ghosts

I think we all need to get away from where we’ve been.

Where I grew up the sky was too big, and eventually it all started feeling washed out, anemic, like at any moment the ground would shrug me off into the blue. And the other place, it was sort of like that too but more in a purple-eyed pedantic way, where I found myself walking the same route again and again and staring into people’s faces and not seeing them at all.

All those moments you were low and gray, they stick around. Your own ghost haunts the streets, passes through you and gives you the lead lung. Grasp, grasp, you grasp for meaning and love and it all slips away and then you’re driving too fast at night because you can’t feel the road disappear under the wheels.

And I can’t even imagine the Illinois blues, the can’t-flee-the-suburbs shakes, the part where you’re still there after years and years and you don’t know how it happened.

Where do we go? Where on earth can we go? Just now it’s climbing into abandoned buildings, onto roofs and looking at the stars and talking about the place we’ll have one day with big, beautiful windows and always the deep smell of a home all our own.

But you can’t just leave your past self, your poor, wandering ghost. You’ve got to return once more, one last time when you can still call it home, and you’ve got to breathe in. Breathe in, close your eyes, and softly, with love, kiss your ghost goodbye. 

words like these keep writing themselves

You’ve been lit up, a burning man in my head. You dance slow, you dance with your head hung down, your limbs moving like underwater. And you whisper, you whisper to me in my sleep and you turn me back into gold.

            The moon is a waxing gibbous. I could hold her close, I could kiss her silver lips with mine, I could hold her silk hair in my hands. Her skin blurs the burning man, erases him from the fields. She’s so cool, unlike him, who burns all the time and she, she tastes like lilacs, like jasmine and pearls and she’s got fingers that taper. I can float on her body with eyes half-shut, pupils large and empty. I can float for a long time.

            What does he do at night? What does he do at the blue, what does he do when the cars roll past in damp separateness, not seeing him from their bright bubbles? What does he do when the dreams visit him? What does he do at the miss and yearn? Toothache in his chest, feeling of “why couldn’t we…”

            Snap awake, snap awake, pinch yourself and breath in. Breathe in and call up the moon, ask her over and kiss her mouth, nip her ear and crush her hips to yours. Fill all her spaces and feel that perpetual August night, feel it wash away that burning figure in your mind. Close your eyes and try to forget.

Tuesday Blues

Drawing from indeterminate time in the past!

haec cura

It says "hic cura" in the sketchbook, but I goofed, it would be "haec cura." I think I meant to say, "this anxiety strips me of my mind," but I don't think the "mente mea" is right either. Oh well. It's not like the whole internet knows Latin.

we start the mania

SHOWING OFF MY MAP OF TASMANIA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rcoreV10hI8

March 7th

Yes, I totally ripped off the bird from this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=skCV2L0c6K0  Endearingly pissed-off animals are the best.

bear

Given that it happened before my figure drawing class, I'm okay with the anatomy going on on the left page. Besides, I feel like the flower heads and the bear head kind of draw attention away from the problem spots...

Complexities Unfold

 

For some reason it's always yellow that ends up getting everywhere...

very very red

Apparently this was around January 23rd ish, as that middle bit says. And that writing bit on the second page is by a fellow named Luke I met an an open mic whatsit at a coffee place (I really am an insufferable hipster.)

don't forget (from sometime around February?)

 This is from my last Moleskin, and I believe I drew/wrote all this sometime in February.
Typed out, this is what got written...

To claim boredom in the face of all this is awful.
Tell me, when did you last look to the sky? Feel the stretch, the yawning arc of blue?
Take off your shoes. Curl your toes into the wet ground, feel the chill, remember how every second, every fucking second your synapses are firing, your brain is glittering like goddamn christmas. Remember how much it takes just to walk. Then try to claim boredom again.

taste the rain
bite down, feel the pain and almost iron
feel your heart beat rhythmic
now, very carefully, listen to what the trees have to say.

cherry pie and a slice of the sky

I think a lot of the left page was drawn/written when I had a fever...
Also, I think I may need to start incorporating highlighters and extremely bright colors into more things.

the rat king and some stuff

Everyone is fond of owls! And some people are fond of rat king, but not too many, he smells a little off.

sol novus

Yes, I am just going through my current sketchbook and uploading the past. It's kind of irritating, cos the earlier stuff has issues... actually, I'm sure it all has issues, but I will only realize them in retrospect. SUCH IS LIFE. (Why am I so tired, I slept for about twelve hours last night...)

she lied.

Disclaimer: I drew this before I took figure drawing class, so no judgey-judge on the anatomical fucked-uppery that is the page on the left, and sort of the face on the right.

crazy eyes

Page one! There might be a little Black Swan crazy in here, just maybe.