs of intelligent life. Date: 1994 Nov 2, 06:13:34 p.m. PST From: Vis (#2145) To: *Text (#1443) Subj: My $.02 The Advantages of Eating Poetry in the mouth, ink and spittle become one with no care to the words, the coded thoughts of the author. chewing on a scrap of heavy-bond, my mind slips away and i don't care about the words anymore, don't feel the poem with all of its dry pretensions, with its songs meant for the heart but aimed for the eyes. nothing will do any better than this, the paper sliding through my lips, the coarse words and ink smudges letting me know what poetry really is. [Whee, I wrote this about 4 years ago. It sucks, but the sentiment remains.] -- Vis Date: 1994 Nov 3, 06:00:14 p.m. PST From: polyhymnia (#905) To: *Text (#1443) Subj: II. distance miles marking inaccessible reality tempting and perhaps inside the lovely arc of the arm. something slides lithely beyond my reach to parry the mapping for which a mind might plead Date: 1994 Nov 3, 06:08:54 p.m. PST From: polyhymnia (#905) To: *Text (#1443) Subj: III. slinking past those ' boundaries ' we can call them ' annoyances like skin ' skeleton like vision taste or aural knowledge to splash and tilt lurching into an unearthly endlessly harmonious counterpoint ' simplicity of interruption ' simplicity of pure expulsion ' simplicity of no body no flesh ' simplicity of pure voice someone ' unknown ' intimate ' anyone the stark singularity of the name isolated. if the data stream is precisely orchestrated and the code symmetrical then you will resonate or reverberate or echo or animate dynamic overtones or maybe you won't. (sorry about the ' marks ... i don't know any other way to insert spaces at the beginning of a line. i realize they're disruptive, but didn't know how else to do it.) Date: 1994 Nov 3, 06:12:21 p.m. PST From: polyhymnia (#905) To: *Text (#1443) Subj: V. there is some comprehension of geography not a rigidity like you might be inclined to assume given the precision of that word geography but the sensuality of place catching in my throat and creeping into the world which flickers in the edges of my reality something produces a desire shaped like sugar biscuits and pomegranates reflected in the gleaming paint of that swift car. there. Date: 1994 Nov 3, 06:15:50 p.m. PST From: polyhymnia (#905) To: *Text (#1443) Subj: VI. there is a difficulty in knowing. when knowing is not ' a reaching out ' a touching ' a palpable movement ' harbored reassuringly ' in fingertips ' stepping delicately around ' deception ' which never infects ' they find their way without the urgency compelled by ' no fingers ' no hands ' no wrists compelled by no possibility of touch so that to know is only to believe. Date: 1994 Nov 9, 09:01:40 p.m. PST From: k.p. (#585) To: *Text (#1443) Subj: i 1000 rpm your... i 1000 RPM your glass sheets in circles, mirrors one-way windows, a turning angle, has its way across the surface of a glass clock [above] the ziggurat hums activity knows spins, eternal, i [monads] & on horizon, we squadron of headlights we flash of white powder we cross the tarmac + dusk- setting boulevard, weeving between traffics, parking lots slip, and paddle creeks of white tinfoil -- [we] wrap the sidewalks in ice + busses pull from curbs & settle-dust, [we] enthuse your face -- smile, usually (i'm okay really i'm okay, just a little: ) fallen like a tightwire (slipping incoherent) a little under the weather: [ tree trunks & snow & a high speed wind chase (you got no effort to put, got no magic, too ) -- stop. ] - k.p. Date: 1994 Nov 10, 03:47:13 p.m. PST From: k.p. (#585) To: *Text (#1443) Subj: reading too much rhyming shit does this to you: i. all the Blue in you are i has move within-without + fly + follow tables (though above) Component Pieces (Skie + love) ii. When Licorice filled me from foot to Eye a Sheet of Velvet spread 'cross the Skie + all my Limbs were Extensions (bright) of first, primeval, Potentia Light. iii. so Vision is Aboveness Height or empty alley bathed in Light covered pebbles, mirror rain (refracted visions of Amber vein) pushing Gold down cooling night Vision has [always] Aboveness Height Date: 1994 Nov 13, 12:05:57 a.m. PST From: caitlin (#1139) To: *Text (#1443) Subj: Childhood When I was a little girl my father and his best friend made art in the back bedroom of the bottom half of a duplex in Memphis, Tennessee i remember the smells of oil paints and turpentine ozone hot metal the flash of a torch FM radio and my mother always singing Saturday mornings with the Lone Ranger and Peter Bowman paint-covered and hungover eating cereal with my three year old self explaining all the magic parts Life is a journey a path of twists and turns I always thought to move away from that time its chaos and mess and now I find that the best parts of myself rest in the warm warm place where love was the most important thing and Jimmy Webb would sell us milk and slices of bread out of the back door of the bar across the street the barflies perched squinting into the morning sun Date: 1994 Nov 13, 12:09:39 a.m. PST From: caitlin (#1139) To: *Text (#1443) Subj: Waking Dreams I have seen you smiling in my dreams your warm hands cupped gently around my heart felt your lips brush mine with such intricate caring heat rising between us like rain evaporating off a sidewalk on a hot day in August and when I touch you and feel your skin against mine your hands beginning the long slow journey of knowing I will lean forward and whisper love in your ear and smile with you as dreaming becomes waking Date: 1994 Nov 13, 11:04:49 a.m. PST From: Trismegistos (#1457) To: *Text (#1443) Subj: SYNAPSIS quick passage through the portals, an initiation: she said "love will never guide you wrong" the elevator broken, climbed the stairs or was it something like another, dream dissolve, initiation pressed against the secret bulk of masonry: immured betrayers groan, the walls have ears, we're in the basement with a plastic garbage bag for bed of roses wondering at the other's sad familiars, bumps and underwear ... roses, as I lit the callow incense but it gutters in the subterranean mildew that smeared the morning after, bachelor shower, she refused black-spattered curtains. "love will never guide you wrong" but then, what else? another, maybe, added, "love? what love, you silly, don't you know what this is?" Date: 1994 Nov 13, 11:06:11 a.m. PST From: Trismegistos (#1457) To: *Text (#1443) Subj: FORTY Forty days flooded under dry air, pigeons flap a landing circle in the withered leaves, frogs must gape and shrivel in their trusting skin, the toads endure. Forty days and nights, the prophet driven to the boundary, no-one's property, dump for unused fences, worn-out scrawls of wire -- and there received his crusts of bread from ravens of the day, while miracle, a lone albino pigeon came to him at night and sang; a liquid, human voice beneath a stagnant sky blood-orange with the quiet fires of earth. Date: 1994 Nov 13, 11:07:16 a.m. PST From: Trismegistos (#1457) To: *Text (#1443) Subj: NIGHT FOREST Traveller, stopped by the rustling of fingers. Tinkling effigies, moon jailed in branches. Rust-spike deep-driven in heartwood of holm-oak. Suggestions of gray in the form of an altar. Riteless release of a fidgeting shiver. Dead man's effects scattered in a rough spiral. Sigh of the night, undisturbed, undisturbing. Date: 1994 Nov 13, 11:08:48 a.m. PST From: Trismegistos (#1457) To: *Text (#1443) Subj: LINGUA FRANCA In the buzz of fading flies, cheap cromos, universal tropic cult of glaring icons: Prince Sihanouk, Sainte Barbare, La Guadalupe, Mahakali Mata. And the sugar-candy bodies with their pious mutilations and their instruments of power reappear as costly boutique T-shirts; taped as flash to drab tattoo-shop walls in a port where no mariner admits a common language; burned by reams in villages where starched evangelists hold sway by dint of medicine -- sold by men who flock to dirt-road traffic jams, sold by blind men, one-legs, lepers, gypsy women with their wail and borrowed child, tacked in clashing pantheons upon the dash of taxis or behind the lucite window wall that guards a ghetto takeaway. Gods imprisoned, saintly faces peek from portholes: refugee, emigre reminded of the brilliant world that animates the trees that die not every year, the crossroad tales told in the lands where flies are much and weather, little. Date: 1994 Nov 14, 04:21:34 p.m. PST From: melusina (#907) To: *Text (#1443) Subj: Found on the Net... I came (heh) across this on the cybermind list (cybermind@world.std.com). Made me grin, thought I'd share it. Hiss hiss. Subject: Re: Erm, Masturbation Cyberblokey's flashing hand playing with his cybergland talking with his cyberfriend cyberwanking at other end how they love the cyberwanky get ready with paper hanky surely are two of a kind don't know they'll go cyberblind Date: 1994 Nov 24, 05:31:36 p.m. PST From: kp (#585) To: *Text (#1443) Subj: A bit of text. please comment/critique? Prologue [an empty stage, papers all over floor, chair sitting in the middle of the room, facing away from the audience, a person sitting in it, slightly slouched, talking to himself, outloud, frustrated] writer: what i'd really like to convey: the endless streets and alleyways. arrange a grid throughout the city crescents, concrete, without pity. somehow the audience must see it so a world of concrete, wind, and snow. [in walks a dancer dressed in bright colours, does a turn around the stage, picks up some sheets while the writer continues to mumble to himself] dancer: really, i think you need some cheer this really has been a good year the sun, it shone, the tears, they're gone all song and wine, without a tear writer: for you, the night is even light! for you, the day is always bright! tho wind may briskly cool the heat you'll say: "this day, it is so sweet!" [in walks a businessman, carrying a brief case, listens to them for a bit, and then joins in] man: oh phooey on the both of you cut the crap, you know it's true the sun, the snow, they matter not a bit of money, now that's my lot writer: you're crazy, sick, and need some help your world is tangled in the kelp of money, profit, loss, and gain, you're causing other people's pain! dancer: not so fast, perhaps he has some coins to give us, before you spaz? this guy, he looks a connoseur of ballerinas, oh, are you sir? [in walks the artist, trips over the briefcase on the floor, and spills his paints on some papers] artist: i say, the orange is out today! the reds are violent! now that's the way! we need these colours, so intense... [stumbles, loses the rhyme] oh dear, i think i lost my paint oh, my isn't this room quite quaint man: here comes the putz, i think he's nuts he spent his money, on paint and honey. and now he begs me for my change i think this man is rather strange writer: but he's a guy aft-er my heart he's got his spirit in his art though filled with passion, he takes his time to mix the colours and make them rhyme dancer: artists, writers, strange indeed the dancer has a different need my friend, the actress, there's a girl! [ sees the actress off the stage ] she'll dance with me -- [ in walks the actress ] let's do a twirl! [ they dance around the stage, giggling ] actress:thank you, my fans, and thank _you_ too, i love you all, o yes i do my arms make motions, long and tall see how they have outstretched you all so gloomy, happy, it matters not as long as you're in _my_ spot writer: this clown would put her actions to my text? she'd screw them up, i think i'm hexed! man: you'll make more money actress:and i'll make it funny artist: that's something that they'd rather see man: you're so unhappy! actress:make it snappy! dancer: parties, dances, and a bit of me! writer: halt this nonsense! get out you twits! you're turning verse into the shits! i'd rather be alone and terse dancer: no need to be tense! actress:this guy he needs a psychia-trist man: some prozac would add a little twist dancer: perhaps he'd feel better if he was kissed artist: somehow i think he'd rather be missed! [exit all except writer.] writer: see how noble writing fares when all around are jokes and dares and even i, am just cliche pretentious racket! begin the play! Curtain. Date: 1994 Nov 30, 12:30:49 a.m. PST From: kp (#585) To: *Text (#1443) Subj: musings from the desert 1. We are waiting at the edges. This desert stretches out before us. It is burning, beyond our sight. We have been caught in the yellow light. We are watching the streetlamp suns We hang below them. There is the wind in the sand. There is bread in the sky. In white we began to travel From my land into yours We were waylaid at the foot of this mountain. We are afraid of the day. Before he has promised us the Logos Now he has returned with the Laws These are the broken tablets He has left us with the broken tablets. We have been scattered on the sidewalks This is the promised land. "Why have you rejected us forever, O God?" Date: 1994 Nov 30, 12:30:50 a.m. PST From: kp (#585) To: *Text (#1443) Subj: musings from the desert cont'd 2. What are the Shapes on the Horizon? 1. The Content of Illusion is Form 2. The Walls of Houses are filled with Sand. 3. You cannot walk on the surface of Clouds. 4. Lonely atoms cannot orbit each other. 5. All relations are of infinite terms. 6. A mixed drink also separates. 7. Cognition produces God in the expectation of Logos. Date: 1994 Nov 30, 12:30:52 a.m. PST From: kp (#585) To: *Text (#1443) Subj: musings from the desert cont'd 3. Why has His manna forgotten to fall on His people? Where is the sustenance that nurished us in our wanderings? Have we been missed in the sight of our Lord? Why are there sidewalks to point our way? Only neon lights to guide us? When all our empty journeys end At the river where we began? Date: 1994 Dec 5, 06:22:20 p.m. PST From: caitlin (#1139) To: *Text (#1443) Subj: Flesh and Bone I wish I could describe the landscape of our bodies moving together the perfect lucidity of skin against skin The poet in me seeks to abstract and distill you to sing a song of hope and desire and eyes as blue as the New Mexico sky But my body loves you flesh and bone knows only sweet rememberings of your mouth on mine of your teeth sunk into my shoulder as you shuddered underneath me and I am left to learn the slow empty ache of a bed without you in it Date: 1994 Dec 6, 12:03:28 p.m. PST From: Amber-Jessica (#277) To: *Text (#1443) Subj: Gold Crystal Death Bus Demireal hushed light of breathing. They took my Amex away. I readied the noose, then thought "what a puerile reaction" -- & digging into the underworld I ride the gold crystal death bus, purefaction, noble gas hallway, archaic blowjobs blue gleam on ebony gloss & bodies manifold-- slish-- I'd give to anything to feel that... Creeping ailanthus I give you a name in the back seat, the pulse an unknown highway outlined in frost, passengers all of us, horizon finehammered copper in a thick twilit line, death bus ticking, cooling on the shoulder, December grasses lucid in fog-- Film fixed timewise-- developments become only stillness of light unmechanical, steampipes, snow, palm & narcissus I shed my duffle in the terminal, vast mammal house & still make decisions somehow as Mr. Dark droops in the moon barn Dissolution never complete, tension flickering over surface & no thinking can make you reliable, no arms imprison what's hovering further out at night-- High empty maples in the sky & lumbering mountain clouds' moonlit edges, phantom rustle of diapers in the sauna... See that? Sensational perversions gladden our hearts. Six baby steps past the intersection, Super Poli-Grip: 'that old man won't spit his teeth in the waterfall!' He cannot find serenity in avant-garde saloons... These dead vex me, these toffees taste bad, these dead need a ticket on the speedcrystal greyhound... Date: 1994 Dec 18, 06:31:51 p.m. PST From: caitlin (#1139) To: *Text (#1443) Subj: Between Memory and Dreaming Someplace between memory and dreaming there is a room its only contents a boy it is a plain room made of bits of my spine flesh from my inner thighs the curve of my cheek soft and warm and drowsing He sits in a plain wooden chair in this plain room this boy who was anything but plain who was everything to me He flashes that sardonic grin of his maddening and familiar as he watches me move through my life my hair graying lines softening ever changing He'll never change this memory boy of mine who rarely speaks now just watches a presence in my head now wavering now sharply focused He has touched me only once this past year one finger probing scar tissue brittle like ice burning like fire his smile softening only when I winced with pleasure pain I cannot evict him and no longer try he is a permanent resident here in this place I made when I was young my first lesson in the futility of loss Date: 1994 Dec 19, 10:57:51 a.m. PST From: Silk (#558) To: *Text (#1443) Subj: re: Caitlin's 'Between Memory.." thank you. it is excellent. Date: 1994 Dec 19, 11:29:17 a.m. PST From: Trismegistos (#1457) To: *Text (#1443) Subj: Poem: THE YOUTH OF ATHENS He knew it, yes, he knew just what to blame, or thank -- pulp-moldy patrimony, deep-prisoned in dad's cluttered attica, what did the trick. All that scattershot of grim mass-market paperbacks, grumbling radaclysm of the bile-duct, spitting at the militarindustrial false consumer advertising mindcontrol the masses modernart popmusic, (whether or not accompanied by sketchy minutopias where Man he find his authentixity, don't matter, after all who reads the Paradiso anyway?) Now in nineteen-nightmare, it's one youth who feels the weight descend and crown him heir anachronistic to that crabbed appendix of the countercult, a 70s timecap, malcontents to wit: Rand and Skinner nobbing hobbes with Marx, Future Shock, the Greening of America, the Screwing of the Average Guy, Subliminal Sexploitation, yes, all out-of-date in their particulars, but still -- the Attitude! So he began to think, to scorn all that he'd previously scorned in a new way. All institutions can be made analogous unto the Church of Rome (&scribbled in his highschool notebook FOOTBALL CAPTAIN = POPE & CHEERLEADERS HIS NUNS OR TEMPLE WHORES / PEP RALLY = AUTO DA FE etc.), and Rome of course a short step from the primitive, the animal, a fertile source of scientist disdain for mating rites, for social cliques, for words of bond. What's left? Among the burnout of his nights, no help from dreams he dare not inspect, Truth comes and fucks him till he screams, and then he runs a way to programmed likenesses of girls he knows wherepon he masters them, as man does beast. He sometimes writes a poem to celebrate himself, his suffering in the cause, like that one the other day about Prometheus; but no, it's all the other way around, it's all a be-cause for his suffering, the bombast never sticks to his abhorred ego; then he does what he does best, with lust. He hates, and burns the words he wrote to cinders. Not his own. Corrupted, like a puppet, this is why he never goes so far as to burn down the living objects, school, schoolmates, or teachers, church and state -- revolution starts at home, if you are not yourself, it's best to take the hemlock when it's relatively fresh. Date: 1994 Dec 19, 11:36:53 a.m. PST From: Trismegistos (#1457) To: *Text (#1443) Subj: POEM: What You Want Choking in your fur, being stung alive, opening silk shroud and finding wings for limbs. Open out your ducts and let down mother love, mother milk, that's sweat gone thick and plasm-sweet. Burning with the sting, liver will distill poison, fill new ducts; spurs grow at your heels. Growing from the egg; larva, tadpole, blind and hairless, be the first, a beast they won't believe. Date: 1994 Dec 20, 12:48:31 a.m. PST From: kp (#585) To: *Text (#1443) Subj: Youth of Athens Excellent poem, though perhaps a bit too close to home in places. Date: 1994 Dec 28, 09:10:32 p.m. PST From: caitlin (#1139) To: *Text (#1443) Subj: Snow White Puddle of light spilling out of the back door. Blue silk kimono pulled tight around her waist, bare feet shoved into hiking boots and she's out. She stands in the middle of the cold white snow after midnight yard, head thrown back, mouth open to catch the flakes which dance in the air around her. All the world has gone dead quiet under its blanket of purest softest light. The cats stand at the top of the back steps and look at her as if she's gone mad, dancing there in this cold wet stuff they will not deign to touch with their elegant paws. She laughs to see them, looking so haughty there in the light, their dignity wrapped as tightly around them as her robe. Her skin is still warm from her bath and steams where the large luminescent flakes touch it. Flakes lying on her hair, on her robe, on her arms like feathers from some incredibly huge and magical bird, or the detritus of a giants' pillowfight. She stops her dancing to stand, very quiet and still -- the yard, transformed from its normal state into something so painfully beautiful she can hardly bear to look at it. She remembers doing this as a little girl -- spinning in the rare Southern snow, her white go-go boots and coat and hat all securely fastened to keep her warm and dry, her mother standing at the back door to make sure she was safe. There was never enough snow to make a respectable snowman. Once her boy cousins tried to make one out of mud they covered with a layer of snow frosting, but all the glazing melted and there was nothing left but a pile of mud in the middle of the yard, slightly misshapen and forlorn. Ice was the usual winter event of her girlhood. Ice, diamond hard and brilliant, trees and power lines breaking under the sheer weight of their coating, cars and people sliding into disaster with every move. Not like the soft blankets of snow that lie so quiet on everything they touch, the night's dark brightened by the clean white. There was snow in the mountains near Taos and she climbed out of a hot tub to roll, naked and shivering, skin burning, her lover laughing at her bareassed audacity -- he too chickenshit to brave the fire of snow on hot skin. His laughter stopped her rolling and she climbed, sedately, back into the tub to sit properly again, hands folded. This failure to roll in the snow was a metaphor for their relationship -- she always running headlong into intensity and he holding back, mockingly waiting for her to grow out of all the things he said he loved about her. On this night she is blissfully alone, no one waits inside her house to judge her silliness. She has never felt as free as she does in this moment, standing in her backyard, snow falling all around her. She smiles to herself and drops her robe to the ground, pulls her feet out of her boots and falls backwards, making a perfect snow angel, marred only by the print of her ass. Clambering out of the angel carefully so as not to ruin it she laughs and laughs and falls again, makes an entire choir of angels, stark naked in the after midnight alone and quiet of her very own world. Snow falling harder now, surrounding her, and she is beginning to shiver, teeth chattering, skin goosepimpling. One last look at her angels and she gathers her clothing and runs lightly up the steps into the house, tripping over indignant cats on her way back to the bath and a cigarette before dreaming. Date: 1995 Jan 3, 10:33:41 p.m. PST From: Gaijin (#1460) To: *Text (#1443) Subj: Pet Peeve Haiku The Press does not know, `To-ki-yo' is said `To-kyo'. It annoys me so. Date: 1995 Jan 16, 09:26:08 p.m. PST From: Caitlin (#1139) To: *Text (#1443) Subj: Reinventing in Bare Feet Lately I am walking barefoot through fields of broken glass nerves strung tight veins threaded with barbed wire The process of reinventing myself is painful and slow bits of burlap velvet silk and linen and one odd piece cut from an old feedsack stitched together clumsily threads pulling loose drops of blood an altogether inept piece of handiwork I hope will hold until I can sew something stronger Date: 1995 Jan 25, 08:27:31 p.m. PST From: Trismegistos (#1457) To: *Text (#1443) Subj: 3 poems: IoU I Stalk, stick, umbrella broken by a stronger wind, a whip, my path down streets a sketch in pencil on a map. At night, alone, a hiss. The radiator sews my ears. I wake up dead, a rigid stick in bed, I cry. O Bird's mouth, open giving swallow's mouth. Pulsing dying worm's mouth, digging air. Ringing nest of blind mouths, naked mouths. Debth paid off, the patrimoney burned away in kisses. Writhing, gulping, one mouth. U Upside-down, the world turned. Why? Turvy-topsy, hanks of grass and clod fall, slow, hover, speed rise. Like a ball it swivelled gimballed all below us Old Gray Globe to see what planet could eclipse its round aloning. Turning once and not in the way that makes the night and day, we all flew for a while; turned world, the down upside. Date: 1995 Jan 25, 08:31:36 p.m. PST From: Trismegistos (#1457) To: *Text (#1443) Subj: Poem: THIS CITY Christ City where the parables played on concrete would dispirit 12 times 12 disciples; Ritch City where guttering's the way to burn with money you don't know, the tic-tic electric, we may know, the tic-tic electric, we may be dead but aren't we Fabulon Shit City where soleblack gumspots make soiled fake leopardprint from the concrete And whose triumph went without belief, the lone parade, and in the wake policemen ask: what was he on? a springing cat, a toddling ass? His City. Date: 1995 Jan 27, 01:22:16 a.m. PST From: Sai (#861) To: *Text (#1443) Subj: re: IoU Trismegistos...is truly insane. good show. -aka Gutenberg, the plain vanilla ass key vendor. Date: 1995 Feb 4, 01:27:48 a.m. PST From: Caitlin (#1139) To: *Text (#1443) Subj: I Remember I remember the look in your eyes the first time you crawled naked across a bed towards me I remember wanting you more than I wanted to breathe I remember wanting to fuck you to devour you to steal your breath to burn you up I remember the way the length of your body felt against mine the texture of your skin the taste of you the smell of you the sound of your breath in my ear I remember heat and whispers and holding you close after the storm passed the way we fit bodies spooned and cooling Date: 1995 Feb 4, 08:17:10 a.m. PST From: Arc (#2145) To: *Text (#1443) Subj: Violets are Red Roses are owait Violets are Red Roses are Blue I hate poetry and so should you Thank you. -- Arc Date: 1995 Feb 4, 09:17:50 p.m. PST From: Boudicea (#1021) To: *Text (#1443) Subj: dammit. i don't need to see poetry that makes me horny and lonely like i'm not already and makes me want to cry more. Date: 1995 Feb 6, 03:08:03 a.m. PST From: Caitlin (#1139) To: *Text (#1443) Subj: Edges Up here in my head where the images words colors swirl and ocasionally spill out of my ears and down my wrists you are embedded a shard of glass cobalt blue razor sharp edges surface cool and smooth that warms when I stroke it with my fingertips that have forgotten how to stay silent how to keep themselves from bleeding when I run them along the edges that make you so interesting to me Date: 1995 Mar 2, 03:46:43 p.m. PST From: Caitlin (#1139) To: *Text (#1443) Subj: Silence It's not so much the words we use it's the spaces in between where all is falling into long soft silence spun of silk and amber and the whispertouch of eyes and breath on flesh and bone that does not need the web of words and noise to know Date: 1995 Mar 2, 07:38:56 p.m. PST From: Silk (#558) To: *Text (#1443) Subj: caitlin's last you go, girl! (I like that one a lot) Date: 1995 Mar 5, 10:41:57 p.m. PST From: Caitlin (#1139) To: *Text (#1443) Subj: Driving Driving through the long black night, moon sliding behind clouds and the sky is the color of the road is the color of the sky until I can't find where one starts and the other stops and I'm watching the moon and stars outside your window and stealing looks at you, reaching over to stroke the back of your neck with my fingertips to hear you sigh and feel your skin twitch and come alive under my touch. Between-station radio static and out-of-state weather reports and late-night DJs selling songs I haven't heard since high school and the car reeks of sex and our words drip with sex and I am covered with you. You are everywhere, your smell clinging to my skin which burns in all the places you have touched and aches in all the places you haven't touched since we met, eyes shining with anticipation of that quick fuck in the parking lot that only put more edge on the tension sparking between us like a lightening storm. Stopping for a quick smoke in the cold dark of a rest area where truckers park to sleep away a few hours before heading off into whatever night they have invented for themselves and I am watching you throw stones onto the roof of the picnic shelter watching me smoke and shiver in the cold, the end of my cigarette glowing and smoke curling out of my mouth and into the air. Stepped out my smoke and you are hard against me and I am hard against you and the car is hard against my back and we are all mouths and tongues and crashing teeth and cold fingers straining through fabric to get at warm skin. The night is all gasps and whispers and the urgency of flesh which hasn't touched flesh in months. Your fingers find my nipples and pinch and pull until I ache with wanting you, my cunt grinding against your cock, my tongue fucking your mouth with all the words I've lost in this moment when all that matters is how you feel against me. You raise my skirt, fingers stroking my clit as my fingers stroke your cock as our mouths suck and bite lips that are bruised and swollen and then I raise my knee and you are inside me pushing and straining and we are whispering in the dark: Come for me. Fuck me harder. God, I want to feel you come. Fuck me. Please. Yes. Your face is buried in my shoulder and when you come your teeth bruise my skin with sharp pleasurepain that sends me over the edge, breath ragged and heart pounding, cunt clamping down around your cock as my fingers dig into your back. Smiling and laughing and kissing we hold each other and adjust clothing in the cold eye of passing headlights on the road behind us which stretches out towards the promise of a borrowed bed at the end of several more hours of driving and at least one polite conversation with the friend who waits awake in the long night to let us in. Date: 1995 Mar 7, 09:00:25 p.m. PST From: kp (#585) To: *Text (#1443) Subj: The Smile is Inside With pots on stoves and hearts aglow Around ye tables, coffee clamours, And busily, the silverware shines, Over a figure, who in a street is lined, By concrete chips and sheets of ice, His bus' further engines roar Among some fire hydrants ground And parking lots of crisping white His reddened cheeks & a glancing cough In torn coat and a borrowed scarf. O astonishment, and tea galore, In my blood the vacuum really moves, So fluids upward flow, they progress -- Thus my feet are drained, and I am Stuck, with these veins un-swell, For tonight the cabin pressure Drops so low -- I am without air, And bursting red, I grow lightheaded -- Breathe deep, now ye are in outer space. My broken tendons, severed back, Your fingers in my twisted sack, Of bones, I reek of cigarettes, I walk the moon in spraining legs -- A craft or rocket, I am neither ready To reach that sky, that lays below me, I must be sleeping there, An invertebrate worm, Awaking lost, beneath a sign "All hands on deck," -- Oh ye of little faith, This street we walks, I am served The bodies shuffle -- busses roar, Oh God Why have you forsaken me? My books remain Full of fairies, castles, trolls, While I marry such an elf Within my skull, that I am forced again To lay down conditions For yet another Unconditional surrender. Date: 1995 Mar 8, 09:38:40 a.m. PST From: Trismegistos (#1457) To: *Text (#1443) Subj: Poem: EARTHLY DELIGHTS EARTHLY DELIGHTS a white lad of twelve in Kenosha, Wisconsin enchanted by prints of Hieronymus gardens blankets the windows and makes known a LOVIN (parents away on their own fornications) his stringy-haired cohorts from wood shop and Scout Troop, some mysterious lasses from Talented and Gifted, speak easy and enter, in redlight and strobeflash strip and inhale from a brimming tin cauldron widdershins dance under mad old Led Zeppelin the sallow flesh colors to seeded red berry, calibans pipe, maenads hide in the curtains the wriggle's gone meaningless, life ornamental i wink the TV past -- its "live from Kenosha" a coffle of children, in orange and handcuffs bows out of the house, past a gantlet of newscrews with millions of children, unsupervised, watching new channel: a man with a corporatist mission "we must all pull together, both worker and management" he loudly denies that the classes should struggle and peddles a pamphlet called "Aren't We America?" ah Sony I'll miss you, I'll wet a white tissue, the shards of your screen will I gladly recycle, I'll shingle some wings, and their sharp overlapping will cleave the air, take me to one place at random I clear the flat tarmac, set down on the sidewalk, I check my location, and walk past a clearing, the windows are muffled, I press the right buzzer a naked lad opens, behind him, red strobing. Date: 1995 Mar 9, 01:37:12 p.m. PST From: Amber-Jessica (#277) To: *Text (#1443) Subj: Blown into the Voyde Boring wooden toys in the 1970s I wanna rock and roll all night and part way to Syracuse House music remains my organizing paradigm, also light slanting into trashy lemonbright alleys, the clang of New York next morning The problem with ramen is I always boil the seasoning packet unopened There was a cool beauty in the World Wars For me, a child of nine pondering gentle camouflaged bombers drifting silent over dapple-coloured Alpine forest Soft snowy expanses under floodlight Gapemouthed peace of frozen corpses & ashuffle through trash in Tompkins Square I remember the day I discovered your real name I was listening to LL Cool J I was destroying vital documents I was cranky I had taken on the Torah & was ready to work 120 years I was at summer camp and there was a feeling I got when I looked to the west Staggering real amphetamines Echoes of the discotheques twinkle dismal, lustrous And those boring wooden toys implacably simple, function thorazine-remote Who could imagine us, winterwhite, sitting on the foot of the bed Those days are dead The mind a bright red hollow horse with wheels Date: 1995 Apr 4, 12:33:38 p.m. PST From: Rebis (#875) To: *Text (#1443) Subj: NEWT'S AMERIKA We're crooning nightly. Renewing thorny logic, Cheerily noting wrong. Coiling energy, thrown. Wrongly enticing hero, Ongoing wintry lecher, Reigning theory clown, Whining electron orgy Growing incoherently. Date: 1995 Apr 24, 04:32:10 p.m. PST From: melusina (#907) To: *Text (#1443) Subj: kissback Each stroke a promise, slick upward slide scraping against everything you ever said to me. Eyes straining inward half-lidded looking for a flat black plateau and it's almost your touch, harder, but your softness was always a lie. The water is too hot, hot that makes you shout and back away from my steaming skin, but the boiling needles turn my mouth into something like a smile. If I stand on my toes, I can see my face, a fog-ghost in your shaving mirror. The steam smeared across the shine blurs deliberation clear and delicate, thin plum-skin gloss laid slick across my bones. Alone with my skin inside this fire your traces teach me where I slam into the world closed by the hammering of your heart as you count your need across my carefully numbered ribs. My eyes are strange and wide, sucked into the pure wake of the blade, all there is. I pare myself precisely, but my legs are not long enough, they are slippery and my thighs slide whispering spangled secrets together over the curves of my calves, but they are not enough, I am still too far away. I absently consider my fist, the bones of my fingers curled thin and angular, the scar on my knuckle from the heat I was told not to touch. I prefer cuts to burns, blood to blisters, and with each bruise my skin shivers resentfully, red loosened but trapped silent inside. I think about this and I think about you behind restless dreams of heavy desire and I do not have to guide the blade as it peels me in a solitary rhythm. Soon I shine like marble in the wet and the water drinks insistently the crimson drops that dance from sharp kisses on the hip-jut of bones up from the curve of my belly, on the pale sweep where the blue map of my wrist begins, around the edges of the skin-hollow where my ribs cage together shadowed under my breasts. This shallow sting is my secret warpaint, and I laugh with the razor that slices me out of your dull purple ache, wash of steel across my swollen lips and we are lovers indistinct in your silver eye, coming to kiss you back to sleep. Date: 1995 Apr 26, 01:47:02 p.m. PST From: Boudicea (#1021) To: *Text (#1443) Subj: shudders. Date: 1995 May 12, 09:45:31 p.m. PST From: YjAzU (#2576) To: *Text (#1443) Subj: known/unknown i do not fear the unknown the unknown is safe and easy i bask in my anonymity in the unknown the known is full of my daily fears my daily love my daily work i fear this world it is ever changing in ways not made clear to me in the unknown, i am who i make myself i have ultimate control overnight i build worlds and tear them down i carry buildings and elephants without a second thought and my love is unknown to me as mysterious as myself in the known i am small confined to my carbon self powerless limited finite mute i fear my powerlessness i fear my size in the unknown i am limitless as large as an electron as minute as a universe i travel by particle, by wave, by photon nothing can stop me i am all encompassing in the unknown my love and i meet in obscure realities our souls touch and we become supercharged learning of new unknowns deep within ourselves the known shows me only what i already know all of my failings my confinement as a point in a plane the narrow boundaries in which i move i chafe at the borders i pace nervously i see no break in the fence Date: 1995 May 15, 06:49:25 p.m. PST From: YjAzU (#2576) To: *Text (#1443) Subj: the rain was coming down softly and i was thinking of you, my body in oregon, yours in arizona, but our souls lost somewhere between... i was walking up the puddle strewn lane, the same lane that i'd walked a thousand years ago with another man... but this time, i was walking with you. i could feel you beside me... did you dream of walking with me? i pictured you with long cape and officer's boots, so tall, walking beside me, head down, afraid to look over at me at first, afraid to admit i was real... after a while, i took your arm and we walked on in silence, the rain falling all around us, sighing against branches and rooftops... we did not speak... we did not need to... the lanes are eclectic: now a well kept garden, now a trash pile, a dog barking, a tree in bloom, the bitter smell of urine mixing with the cleansing rain, and on we walked, not needing to say anything, not wanting to disturb the perfect silence, each wrapped in their own thoughts, separate but the same... i thought of you, i thought of leaving him for you (i did not take your desires into account, you were the perfect fantasy with your desires reflecting only my own)... i thought of being in bed all day, i thought of fighting... i thought it would never work... we move in different circles in real life, but in cyberspace we are soulmates, we each desperately need something that the other has...what is it that you have that i need so badly? what is it that you bring to me? as i approached the downtown the car exhaust mixed with the rain and you blessedly stopped haunting my thoughts for a full five minutes... but as i went home again, i found you waiting by the lane, waiting to take me there... you told me you would never come, would never meet me, but you would always be with me... you told me we had the perfect relationship, the lines of communication open... you told me that if i met you i would no longer like you, but would be disappointed... i told you that would never happen, couldn't happen, that i would take you any way i could get you but you said no... we would no longer be *we* if we met...you looked deeply into my eyes and told me we were only electrons... cells are irrelevant... my heart cried MIN and it echoed down the lane and into the mountains...the echoed returned I am not Min...I am who you make me. you disappeared into the mist when i turned the corner towards home...you promised your return in cyberspace...you told me i was a fool, you told me i take it all too seriously...you told me that you wanted me too, that i made you happy, that you wanted me wanted me in your bed in your head but never in your home. it's a new kind of relationship for me..be gentle with me, for i am fragile and dependent...you promised me you would hold me safe, small grey bird in the palm of your hand and i trusted you and made my nest there of fragile hopes and tenuous dreams Date: 1995 May 16, 09:27:52 a.m. PST From: Caitlin (#1139) To: *Text (#1443) Subj: Conversation Without Words I reach out and touch your hair because I can because you're here because it's beautiful and feels so silky underneath my fingertips because it's yours because you let me. All this long night of talking talking talking, the ashtray next to me piled with butts, the room smelling of cigarette smoke and the tangerines you drove across country to bring to me and I am running out of words. I've been watching your hair fall into your eyes, watching your hand sweep it back from your face, and in my drowsy state I want to know what your fingers have been feeling -- so I reach out and touch your hair, my fingers brushing it back from your face, snagging slightly in the tangles, my eyes caught in your eyes which are smiling back at me and the room is silent for the first time in hours. I can feel myself starting to blush, heat rising from my chest to enflame my face, but you capture my hand in yours and kiss the inside of my wrist, your tongue tracing the pulse that beats there and now heat is rising for different reasons and all the thousands of words we've spoken come down to the feel of your skin against mine. It's funny how in the end there is always this one moment of anticipation when there's nothing left to say with words and bodies take over to finish the conversation. And your mouth, which spills those beautiful words into my ears, is warm and alive against my pulse which is racing now. I cannot take my hand back. I have nothing left to say. You squeeze my hand in yours and lay my palm against your chest so I can feel your heart beating as fast as mine, blood and pulse moving underneath the thin layer of warmth that is your skin. I close my eyes to hide myself from you, but your lips are on mine, mouth soft and warm, and when your tongue slides inside to touch mine I know I am discovered in the way that my mouth opens to let you in, the way my tongue meets yours, the way my body leans to feel you against me (hearts beating, chest-to-chest). You are smiling and kissing me and smiling and tonguing my ear and smiling and whispering your breath into my mouth and smiling and unbuttoning my shirt and smiling and capturing my nipple in your mouth rolling it with your tongue and teeth and my hands are in your hair again because there is nowhere else for them to go and heat is rising between us like an August day. You (gently, ever-so-gently) lay the length of your body against mine, my head cushioned in the palm of your hand and I open myself to the warmth of your fingers sliding underneath my skirt to stroke my thighs, muscles quivering and jumping when your fingers stroke my wetness through the thin layer of silk which covers me. You cup me with your hand and then slide off skirt and panties and there is the feel of cold air on warm skin and your finger sliding inside me, moving easily through the folds of skin and wet to probe desire and heat which is still rising rising in the room which is filled only with the sound of our breath and the smell of sex and emotion lying thick all around us. I can feel the ache your finger leaves as you bring it to your mouth, sucking me off the tip, your eyes still smiling into mine as you bend to let me taste myself on your mouth which travels down my skin, tongue and teeth alternately circling and nipping. I raise my hands above my head, arch my body underneath your, and try to remember what breathing is when your tongue strokes my labia, circles my clit, enters me -- your hands helping me spread my legs, helping me open to you, helping me want the feel of you against me. Two fingers (then three) slide inside me, stroking in and out and in and out while your tongue presses against my clit and I don't need your help anymore, need only this feeling of you on me. You slide your fingers out of my cunt and into my ass, tongue circling and flicking and circling my clit, fingers stroking me, tongue circling and flicking and I can feel the tension rising, know the instant before I fall, gasping for breath and calling your name in the warm dark. Date: 1995 May 16, 09:45:47 a.m. PST From: legba (#95) To: *Text (#1443) Subj: Catch of the day A vat of eyes, golden, round nickel-sized and shining, all watching me red-gold scales, latticed, pink-red where inside used to be and tracery of little bones sea-memory flashing in coin-flat gaze epiphany of fish heads Date: 1995 May 16, 02:22:42 p.m. PST From: Caitlin (#1139) To: *Text (#1443) Subj: Body Talk Too many people own too many pieces of me. I give myself away too freely like some surreal K-Mart Bluelight Special -- pieces of me, 5 for $1. Buy one, get one free. I am simultaneously mother, lover, ex-wife, director, poet, secretary, net denizen, daughter, granddaughter, niece, cousin, friend, co-worker, confidante, and on and one endlessly. My body is bound by a fine web of silver wire which connects me to all the people who have rights over me. It is beautiful, this web, glittering when I move, but it tears my flesh if I move too quickly and I fear that one day everyone will pull their thread at once and I will be cut into a million bloody ribbons. Somewhere in the center of this net I sit inside the amber that is made up of my rage, my fear, my loneliness, my need, my desire, my grief, my regret, and all the thousands of other pieces of blackness that I lock away to finger in silence. I am expert at taking my darkness out on my flesh. I tear at my cuticles until they bleed and my son asks where Mommy got her owie. (Mommy gave it to herself, sweetie). I rarely sleep. I don't eat enough on too many days and find myself late in the night, hands shaking from low blood sugar, guzzling orange juice to bring my body back into some semblance of normality. I smoke as much as I humanly can in a day, lighting cigarette after cigarette on into the wee hours of the morning -- piles of butts and ash and dead matches growing on the table next to me. I have at various times in mylife abused alcohol and assorted drugs, played with knives and fire, been involved with men who beat me or who ignored my emotional needs because they just weren't tidy enough. I am possessed by a rage that frightens me in its intensity, stepping into confrontation as if my small frame contained the soul of some 8 foot tall warrior who is beating against my flesh to get out. I mark my life's journey on my body -- each pierce a physical symbol of some step I've taken. I've pierced lobes and cartilege and most recently a nipple -- threading 12 gauge wire through tender flesh and it hurt so good; pain I rode like flames and that unbelievable euphoria that comes from the combination of endorphins and terror overcome. It is a way of taking myself back for myself, possessing my body by force, remembering I am alive and can feel something more tangible than these words that clamour for attention in my head and spill out onto the page when I least expect it. I wear my self-inflicted scars like badges of honor, let my lover bite me so hard the skin turns purple where his mouth has been. I would let him draw blood if he would. I treasure these marks because I can never get him close enough, can't hold him long enough. They are tangible proof he's been here in the same way the stretchmarks and episiotomy scars I earned from pregnancy and childbirth are tangible proof my son once grew inside my body; tangible proof in the same way my ragged nails and cuticles mark my stress; tangible proof in the same way the wire I push through flesh marks my need to overcome fear and the pleasure there is in pain -- tangible proof that I can bear anything. Date: 1995 May 16, 07:46:26 p.m. PST From: kp (#585) To: *Text (#1443) Subj: Carnival I Carnival I. "THE TOYS WERE COVERED IN BLOOD" There, the headlines ringing boldfaced, the FBI, the CIA, on the trail of "anarchists," nervous about lunatics -- nervous about governmental overthrow -- "From Caldwell Snyder galleries San Francisco one thousand five hundred dollars -- things is the category there is a mysterious little squiggle in this puzzle we'll start with you dan -- two Ts -- two hundred The letter S," - Spinning the wheel -- a daycare collapsed by a bomb in Oklahoma -- The children, hundreds bleeding -- Right wing militas -- "vowel A" -- "Things" -- The plant taken from cold window, flowers pink with spring, leaves full -- Eyes of author bulbous from sockets, tired -- "I'd like to solve the puzzle," "RIGHT BRAIN & LEFT BRAIN - and, uh, you won eight hundred dollars, which side of the brain will you be hearing from? -- maybe both -- scratch resistant, from Krieger watch, $2,190 -- hang in we'll be back with more -- in a minute," -- detonation. "I'm coming home to a very special place" "We want to be your star" -- "It's a binding agreement, or one of God's promises to man in the Bible." "unsolved mysteries at seven - secrets of terror - scene of the crime -- latest techniques in plastic surgery at ten" "Please, please can we have one, there it is" -- "Let's spin it again!" -- As City Gets Ready to Pave -- Gun deaths set at $6 billion -- Public health intervention GUN COSTS -- Phoney psychologist sentenced to three years Canada, Mexico unite to battle U.S. trade bill -- "Yes, two Ms -- $800!" U.S.-based racist groups have tentacles in Canada -- "AMONG US" Soldier convicted in Somali killing to be moved to Max. [buzzer] "NO D" No new trial for man who used drunk defence in rape case -- "Magnanimous" $900 for a reasonably coherent English Language sentence, "he was feeling very magnanimous" You increased your lead, $5890, "You won the art!" -- South Korean Gas Blast kills 83 -- "... on April 19, the spotlight eventually turned toward the country's paramilitary groups" -- "Doug is right, he picks..." -- Investigators might be seeking former military comrades of McVeigh as potential suspects "I know she didn't make it. I just would like for them to find her." -- "Did you have a good time here?" $5000 for Ken, $3000 for Larry, Spacious Village, Tories rally hoping they'll rise again (The fictional account outlines the overthrow of the U.S. government by white supremacists, who bomb federal buildings.) -- "I had a ball here!" Date: 1995 May 17, 03:10:59 p.m. PST From: Caitlin (#1139) To: *Text (#1443) Subj: Elegy for a Lost Boy Ice broke branches and made the streets slick and dangerous all that winter, piled as thick as these words I pile, one on top of the other, in an attempt to tease you out of the corner in my head where you've crouched in not-quite silence for so long. I've always given the barest facts of you: first love, 17, rolled your car, dead, depression, life goes on. These are parts of you I can easily state and contain, numb to the facts of it all as I am, given long practice at icing over that particular wound so the itching doesn't drive me insane. Ice broke branches and made the streets slick and dangerous all that winter, and even though you died in summer it's the winter I remember best -- sliding through small-town streets in the passenger seat of your car, windows down to catch the icy air on our skin. All that laughter we spilled out into the nights in front of fires made from logs some one of us stole off of some unsuspecting neighbor's front porch and kindling we wandred drunkenly into the woods to gather. Fires to warm and us and keep us safe from the dark, light and heat to mask adolescent confusion. Of all of us, you always gathered the best wood, managing to find the driest pieces when nothing dry was available. I used to wonder if you stockpiled it in some secret hiding place you never shared, except you shared everything of yourself and I could never imagine you holding even that back. I remember kneeling with kitchen matches and scraps of paper, striking a match off my ass and slowly nurturing that small flame into a blaze. It's a talent I discovered with you, this ability to make light and heat where there had been none, and I'll never forget the sense of power it gave me to see flames I set dance high all around us. You were always so completely fearless, frightening in your reckless abandon and intensity for living. I remember watching you climb the water tower ahead of all of us, hands barely skimming the handrails before you stepped onto the platform and leaned your long frame over the edge, further than I ever dared. You would do anything, say anything, be anything and the fact that one day you turned to me and spoke words of love and need was a source of such bewilderment to me in my battered antique hats and boots and bluejeans; books of poetry spilling out of my backpack and pre-rolled joints filling the silver cigarette case in my hip pocket. You were wild and free and completely connected to the physical and I was all sharp edges and intellectual intensity and hidden words and images I hadn't mastered yet. I've always wondered what you saw when you looked at me, always wondered why of all your lovers I was the constant, always wondered why you gave me all you did. You were such a mystery to everyone who knew you, yet you seemed so clear to me -- this wild, reckless boy who was living harder and faster than anyone we'd ever known, devouring your life with greed and joy and a strange sort of grace I've never met again even all these years later. You drove me to your family's cabin in the woods that winter. Long weekend free of rules and parents and we slept in front of the fire, you curled around me and holding me closer than anyone had ever held me before; your hands strong and lean, your legs capturing mine, your breath slow and soft in my ear as you dreamed whatever dreams you dreamed. We thought we had forever in that arrogance that only adolescents have when you know absolutely that you are immortal and life will give you whatever you choose to take. I knew you were dead before anyone ever said the words out loud to me; knew it in the timbre of the ringing phone I hoped no one would answer. Smell of hospital corridors and the adult world which swallowed you whole and kept us from you because we weren't family -- as if family were some wholly quantifiable entity based only on ties of blood and shared last name. Sun beating down on me at the side of your grave and all those eyes I could never escape, spectators watching me in my weakest moment, feeding on tragedy like ticks swollen with blood on the side of an old hound dog. Grief is the cruelest emotion, unmasking me in its power over me, taking all my strength away, shredding me of dignity, exposing me for the coward that I am. Pain like a knife twisted in my heart; pain like a knife that never cuts, only mangles and leaves hard scar tissue in its wake that I probe with one finger every now and then to see if it's still there, and oh-yes (sharp intake of breath) it's there. Ice broke branches and made the streets slick that winter, but it was the summer thaw that killed us in the end. You crouch inside my head, permanently young, permanently beautiful, permanently owner of that girl I'll never be again. I hated you for leaving without saying goodbye, hated you for dying before we had a chance to live, hated you for making me love you. I'll never be comfortable in love again, never cease waiting for the people I love to leave me. Lesson I learned too young -- that people always leave and nothing but winter ice and summer sunshine remain. Date: 1995 Jun 6, 05:50:33 a.m. PST From: Caitlin (#1139) To: *Text (#1443) Subj: Bittersweet If she sent him a sprig of golden-yellow bittersweet, would he take her meaning? Would he remember the way her fingertips felt on his skin, the salty-sweet taste of her on his tongue? Would he want that fragile instant after the lightening passes when the smell of ozone and the feel of warm rain is all there is? The spot on her street where he parked his car has been empty since he left. The neighbors are marking his absence for her. The cat prowls the house looking for him, meowing accusingly at her for chasing away a new-found friend. Her bed got larger and lonelier and she added more blankets to chase away the chill; wakes up mornings tangled in the sheets from dreams and silences. He is burned onto the insides of her eyelids -- blonde hair spilled across her pillows, eyes so wide and blue, lower lip bitten between strong white teeth. She finds traces of him everywhere. Her pillows smell like him and when she shines the lamp on her bed she finds long blonde hairs gleaming up at her in the light. Traces of him in the clash of silver rings on her fingers and the soreness of well-used muscle. Traces of him in half-remembered smiles and the echoes of conversation and books out of order on her shelves. Something new and fragile was created in that space between them that they filled with words and laughter and touch and silence. They try not to finger it too much for fear it will shatter, but its textures attract their fingertips like beach glass smoothed over by the tide. If they hold it gently in their hands it will warm them like a kiss on the palm, mark them like teeth buried in smooth skin (its edges aren't quite worn down, you see). They are dancing slowly and delicately in intricate circles of discovery, peeling back the layers of who they are like experienced strippers who know the audience paid the price of admission for the tease, not for the nakedness at the end. They are careful not to burn each other in all the familiar practiced ways of burning they each know in intimate detail. They are slow and quiet and move gently for fear of startling one another into flight through the high grass. It's raining where she lives and she turns the heat back on, the gray city mirroring her moods too well; oily puddles reflecting up at her from the sidewalk where she walks on the way to the bus and the responsibilities of day-to-day life in the adult world. She held him in her arms not so long ago, wrapped him all around herself in the quiet stillness of a night that wasn't long enough. If she sent him a sprig of golden-yellow bittersweet, she wonders, would he take her meaning? Smiling to herself, she thinks he would. Date: 1995 Jun 7, 08:46:26 p.m. PST From: Dave (#533) To: *Text (#1443) Subj: a motive Crave. We frame our lackings and subtractions so forcefully. We dig craters around a pockmark to prove absence. We pour the sand of existence through the tiny neck of desire, sometimes just to watch it go. There is no pleasure in answering a desire quite like the slow drowning. Call out for a savior, standing in the sand; watch the tide of anticipation gather and begin to advance. Lapping and retreating. Slow consumption just as planned. A scavenger, I uncover things. Meet a whim or desperate need, a simple distraction of ecstasy, in exchange for my own feast and plunder. So few barter for the wait, angry demands, sooner now, but the delay is exquisite, the delivery merely accomplished. This is the theater of desire. An act, a stage, play. All ignored, deliver my desire. But just so, just so I can't tell. Date: 1995 Jun 16, 03:17:02 p.m. PST From: Dave (#533) To: *Text (#1443) Subj: which apocalypse rest rest fine warm steam pipe rest rest rest fine hidden rest stretch sound is swinging chain again watch rest shift yawn the light has changed hot steam pipe hunger know where rise ready flex hopper conveyor roller compressor shaft spool shelf sound will be rat behind watch roam bug taunt tangle it Date: 1995 Jun 17, 06:07:05 a.m. PST From: Caitlin (#1139) To: *Text (#1443) Subj: Map We are here at the end where there's nothing left but shouts recrimination and all the best methods of hurting ancient patterns of veins tied in knots blood like acid and not even any tears Date: 1995 Jul 3, 04:00:33 p.m. PST From: Caitlin (#1139) To: *Text (#1443) Subj: Dinner and Dancing Desire is a dance we execute with practiced skill At dinner we have careful hands careful eyes careful conversation we are careful not to touch We ride the trajectory of this current with grace and ease holding fast to the edge of the wave so as not to drown too soon There is a moment when denial is still possible and we crouch in that instant carefully What was before what will be after can be no sweeter than that anticipation of possibilities |