for the birds

Just so you know:

2005-12-21T18:07:53Z

This journal, friends, is dead. ofbirdsandwires is where I have been for a while, but I wasn't comfortable with lots of people knowing. I have my reasons. I might friend people who add it, and I might not (but I probably will).

shouldering @ 2005-12-04T16:18:00

2005-12-04T16:24:26Z

I always said I would never do a friends cut, but...well, now I am. I don't feel comfortable writing in here lately and I'd rather have a handful of people reading who actually care about me (and vice versa). It's nothing personal, so please don't be offended. I'm sure you'll realise that we've never really made the effort to get to know each other, and I know that's my fault in some cases. I'm also deleting some alternates/old journals or people who haven't updated in an age. If you still use the journal tell me and I'll add it back.

If you'd still like to be added by all means comment and tell me (there are some of you I would never ever cut - you know who you are, really) and, of course, anyone who wants to delete me can take this as an opportunity to do just that. I won't mind, I swear.

a fiction of birds, and wires

2005-12-03T19:14:06Z

You are what you love, and not what loves you back

All day I thought I was lonely, was wearing it like a weapon, but I realise that I was just alone. This is the great distinction of my life, the thing that has had me reaching for door-frames as if the world was falling in on only me. This is what has ruined me.

I do not know how to reconcile these sides of me. I feel a dull sense of duty to the secrets I've pressed into people's open palms, ignoring the fact that they are fractions of me, not them. I want to tell all but I have less and less to say. I am writing a notebook's worth of small character sketches, but the book keeps getting smaller because I rip the pages out every other day and promise to start again. I want to achieve something, prove to myself that I'm better than a drawer full of balled-up notes and mistreated notebooks. I will finish. I will finish and fix it all.

things I am forgetting:

- how to talk to you
(I tried my hand at equations, explaining myself through maths, but I got stuck between the cosine and 'both sides must be equal'. I have tasted biology on the tip of your tongue and picked your physics out from between my teeth - chemistry was why I left and how you stayed, a hairbrush and some gum and a messy bed. My last hope is dear sweet Desdemona, constant Penelope, two ladies with water in their hair and one who threw herself from the battlements. My last hope is blank verse and comfortable iambic pentameter. My last hope is sibilance and the weight of punctuation.)

- why I cared, and how, and how much
(nothing feels safe. nothing feels safe. nothing feels safe. nothing feels safe. nothing feels safe. nothing feels safe. nothing feels safe. nothing feels safe. nothing feels safe. nothing)

- why I wrote anything, ever
(that's it, that's all. I am no good)

- promises and bathroom floors
(you were smoking me, weren't you? between your yellow fingers. you just inhaled and exhaled without saying a word)

-

[I have always read 'angels' as 'angles' and I think this explains more than anything else could]

shouldering @ 2005-11-27T21:38:00

2005-11-27T21:39:20Z

taking a breath,
because my hands are empty and my mouth is dry &I do not know how to figure anything out.

View Poll: #621138

shouldering @ 2005-11-23T22:13:00

2005-11-23T22:13:13Z

View Poll: #618956

having learned well

2005-11-22T17:28:49Z

where I fold and unfold my left arm into November, my hair
into my sister,
where the black-gloved woman plays my heart like a
crumpled
violin,
where I stand creased and lusting for paper,
where I have no
more dead lovers
than you, where beautiful girls are always asked for
directions,
where I keep myself real, flirting with the ventriloquists,
where my father holds me like a paper doll, where doors can
be
torn down
swiftly, where neither one of us is a miracle,

I understand only this:

It is lonely in a place that can burn so fast.

- In The Origami Fields - Sabrina Orah Mark

- - - - -

these days I open my heart a little wider and talk with my hands a little more in hopes of making the small difference that will keep Autumn around me like an ocean. It never is enough, and in the mornings I wake up earlier to warm up my poor little car and play the story of my breath out on the windscreen, but I guess I'll keep trying.

I write lists of the eyes I have looked and been looked at through. Like:
- sea eyes
- wheredoyougowhenyouleave? eyes
- pretty-little-bird eyes
- pulse and all eyes
- I forget you all the time eyes
- I can not apologise eyes
- wires and wings eyes
- hand against chest eyes
- citylights eyes
- milk and secrets eyes
- the lies you spin eyes
- you were smoking me, weren't you eyes
- stay oh stay eyes
- teenager eyes
- someone different eyes
- lungs working eyes
- trust me trust me eyes
- your hips save me eyes
- table-top dancing eyes
- real eyes
- explosions! eyes
- november keeps me eyes
- you were all eyes
-

I smoke vicariously and burn vigorously, despite the set of my shoulders. I make promises to stop complaining and complain about my promises and I say "you love me!" and mean it and they say "YES!" and mean it more. I miss catching the bus because I miss the feeling of a city [any city, even this one] moving, of being at the centre, tired and shared and choking. Funny the things you miss, and why and how much, when you do not have to wrench yourself from them and give up. The quiet things you give away, and miss and ache and build your homes around.

I do not hang my reflection in any mirror, but I run my hands through my hair and laugh and feel ancient and holy and beautiful, dusty with whispered secrets and a brand new power in the so[u]l[e]s of my feet. I am still angry, but I am fitting 'content' into my every day-to-day.

!!!!!!!!!!!!

2005-11-19T10:36:02Z

Bob fuckin' Dylan.

Do I really have to say anything? It was amazing. Of course.

Walking back through the tunnel to the train station the cute buskers were singing and the crowd was singing and "How does it FEEL?" is a beautiful god damn chorus to be inside of.

I did manage to lose my mother, though. I had to beg a phone from someone and she had the security looking for me. "how old is she?...EIGHTEEN?...riiiight".

shouldering @ 2005-11-08T23:14:00

2005-11-08T23:15:18Z

"For those who believe in God, most of the big questions are answered. But for those of us who can't readily accept the God formula, the big answers don't remain stone-written. We adjust to new conditions and discoveries. We are pliable. Love need not be a command or faith a dictum. I am my own God. We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our educational system. We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us."

- bukowski

View Poll: #608230

shouldering @ 2005-11-07T20:59:00

2005-11-07T20:59:43Z

View Poll: #607297

shouldering @ 2005-11-06T12:40:00

2005-11-06T12:43:37Z

"I want to work in revelations, not just spin silly tales for money. I want to fish as deep down as possible into my own subconscious in the belief that once that far down, everyone will understand because they are the same that far down."
- kerouac

I mean, come on, how could I not adore him?

Adore is the word of the moment.
Ignoring is the way my movements are shaped.

I have my moments. I trust November. I sing in the shower and drink in the bath. Next week I’m going to France/Belgium when I really shouldn’t be. All I do is smile when you can’t see me. I would make you all dinner and bring you all flowers if I didn’t have so much work to do. I don’t have that much work to do. I desperately need to know about beautiful movies. You definitely need to tell me about them.

shouldering @ 2005-10-31T20:14:00

2005-10-31T20:15:14Z

Everyone I love is a poet. A goddamn rip your heart out and re-work its rhythm into something holy and beautiful, poet.

For the Dead

2005-10-29T22:15:31Z

I dreamed I called you on the telephone
to say: Be kinder to yourself
but you were sick and would not answer

The waste of my love goes on this way
trying to save you from yourself

I have always wondered about the leftover
energy, water rushing down a hill
long after the rains have stopped

or the fire you want to go to bed from
but cannot leave, burning-down but not burnt-down
the red coals more extreme, more curious
in their flashing and dying
than you wish they were
sitting there long after midnight

- Adrienne Rich

- - - - -

there are some things I would give anything to keep tonight, like a fresh conversation with the boy I adored when I was sixteen, or the strange, far-off, wonderful feeling of being thought of in tender terms. Like "what matters most is how well you walk through the fire" and a smile that doesn't let go. I know, I know. These little nothings are the world.

shouldering @ 2005-10-27T11:49:00

2005-10-27T10:51:08Z

          + wires/reason/maker/killing/frug
          + everyone a fan
          + bukowski like breathing
          - listing pros and cons
          - limited choices

          & who are your favourite people on lj? I want new journals to read.

shouldering @ 2005-10-17T15:05:00

2005-10-17T22:19:05Z

This week it has been cold and I do not feel well.
That’s no way to win you over, I’m sure, but there’s something to be said for facts. I’m on the lookout for tangible truths, peeling my ‘metaphorically yours’ love letters off like skin after too much sun and not enough care. Or like paper after the same, if that suits you better. I am seeking definitions and taking them at face value, filling my pill box with them and rattling along my easy way. It is not a fear of confrontation

[con•fron•ta•tion, n
1: a bold challenge
2: discord resulting from a clash of ideas or opinions
3: a hostile disagreement face-to-face]

it is a desire to find a focus. Today it almost rained and last night I smashed a wine glass. It is not beautiful. Everything has found its way to my door at the same time, so I climb out the window and down the road. Here I will say “like Fra Lippo Lippi” because the page is in front of me, annotated and real.

This afternoon I was the very picture of the cold shoulder and tomorrow I will be a lack of noise. I am slipping.

Questions:
- what do you keep in your 'memories'?
- what pieces of writing are you most proud of? I'll show you mine if you show me yours.

Not a question:
- Last week (or there abouts) was tilvictory's birthday. Crystal is amazing. Happy [late] birthday, beautiful. Be well.

shouldering @ 2005-10-02T15:44:00

2005-10-02T14:44:56Z

eighteen.

(also, yesterday was beautifulzion's birthday and she is gorgeous and amazing so yay for her)

wore the time like a dress

2005-09-21T12:31:01Z

Oh September, you've never really been enough for me.
You are not red when that is what I need. You are the old smell of new books and an end to a Summer I never asked for. I am in bare-feet because of you, though I'm craving layers to guard my throat and the days to spell my thoughts out in personal clouds that hang in the air between this moment and that after speaking. Your air is too warm; and where are my storms of leaves?

September, you're out to make a fool of me.

You are leaving my seventeen as a monument to personal bitterness and private venom, affording me no time to put things right. I thought I would be better but you tricked me (liar) and I am still a screaming mess with tangled hair and too much black around angry eyes.
I blame you because I haven't got the words to bargain with, saving my admiration for beautiful girls of science & sea and so much beside. I blame you because I am without. You are of falling bricks and too much Sun and you'll take my brother away soon, though I have lost count of the people who have been shipwrecked in the puddle of my lack of motivation.

shouldering @ 2005-08-28T16:03:00

2005-08-28T15:09:31Z

If you draw a line
Precisely safe and parallel to mine,
We can sail together
Clear on past the stars
And never meet.
And since the holes between
These points of distant heat
Are deep and blind,
Sight a course for collision
And hang on tight!
...the precision of our loving
Is the lethal kind.

- Geometry - Ken Kesey

I don't know, forget it.
I am in the mood where everything tastes like disaster and the only thing I know how to do (and how to do well) is cover my head and hide under the table.

With that - and writer's block like a punch in the mouth - I'll be annoying and needy and desperate and ask for annonymous comments. Anything, really (secrets secrets secrets); you know how the thing goes.

break me to small parts, let go in small doses

2005-08-26T14:36:48Z

You see, I’m having an end-of-the-world party, and I’m painting my face (one last war? A soft one, to end things right) and I’m scribbling invitations on the back of postage stamps and sending all of the letters I ever said I’d write to all the people I ever said I cared about. I’ll be filling up balloons with the hot air from all of the promises I made and I’ll hand out apologies as party favours.
Your name will be at the top of the list that I’ll leave at the door. No more fingers around your throat to keep you away from my fragile countenance (no more fragility. I was foolish, but I’m sure you knew that already). It doesn’t matter anymore that I don’t matter anymore because who can hold a grudge when the sky is set to fall? Anyway, you always were a sucker for catastrophe and my cupboards are stacked with enough liquid courage to drown the whole world, our small sorrows and all.

I’ve got my goodbye speech ready typed, double spaced and endlessly edited, on the brown paper you wrapped my heart in when you sent it back from the war (shot full of holes, but it never was much of a fighter anyway). When the guests are soaked in anecdotes and the open bar I’ll get up on my chair in heels that would make your mother blush and I’ll tap my cocktail glass and I’ll say “Ladies and everyone else, we’re really for it now. Outside, quick! Children and sloppy drunks first” and I’ll show them how to hurl bricks at the same sky we wished for our lives under, how the fireworks are flashing danger and how we were wrong each time we tried.

I won’t bother circling the room for you, love, because you’ll have better things to do than celebrate the explosions in my sky with me. I’m having an end-of-the-world party and the two guests of honour won’t bother showing up; you and the-end’ll be laughing through your self made smoke at chicken little and her killer heels and her room full of broken hearts.
(this is how I deal with you not being here, this is how I dress up 'alone'. The sky won't fall but maybe I will, and no one will notice the difference)

if nobody speaks of remarkable things

2005-08-23T13:26:38Z

"If you listen, you can hear it.
The city, it sings.
If you stand quietly, at the foot of a garden, in the middle of a street, on the roof of a house.
It's clearest at night, when the sound cuts more sharply across the surface of things, when the song reaches out to a place inside you.
It's a wordless song, for the most, but it's a song all the same, and nobody hearing it could doubt what it sings. And the song sings the loudest when you pick out each note."

- jon mcgregor

(if I could have written any book, it would be this one)

holding my breath for the probable

2005-08-10T15:52:36Z

five days in the sunshine, fading through phases of laughing like riots and warming myself in the spotlight, and only speaking when I couldn't manufacture a silence high enough to hide behind.
I didn't write a thing, which is odd, and I didn't think in swirling sentence fragments, which is worse.

(I did, however, fall in love with Tom Robbins, and everyone should read 'Still Life with Woodpecker' with their feet in a pool at the top of a hill, hand around a glass of someone else's expensive wine, with nothing but the sound of the lack of noise to keep you ticking)

Everyone has said so much! I don't want to lose any words, so if you have a post that you think is important then make sure to tell me.
I'll get back on my feet and make use of my hands. Soon enough.

oh god, where are you now?

2005-07-12T13:46:32Z

We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and a presumption that once our eyes watered

- Tom Stoppard - Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead

today I sat in my garden, swapping between my journal and the play, forgetting which was which and writing memories in the margins of both. I laced a soundtrack over the harsh notes of grass being cut and I was grateful for dirty feet and clean legs, tangled hair pinned back with cheap sunglasses and afternoon beer to put me to sleep.

I want to know what you are grateful for, today.

oh, you

2005-07-08T22:27:31Z

"Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color."
- W.S. Merwin

I’m not sure when the change happened, when I stopped praying for rain and started hoping for a slip of the tongue to prove my inner theories about the beauty of mistakes, the power of gentle human error. This is the summer I am seventeen and full. I make promises against my bedroom walls – all grey paint and the ghosts of notes scrawled in a midnight hand – that, if I cannot make myself be happy then I will make myself care about it. This being numb, this apathy, this paralysis only broken by the occasional non-committal shrug, this is not enough and it is certainly no way to live.

To live. My fingers slip on my new keyboard and that word is always ‘love’ and no, no I don’t mind. I don’t mind at all.

[I have apologies I'm not sure I have to make, but ones I will be willing to scream down phone lines and across streets should the need for them ever arise]

bittersweetheart

2005-07-03T21:28:54Z

Whatever you do, don't tell anyone.
Don't let them see what's really going on because without mystery what else do you have to offer? Put your pretty left foot in front of your pretty right foot and make your way to the door, out of the door, across the street and right the hell out of their lives. Because you've been found out and we have no need for realities.

but no, what I really meant to say was that I'm bitter about how much I need you (how you settle yourself into my tracks and make it worse by making it better). You were the everything after - the eternal, the shape inside the lack of definition. I have met the Sun and learned to speak with fire on my tongue, to sign my name in ashes, but you are the everything after and I am never enough.

- - - forever afraid of not being enough. But when does the fear break away? Eternally second best and it doesn't really matter what anyone else says because I know how to fold myself, where to hit, where my fault lines lie (across my back, along the contours of my neck, everywhere. How do you live when the only thing you're made of is mistakes?)

I don't know how to be anything other than a mess.

drops

2005-06-25T07:57:11Z

you should say something - not to make me feel better, but because I think you're forgetting how to push hot air over your lips and to make yourself heard. We can sit here, untouching, knees so close and palms mirrored but with a breath in between to keep us safe, keep us sane. We can sit here and I can write your history with the pad of one finger tracing circles on my thigh, willing you to close your eyes, feeling the separation of ground and sky and belonging to neither and craving each.

When it rains like this, soft and persistent, only evident in the ruffling of pools on the ground, I think of you because I have nothing better to do. I open all the doors and sit with my feet outside and my hands inside and my heart in my mouth and my hair in my eyes. I play the music of dead men but don't listen, I know those sounds so well, like photographs inside frames on a wall I focus my eyes on to keep from uncovering,
You know the syllables of knocking me down, and I respond with my paper bag sentiment. There is no fight left, no more teeth to bare or pink skin to insult with scratches. There is no more.

(but you should say something)

subtraction

2005-06-07T21:03:29Z

I'm infinitely interested in the shapes you make when I'm not around.
Do you drum your fingertips (right hand, left hand, left hand, right hand) when you think on your own. How does your face change when the air does when the mood does when the light dips. What lines are formed around your mouth that I have never, will never see.

You'd think these would be questions, but they're not. I don't want to know the answers - I prefer the ones I make up when I'm half way between sleep and the rest of life, when I don't want to concentrate on myself because I don't feel constant.

The crash of a tree in an empty forest, well dearheart I don't care, the sigh of you in a lonely room? That's the kind of stuff that wakes me up in the middle of the night. That's my only question.