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24 November 2013
Chicken Sessions
24 November 2013 18:40A reworking of the three latest pieces. Still a bit frankensteiny but the good parts really worked. Need to make it more cohesive.
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I have Picasso’s blue period all over my tongue and all I do is lick barber poles until they stop being candy canes and start being the glowing electric bug killers that hang out in front of lonely bars in hot provinces. I have a helmet made from dreams rolled flat and lacquered into a carapace that protects me when I rush headlong into stupid, stupid intersections. It doesn’t occur to me that there is a shorter way to the destination. I still try to get recipes by seducing shoe stores. I airplane my shopping lists into blue skies that I can’t come back from.
To say that my heart is a parachute would be accurate. It only opens when it’s falling and it doesn’t stop the descent, it only slows it down and makes the landing safer. I wish I could get taken away by aliens and brought back a better person. But if you judge a peacock by its ability to explain particle fusion, you will disappoint the road map and learn to speak in crutches.
The bedsprings of your lips leave me wanting to test the tensile strength of honesty. You bend me like sound waves through a speaker. I’m a frat party balancing on a stool in a closet and you’re the avalanche pinned behind the starting gun. If this is a staring contest, I’m all out of eyes. Because I’m old.
Sometimes, the ghost of me arrives. I’ll be sitting in a coffee shop, hanging out in a bar with friends, even reading a book by myself at home and there’s a feeling I get when I know that that guy, that yesterday me who really knew me would know how much fun I’m having and then it makes me sad because now I’m the only person who knows. It’s like rocking out to Sabotage and then remembering that one of the Beastie Boys is dead. But this isn’t about my sadness or the idea that I’m lonely. Because I’m not. I’m not.
It’s just that when young me breezes in, it’s unexpected. I’m happy to see him but I feel a little tainted that he chose such good times to show up again. I miss him so much. I miss him to the point that I wish I’d never been him but only for a second. He crosses my mind and it’s a stroke across my heart from a cold, mid-life crisis paintbrush. Younger me was a douchebag and I am trying to be less of one but I miss his fire. And this is where I live sometimes. At this crossroads of memory and reality. A yearning for a greener-grass past that was never actually as good as this present.
But back to you. You’re a time before coffee. You’re a land before space. Deep within the lungs of God you awaken. You have no complaints department because you have no complaints. Duct tape holds together the model airplane of my soul but you, you’re a classical violinist on vacation here. You’re a piano-string-puppet and there’s a blue fire in your heart. You’re a key. People put keys in to unlock things and turn keys to wind things up and pull keys out to make things explode. Cats run wild on your farm. Your teeth float to the top like your mouth is made of cream. You’re limber cause you’re good at limbo. You’re weightless cause you’re good at waiting. Lighting doesn’t kill because you’re a better conduit than the rest of us.
You remind me that barbers used to be doctors which means that barbers used to bleed their customers
to make them feel better. You remind me that genies are a euphemism for hubris and that our greed is a lying telescope to another world where nothing bad exists. Our fantasies are a forum for untruths that only speak to us in paper lanterns and lovers that never say the wrong thing.
All I know is that a scorpion’s claw can’t hold a pen and that I’m happy that I know you.
tags
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I have Picasso’s blue period all over my tongue and all I do is lick barber poles until they stop being candy canes and start being the glowing electric bug killers that hang out in front of lonely bars in hot provinces. I have a helmet made from dreams rolled flat and lacquered into a carapace that protects me when I rush headlong into stupid, stupid intersections. It doesn’t occur to me that there is a shorter way to the destination. I still try to get recipes by seducing shoe stores. I airplane my shopping lists into blue skies that I can’t come back from.
To say that my heart is a parachute would be accurate. It only opens when it’s falling and it doesn’t stop the descent, it only slows it down and makes the landing safer. I wish I could get taken away by aliens and brought back a better person. But if you judge a peacock by its ability to explain particle fusion, you will disappoint the road map and learn to speak in crutches.
The bedsprings of your lips leave me wanting to test the tensile strength of honesty. You bend me like sound waves through a speaker. I’m a frat party balancing on a stool in a closet and you’re the avalanche pinned behind the starting gun. If this is a staring contest, I’m all out of eyes. Because I’m old.
Sometimes, the ghost of me arrives. I’ll be sitting in a coffee shop, hanging out in a bar with friends, even reading a book by myself at home and there’s a feeling I get when I know that that guy, that yesterday me who really knew me would know how much fun I’m having and then it makes me sad because now I’m the only person who knows. It’s like rocking out to Sabotage and then remembering that one of the Beastie Boys is dead. But this isn’t about my sadness or the idea that I’m lonely. Because I’m not. I’m not.
It’s just that when young me breezes in, it’s unexpected. I’m happy to see him but I feel a little tainted that he chose such good times to show up again. I miss him so much. I miss him to the point that I wish I’d never been him but only for a second. He crosses my mind and it’s a stroke across my heart from a cold, mid-life crisis paintbrush. Younger me was a douchebag and I am trying to be less of one but I miss his fire. And this is where I live sometimes. At this crossroads of memory and reality. A yearning for a greener-grass past that was never actually as good as this present.
But back to you. You’re a time before coffee. You’re a land before space. Deep within the lungs of God you awaken. You have no complaints department because you have no complaints. Duct tape holds together the model airplane of my soul but you, you’re a classical violinist on vacation here. You’re a piano-string-puppet and there’s a blue fire in your heart. You’re a key. People put keys in to unlock things and turn keys to wind things up and pull keys out to make things explode. Cats run wild on your farm. Your teeth float to the top like your mouth is made of cream. You’re limber cause you’re good at limbo. You’re weightless cause you’re good at waiting. Lighting doesn’t kill because you’re a better conduit than the rest of us.
You remind me that barbers used to be doctors which means that barbers used to bleed their customers
to make them feel better. You remind me that genies are a euphemism for hubris and that our greed is a lying telescope to another world where nothing bad exists. Our fantasies are a forum for untruths that only speak to us in paper lanterns and lovers that never say the wrong thing.
All I know is that a scorpion’s claw can’t hold a pen and that I’m happy that I know you.
tags
Ambassador
24 November 2013 18:41The thing about sleeping in zero g is that I have a lot of dreams about being in my mother’s womb except that in my dreams, my mother is sleeping in zero g as well. That’s impossible because my mother never went to space. She was sixty before the alien diplomats came down to earth, one in every major city and no two aliens the same. Glittering ships that defied all reason touching down like inverted chandeliers before discharging creatures trained to field questions in English through their translators. The one in my home down of Phoenix Arizona was a tall insect that looked like a violet, leafless tree that walked around on crab-leg roots with a tight line of softly-glowing blue eyes down its trunk.
I was twenty-five years old at the time but still, when I saw that creature, I felt like a six-year-old who knew what she wanted to be when she grew up. Your calling can come at any time, I guess.
I wake up smiling at the memory and uncurl, the light slowly branding up to daylight in my quarters. I turn on the gravity and look out the window. Through the porthole, I can see a cadmium cue-ball planet with scudding blue clouds and a double meridian of shadow from its two suns. It’s beautiful. I’ll be briefed about its name in a second but for now I just drink in the view and once again swim deep in the wonder and pride I have at my job.
And then I look in the mirror.
I had alopecia when I was thirteen which means my body hair grows in patches now. I also have a dark wine birthmark that splashes across half of my face and most of my right arm. One of my eyes has too much eyelid and is higher than the other while my wide, thick lips hang like deflated inner tubes over the ragged jut of my huge, uneven teeth. My chin pushes forth like the prow of a ship. My nose is more like a beak and would probably come down to nearly touch my shelf of a chin if it hadn’t been broken in a youthful bicycle accident. It’s like a shark fin shaped into a child’s drawing of a lightning bolt in the middle of my face.
My point is that by human standards, I’m ugly. Hideously ugly. Almost comically ugly.
And the aliens don’t care. Because of that, I smile again like I do every day here. I don’t care if I ever see Earth again.
I take a morning sip from the protein udder on the wall and zip up into my jumpsuit. As I leave my quarters and join the flow of traffic to the main hall, I bump into a krinotaur. I think it’s beautiful. It flows past me like a wave settling next to the shore.
Maybe it took the job for the same reason I did. Maybe its eye cluster is too bulbous. Maybe its leg-stalks are too short. Maybe its communication mandibles have a noticeable stutter or lisp equivalent that's erased by the translators.
I would have no idea.
Everyone's earned the right to be here. We're diplomats and we're intelligent representatives. I know that the other life forms have tests and training just as stringent as my own that brought them here. We’re good at what we do; useful to our homeworlds.
I head to the briefing room to learn about the white planet below us and what city I’ll be assigned to welcome them into the galactic council.
tags
I was twenty-five years old at the time but still, when I saw that creature, I felt like a six-year-old who knew what she wanted to be when she grew up. Your calling can come at any time, I guess.
I wake up smiling at the memory and uncurl, the light slowly branding up to daylight in my quarters. I turn on the gravity and look out the window. Through the porthole, I can see a cadmium cue-ball planet with scudding blue clouds and a double meridian of shadow from its two suns. It’s beautiful. I’ll be briefed about its name in a second but for now I just drink in the view and once again swim deep in the wonder and pride I have at my job.
And then I look in the mirror.
I had alopecia when I was thirteen which means my body hair grows in patches now. I also have a dark wine birthmark that splashes across half of my face and most of my right arm. One of my eyes has too much eyelid and is higher than the other while my wide, thick lips hang like deflated inner tubes over the ragged jut of my huge, uneven teeth. My chin pushes forth like the prow of a ship. My nose is more like a beak and would probably come down to nearly touch my shelf of a chin if it hadn’t been broken in a youthful bicycle accident. It’s like a shark fin shaped into a child’s drawing of a lightning bolt in the middle of my face.
My point is that by human standards, I’m ugly. Hideously ugly. Almost comically ugly.
And the aliens don’t care. Because of that, I smile again like I do every day here. I don’t care if I ever see Earth again.
I take a morning sip from the protein udder on the wall and zip up into my jumpsuit. As I leave my quarters and join the flow of traffic to the main hall, I bump into a krinotaur. I think it’s beautiful. It flows past me like a wave settling next to the shore.
Maybe it took the job for the same reason I did. Maybe its eye cluster is too bulbous. Maybe its leg-stalks are too short. Maybe its communication mandibles have a noticeable stutter or lisp equivalent that's erased by the translators.
I would have no idea.
Everyone's earned the right to be here. We're diplomats and we're intelligent representatives. I know that the other life forms have tests and training just as stringent as my own that brought them here. We’re good at what we do; useful to our homeworlds.
I head to the briefing room to learn about the white planet below us and what city I’ll be assigned to welcome them into the galactic council.
tags