...

Threading string spins delicate the blanket. Woven through fibers chained unbreakable, its links fragile as the reciprocal breath of eye contact with a passerby. And in that instant you recognize your own tread, rocks rhythmic and signature, and just as easily passed by. Quiet the glance given the mind's eye from behind, over the wishful shoulder, beyond what would be there. Driven frantic, next steps solidify a wake; white rapids, salvation of unawakened seashores.

...

See what I've created.
Look at what I am,
at how I seem to be.
Deep breath difficult
still so sweetly desired.
Dear frozen/thawed/perched
pen, above the thirsty page.
Indifferent? (Please.)

"We do not feign tortured, my daughter and I."

And anyway, the prayer of the priest is to make peace with the lot of his life. While the girl on the motorbike too big for her, she talks dirty (of engines) with the fellas she rides with.

Just then, and when the light turned rosy, the stalking women spoke loud of ambrosia! Filled the sky to its atmospheric brim, with claims of last sight at first whim.

[Peole think it right to opine on what is offered them... Even so, what have you to offer?]

To allow--What magnificent madness is this?! To stay awake, and in waking give free reign to the things you've really no power over anyway. Indeed, to allow, and of course to enjoy, each moment's beat; the flow of perceived time with its singular rhythm. And to write within the inherent limitations of context? Gratitude endless, allow me to be grateful.

Faretheewell folk,
-Talthea (3/20!/09)

For the day preceding a birthday.

Love to write beside the fact of lines. Sleep so quiet in the midst of chaos like anarchy's latest dream. Just try, just for an hour or so, and decide to last that long. Along the river's panel of glaring critics, be blinded by the fading light, if only for the round of night, and shirk the girth of day. Dream dreary if you'd think to dare, make allies of the light and dark, still one, still un-unified. Ewe-music, not silky like love's version of sex, but wool-fuzzy instead, and really much warmer than need be admitted.

Imagine being caged--designated animal, and left to chew at your rapidly healing flesh. Where would you end up? Who could you easily trust, then? Or carelessly converse with, when each person's eyes ever hold the silent, eager nature of intention? And when do you stop wanting, somewhere within yourself? When does one cease falling for life's promised offerings? Maybe it's ungrateful to wonder.

You should know that I love an awful lot about you. Your compassion, if not pure love; the question, grave, of whether you can think of me without the aid of my absence; your spring-endless source of creativity, without wonder; your messy soul, and artist's fingers with critical glance; your selective silence, hidden between the barrage carrying over of never vicious sounds--not quite aggression in music, but determinedly determined, having somehow learned to separate the two, my dear? Oh, I do love you, even though I want more from myself than I've any right to expect you to supply, as though in supplicant offering. What do you have to do with that? Only that i wish the answer were 'something'.

Faretheewell folk,
-Talthea (3/18/09)

Confessions of a misplaced home?

When I was sixteen years old, my mother began seeing other men. 'Other', meaning not my father; 'my father', meaning her jaded husband. There was no deceit involved, never the behind-his-back affair. It was not her way--she was always very open about her infidelity. Wanted to share it with the family. Encouraged him to pursue similar past-times. She was so caught-up in the illicit excitement of all of it, or so I tend to think, that she never particularly focused enough to see the daily hearts being bruised. Thought this "new development" of their "relationship" would ultimately prove a deeper bonding between her and my father; as a transcendental step in their evolution.

She believed this, I believe, wholeheartedly. Even when she moved four-hundred miles away from him, "temporarily" leaving her kids and the only home they'd ever known, to take a new job in the same city as her at-the-time lover. Even now, she thinks she believed we would all have been able--let alone willing--to follow her. The fact that there were five of us kids, three dogs, a cat, & two cars living in a house that still needed to be re-hauled, cleaned up, and sold in the wake of her absence, somehow didn't seem to stop or strike her as unlikely odds. Even so, I can't help believing her: we just never crossed her mind.

Faretheewell folk,
-Talthea (3/17/09)

"You're beautiful, and smart, and worth every moment of the day." -Anon

She stared up at the canvas and smiled its blues and oranges. Across the street from the cafe, she stayed vaguely aware of a presence she would soon need to acknowledge. With all of her will, though, she tried to keep present with this moment: its view of a desert painting; its scent of roasted caffeine; its impression of waiting like a solid thing to cling to, with her fingertips or toes; the signature of an artist to symbolize it all. "Tyler Burke," a name she did not know until then, but one her semi-present self still hoped to remember.

And back across the street. Yes, eventually her mind shifts back there. To him, waiting across the street. Her yawns came more frequently when she thought of him there--were they reading the future? Dreading it, or finding more comfort than she was comfortable with? Or better yet: fuck him/it/everything--maybe she was just crashing. Jesus knew she had every excuse to be tired after twelve straight days of fine-tuned, screaming stress levels. And every right to let him wait.

She remembered the confusion especially well. Again, finding it necessary to stop the thoughts comingcomingcoming--to listen and pay mind to her body, in a way she'd once taken for granted. [She wanted to see stars not but for the darkness, but brightly lit of their very own accord. No comparisons; no relief--just boundless gratitude to be there to see.] Ready or not, she told herself futilely consoling--here we go, dearest.

Faretheewell folk,
-Talthea (3/14/09)

On trying to get The Secret Life of Bees to play for me...

Loaded up with some coffee and lemon water, feeling nothing like a watered-down dream. I hope for the definition of 'best' to come soon. Feeling good and necessary, writing words like their good lives depended on it, and I know. Mugs so satisfying, painted on with gala apple-likenesses. I realize, if I called my parents right now, chances are that they'd take my call. At least to call me back. What an unseen Blessing, this little thing swears itself to! What if my parents were unknown to me? What if I didn't have any at all? (And never knew the difference?) Still, I go days and weeks at a time, never worrying much myself about it, and daily fail to call...

Faretheewell folk,
-Talthea (3/12/09)

"100 telephones shake and ring. One of them's from someone who knew you." -Guillemots

My core muscles are burning out the breath from my lungs, like the flash-pyrotechnic game of pistons. My dog's ace bandaged back leg jumps up before she does every time she tries to arise, cuz she can tell it's wrong, doesn't belong. Hungover from an evening spent with poets--feminine like something sacred, and sharing like their creations don't belong to them at all. Like possession is a thing imagined, barely recalled of an uncomfortable dream from the night before. So that now my night before was a dream best remembered?

Faretheewell folk,
-Talthea (3/8/09)

Faretheewell folk...

I heard this tonight: "Worse than being hit, worse than being molested, worse than being lied to, is to not feel credible: when nobody believes you." My stomach tightened when I heard it, and my eyelids began to burn. I listened to the woman that said this to me as hard as I could, trying like hell to take it to heart--trying not to say a word. I had heard her voice crack when she said this to me, and then I heard it solidify again as she proceeded to take her stark revelation and churn it through the structure of her mind. Organizing it in her thoughts. Explaining it away again.

I know that when we say things like this they feel hyper-real through their confession, but that their reality fades and flows with our proximity to their context. But even knowing that she would forget the power her own words had on her, and on me too, I couldn't let them go. I didn't want to. I wanted to hold onto their stinging power as though it were truth, simply. I wanted to take that representative truth along with me, through the colors of my days and nights. I wanted to hold it up to other truths, to look at it again and again through the lenses of separate experiences, and the feelings that are foreign to its understanding of the world. I wanted to compare, organize, and double-check so that I too could be willing and able to explain it back, and keep it at bay.

Cuz you know what? That shouldn't be fucking true, even though it is.

Faretheewell folk,
-Talthea (3/5/09)

"This was back in '92. She was like, 'Do I look sexy?' And I was like, 'Well yeah, you're fucking hot." -Renegade announcer over megaphone.

If you stop haunting me, I'll stop writing these damn things. But we only ever come close. "It's not optimism," she said, "it's self-preservation." 'Displacement' is the ability to talk about something not currently present. As I'm displaced by you? In honor of Aristotle then!, and On Marvelous Things Heard: tonight we heard some marvelous things indeed. Nothing like a poetry slam in a cramped one-room bar!:

Sincerity comes reluctantly with explanations in it's mouth, in this, the wake of secrecy.
Your hands tend to the unspoken for, their touch, an intrusion upon shame.
With a voice descending the depths of disillusionment,
still your hands return, having never learned the difference.


Such a thing not even read, though it's just as well. Beautiful words, formulated for to break predictions into tiny pieces, move me to the point of an absent smile that lasts the night, which might carry me to sleep in peace. But they run the risk of addiction too--not sleeping when I lay my head down, but bound to the books that come close. "Great Scott!" (But not quite that yet either, hey? And anyway...)

Faretheewell folk,
-Talthea (3/2/09)