24.

>>>


I like the number 24. I like the number 12, I like having it twice. I like the possibilities of 24, the possibilities of 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 8.

Happy Birthday, to my 12 year-old-self. On the anniversary of the first complete rotation of cycling 12, cycling possibility, the age that promises possibility, but possibility anchored by my own will, anchored and drawn up from beneath leagues of years limited by factorial logic.


>>>

"why like this"

>>>
by: Johannes de Silentio



"this work is polarizing," she thought.
the skull of a goat wrapped in stolen metal wiring.
seven feet high, twice as wide as a real
human, beast, bestiality.

"like reality, but better. i'd like to display him."
the artist responded, "installation will be tiring."
"no matter," she said. "this work reminds me
of nothing I've read and everything I've seen."

and she thought inside, "us;" and she meant another,
an other, a match, a mate, a brother,
nothing matches. "why like this," she thought.
"patience mimics care, poorly, as a virtue."

"the opposing viewers may want to hurt you,"
said artist, in regards to his sculpture. still
thinking of love, the woman replied to herself;
her answer, true, for either the guy or myself,

"i care outside confrontation that suggests otherwise.
i am getting better at forgetting to apologize.
i admit imbalance.
it persists, the valence."


>>>

of whom should i be afraid

>>>

my light and my salvation,
my darkness and tribulation,
all free fall in adulation
of whom should i be afraid?

emptied of pennies or
absent my body in full-
working motion
whom shall i fear?

I believe I shall see the goodness of the Lord
in the land of the living.

>>>

another gentleLena

There once was a woman who traveled the world.

However, her adventures abroad afforded her neither sightsee nor souvineer; the mementos of her journeys were all in her mind and her skin.

As a child the woman traveled in books. Away from the sometimes seasons of her rural surroundings she escaped to and from the Occident. She was alone, the omniscient puppeteer to her self-built planet.

Thus, in spite of her solitude, or perhaps because of it, her life was exceedingly full.

As the child grew (her name was Lena), she grew tall and also away from books and into sound. She had read the world and now wanted to hear it. She knew what all of the cities sounded like. She knew what music the people who lived in them made love to.

Lena wanted to make love to the world now. She longed to experience the musical cities but was afraid to leave her own. She felt alone.

Thus, in spite of her solitude, or perhaps because of it, her life was exceedingly dull.

Lena decided to make love to the world then. She made herself beautiful. She looked exotic even though she wasn't. Finding lovers was easy for her. She knew them all already.

Her lovers were from all different places but always artists. She did not want to be an artist. She wanted to love an artist. She took a job at a gallery where she could always be displayed, a living work of art in striped dresses and heeled boots.

One lover was from Italy. He sent her a bouquet of roses every month. She let them die but let him come to her. He liked knee socks. Lena let him put them on her only to take them off.

"Lena," he said. "I want you to marry me."

But Lena hadn't traveled enough.

Another lover was from Russia. Lena pined for him like she had pined for no other. Thinking of his blue eyes made her wet. She got the chills. They followed him from Moscow, he said. The cold called. She never saw him again.

Lena took her Swede lover for a swim in a lake. He dared her to take off her underwear. She held them in her hand above the water and he grabbed them from her. He lost them and she was lost to him and she had to walk back to her house with no panties on under her skirt. He teased her about that. He put his hand under her skirt as they walked and they had to stop walking.

Lena loved each new lover differently. They were all special to her. She became a woman well-traveled. By her mid-20s she had gotten to all of the continents except one, and most continents more than once. She had a frenchman with beautiful hands and an Egyptian who offered to do her taxes. She invited a German to her bed and a Greek into the bathroom at a bar.

Lena's friends learned about the world from airplanes and eating. Lena learned only with her sex. Because she experienced the world so intimately she took the most intimate secrets of the world into her body. Her body showed that. Every day a new man asked her where she was from.

"Are you French?" the cashier said.

"Are you Polish?" the friend-of-a-friend said.

"Where are you from?" they all asked.

Nowhere she replied.

After seven years of this Lena started to confuse Beijing and Budapest. The scents of her lovers became one odiferous mess. She longed to belong to one place for she was Nowhere. Where is my home? she thought. I will make one of these lovers my home. I will settle into one of them.

Lena tried to settle into one but she could never stay in place. Some glacier or the ocean in floated on always called her away. She tried to ignore their calls but that only made everyone more passionate for the gentle Lena.

She stopped sleeping and only ate things that grew on trees. She disappeared into headphones and masturbated indefinitely to a perfect body composed of all her lovers.

She longed to stay even though she had really always stayed. Like a stray dog Lena wandered the globe underneath her bedsheets, which when touched revealed the perpetual wet of the world.

Dirty Dream no.2

I feel asleep in a familiar place for what was about to occur and perhaps that particular spot summoned an overlapping memory at any rate that's where the entire dream unfolded.

As early back as I can remember we embraced and I clumsily knocked something hard to obtain and costing you money into your lap; you effortlessly saved the prize and refilled the small capsule with what for some reason mattered to us.

Kissing you was desperation and I felt more eagerness from you which was strange because I always feel the more uncontrolled one; not used to feel like this anyway but I do now only with you.

Only you weren't you you were someone else who had came before. The arms which had just clung to your neck like tentacles released - no, pushed you away in disgust. I stared at you in horrible disbelief. Though you appeared identical inside I knew who you were.

You knew it too and smiled that smile I die when I see it I die. Now however now your insides taint that beautiful smile and you keep making very time-specific facial expressions each wonderful in a new and painful way. I want to suck them up for in my other life you are gone so much.

Mmmm skyscraper I love you - ringing in my ears (turned out to be the sizzling of a steak some bitch frying on the tele my god what a repulsive image to wake to my god). Strangled in a blanket (both instances) I fell off the couch.

I thought how to get you out of my house, my parents were upstairs. Hello they would tell you. But it's not really him it's him I'd say, as if this would explain why you weren't where I told them you were and neither were you especially not here.

Not gotten to the idea of hiding you near the furnace I actually woke. Oh god I thought oh god I am never taking a nap again because I dream so deep into my real thoughts, not like a runaway imagination but an imaginative run of real thoughts.

Really I told you though far (you're all far, all far from me) I don't compare I don't want anyone to get into my overlapping mastrubatory thoughts and late afternoon dreams one lunatic is enough one goddamned lunatic was enough and two was unlucky three a fucked up coincidence and four well four, well fuck you god I am starting to think it's me that's fucking you up, all of you.

i'm waiting for the day

patience ascended.
"you'll need it" she said
"to mend aheart asunder."

"mend" i said. "not him.
wounds aren't covered in
fatuation and months."

"you wish him to pine?
you leave him to dogs?
you will expose him to wind

and subject him to cold?"
"no patience i still need you
around. but for mending no

he knows to heal he helps
himself. to feel, i wish
us to be by ourselves."

"darling" she mused "you
are honest and sad. some
things aren't easy. why

add an obstacle?" "i am
serious" i said "when i
said, when i sent him."