nika states

Until you know the sound of heavy fog, a white mouth
more than a pillowed, bewildering rain, that can only
whisper its greedy chatter, that will chew you up
with its fir tree teeth and spit you out
a slow-limbed, slavish thing

or you tell me you have frozen first to the metal
straddling the high head of the rotogate at the zoo, away,
away from the nightwatchman’s dog – he barks
at your ankles and you fall backwards
into the swallowing snow, and the stains
of compassionate streetsweepers

and you meet a stranger on the steep, the slipping
path they have named for a snake, and take his hand
to reach the river and with his Bowie-eyed hound
pass through a door in an alleyway on
the other side

how will you see my halfway dangerous things,
the maybe benign? will you know, already,
that I am just as afraid to die, remote and feverish
in the dry attic as in the fallow, muddy country,
in the booming tunnel under the tracks,
in your kitchen, suddenly and
without reason

in this prized fear, the studded heart, sweaty knee
it is all in the name of gratitude, to be so afraid,
and so fond of the next day’s prospect;
tonight the plan is never to be brave again
as in that year when nothing mattered, but
also to have thirst enough
for fog and snow and
river water.

—-

Uhm. yes. The Bananas are Leopards is a related exercise.

Thank you! All of my photos are taken with an entry level DSLR I somehow hijacked from my mother when I was getting into taking pictures. I would recommend this course of action to anyone. Except the stealing bit. That was mean. Craigslist is infinitely more humane.

Also, if anyone reading this is not naimlung, go check out naimlung’s tumblr. The people look alive in those photographs - a rare and wonderful thing!

Also Also, take the time to see what Mills, smelliott, halcob, and Jesse Hemminger are doing. Don’t be surprised if you find something lovely. And if you are any one of these people, or one of the (sadly unnamed) others who recommended me to the directory last week, just sit back and bask in your own awesome.

Jesse Hemminger

Spring is blowing in so violently, with sharp sticks to the face and the dizzying sun engaged in a blinding game of peekaboo. The crane takes off against the wind and falls endlessly in disfigured circles, the tops of the puddles skid off and up into the axles of tractors, the tram windows splutter with rain but only for a moment and without any overcast. It’s blown all the people out of their sitting rooms and onto the lawn behind the schloß, where the groups of kids with guitars mostly play Oasis’ ‘Wonderwall’ and a dancing, acrobatic version of Frisbee. Everybody is eating ice cream and suddenly we are all allowed to smile at each other, like the first few days of snow when even the adults could not defeat their wonder, before the thousand breasts traced on trunks and many immobilizing layers did it for them.

I dream faintly of shaving my head again, to better see the way flat fields go tidal with quickly passing shadows. Even if I’ll be gone too soon to see green curling from the trees it might be worth it to become aware of the back of my neck again, reconnect with my temples and the tips of my ears. But faintly, only, because I think about laying my head in a favourite lap and feeling fingers at the irrepressible cowlick, the way the scalp prickles when escaping from unnatural parts. This will happen on a beach or in an afternoon bed or on the wet concrete by the pool. Today I had a conversation about the strange, human trait of conviction, how I sometimes imagined I knew what a stranger’s name would be or that I would win the meaningless raffle, but how the important things were rarely more than a measure of possible percentiles, hopefully educated guesses. Still, I am given over, lately, to the superstition of this happy tableau – a small, unavoidable scene with segues to numberless things – and something in today’s whipping halo sounded like a solemn promise.

Boots 50 US cents, rummage sale. Santa Cruz, CA. 2007
Plectrum homemade, cut from expired AAA card. USA/DE. 2009
Orange 20 EU cents, Penny Markt. Kalrsruhe, Germany. 2010

A few weeks in Californian February, the weather bipolar, trees who forgot themselves blooming in fleeting clouds from the sidewalks, I’d wake up around dawn and get my feet wet on the front lawn. Things were very new then, when I’d only recently learned to look. I’d walk around a neighborhood I’d mostly held in slow contempt for ten years and it was like touring a foreign country previously seen only on google images. It was easy to be a stranger in the suburbs, to only just have met the old man whose wife indulged him when he started to turn their front yard into a cactus garden. Sitting on his porch in Rubber Arizona, the scorpion glued to the rocks in primary yellow. They may have always been there, a few blocks from Newhall street. A strange combination of never having walked so close to, so far from my own block - or maybe I’d simply failed to notice – but anyway, those things were new to me, like the cobwebbed speaker (a big one, the kind that reverberates in your ribcage) in the alleyway behind the townhouses.

February again. A train to Heidelberg, which is a city of great intellectual history, except that I mostly remember buying BRAVO magazines from the Lotto down the street, or, in the summer, laughing at the tin-foiled steaks in the barbeques of chain smokers on the banks of Neckar river, the nonsensical battle with cancer, and thousands of miles away, America ordering two big macs and a diet coke. Personal history is longer but less well documented than Goethe’s visiting perambulations; I trudge the fifty cent boots, sodden riding shoes to Römerstraße numbers 47 and 49, and can’t tell which of the two doors used to open with my father’s keys. I am two decades old, an adult for the first time in this city, and it never used to snow like this; the boots are a study in salt – the marshes of Alviso, the cave at Twin Lakes beach, the street crews of Baden-Wurttemberg melting down the stunned country. It’s more beautiful than I remembered or imagined it, with the old village on the hill where I seem arthritic already, hips and ankles stiff and red from discovery, rediscovery. I used to walk as far as you wanted as long as there was a bag of tangerines in the backpack, into the thicket, deeper into rooted places. Still.

I have a ticket. I can sit on my mattress on the Albtalstraße, citrus on the bedside table, waxy where the candles spit. I can water the plants, and read bilingual collections of Australian poetry acquired with a borrowed library card, brew tea. Check the mail box, walk to the bank and I will learn a new word I might have known once. I can take more trains, keep my feet wet. I’ve stopped noticing whether or not other people notice my singing in English. I will love it for as long as I have left. Look – I think I’ll feel green wherever I go. The world is wide and its worth may be ineffable, my place in it mutable. The important things have sometimes not been grand or obvious; what is visible here is that the boots are worn, that the plant is shedding, that nutrients are being consumed. And some of you may know from context that all this is happening on the European Continent, that there is some sort of transatlantic adventure going on. What is less visible is the way plates shift subtly, how we howl or smile behind things, that a few square inches of spongy, coral-shaped matter will explore themselves and find enough new material to build a bridge to an undiscovered country. I have a ticket. I know what I want to do with it.

I’ll be returning to the United States of America on March 13th. I have never been this excited about the future, or this thankful for my past. Things happen. Does anybody realize how incredible that is? It should not be said in consolation or dismissal.

Celebrate, celebrate, celebrate; things happen. And Hope? It’s priceless.

Jeff linked me this video this evening, and I’ve watched it a couple of times because it gives me a feeling that reminds me a little of swallowing a lot of helium, and gesturing animatedly while screeching jubilant, unintelligible things. This feeling is less annoying than it sounds. It is, in fact, awesome.

I am not often very brave, or willing enough to put my foot out and help something really happen, but I always do one small thing, and it is what makes me happiest in the world; I sing everywhere - on crowded streets, in elevators, in cars, on park lawns. This is partly because singing is automatic and quite possibly unavoidable for me, and partly because I am always hoping for first (and second and third) followers. I want other people to sing on the streets, and in elevators, cars, and park lawns. I want them to sing even if they have terrible pitch or always forget the words, because this production of sound - of music, and emotion - is one of my favourite things about the human animal.

And every so often there is a result. In the midst of the third verse of Geoff Farina’s ‘the Rights’ I pass a man holding a slightly bent umbrella, and he starts in with an old torch song, maybe by Cole Porter. I cannot hear him past a few steps because the rain and the exhaust of cold cars in wintertime is overwhelming, but I hope that he keeps singing, and that someone hears him, and starts as well. Sometimes it is only a whistle, and I am glad even for that, and sometimes the strangers know the same sounds I do. I once accidentally hummed House of the Rising Sun with a stranger in a public bathroom. We never saw one another, and perhaps it was better so.

I would still be unsupportably happy as a lone nut, but the people who join in are what make these displays more important, and more rewarding to me than nearly anything else in the world. Whether the singing is a guileless, thoughtless thing, or something I do deliberately, I am always pleased when I notice mine is not the only voice. So I am asking you all to do me a favor:

Join in.

(you too, Mr. Lindsay.)

I met you on some mountain in mexico
the grass in the desert below was blue
you tucked yourself inside this undersea
and you took video recordings
things like eels and the bottoms of oil tankers
all barnacled

I was so happy for you, getting to see
and I was still standing atop this
like a ziggurat that had lost its form
curled into something more natural
somehow I knew it was a human thing
trying to explain

Each line is a fragment from a short conversation I had with a friend last night. They don’t aspire to poetry, even if they appear to be doing so – they’re merely skeletons, arranged a little haphazardly, rattling around to make a point. I was just someone recounting a dream, lamenting the infrequency of vivid ones, until I remembered myself - that I go through a good portion of my time experiencing the world around me as the two people in that dream did. “The world is straight up magical,” I told my friend. This kind of statement seems typical of me in certain common moods, but I hadn’t really registered the full history of it until last night.

Some of us are encouraged, from a young age, to engage our imaginations; our environments are ones that foster or at least allow for an appreciation of science fiction, fantasy, folklore, and all manner of alternate narrative. When I was a child, my parents introduced me to Daulaire’s Myths, the Chronicles of Narnia, the Last Unicorn, and Star Trek, among others. They bought me all the books I wanted, even when I stayed up far past my bed time, blankets tucked into the top bunk for a makeshift canopy, glow from the flashlight almost embryonic when I tried to hide it with my hands. For a long time I had a habit of living fictionally, dreaming vividly, and waking rather more slowly and unhappily the next morning. That time was invaluable to me, even long after it slid into simple escapism, and I am still grateful for it.

I felt deeply, personally wounded every time C.S. Lewis had his Aslan tell a child they were too old to ever return to Narnia. Before religious allegory had entered my vocabulary, what I understood was this: when children grow up, they must spend all their time in the real world, where there is no magic, few grand things happen, and nobody is as happy or heroic as they could be in that other, special place. That belief persisted at some level until long after I had learned to think (and read) critically. I spent a great many years doing everything possible to put off functional adulthood, and for that I credit (only in part, of course) my imagination, and the imaginations of many different authours, filmmakers, and poets. Somewhere between seventeen and nineteen it hit home that I had been grieving prematurely for many years, and that I had not managed to fully enjoy either Narnia or the real world as a result.

I am a very little bit older now, and what I understand is this: when children grow up, they spend some of their time in the real world, where there is also magic, many grand things happen, and people make all sorts of opportunities to be happy and heroic. This is what I am trying to explain when I show people the pictures I take. When you have been mourning for most of your life and suddenly realize that nothing is lost, you want to share that with people, I think. I go outside and I see the way a rotting, shit-coloured leaf waves a little shyly from the bed of the creek – it is waving to the swan that has just landed, and the rest of the water is waving, too, and I think, fuck, if I had noticed that ten years ago I would not have spent so much time crying. I love this man who yawns in my bathtub with the window open and his breath looking pale and tangible, and I want to have a picture in order to document: look, that was grand, that was happy. I take a photo of myself, looking into the camera, taking up space, and I feel brave.

Everybody should take up space. I inhabit a world that is vivid, and special, and always accessible, and I want to say to everyone: it’s your world, too. This is all real.

This is the title track off of Brasstronaut’s Old World Lies EP. I’ve been following this band for a while, hoping for more (four songs is not a lot to have on repeat), and now they’ve finally seemed to have finished their debut album. It’s called Mount Chimera, and it’s scheduled for release on March 1st. They’re also touring around Canada and a few US cities. As I won’t be back in time to see them on this tour, I am going to suggest, strongly, that you find a way to do so. Here are some dates:

2/20 Nelson, BC – The Royal On Baker
2/24 Edmonton, AB – The Pawn Shop *
2/25 Calgary, AB – Broken City *
2/26 Saskatoon, SK – Amigo’s *
2/27 Winnipeg, MB – Lo Pub *
3/1 Fargo, ND – The Aquarium
3/3 Chicago – IL – The Dark Room
3/9 New York, NY – Piano’s
3/10 Brooklyn, NY – Littlefield
3/12-13 Toronto, ON – Canadian Music Week
3/15 Jamestown, NY – Mojos
3/17-20 Austin, TX - SXSW
3/22 Rochester, NY – Bug Jar
3/24 Montreal, QC – Divan Orange
3/25 Ottawa, ON – Blacksheep Inn
3/27 Hamilton, ON – Casbah Lounge

the aspiring coroners are all women. I am here for other reasons; we watch an eductational films about dead or dying babies.the heights o fmy old elementary school have chamged. So few children, though this is where they should be, but young men with curled sideburns loping between offices, asking how to handle them. We have lots something in this town, obviously, and replaced it with impossible livestock, yoking megafauna to our suburban utility vehicles when the gas money runs out. The imginary horse with dusty thigh meat still strains before the mustard hulls of these fat tugboats. We have lost our fossil fuels or forgottem and returned to our old was. Soon we will torment mammoths in the oakland zoo, our children picking their noses, the lady coroners tweezing the snot from the fur between its eyes. Ah, but then, then. Nobody will be jailed anymore.

-

february 19, 2010, eight thirty nine AM until eight fifty two AM, waking.