let me keep mine

.


in my sadness, i spin the record.  in my sadness, i lift my shirt over my head.  slowly now, slowly, slowly, as if you were in the room. 

in my sadness, i look at my tits in the mirror.  i walk slowly toward that silver surface and grace my pink nipples across that slick, chilly surface slowly, slowly, as if it were your chest.  the cold shocks me.  i was expecting your warmth despite my games of pretend.  this bourbon has got the better of me. 

i imagine my fingers belong to you.  these are your fingers in my hair.  these are your fingers smearing my lipstick.  these are your fingers teasing the waistline of my panties while thom york sings "immerse yourself in love".  i'll lift your shirt off and i promise i won't look at you as if you are a fantasy or a holiday.  i'll look at you like what you are:  i'll let you be a man.

for as much as i love fantasies, i'm tired of them.  somewhere along the line, i grew up.  suddenly, i prefer reality.  i want the scars on your hips and the sordid details of your past and all the horrors of your upbringing.  i want your mouth on mine and i'll let you keep your secrets...

let me keep mine.

let me keep some sense of pride.

let me keep a dry eye, love.

if you give me anything, give me that.


...


pink lipstick and photographs the one-hour photo up the road won't develop.  who am i becoming?  anne says i fell in to a wrinkle in time...   those years i spent in such atrocious agony, those hours i spent wrestling with guilt over the simplest of wants, the simplest of desires...  that wasn't me.  this girl, here, now, with a fifth of shitty vodka in the freezer and a filthy mouth, topless and unapologetic, longing to disgust every single person who still might lay claim to a shared heritage because we were brought up on too many lies...

i can't look at myself without wanting to show you who i really am.

i don't care the consequence.

the mirror is a lover and the mirror is a challenge.

the mirror is you.



i have become entirely singular.  i have never been more myself than i am today.  i want to show you.  if you're going to look away, do it now.


.

dream

last night i dreamt that someone who is no longer in my life (but someone i very much admired) stole a whole bunch of paintings and drawings from me. they stashed them in a glass building and when i learned of the theft, i went to the glass building and looked in through the dark windows. there were all sorts of beautiful, fashionable people inside, milling around looking at art, and i could see my work spread out on the floor in the rear of the building. i was waving my arms on the other side of the glass but no one looked at me. i could hear them talking and laughing. they were all smiling and drinking wine. and i stood on the outside, feeling entirely helpless, unable to collect my babies.

Johnny Depp showed up and he had hardly any hair. all patchy, like a symptom of disease or maltreatment. and he hugged me and said, "i know how bad this feels."

when i woke up, that horrible feeling of realizing you've been robbed was still on me- the horrible realization that you trusted the wrong person and that, as a result, a sick violation found you.

the dream was a very accurate mirror of reality. and it's no accident that my paintings and drawings were the sacrifice. the symbolism is an easy one to figure out. even the thing about Johnny Depp... which is odd and funny to me because i never dream about celebrities. ever. but i suppose he would know what that feels like: being used by people he had trusted to govern his career, having his image twisted in to something he couldn't stand, and his own naivety being shoved in his face.

and that was the dominant emotion in the dream: embarrassment. feeling so embarrassed of my naivety, my trusting nature that took me down a bad path, a path away from who i truly am... such a sick feeling. horribly sick.

i woke to find myself slowly growing angry about the whole thing. i went to my notebook and wrote fast and hard. now, with my coffee and the sun moving high, i feel thankful to not only have found my way out of that dream, but out of the reality it so perfectly symbolizes... that i am free and i have open doors all around me.

spectacular!

and so now i circle back to 'The Society of The Spectacle' and i see how savvy it all is- mistaking appearance for reality... or, rather, accepting appearances as reality: 'seeing is believing' and all that. and just as Debord says, sight is the most easily tricked of all the senses. accepting appearances as reality is accepting a non-reality. it is living a lie.

so... how to crack this non-reality? how to create a fissure where the truth can actually be seen? how to establish a road toward hope where truth can even be recognized as such?

he says: In a world that really has been turned on its head, truth is a moment of falsehood.

how sad and how helpless we all feel sometimes. how inept, how confused, how forlorn and despairing. how sorrowful the world becomes when truth is denied for the sake of appearances.

a hand must be kept on hope. art is a way to find that hope. it can be the thing that encourages the crack in The Spectacle. it can be the thing that counters the upside-down appearance with an odd mirror that restores a true(r) perspective. the fast flash of undeniable reality, charged and angry and lovable- necessary.