Learning the soft words & having freaky dreams
Dog-Ear: Jan. 6, 2024
1/6: What does it mean to be awake w/ my words, alive enough to catch them, phenomenologically in the word w/out being taken by the world and replaced? I type and then I write and I type again - I am different in each iteration. Words turn to bone - are they true yet? Am I a code undeciphered to myself or just pretending? Is everything on earth subject to interruption? Everything all the time, a car horn honks, the body alive in its aches, the train of thought diverted to stranger and stranger tracks, stranger and stranger lands. Our word of change, our species as a whole, depends on disruption.
I see my friends all learning to forgive themselves (I set a chaotic example; even I am interrupted in this). My friends are writing and running in all directions, moving fast and slow and in circles. We collide when we run into each other - we become something others wish on when we fall. If this is the pace of authenticity, so be it. Our impulses are electric, striking in or striking out, changing the landscape. So much power, thoughtless ferocity or-or-or so quick we miss it, so bright we blink, like nothing really changes the world after all.
Know better, know better, we know better. No pace an artist moves can be wrong unless rendered completely still, dead before death, hopeless before beginning. I have enough bones in this room to know nothing imbued w/ spirit truly dies: snake and bat and rat, soulless wishbone sent as a sign and stolen as a treasure. I face these bones, lives gone, the way I face the whole world, going and going and going.
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Truth is, I never bothered to learn the gentle words, the words like velvet or silk. I only have love love love left. I have been milked of the soft words, the words tenderness is made up of. I grew bored of the sweet things, the delicate nothings we all rest on when the winter steals the air. When love first failed me, I sailed across the sea, living only in my black boots, the man in me. I have watched masculinity soften and harden and I struggle w/ both, every time I open my eyes, every time I close them. I have watched femininity become fire and water and earth, the most glorious, trembling thing, only hurting itself, hurting because it’s bee hurt.
Everyone on Earth so afraid of hurting and being hurt (me too) that we made love a thing opposite of ourselves instead of a thing w/in ourselves, only made greater and greater the more it’s shared.
This morning, I listen to music that reminds me of horses. This morning, my best friend sent me Paulie haunted by the Virgin Mary hanging in the Bada-Bing (Season 6 Episode 9 ‘The Ride’). This morning, I had another violent dream, when I fell back and back and back to sleep.
Last night, T and I camped in our driveway. His latest project has been to install a pop up camper on the back of his truck. We had a heater outside snaking warmth in through an aluminum tube in the zip up window, a steady beep beep all night night, and two sleeping bags we held each other through. We slept a few hours here, a few hours there, until alarm clock called him to work. As the dark dared to recede, in clogs carrying pillows, I invited sleep to find me where she normally does (gray room, head by the window). I tried to dream of vampires and got distracted. The cats returned one by one, closer to me for warmth, asking no questions of where I’ve been. I remembered my body, remembered to relax into it, with curtains pulled against time.
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I dreamt, first, that I went to a new restaurant late night w/ some friends. The owner quit and told me to run it before I finished my second drink. I field complaints and insults the whole night through. Immediately it shifted. I dreamt I was home here, or in a house mostly like this one (rare). It was night here and I was cleaning - moved a bunch of junk out of an unknown corner in the kitchen, like all our lives discarded and in the way. I then found two new rooms, furnished bones of a bathroom and an office and in my color scheme. When the sun rose in the dream, it streamed through the windows. A roommate and I were on our asses on the living room rug, making way for a strange aggressive cat to run over us, past us, out the door. Within moments, I made eye contact w/ a spider on the coffee table - the size of a thumbtack, juicy, its burgundy body going cherry in the light, a two bodied thing trying to tell me something. Before I knew it, I was outside w/ the sun and everyone, my neighborhood flashing by. We were looking for something, the cat or something. In a blink, back in the house, bullets zipping through, shot facelessly from all sides. Then I became lucid to my day, this dream jolting me into it. I am lighter now at least.
Now I am awake to the world, carving more words onto more rocks, drawing more spirals into the dirt, pulling everyone I can into it. I am building not only a new capacity for love but an honest vocabulary for it (I’m aching, it’s so overdue).