To trick oblivion

September '25

Vellum, quicken, arcane, clysmic, indented yellow, hours spent drenched, clothesline up on a clear day, their nudes stiffening, from-scratch biscuit and crème fraiche. Fall already feels certain with the increased desire for touch, still sleeping most nights alone. Feel evil, feel feral—a psychic biter. What is that: to feel a stare? Why can I never subdue mine, unsubmitting, what comes out of my eyes? Deluge a revolution, Vilnius, death of commonwealth. Autumn bracing—window embrasures. This is living all the time. Despair dulls in light of other feelings: no dull moments lessens despair.

==

“You have cut me,” she said, using language like Dickinson might, a little sharp—you scratch—you needle me, all the while crocheting with crimson yarn, something rippled and fleshy and unspecific forming along the length of the needle. People will ask you to blunt yourself, stretch into a palatable thing, or inhabit a fantasy. My face resembles servitude, I know; I’ve asked for it. Spoke with [X] last night, a short chain of cigarettes on the ledge above the 68th street station, of return, of addiction to suffering, of trying the same thing again and wanting a different result. What it would be to love the thing itself—to become a masochist essentially, revel in those sick nights I can’t sleep and think of dropping myself through the gap in the fire escape. How masturbatory is it? When will I finally be done with what’s excruciating? [X] sends me a register of tumbling sacred hearts with arms and legs. Courtesy call, quick-eyed sirens in scarves.

==

What do you do when your instincts fail?

“I don’t know what a void is but I know what a black hole is.”

I was already sure I’d never see him again—my stepbrother who’d already been severed by paperwork, but who was housed among us once, in that awful split-level’s lower floor for years. He was gentle—he slit his own throat in his father’s backyard. Maybe January 2020. With what I’m not sure. In the email his father sent my mother, he’d described it as a sudden neurological collapse, some made-up thing like “cranial lapse.” His relatives thanked my mother for being kind to him at the funeral. Once a drinker, his father had abandoned him early in life and blown his college savings on a sports car with two doors. Yes, I wanted to blame him, but I’d never see him again either. My mother uninvited me from the viewing of the corpse at the eleventh hour. Losing a brother that way had been my worst fear for so long since mine, by blood, had taken a blade, too, and hoped to die, and failed. [X] deserved better. He disappeared into the ether.

==

Steel web, streetlight, the screech of locomotion.

“In the episode, it’s unclear whether...”

Syntactical distance + desire, tug of repeated elements

Tincture. Columbarium. Jurassic essence.

==

This house of two women. Silence encroaching, tide, intolerable, sure. The shoes of men in pairs left by the door. Loafers, vans. I rarely notice men’s shoes; I only look at shoes on the train because I look at everything on the train. I’m on my way back to analysis in-person for the first time in months. Will get coffee, do work—perhaps see a show at [X’s], maybe the [X] fair. Once home I’ll grocery shop, tidy up, wash my hair—

==

LBB’s “Real Life:”

1. Soon the electrical wires will grow heavy under the snow. (1 line)

2. I am thinking of fire of the possibility of fire & then moving across America in a car with a powder blue dashboard, moving to country music & the heart is torn a little more because the song says the truth. (4 lines)

3. Because in the thirty-six things that can happen to people, men & women, women & women, men & men, in all these things the soul is bound to be broken somewhere along the line, that clove-scented, air-colored wanderer blushing with no memory, no inkling & then proceeds across America in the soup green of the tropics, toward the cadmium of a bitter sunrise of a new age, at the white impossible ice hour, starving, past the electric blue rivers melting down, above the snuff, terracotta, maybe fire, over the tiny fragile mound of finger bones of an Indian who died standing up, through the heliotrope of a song about the sunset, to live the thirty-six things & never come home. (22 lines)

Sleep instead of having a last cigarette. Sleep instead of eating. Thinking, looking, reading. One cannot be alone in sleep or is it only in sleep one can be fully alone? I missed him, not my twin but his replacement’s replacement. The hour’s duplicate, week’s flavor.

==

—before seeing [X]. Yesterday’s scribblings interrupt today’s. I forgot to flip the page. It’s good to be writing again. Although it’s asinine—after making nearly a year public, would I ever do it again, knowing that all my lovers and all my friends read them? I am no longer writing to just myself but for the world, into the world. I dream of art pilgrimages ([X]’s aphasia), breasts revealed to be balloons, kissing a friend, [X] showing up cheerful and out of the blue although we’re a long way from home, stealing a cheap pair of panties from a new pack that were gift-wrapped for someone else’s “girl group” —why did I do that? My dream-self is rarely a good person, except she in the dream pushed the kissing friend away and said better not. Better, not. 

==

The inflection in the voice of someone I know.

Borrower’s log.

“Writing it all down so you would know exactly what it is to trick oblivion” (Danse Macabre)

==

Needle in the “I.” There is no “I” to look through. To write of it is to tenderize it, like meat, to press and pound the essence out of it. 

Mons pubis sounds like a planet name. Ersatz sneeze, easy on the “I”: beauty affording grace.

Mishima’s private army

“A weed has no genus, it is a psychic quality”

==

Tall blue candle in a wine bottle whose label has been hacked off by [X] with a knife, periwinkle, not burned down enough yet. It’s autumn, partially acknowledged in my fog, my daze. There’s Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus on the couch, which we read before I crawled on top of him, in the middle of the morning, obscured by foliage in front of the window and the glare of sun on a still-clear day. A sort of permissable slowness, luxuriating, I haven’t felt in forever: the notion I could take a warm bath, watch a movie by myself, just read in between obligations rather than respond to texts. Could I be selfish? What debt am I paying to the world? What is the source of my constant, frantic guilt? Felt it yesterday after analysis, anxious, rumpled, addled, probably from booze and too many cigarettes, the night previous with [X] in her striped dress, a Sunday quiet at [X’s], hearing about her badminton soap opera of a situation and giggling. Still receded into myself a little more than usual, then a fresh cigarette that morning, I’d tried to explain the [X] situation but there’s no way I could justify going to [X] after all I’d said except I guess I feel like she owes me something. People can be jealous when you’re getting fucked and it makes you opaque. I’ve been listening to Myles’ “Chelsea Girls” in their tough voice, and inundated with it, I feel tougher. I am so allergic to the season I was born in, which makes sense. I refrained from telling [X] that when I’m fucking, not as in a phase when I’m getting laid, but I mean in the moment and act of sex, especially when extended, I feel so much like myself. I feel real.

==

“You think my gait’s spasmodic? I am in danger, sir.” —Dickinson

==

The day Charlie Kirk got shot, I got drunk off of watered-down Cayman Jack bottled margaritas and two Peronis and dyed my hair back dark brunette, the job a bit mottled, and rewatched Moonstruck.

==

I couldn’t rid myself of it: ochre, Lachrymae, floating up through shadow with its sickly heat. I can’t be had. All recedes and you hear the click of the lock echo from a secret chamber. I’d like to toss this chest into the sea. Today I’m hazy, a little nauseous: cleaned the apartment, going so far as to dust my mirror tray on my cabinet vanity, while listening to Gaitskill’s Veronica, for no one really but myself and for the sake of passing time. What is psychically repulsing me? Such a bad feeling but mostly reacting to something invisible and external, not so much internal? Then, even when [X] bailed, I went to the [X] book fair, got a bang trim, a whisky-soda high-ball with [X], then off to Ridgewood and the block with its sodium-vapors. Drunk and bitter I chewed [X]; he squirmed, apologized, fed me Nepalese and an acid western, and I fell asleep before the end of Little Miss Sunshine. 

==

German chemist Friedrich August Kekule dreamt in 1861 of the ouroborus which brought him to the shape of benzene, six round carbon atoms forming a closed ring. Pearl and oil are on opposite ends of the spectrum of iridescence. Here I am, against the shade of fallkill, having lost so much time. The only time I’m guaranteed to feel normal is with other people, which is why I continually escape into them, make little time for being alone where I am bound to writhe or otherwise float off of the rational plane. Keep having to forgive myself. I want to be selfish, start dressing more like Patti Smith but otherwise become illegible.

==

Yes, forming a membrane around myself, receding. Protected and solitary in a new way—what it would be to keep becoming more independent, to shed all of those meaningless emotional responsibilities and walk my way back to a life from there. Who knows. I’m only allowing myself to follow my gut now. Gracious power in losing feeling. What is it to “feel” a subjective quality: i.e., beautiful, ugly, alone?

==

If I’m sleepy now, it’s a cozy feeling: less bone-tired exhaustion. But how much did I really sleep I’m not sure. Those I sleep next to are bound to enter my dreams. I think I woke up as early as I assumed I would but not fully, just beneath the shimmering surface I stayed in warm water, bobbing in its aimless currents, would not break fully, it was comfortable, too comfortable, to be wrapped in an embrace while sleeping, to be in the presence of another heart thudding at sleep-speed. Listening to Elkin’s Scaffolding, a moment when Anna, the narrator of the first part, describes a problem she experiences with escalating attachment with a lover to combat their essential strangeness, their “otherness,” how unbearable that is but impossible to mitigate. How can we enjoy—linger—in one another’s strangeness?

==

What happens in your notebook when you write? How does the cadence you’re thinking in enact —?

==

[X]’s apartment smells of frankincense—red felt poppies, paper laterns, the bay window open to the noise of faint droplets, tires on the damp asphalt, doppler effect going down the hill, engine hum and rasp. Resigned to the West. All the times I melted into couches, became them, remembered them—was hosted, was analyzed, was fucked. Act of crashing. On the couch I am received: I keep each with me forever. Wearing my threadbare sailor sweater, water lapping like tide against my mouth and slipping down my chin. Twin color. My hands are very cold. Damp draft, shreds of pinkish silver clouds. Maiden flight. Yes, frankincense. Salt air and damp and velvet. In the future medieval toils the medieval futurist. Conical silence, conical stitch, the sitch, the electrical switch. How I’d like to borrow the fragrance of a field. [X] yodels, wide-knuckled on the steering wheels, those little hands I love, along to Patti, and we pass the firs with clouds lying low, dozing inside pastures, smell of the bay, feathering texture on the tide we don’t want explained, a cabbage bigger than her head, heirloom by the pound on toast, immodest scoops of black cherry and rocky road.

Everything is an object. Shroud it. Slow down. Slow down. Slow down. Less, less, less, the year of less. I am hidden.

How being paired with another erroneously subjectivizes us: “[X] and I,” e.g. 

==

No matter what, no matter where I am, no matter how reciprocal the dream is or how cyclical, no matter how long I have gone on in one long loop, no matter how the landscape has been altered irreparably by storms and their signs: you are in my vicinity. 

[X] speaks of watching her mother degrade by fever and go nonverbal—the breaking of a membrane into the real, where all other woes will forever feel fake.

She said she ([X]) was like a cornered animal. 

What is possible inside, without remove?

Straight into the belly—death hovers, encroaches, shakes its bells to remind us it will come for us, and that it is never quite dignified. I don’t yet understand it and don’t want to. Finality in perpetuity.