kraft

LET IN THE NEW, THE VIVID, HORROR AND PITY, PASSION, THE STRANGER HOLDING THE FUTURE. ASK HIM HIS NAME.

— from 'Away and See' by Carol Ann Duffy, with everything capitalized to highlight extreme states of mind. Also because I am screaming but only in a metaphysical and highly philosophical way, which is a sound that only the soul can hear. (Okay. Not really.)

I am feeling so blah: like, your future stretches out like a grey nullity, an emotional void. It's like staring down into the proverbial abyss, knowing there's a light switch somewhere but you can't be arsed to look for it, because nothing seems worth illuminating at this point in time. I would be grateful if I shrank into my seat to begin a new life as a punctuation mark, devoid of any ambition. 

Yes, I have no ambition. I no longer have any desires. If all the colour in the world were to be suddenly purged by a freak nuclear disaster caused by a tsunami caused by an earthquake, I'd be the last to realise that anything, if anything at all, had changed. 

Recently I've become more interested in staying really still for extended periods of time, to experience shifting currents in the air. Like prickles on my skin. I read lines about the wind. A shiver / sung like wind through barley up and down her back. ('The Year of the Letter' by Jackie Kay) And it's amazing how it stirs that same feeling in me. A hundred books flap their pages like broken wings. It's incredible how the strongest connection between the wind and brokenness seems purely visceral — it's purely felt; an idea more concrete than an idea. 

I'm going to a sad place where this is abstraction, a world of ideas unfairly lumped together with algebra. (That is not to say one is more or less valuable than the other. But you get my point.) I'm not exactly interested in the Real anymore. I'm drawing the curtains shut.

(surprise! a page cut.

Here's an experiment in sound, form, queer theory and intertextuality. Enjoy.)

Prosody 

... Stupidly, I am missing you. No, you silly bitch, not you. You. The one with the awkward passes and bi-curious dress sense. That annoying shrill laughter and the thing you do with the effeminate crossing of your legs all the time? We also shared so much boredom together. Why am I talking in italics. OK. Now this is less pretentious. But you get it. I wish I could do that Chinese bite-on-my-finger-so-you-feel-the-pain-10000-miles-away thing, but upon some reflection perhaps that wouldn't be very considerate. I'll do my own Florence Nightingale as deranged junkie thing and you'll do your own beloved commander-to-all thing and we can meet in the middle, like in Benjamin Button, only this time it's not in the chronological sense. I'm sorry the only illustration I can think of has to be so qualified. 

"I miss you" only works within a mutually agreed arrangement. Otherwise it becomes creepy and needy. 

Oh my God how can cough syrup mess up my mind like this. It's pathetic.

Ways to say goodbye:

I love you! But not in a queer way!

I love you like Oprah loves Gayle!

I love you like David loved Jonathan!

You are the maple syrup to french toast.

You are the woolen muji sock to my tired foot.

You are the wind in my hair. 

You are the lemongrass in my ginger herbal infusion.

You complete the rhyming couplet at the end of my favorite poems, giving me the warmest electric shocks. Goosepimples. I would take a paper and do crayon rubbings to immortalize these moments.

Once I dreamt of your puppy-like warmth, and me grinning idiotically, helplessly, at my teacher at the same time. She offered me a knowing smile. Continued with the lecture.

I have never called out your name by night but secretly I think I want to try. To see if I can say your name like a spell...

The dark, shifting shapes. Lean my head against you. I've never leant against anyone before.