Thoughts for Birds

2012-01-16T13:31:00.000-08:00

I can't tell how I am, but let me deduce:

I don't have any thoughts anymore
.: I have nothing to say
I haven't cried since August
.: I have nothing to feel

2011-12-15T10:05:00.000-08:00

(not only next but all Decembers, infinite Decembers)

2011-12-14T13:13:00.000-08:00

Everything's melted into an ocean of superglue, Christmas crackers and cigarettes and public transport and dinners and what-do-I-do-with-my-hands. Stuck, stuck, stuck. This is today: you're a sarcophagus minus the pharaoh inside and you've counted enough palms against your ribs to last you for the next year-or-so. There you are on the stone steps in front of the station, in your crinkly button-down dress, your pink nose, staring at your ankles. No orchestras within you, only a lump in your throat. This is December, this is when you're supposed to be snow, supposed to glow, ice floe.

I feel funny today. Most other days, too. Maybe it's clashing cymbals that I want, thunderbolts, the whole set. The magnetism of tragedy.
But I still don't know what to do with my hands.

2011-10-15T06:15:00.000-07:00

scraps

Not long ago I vowed not to think it anymore and I’m sorry, I never meant to put this promise out on the street (I know it’s cold), but I still just don’t know anymore, I don’t know what to do, say, think, feel. Recent additions to this state of mind: where to look, how to touch, breathe, not shiver, sleep. Wish I could build a word mincer, you cough adjectives into it (off your chest) and you turn the crank and out comes the word you’ve been trying to invent for the last year-or-so. My ingredients would be as follows: strangely-calmly-but-not-really-darkly-sad, seventh-cup-of-coffee-not-tired-but-exhausted-still, shaky-hands-always and goosebumps (origins unknown). All this blended into a misanthropy milkshake spiced with parentheses. There’s a word in that. Maybe.

*

Everything's always about the wrecking, not a word is ever lost about the actual seafaring: you're only the tip of the iceberg, I'm sorry.

*

Must stop referring to everyone by their initials, that system doesn't work anymore, but today L. told me that I was the archetypal romantic lover, only less self-indulgent.I don't know if I want to be an archetype or a romantic, but I'm certain that I am a terrible cast for the role of the lover.

*

Maybe this is what I’ll write stories about later, later being the indefinable stretch of time that may or may not be set in motion, this being to sit cross-legged on my mother’s balcony in rural Germany, reading Calvino and ashing into a coffee mug with a panorama printed on it from somewhere that isn’t here, here being this balcony in October, this October breaking my heart. Forever turning over the concept of home and the light falling through the gingko biloba and this and later and I don’t know. I don’t know.

2011-08-27T06:59:00.000-07:00

I don't want to have Ludwig II Syndrome anymore, "an eternal enigma to myself and others". It all comes from, I don't know, constantly writing about dead people, maybe, and missing someone before he's even left and also not feeling anything at all when your favourite tree gets taken down by the wind. Would rather be a reference book with a table of contents as long as a tree trunk.
I'm really tired.

2011-08-25T12:44:00.000-07:00

2011-08-23T09:23:00.000-07:00

Don't know what it is with my strange obsession with bookshop neurosis, worries me quite a bit. Circular thoughts about the shelves as my safe haven and maybe that's really the only place I can have my falling-aparts anymore. Last night someone put on a horrible and sad nineties mixtape and I sat on the steps outside by myself, watching the thunderless blue-green Morse code lightning against the fields and when a particularly awful song started playing I burnt a hole in my tights because my hands were trembling more than the garden in the pre-thunderstorm wind and it hit me with the force of a blue whale's fin that forgetting is not an option but then it started raining on my mosquito bites and I retied my shoes and bit my lip and I could taste my cherry lipbalm and maybe it's acceptable to hold my world together with sticky foil just for a bit longer, maybe it is, I wouldn't know.

2011-08-10T03:42:00.000-07:00

"I stand by my initial statement, you're water in my windpipe."

2011-07-30T11:44:00.000-07:00

Took myself for coffee today but went home before I could re-enact my meltdown behind the shelves at Waterstones last month. Once is too often for crying in bookshops. I know you’re supposed to want to be happy, but if that’s the case then why is rain your favourite weather and why do you have your fingers crossed that tomorrow will be cloudier? Maybe that’s just the natural order of things if no one notices the colour of your eyes but only their size. Talked to L. and she said it’s got to do with being bad with goodbyes, but I disagree (it’s the spaces in between them that are problematic). Maybe these things are easier to be said from a bathtub than from a balcony at night with your left hand turning blue because it has to hold the receiver.
At odds with time, can’t decide whether to fast-forward or to freeze it would be the cleverer manoeuvre. But I know for certain that I’d feel better if it was December because winter feels more survivable in general. If I had a say in seasons it would be December for ever and dark by five in the afternoon and there would be snow flowers on everyone’s window every single morning without fail.
M. is in some faraway seaside place, reuniting with people who miss her because she is friends with the whole world and it’s a bit tiring sometimes being asked why I’m so different. Might be adopted.
A few nights ago I was in bed reading A Perfect Day for Bananafish when the sirens started wailing. An orange copper coin from my window. Read about it in the paper the next morning but it didn’t feel like I‘d seen the same fire (‘I could have held in my hands‘). Can’t stop thinking about my grandma’s emergency suitcase and her basement full of tins. I miss a lot of people today. Today is lonely.
L. and I bought a tent yesterday so that we can camp by the North Sea. Feel like I should be by the seaside now, making friends that will miss me forty years from now.
Instead I’m here writing a doctoral thesis of a diary entry. No wonder.

2011-07-26T16:54:00.000-07:00

Can’t sleep, might as well write.
Back into the maelstrom again. Lost the ‘C’ on my keyboard. If this all were a novel, it would stand for something. An omen, the Grim in my teacup.
Calculated 77 more nights of my room here belonging to me (not counting sleepovers of course). Refusing to rearrange my shelves, stacks of books everywhere. Went as far as to try write a Christmas list, but couldn’t think of anything to wish for. Then made a vow to stop saying ‘I just don’t know anymore‘; have lasted twenty hours. There’s a deserted cobweb in the corner of the ceiling and the ballet is closed for summer so there’s nowhere to go with M. (we had lunch on Monday, rolling roasted mushrooms around our plates in silence).
Thoughts only stay in my head for milliseconds, can’t explain. I’m cold.

2011-07-26T10:03:00.000-07:00

Want to write volumes so that I won't forget (pirouetting on cobblestone, stargazing through clouds, book discussions on midnight trains).

2011-06-26T07:44:00.000-07:00

2011-06-26T07:40:00.000-07:00

2011-05-05T13:43:00.000-07:00

"I want to speak to you all the time." - chairs crumble underneath you, left sitting on a pile of rubble.
And then what's left collapses when someone dependable does something microscopic and true for you, like saying tomorrow I'll bring you the book I told you about and then really bringing you that book. So you take it from him and leaf through it and everything quivers because this someone brought you his book and then you want to adjust his tie and do up his top button and warn him of the world outside because it's not full of people who bring you books when they said they would (their words come from the poems homeless cats scratch into walls at night).

2011-05-01T04:02:00.001-07:00

I was convinced things could be different, and maybe for a while they were, in a parallel universe that was really only the wind making seashell noise in your ears. But of course the performance of this particular magic trick got sloppier with every matinee and every black-tie dinner invitation, sloppier and sloppier until the ugly truth refused to be the virgin cut into thirds any longer. "I don't want to sit in meadows picking bouquets for you, my eyes are itchy. I'm allergic to pollen and I thought you knew," it said to me not long ago and yes, I knew and I'm sorry and I wish there was something to do for you, truth, but there isn't (there is not). And by performing another astounding illusion I made my ribcage into a furnace to transform heartache into the tragedy everything feeds on; but the important thing, the thing that is most often forgotten, is that tragedy will always fall short of beauty. We make it out to be pretty so we can all be fragile flowers, but it doesn't work that way. It doesn't. So I'm sorry, really I am, and you should be too. "You sound so soft" - but I'm not, you see, that's the problem.

2011-04-13T06:03:00.000-07:00

Absolutely, infinitely out of ideas, all I remember how to do is shrug. What do you do when? What do you do?
I've become a bit of a vagabond, hairbrushless, ringing my own doorbell in the mornings. Went to Krumlov last week but it didn't change a thing and not a thing had changed and I thought we said no more nights as shipwrecks on the jetty:
"I knew the universe would catch up with me soon."
"But this is only you swallowing the black hole."
I think the problem is that not even the lake is beautiful enough anymore without you having seen it (and most of all without you yanking out daisies or listening to my blood).

2011-03-31T04:18:00.000-07:00

nightly

glowing pale blue on the balcony
us ghosts in nightgowns steaming like
hot drinks in porcelain cups
cupping smoke in our hands
drowning would have been lovely
we sigh and pick twigs from our hair
but the sea is too hungry we decide
doesn't drown but swallows

on the balustrade frozen feet
stationary equilibrists bobbing heads
like young flowers our petal eyelids closed
we wear kneepads and helmets
but protecting see-through limbs proves a bit hard and
one of us begins to wonder
is it possible to love someone
without knowing their handwriting?
can ghosts even write? we've never tried
probably perhaps we don't know

2011-03-19T06:35:00.000-07:00

All everything does to me is leave me with my feet dangling, not knowing what to do: somewhere in translation whole chapters disappeared, blown over rooftops for the lack of a paperweight and then -
Trains of thought, steam trains, trails of muddy footprints. And in none of my books a solution as for what to do when I see you with grass-stained knees and earth on your cheek, blood dripping from your elbow onto your dirty shoes. The answers to all those questions you ask me when it's dark, I (with a flashlight) project them onto the moon. But you never stop wondering about waltzing and loving and horseback riding and which bowtie should you pick? Oh, I don't know, take them all, come back with your arms full of fabric. And how I spend my nights: breathing, thinking about you playing coat rack for me and your newspaper reading, how you have your coffee black as well and -

2010-12-16T12:23:00.001-08:00

Even past the help of my books now (all I see is unscalabilty cut into rectangles).

Consequence: you develop a taste for the sad kind of beautiful, for heartbroken horses and backyard explosions, ships tipped to the side.
Please please please.
Won’t stop snowing until.

2010-11-22T12:44:00.000-08:00

Lost something.
Ice flowers on the window every morning, unspeakably cold in my turret. Essence of last week: the difference between belonging somewhere and somewhere belonging to you. Snowflakes into foam into salt grains into wells; doomed as always to love only the idea of everything - physical laws melting on your tongue.
A cruciality: ‘Tying someone else to the railways is the worst part.’
And to be thought about until Christmas: ‘What exactly is the appeal of disappearing?’

2010-10-28T09:08:00.000-07:00

For safekeeping, etc. pp.

2010-10-28T09:01:00.000-07:00

2010-10-23T15:53:00.000-07:00

No-one to bring home roasted almonds, no home to bring them to. My pocket universe has shrunk even smaller; grand ideas: cobwebs.
Won’t be home for my birthday this year (no cotton candy in October either). Maybe the swans will listen. We share blueberry muffins on Tuesdays.

2010-08-24T11:43:00.000-07:00

Remembering will always be a mystery to me, comes swooping down on you like bats -
P., he’d buy two tickets whenever a circus grew out of the field-behind-the-house overnight. Tiny circuses they were, with packs of dogs instead of lions and sometimes even a solitary zebra. But there were cotton candy clouds big enough to disappear in and always someone who‘d turn the crank of his barrel organ with every bone of his body, turn it so gloriously it would shatter you.
Those were the sticky-sweet popcorn days, when I looked a bit like a daisy, when I first got that peculiar feeling of having a heart with a touch of the flu. It grows and grows among your ribs, soaks up all the glossy things and everything else you never want to forget again, it swells and grows and grows until there isn’t any room left, not for matters like words or lungs. And then it bursts, your heart, explodes and covers your insides with crystal grains and rubble. Everything that ever made you feel, scattered throughout your whole artery-web, forever circulating.
(There’s no turning back after the first crushed valve, not even when you are still small enough to only lick the frosting off your candied apple.)

2010-08-14T16:21:00.000-07:00

The White Feather: two wars in Prague, P. (whose heart I inherited), one thousand and forty-five pages come to haunt me.

2010-08-08T08:59:00.000-07:00

white sables

please tie my veins into bows, your feet must stay awake one two three
and will you carve chairs out of tree trunks
with your scalpel, then it won't be so hard
when we have to tell swans' spouses we're sorry but we did everything we could
and the swans start crying
and feathers repel water (especially sweet water from a lake)
but we could tell them to please sit down
and put our hands where mortals would have shoulders

lakes can never feel at home, not here
says the widowed white bird
not with someone who has foliage for lashes
and is every tree at once

2010-07-22T01:30:00.000-07:00

2010-06-18T13:44:00.000-07:00

Never would have thought that clouds could be so heavy.

2010-06-02T07:35:00.000-07:00

I want to build a tree house so badly it hurts my ribs.
Only proves that impossibilities pulverise the bones. Slowly slowly, but the dust still makes you cough.
Saw a hornet today. A bit worried about many things, green elbows from outside, tangled hair for the rest of time (would be nice).

2010-05-23T13:57:00.000-07:00

Treacle days, sticky and sweet. Turning pages with berry-stained fingers.

2010-05-20T12:15:00.000-07:00

Grooming my thoughts like horses, letting them eat sugar cubes from my palms.

2010-05-16T03:09:00.000-07:00

Means too much, everything. Every thing.

2010-05-02T07:31:00.000-07:00

capillary-everythings

2010-03-05T08:24:00.000-08:00

Wouldn't you like to be brave and see raspberry skies? I think you would.

2010-02-26T11:27:00.000-08:00

Been lost in an ocean or two, an underwater graveyard of sorts, forever waiting for the day we'll catch that grasshopper.
Everything is like sinking my teeth into apples, a neverending journey with Leo the lion and bears named after dead men.
And M who writes letters in ink that never dries.
All those boys with their soaked paper hearts.

2010-01-17T09:54:00.000-08:00

2009-12-30T04:10:00.000-08:00

Everything breaks my heart.

2009-12-16T05:13:00.000-08:00

Still no sign of snow.
I can't sleep on my left side anymore, my pulse worries me.
Don't like feeling them knock, my veins.

2009-12-11T12:04:00.000-08:00

My snowbear (from when it snowed every winter and everyone was still safe).

2009-12-01T10:26:00.000-08:00

"You can't wish for someone to give you words in boxes."

2009-10-31T12:32:00.000-07:00

2009-10-24T13:34:00.000-07:00

2009-08-11T13:38:00.000-07:00