The Discarding of Self

The night is absolutely beautiful except for the crowd. Gone are my long, cold nights of suffering winter. She leaves behind her heated breath but the beast is asleep.

God, I must have cried for half the day today! Too much of everything and the silent film stars have started to speak, but nobody likes their thick European accents or oddly pitched voices and so they die. The heroes are dead, and I sense that I will be equally discarded when nature is revealed.

But there will always be memory... those silver scraps of painted lips and glassy shaded eyes-- those dramatic head cocks and thin, think moustaches.

But things are not so bad. I am at least feeling like there is some hope, some room for change, some SOMETHING because the pendulum has made a rather rapid trip to the bottom and it must go back the other way.

Anyway, must go to choir.

She's Come Undone

Okay. I am absolutely going to die. I really, really, really, really, REALLY screwed up this one. VJ and Rick just saw my wrists; Amac found out that I was smoking and told BigSis; I told ChoirMan that he would die or hit me; I told GoldenFinch and B that I am on drugs; I told Contessa that I was abused and smoked a mouthful of cloves in front of her... WHAT AM I DOING???



I feel sick, I feel sick, I feel sick, I feel sick!



I really think that I'm going to vomit right now. Oh God!

If VJ says anything to Amac about my wrist, I'll die. I'll really, really die. I'll do it right away-- without hesitation, so at least they'll all know, but I won't have to face anyone.

Oh my God, I'm seeing Amac on Tuesday and I will have to make SUPER sure to cover it so that she won't see it.

Oh God! What is VJ thinking right now? It's all unraveling! All of it's undone and I can't control this wrenching inside of me. This indescribable punch in my gut. And for how long did I think I'd be able to wear two masks?

Amac said that everyone was worried about me about what happened last year and that is why word was passed around the sorority about the West End on Thursday. But what the hell? Amac was involved in all this sex stuff when she was like, 12, and nobody still holds that against her!

Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god, It's all coming undone and I feel this charade about to end...

God, help me!

A Fork in the River

Anyway, B came back then, so I stopped.

At Lincoln Center now in a gray breeze rained by Elvis and the fountain. Opera concert was last night and I stained my tounge so black and burned last night that it seems a relief that I'm even breathing today. And my scar will be a week old tomorrow.

I don't know what's wrong lately... I feel like I knew GoldenFinch and now I don't and things run in such different rivers (god, I love that breeze!) That I have realized that this isn't a fork. I haven't ever been of the same source. I cut off all my nails last night. Mommy should be here soon... if she's ever on time... And my throat hurts and I have to go to NJ tomorrow to sing and Dr. B is going to give me so much stress. (They call me Poor Boy!)

Anyway, I have been in either one phase or another of "out of it" since Wednesday and I can see how life like this is so easy and how the days can become annoying and weary passages between the blissful nights. (The air! The air!) I can see the comfort and the color and the inevitability of the pattern once it starts.

Anyway... I have a headache and my throat burns. I hope that Dr. B isn't too pissed. Anyway... I feel too blah to write anymore... Blame it on El Niño! I'll go back and read.

Across the Ribs of Time

Okay... So, here we are again in the sweet born breath of Spring that seems to deliver a freshly eaten compost heap and the staleness of a lover in the closet-- never kissed. And my head pounds and my fingers are stained yellow and taste like honey when I lick them.



And I am sitting here in the shade by Lowe, unable to commit myself to the sun. My memory won't serve me anymore and I haven't seen GoldenFinch since Wednesday. And someone got stabbed at The West End last night. They say he's in Beta. We were all locked in and had to leave systematically, showing our ID's. And I saw the source of my "twin suns," only those scars are already pink and raised and faded and are comfortably smooth as memory, but no longer sting. It was sweet to see him though.


But I can't think with this headache and everyone moves slowly through the filter of avant garde choreography. And the breeze here will leave me to hang and sway from the noose of humidity on the poplar tree.


Anyway, that was abruptly interrupted. I just saw Shazada and Parisa from high school, put on some lotion, moved into the sun and sucked it up. And I see Jaimie and Brandi sitting not too far away and I hate what I allowed to happen in front of them last night. I'm not worried about smoking though because I know it won't even be an issue once the Summer comes.

And B passed a little while ago and said that he would come back, so I will write until I see him.

God! This breeze is beautiful!

But I still haven't spoken to GoldenFinch since Wednesday night and there are still a lot of things that we have to sort out about that.

I want this time to stretch on forever, across the ribs of time so that I will never have to be anything else ever again.

Oh god! I'm smearing this page with my greased sun-smeared hands. Tonight I have the Opera Ensemble concert and Mommy is coming and so is KW.

What a good week to have straightened my hair! We've had dry weather non-stop. But wait-- don't slop away from the the pain in your stomach! Don't let it be as easy as telling about your hair!!!

What I Create

Things are scaring me again. I totally fucked myself up last night and now I don't know how I'm going to hide my wrist at the Opera Ensemble concert or in front of Mommy on Saturday and Sunday. God, I'm such a moron!

And I didn't want to do it, but there was nobody home until it was too late, and then-- thank God-- I spoke to Eunie. But it is out of control because everyone sees. But in some strange way, it makes me feel better-- seeing it there... It's like the completion or the fulfillment of myself.

Anyway, I have so much stuff going on this week with rehearsals, etc. and I am super stressed about the weekend (is there anybody out there?) with everything that I have to do.

I am stuck in CD II of The Wall.

Out at Symposium until 1:30 AM (it is 2:24 AM now) and I have my CC midterm tomorrow and did shit.

God, I'm tired though and worn and hate myself for what I create.

Save me! I don't want to be this, but I can't get out because I'm not even sure that I want to get out either.

Anyway, I am super tired, so... Good night.

-H-

The Death Knell

Whispering winter. She soothes like a violin placed slightly too high, bleeding by Picasso into a woman's waistline. And the king calls for another Adagio.


On the LIRR I travel across the plains of my home and Russian snow is laced with sugar and smells and tastes like the tears which drop from the soul of this violin. Dissolved with the rapidity of cotton into my removed consciousness and slight discomfort.

Someone was killed at Columbia on Friday night and all I can see is him pressing back her head, holding it in his hands, the soft pulse on her neck and then sudden beat and blinding waves of color and the smell of blood reminds me of stew and of chewing the insides of my lips and tearing at my tightened gums. I smell it. And suddenly it is on my hands; drying under my nails, staining the snow from black crimson to fuchsia.


And my hand goes to my neck and it is I who bleeds and it seems like red paint stroked against the pasty, clammy white of my throat. My cheeks drain and I imagine Mimi sputtering up her soul in her bed and suddenly, the vision is gone and I am on the train through my sweet, blissful snow.


And I resist the urge to admit that some dark part of me longs for the drama to resume, for the vision to return. Part of me longs to see everything in red and white-- longs to see the clouds tear and bleed before me-- to see God himself wave a ghostly arm to wash away his own oozing red tears-- to see heaven weep, lying in the lap of a valiant tenor who, frantic and disbelieving, denies her death as she passes into sleep, softly trilling her end.


I want to see him rise with the murdered heavens in his arms and lament the curse of his life, of his love, of his tragic flaw. I want to see him crash to his knees and to wipe away my own soft tears in a wave of applause and orgasmic completion as the curtain wraps herself around the world and I rise into the void of end.


But we are approaching Penn Station now and fantasy must hold her breath for a while longer.

Mahler: Symphony No. Three

Well, I wasn't...

Anyway, twenty four hours later, caught inside a grain of sand-- carved and ancient but with the plastic American wrapper. And what was just wildly romantic now seems sweepingly "Disney."

Mahler-- Symphony No. 3. Bitten by a flock of bloodthirsty mosquitoes. My head hurts of absence and my wrist moves faintly with fatigue. The size of the sound pounds inside of me but does nothing more that stretch the film over my eyes wider and tighter and I feel my heart tremble as if it were Palm Sunday in Jerusalem.

The horns are too clear. The sound of thunder is the definition of all things abstract yet most tangible-- like time or measurement (Duchamps-- Three Standard Stoppages).

And the taste of my painkiller sticks to my tongue through a whole page of my life-- taunting me with the possibility of what is only a pocket away. And Monday-- no coke, no food, NOTHING.

The bird that flies into my hand doesn't realize where it goes-- I will squeeze the life out of it until that throbbing mass lies limp and I let it roll to the ground-- the tiny carcass that I can't help but weep for.

Inside my head on the outside of me! Can anyone understand the weight of that? Probably not...

And my eyes glaze and concentration drifts down the winding halls with girlish, ghostly moans. Writing saves that but they beckon nevertheless. The cross is tasteless and cheap against the backdrop of the rest of this. The candles have drowned themselves in their own loathsome wax, melted by the eclipsical lights of the cameras.

The tympani player breathes deeply.

If I stop writing, I know that I will go under-- to sleep or unconsciousness-- pulled by the weight of this whirlpool of Mahler.

The army fades and Hollywood responds: "Don't go! We'll make you better! Bigger! More the way we want you to be!!"

The army silently contemplates-- dead-- the corpse merges with the screen-- an underage necrophiliac.

"Tomorrow," she says.

"Uh huh," I reply.

And wonder what kind of nonsense pours from my eyes. What color ink I cry. But I can not cry at all now... for the pain of absence is too great-- absence of those puddles-- absence of Patti Smith and Pete Townshend and yesterday's stale breath.

And, oh God! I want to throw up, I want to throw up, I want to throw up, I want to throw up and self consume from the inside out. To stain my coat and spoil the floor and disrupt the world with horror at having seen a fully grown person disappear into a vomit stain on the floor of Riverside Church.

My eyes won't focus now and I am too tired to force them and am scared of myself and what I am doing. I spoon the mist away.

But this only sounds like the score of Beauty and the Beast, Part II, so it all seems hopeless again. (Even though II is a rather beautiful Roman numeral!)

I can't think anymore, so I close.

*******************************

Movement three now.

Suffering speaks: PERISH!
But all joy desires eternity!
Desires deep, deep eternity.

-Nietzsche- (Also Sprach Zarathustra)

Weh spricht: Vergeh!
Doch alle Lust will Ewigkeit!
will tiefe, tiefe Ewigkeit.

That is the only rub.

But my throat burns now from that minty poison that I should have thrown away long ago. That mint that rejuvenates the spaces in my collar bone but can not clear the mist form my eyes-- only infinitely compound this headache while I long for release-- to be spared the burning lighter on my nail-- to call back the wind just this once so that I can stand inside a glass box and watch General Custer die on the plains alone.

I will throw kisses against the windless fingerprinted surface, watch them spiral to the ground and hope that they have sealed his eyes in satisfaction. As the horns now play a gentle farewell and three young men from West Point shoot against the white sky-- the kind that I hate-- the kind that makes me sleepy (as I am now).

And stained glass depressed when the color is gone. The branches batter my box in a Renaissance dance and coax me out to join them. Letting me close my eyes again the blue and believe, for a minute, that blue is permanence. (All the while that skipping record in my head reminds me that it is not).

And at the end of the night, the street lamps shade my skin with the color of yellow infection and blisters swell and fill on the bottom of my feet and I crush them as I tread along the thick white paint of the crosswalk. I press my stiletto heel into the head of history and lean back with all my weight, sweating and squinting as the blood pours out of my ears and trickles- sticky- down my neck and dries in red streaks. And when I pick up my foot, all of the blisters run and have burst, but there is no dent. Time springs back effortlessly-- like foam.

And I want off the carousel NOW! But Billy just laughs at me and refuses to pull the switch, and so languidly, I sling my arm around the horse's neck and press further and further into myself the prayer to stop and the delusion that it will.

"It will not," the record says.

But in my exhaustion, I do not have the strength to acknowledge it. No strength, no will, no plan-- only the soiled shell of myself kissing the horse's neck, remembering that there is no heat in plastic and praying for someone to switch the god damn switch to OFF!