orderlyconduct

“I am become
dumb
in answer
to your dead language of amor.”

Mina Loy, from “Letters of the Unliving“ (via visualandcritical)

(Source: proustitute)

Sketch, 25 April 2012

flesh

returns

bones

and mornings are redefined

as a time

for breaking-fasts

and sleeping late in your arms

not drinking tea

and dreading the curves of the softening fruits

in the basket over the sink.

“I desired always to stretch the night and fill it fuller and fuller with dreams.”

Virginia Woolf (via seabois)

100412 - All I write lately are first lines in a rush to get to work.

This morning there is a possum slaughter on the wet asphalt.

Entrails festoon the route between our houses, little clumps of fur like bouquets affixed to pews for a wedding.

(Source: steppingoncracks)

“Don’t melt too much into the universe, but be as solid and dense and fixed as you can. We all live together, and those of us who love and know, live so most. We help each other—even unconsciously, each in our own effort, we lighten the effort of others, we contribute to the sum of success, make it possible for others to live. Sorrow comes in great waves—no one can know that better than you—but it rolls over us, and though it may almost smother us it leaves us on the spot and we know that if it is strong we are stronger, inasmuch as it passes and we remain. It wears us, uses us, but we wear it and use it in return; and it is blind, whereas we after a manner see.”

Henry James to a friend, Grace, in response to a letter in which she explains her deep sadness over the death of a friend. The entire text can be found here.

050312: A list

I feel so consistently comfortable
in 9 lines of text,
someone else’s tattered and too big shirts,
the warm light of 10AM,
your arms which know the heavings of my sobs and of my laughter,
the syrupy burn of my third bourbon of the night,
with the beginning of a smile-ache under my dimples,
the careful application of black mascara
and brave red lipstick.

But, I am not comfortable in the company of these ghosts,
their silence,
or with endings without goodbyes.

112711: Piss Strikes Porcelain

Piss strikes porcelain.
The necessity of personal drainage
cascades against once precious Chinese glass.
My grandmother insists on describing urination as a “tinkle,”
as though the inside of a body is a series of well-crafted bells,
instead of a well-worn pathway of constantly decaying and regenerating flesh;
excretory symphonies clanging in a soft-sack mausoleum.

Solving the problems of waste disposal has allowed the social body to grow to a size supportable only by artificial armatures of concrete and steel.
The separation between shit and the mundane disguises the fundamental weakness of the collective organism,
kept alive with simulations of plants and sunlight and water that push the body to masticate, digest, and expel. To fuck and duplicate.

The architectures we erect to support this ridiculous explosion of bodies disintegrate even as we build them.

Our bodies, too, are experimental constructions
built to be run through with plastic tubing and copper wires
instead of being vortexes of mind and spirit,
material shelters for our most essential functions,
raw tissues that allow thought and experience to flourish.

Cataclysm is here. Now. In the details
of our inability to communicate,
the vast distances we’ve erected between minds and bodies,
hands and mouths,
hearts and love,
histories and presence.
It is made immanent by the statistical sameness that results from our massing and reproducing,
the desire to feel needed by,
and the impulse to call the need love.

My body is the most constant test to my altruism.
Everyday it’s softness and cracks, it’s shortcomings,
it’s need for scaffolding affirms my own interior doubts.
It is explosive, half-rotten, and unreliable.
It pounds in my ears, the aggressive acoustics of a hollow construction populated by an outsized rhythm section:
I am full of dissonant and fast-paced bass drums and it is sometimes hard to hear the bells over the insistent beating.