"parking your car, you said: i'm overwhelmed.
you were thinking out loud. you said: 
i'm overwhelmed.
you were parking your car. you said: i'm overwhelmed.
you were thinking out loud. you said: i'm overwhelmed.
you said: i think i'm like tennessee williams.
i wait for the click,
i wait...
but, it doesn't kick in."


-the national, "city middle," 2005


brick pollitt: something hasn't happened yet.
big daddy: what's that?
brick: a click in my head.
big daddy: did you say, 'click'?

brick: yes, sir.
that click in my head that makes me feel peaceful.

big daddy: boy, sometimes, you worry me.

brick: like a switch clicking off in my head... turns the hot light off, and the cool one on.
all of a sudden: there's peace.


-tennessee williams, "cat on a hot tin roof", 1955

"It is when considering the concept of eternity that I become most frightened: to live without that which I am missing in the present alone seems just bearable, but the prospect of surviving within a void through decades, as bones wear and ideals abandon, beside fruitless and failing attempts to recapture that which I know, in the honest present, to be forever lost... There lies the root of all my fears.

I am afraid of a prophecy, of a fortune not terrible and hardly extraordinary, but a life from which I lack the tools to escape and the courage to describe: lackluster, and vanilla. I do not fear the irrational, the useless, the tomorrow; mortality hangs over and suffocates the precious internal fibers of hope and lust and joy, and stains my every footstep with its clammy presence of light and dark.

I fear the future that is created within my every waking moment and cemented by hourglass ghosts; I am terrified that my past will become an abyss, and not worth remembering."

four days after the rain began, we lay among the long, dripping grass stalks. such an anarchic decision, to hold each other inside of the insect laden grass, grounded in damp and unknown earth, bodies endlessly vulnerable to the october chill that tangled our hair, and the spitting rain that curled it

our blatant, silent audacity in the face of convention, of heaters and fireplaces, of beds and warnings, flaunted our refusal to descend into adulthood. such a docile stand, and yet it held us close within the moment, under the two or three stars that flashed in spite of the fumes of a dirty city, a terribly stiff and glassy-eyed city. had anyone stumbled across our curved and trembling forms that night, such a moment would have been annihilated, tinged in our memories with the stupidity imposed on our by our finder. and we would have become whatever they believed us to be: thoughtless, senseless, pretentious

because no-one found us that night, all we were was: free. all we tasted was a defying of rules, the anarchism of falling in love, in the cold and wet, among the grasslands

to speak would have brought us back to life, revived our awkward teenage existences. we chose to hibernate our rapidly beating blood and bony joints, our rapidly firing minds; we hid, silent, within the elements, rain droplets smattering against our burning bodies, fuelling our quiet rebellion.

"i will always try to hate you more than i love you.

loving you is a place i never want to go back to. hating you is hard, and wrong: mentally reeling back and slamming my fist to your face every time it swims into my mind is nothing that i want to do. but crushing myself against you, ever folded in your girlish arms, didn't work.

loving you, didn't work.

i wanted to spend my life in rooms with you, any room, any crowd, anywhere.

and now, i'd spend the rest of my days in any room you weren't in, so i don't ever have to stop pretending that i hate you harder than i ever loved you. so i don't ever have to feel like that again.

hate may be a double edged sword, but love is a slaughterhouse, full of knives."

and even she didn't feel it, not at first. it crept up on her, swept in with easy conversation and friendship on fire, the flow of storytelling and the see-saw of he and her, words said and words meant, amateur dramatics and desperation. 
a twitch of recognition, like the electricity of reliving the precise way someone tasted. 
it wasn't love, exactly; not understanding, completely; not replacing, though that was all part of it. she felt that: they recognised the damage in each other. of loves lost, dreams shattered, needs rejected and desires broken. parts of themselves that had been there once, but had had to be replaced, because they didn't work, quite; they couldn't fit.


it was years on, of course. we were broken and beaten and battered, stitched and fixed and carefully pinned back together, unrecognisable from what we once were, who we had been. a tangled mess of hair, shuffling, nail tugging, lip biting, crouching, looking. quite removed from the our pre lapsarian states, our untouched souls.
and even i didn't feel it, not at first. the instinctual, animalistic spark of recognition: of damages done and holes filled.


of course you understood me. it was like coming home.

this was not a love story.

if i could, i'd get you in a cardboard box -- duct-tape shut the hanging cardboard. cut us off from the oxygen. breathe into your mouth so you wouldn't have to inhale anything else.

-- and tell you, in between breaths, tell you in whispers and secrets, with still life hanging all around us.

e v e r y t h i n g

i can, everything i remember...

...stories and folklore i can never have you know. 

because memory doesn't falter -- won't blur years o' missing you, all partitions and glass and lies of you,

all broken and lingering poltergeist moments.

fingers thrown wholly into hair, fingers fisted and tightened and burning against brick walls and panes of glass.

if i could, i'd burn you to the ground with clichés so pedestrian they taste bitter. send sparks flying around you, send flames passing in and out of your head -- like  

i love&love you and i can't believe i 

and and-- and watch them lick and burn you, watch them slide into your veins and.

. "my boy, my gorgeous boy, mine because when god set the traps and laid out the tests he shaped you and i as one and slammed our identical figurines into dazed jolted teenage skin"

drifting surf-sky flirts with malboro red and dank bruised purple, settles languidly on an ocean of corflower blues.

i watch and hope

we were never a love story

like an affirmation, like a life raft, like a shrine.

we were ice, immobilised by our unliving. paralysed as we were by ghosts and dread, we moved like burn victims, gunshot survivors.
we moved like parts of us hadn't survived.
we were statute, watching like pensioners the lithe innocents tossing their smooth selves around the city. cartwheel exultation on street corners and leaping excitement behind the trees. rich exorcist laughter bouncing down train platforms.


of fighting life, we grew exhausted.
and fighting paralytics, we grew wiser.


today, we burrow deep&deep into water, sliding and stretching through chlorine, until our hiding becomes discovering. we dance with ourselves in the morning and seek hilarity in today's tragedies come evening. we fly into the air when you bring us colour. we go barefoot and let them stare. we laugh ourselves to the ground and gasping.


slowly, we are learning to move again.

your sleeps are like deaths. you become a shell, and you leave me there alone. while you twist and turn in the intracacies of sleep, taken entirely from me by unconscious callings.
i wait and watch.


when you come back to me by inches, you leave behind half of who we were before our ink night lifted.


we come back to life, gasping with inhibitions, brought face to face as we have been with our souls, our ghosts, our own blacknesses. brightness seeps into us as the ball in the sky flies above mountains. glitterati sparks skim-dance a starburst trail across the wet sheet of ocean.


and we apply tense reconstruction to the unsteady republic of you&i.