where is the crossed signal?

From Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art by Stephen Nachmanovitch, (Section: "Obstacles and Openings"; Chapter: "Vicious Circles"):

Some habits may appear in both addictive and nonaddictive (normal) forms. Some habits may seem addictive, such as physical exercise or practicing a musical instrument, or doing some other labor of love, yet we may consider them to be positive and beneficial. There is a fine line between the pathological and the creative, between addiction and practice. What actually is the vital difference between "I'll just have one more drink" and "I'll just try that Bach fugue one more time"? 

Addiction consumes energy and leads to slavery. Practice generates energy and leads to freedom. In practice, or in creative reading or listening, we obsess in order to find out more and more, as in the Twenty Questions game. In addiction, we obsess in order to avoid finding out something, or in order to avoid facing something unpleasant. In practice the act becomes more and more expansive; we are unwinding a thread outward and building more and more implications and connections. In addiction we are folding inward, into more sameness, more dullness. 

Habits are addictive if that mysterious acceleration factor is present, when enough is never enough, and what was enough yesterday is not enough today. Habits are addictive if the reward and the work are inverted. Samuel Butler joked that if the alcoholic's hangover preceded the intoxication, there would be mystical schools teaching it as a discipline for self-realization. So practice is the reciprocal of addiction. Practice is an ever-fresh, challenging flow of work and play in which we continually test and demolish our own delusions; therefore it is sometimes painful. 

Addiction is what computer programmers call a "do-loop." Self-regulating beings, whether animals, people, or ecosystems, spend much of their time performing repetitive routines. Built into the structure of such routines are end-conditions or exits. We keep performing the routine until the end-condition indicates that the job is done. Pouring tea, we monitor for the condition "Is the cup full?" That condition turns off the act of pouring. Eating, we continue until certain autonomic signs (stomach bulk, blood sugar, and so on) feed back the message that we are full. Normally, we then stop. But it is possible for the end-condition to be omitted, misplaced, or for the signals to be switched, so that the routine is carried out indefinitely, compulsively, until all sorts of disorders, explosions, or breakdowns bring the whole system to a halt. 

If addiction is a form of do-loop, from which there is no exit, procrastination is a don't-loop, which consists of nothing but exit. In a circle of addictive feedback, we believe "The more the merrier." Under stress, such a belief can accelerate into a do-loop, which drives us into an explosive runaway, such as an eating or drinking binge, a population explosion, an arms race. In procrastination we believe "The less the safer." This, under stress, drives us into a don't-loop, a cycle of compression or blockage, like a muscle spasm, writer's block, sexual impotence, depression, anomie, or catatonia. In this kind of vicious circle the exit condition fires off continuously, never allowing us to maintain the activity. This state gives rise to procrastination, and all the other inverse addictions, the addictions to not-doing, the blocks, the allergies. 

Procrastination is the mirror image of addiction; both are disorders of self-regulation. We are stuck in these cycles unless and until we can find the crossed signal and switch it back again.

Goya, Figures dancing from Los Disparates

---

I like typing out passages from books that I want to study. With my fingers moving, constantly checking up on whether I'm accurately transcribing a given sentence, I am forced to pay closer attention.

Also, Wood Mouse, if you ever do read this, here... I love you even more for your having loved and dog-earred that page long ago. :-)

october 4 in the year of the chevy spark

I'm on a Dream Theater binge lately. I have to be in just the right mood for them, so even though they're one of my favorite bands (seems like a diss, somehow, to refer to them as a mere "band")... I haven't listened to everything they've put out. I hoard their songs like something for special occasions. If hitting the bottom of your energy sine wave counts as a special occasion. ;-)

It was with some amusement/delight that I saw some internet-eer recently refer to Dream Theater as the musical equivalent of DFW... I don't think the comparison is especially apt. For one, the guys in Dream Theater are a lot less afraid of occasionally coming across as cheesy, I think (a virtue we should probably all aspire to). but the mood is similar, at least for me. And the Twelve-step Suite is strongly reminiscent of the AA arc in Infinite Jest (my favorite part). Was listening to "Repentance" off of Systematic Chaos last night while building my Imperial rogue a new house in Skyrim: Hearthfire and talking with someone (a friend? I dunno...time will tell).

Sometimes you've got to be wrong
Learn the hard way
Just when you're through hanging on
You're saved

If we are painstaking about this phase of our development
We will be amazed before we are halfway through.
We are going to know a new freedom and a new happiness.
We will not regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it.
We will comprehend the word serenity, and we will know peace
No matter how far down the scale we have gone.
We will see how our experience can benefit others.
That feeling of uselessness and self-pity will disappear.
We will lose interest in selfish things and gain interest in our fellows.
Self-seeking will slip away.
Our whole attitude and outlook upon life will change.
Fear of people and economic insecurity will leave us.
We will intuitively know how to handle situations which used to baffle us.
We will suddenly realize that God is doing for us what we could not do for ourselves.
Are these extravagant promises? We think not.
They have been fulfilled amongst others
Sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly.
We will always be true to our principles.

You're only as sick as your secrets
But the truth shall set you free.
The truth is the truth.
That's all you can do is live with it.


My dark secret with Infinite Jest is that I loved best the parts with bit character Ken Erdedy. That's not got much to do with the above song, actually, besides the fact that he went to rehab in the book... but, come on: Ken. Erdedy. Therefore anything is justified. Because. He is the "linchpin and plinth" of my emotional connection to the book, though it seemed like it was supposed to be Don Gately serving that role. I just wanted more Ken and Kate. And that's sooo DFW, isn't it, to make up something exquisitely beautiful, give you a glimpse, and then practically hide it under a thousand bushel baskets, really make you work for your tiny glint of candlelight. Maybe to prove how bad you really wanted it.

People are weird like that.

I chased off a friend of mine repeatedly, year after year. I don't think it's a good idea for us to hang out together, this hurts too much, etc. etc. You know--the sick-cycle dance of the battle-weary-but-hungering. We all do it, on some count or another, so march your moral superiority over to the docks and drown it, okay? He didn't believe I wanted him gone, so he kept coming 'round anyhow. Maybe I didn't really want him gone. Sometimes I'd flutter a little closer, but always spooking and fast-returning to the getting-gone talk and I'd vanish for months or years at a time. There were some good reasons. He wasn't always a trustworthy person, for instance. And other times he was completely honest but the things he confessed to me were pretty scary. And he liked running from reality into a haze of self-destructive comforts, mostly of the pharmaceutical variety, which I found heartbreakingly annoying. (cuz I'd never myself do anything analogous to that, right? ...cue the wink and knowing sigh and such) But those probably weren't the only reasons, eh?

So. In 2010 he finally gave up and obeyed me, stopped trying. And in spite of the fact that I brought it on myself times a million... and even though he tried for 14 years (we met as kids over a shared love of Nintendo) and only gave up for two.... and walked away saying things like "I will never be a father now, as I can't imagine anybody else as the mother of my children" and then he kept that promise...

There's nonetheless this tiny (I can't stress how very tiny), psychotic (not really) voice inside me that occasionally (I mean hardly ever) pipes up to say:

"See? See? You were unlovable after all."

That voice has a shit-eating grin, like the Cheshire cat, by the way. You will probably recognize it. Pretty sure everybody has one. Um. Right...?

I feel the need to add here that I am a completely normal and sane-seeming person who pays bills on time and doesn't have public meltdowns and is always polite to sales clerks and helps children with homework and is indistinguishable on the sidewalk from any other well-adjusted individual.

Ken Erdedy:

She'd promised to come at one certain time, and it was past that time. Finally he gave in and called her number, using just audio, and it rang several times, and he was afraid of how much time he was taking tying up the line and he got her audio answering device, the message had a snatch of ironic pop music and her voice and a male voice together saying we'll call you back, and the 'we' made them sound like a couple, the man was a handsome black man who was in law school, she designed sets, and he didn't leave a message because he didn't want her to know how much now he felt like he needed it. He had been very casual about the whole thing.... 

Now just one of the insect's antennae was protruding from the hole in the girder. It protruded, but it did not move. He had had to buy soda, ice cream, a Pepperidge Farm frozen chocolate cake, and four cans of canned chocolate frosting to be eaten with a large spoon. He'd had to log an order to rent film cartridges from the InterLace entertainment outlet. He'd had to buy antacids for the discomfort that eating all he would eat would cause him late at night. He'd had to buy a new bong, because each time he finished what simply had to be his last bulk-quantity of marijuana he decided that that was it, he was through, he didn't even like it anymore, this was it, no more hiding, no more imposing on his colleagues and putting different messages on his answering device and moving his car away from his condominium and closing his windows and curtains and blinds and living in quick vectors between his bedroom's InterLace teleputer's films and his refrigerator and his toilet, and he would take the bong he'd used and throw it away wrapped in several plastic shopping bags….  

…everything was ready to be shut down. Once the woman who said she'd come had come, he would finally shut the whole system down. It occurred to him that he would disappear into a hole in a girder inside him that supported something else inside him. He was unsure what the thing inside him was and was unprepared to commit himself to the course of action that would be required to explore the question. It was now almost three hours past the time when the woman said she would come. 

…he would force himself to do it anyway… even if he didn't want it. Even if it started making him dizzy and ill. He would use discipline and persistence and will and make the whole experience so unpleasant, so debased and debauched and unpleasant, that his behavior would be henceforth modified, he'd never even want to do it again because the memory of the insane four days to come would be so firmly, terrible emblazoned in his memory. He'd cure himself by excess.

Y'know, I'm not an addict in the conventional sense. I've never even touched a bong or anything else of the kind. And I can easily go without drinking until 11 am or so most days (kidding, kidding). I don't lower the curtains and hide for anything anymore. None of my addictions or foibles are recognized and societally approved to qualify as life-ruining, and there aren't any clubs to join for support with it. Nor could I really stomach anymore a club that makes you believe in a higher power (that's part of the problem, see).

But, daaaang, I have grown tired of making the same mistakes. Tired of the Sisyphean load itself as well, but also tired of the way I'm always veering off to the left with it after hundreds of not-entirely-dissimilar goes at this goddamn hill. I am tired of rounding the bend and seeing that same, old fucking tree again, that same old rust-stained crack in the stone wall. I want Don Gately to feed me some goddamn brownies and then take a bullet for me so I can live again.

Sometimes I think we are all dry drunks, excepting the drunkards.

(((You should read this all in a very blasé tone, btw. I am actually feeling as tranquil as a bodhisattva, even if I've not got the wisdom of one. People always think you're mad or something when you vent like this, even if you're really just rolling your eyes and faintly smiling. I am rolling my eyes and faintly smiling, goddamnit.)))

But, anyhow, there's no Don Jesus Fucking Christ Gately.

I actually prefer the Marilyn Manson video.

I keep returning to Franny and Zooey for moments like these (it's practically a part of the repeating scenery, after the bit with the tree and the crack in the wall)... the part at the end where Zooey has been caught trying to impersonate their brother Buddy, and then goes on to impart the wisdom of their older brother Seymour instead (who of course has previously blown his brains out in another story, because that's what all our real modern sages do, while meanwhile folks like the Dalai Lama and Joyce Meyers take tea with people like Karl Rove or Alduin the World Destroyer and then proclaim everyone to be equally swell and non-disappointing which is so obviously untrue as to be laughable--and that should be a very, very dark laugh indeed), while trying to comfort his sister, who in reaction to finding herself on a shitty fucking planet has been having a breakdown, focusing all her rage and disappointment into the monomaniacal desire to become a perfect reciter of the Jesus Prayer.

(Could you parse all that? No? Work harder for it, then.)

Anyway, I started bitching one night before the broadcast. Seymour’d told me to shine my shoes just as I was going out the door with Waker. I was furious. The studio audience were all morons, the announcer was a moron, the sponsors were morons, and I just damn well wasn’t going to shine my shoes for them, I told Seymour. I said they couldn’t see them anyway, where we sat. He said to shine them anyway. He said to shine them for the Fat Lady. I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about, but he had a very Seymour look on his face, and so I did it. He never did tell me who the Fat Lady was, but I shined my shoes for the Fat Lady every time I ever went on the air again—all the years you and I were on the program together, if you remember. I don’t think I missed more than just a couple of times. This terribly clear, clear picture of the Fat Lady formed in my mind. I had her sitting on this porch all day, swatting flies, with her radio going full-blast from morning till night. I figured the heat was terrible, and she probably had cancer, and—I don’t know. Anyway, it seemed goddam clear why Seymour wanted me to shine my shoes when I went on the air. It made sense... 

...I’ll tell you a terrible secret—Are you listening to me? There isn’t anyone out there who isn’t Seymour’s Fat Lady... Don’t you know that? Don’t you know that goddam secret yet? And don’t you know—listen to me, now—don’t you know who that Fat Lady really is? . . . Ah, buddy. Ah, buddy. It’s Christ Himself. Christ Himself, buddy.

Or maybe this bit:

Who in the Bible besides Jesus knew--knew--that we're carrying the Kingdom of Heaven around with us, inside, where we're all too goddam stupid and sentimental and unimaginative to look? 

Of course, Salinger, who produced that, died an explosively cranky old loner, obsessed with the minds and vaginas of underage girls. So...

So.

Great job, old man. Real inspiring. I mean, from the grave, you're making me into a better absurdist right now.

Franny took in her breath slightly but continued to hold the phone to her ear. A dial tone, of course, followed the formal break in the connection. She appeared to find it extraordinarily beautiful to listen to, rather as if it were the best possible substitute for the primordial silence itself. But she seemed to know, too, when to stop listening to it, as if all of what little or much wisdom there is in the world were suddenly hers. When she had replaced the phone, she seemed to know just what to do next, too. She cleared away the smoking things, then drew back the cotton bedspread from the bed she had been sitting on, took off her slippers, and got into the bed. For some minutes, before she fell into a deep, dreamless sleep, she just lay quiet, smiling at the ceiling.

Have a nice day, ya fellow morons. :-) Live it out.

<3

six songs - part 4b: the nearly perfect love song

Stars - Hold On When You Get Love and Let Go When You Give It

There's been a lot of talk of love

But that don't amount to nothing

You can evoke the stars above

But that doesn't make it something

And the only way to last

And the only way to live it 

Is to hold on when you get love, 

And let go when you give it... give it.

It's a pretty melody

It might help you through the nighttime

But it doesn't make it easy 

To leave the party at the right time

If I'm frightened, if I'm high

It's my weakness. please forgive it

At least I hold on when I get love, 

And I let go when I give it... give it... give it

What do I do when I get lonely?

What do I do?

Hold on when you get love, 

What do I do when I get lonely?

What do I do?

Hold on when you get love, 

What do I do when I get lonely?

What do I do?

Let go when you give it.

What do I do?

The world won't listen to this song

And the radio won't play it

But if you like it sing along

Sing 'cause you don't know how to say it

Take the weakest thing in you 

And then beat the bastards with it

And always hold on when you get love, 

So you can let go when you give it.

Take the weakest thing in you 

And then beat the bastards with it

And always hold on when you get love, 

So you can let go when you give it... give it... give it

What do I do when I get lonely?

What do I do?

Hold on when you get love

What do I do when I get lonely?

What do I do?

Let go when you give it.

What do I do when I get lonely?

What do I do?

Hold on when you get love

What do I do?

I know it's true, at least I think I do

Nothing that you say or do will make you love me

Forget the song, life will go on

I keep sayin' it from the dark, with you above me

I know it's true, at least I think I do

Nothing that you say or do will make you love me

Forget the song, life will go on

I keep sayin' it from the dark, with you above me

Take the weakest thing in you 

And then beat the bastards with it

And always hold on when you get love, 

So you can let go when you give it. 

Give it... give it... give it... give it... give it... give it.

better than a psychobilly mohawk

Me: I think I'm gonna get an undercut. Then I'm gonna dye my hair a mixture of icy blonde and pastel pink.

Mom: Couldn't you do something normal people do? Like get a tattoo?

Me: Tattoos are permanent. Experience says I don't like anything* passionately for longer than six months at a time.

Mom: True. But you also don't even like pink.

Me: Maybe I'll do rainbows.

Mom: ...are you having a... y'know... crisis?

Me: .....

.....

.....
...


Yes. Yes, I am.

The lazyhawk: a far more likely outcome, given my notoriously sky-high ambitions.

On the other hand, I do have compelling strategy-based reasons for not making my hair into a spectacle at the moment. Maybe next year. EARLY next year.

See... this is why we INTJs so rarely actually do anything observably insane. Our interior simulation schemata always return with manifold reasons why not. There are tons and tons of reasons why one ought to remain an accountant, not run away with the circus, and refrain from sticking one's one-and-only pickle in that plausibly herpetic hole over there. But what a dull reality, eh?

---

* Note: I said "anything" not "anybody". There is a difference.

carl sandburg poems

From Cornhuskers.

I.

New Feet

Empty battlefields keep their phantoms.
Grass crawls over old gun wheels
And a nodding Canada thistle flings a purple
Into the summer’s southwest wind,
Wrapping a root in the rust of a bayonet,
Reaching a blossom in rust of shrapnel.


II.

Three Pieces on the Smoke of Autumn

Smoke of autumn is on it all.
The streamers loosen and travel.
The red west is stopped with a gray haze.
They fill the ash trees, they wrap the oaks,
They make a long-tailed rider
In the pocket of the first, the earliest evening star.
.    .    .
Three muskrats swim west on the Desplaines River.

There is a sheet of red ember glow on the river; it is dusk; and the muskrats one by one go on patrol routes west.

Around each slippery padding rat, a fan of ripples; in the silence of dusk a faint wash of ripples, the padding of the rats going west, in a dark and shivering river gold.

(A newspaper in my pocket says the Germans pierce the Italian line; I have letters from poets and sculptors in Greenwich Village; I have letters from an ambulance man in France and an I. W. W. man in Vladivostok.)

I lean on an ash and watch the lights fall, the red ember glow, and three muskrats swim west in a fan of ripples on a sheet of river gold.
.    .    .
Better the blue silence and the gray west,
The autumn mist on the river,
And not any hate and not any love,
And not anything at all of the keen and the deep:
Only the peace of a dog head on a barn floor,
And the new corn shoveled in bushels
And the pumpkins brought from the corn rows,
Umber lights of the dark,
Umber lanterns of the loam dark.

Here a dog head dreams.
Not any hate, not any love.
Not anything but dreams.
Brother of dusk and umber.


III.

Horses and Men in Rain

Let us sit by a hissing steam radiator a winter’s day, gray wind pattering frozen raindrops on the window,
And let us talk about milk wagon drivers and grocery delivery boys.

Let us keep our feet in wool slippers and mix hot punches—and talk about mail carriers and messenger boys slipping along the icy sidewalks.
Let us write of olden, golden days and hunters of the Holy Grail and men called “knights” riding horses in the rain, in the cold frozen rain for ladies they loved.

A roustabout hunched on a coal wagon goes by, icicles drip on his hat rim, sheets of ice wrapping the hunks of coal, the caravanserai a gray blur in slant of rain.
Let us nudge the steam radiator with our wool slippers and write poems of Launcelot, the hero, and Roland, the hero, and all the olden golden men who rode horses in the rain.

the man watching

illustration by Felicitas Kuhn from the tale "Brother & Sister"

Rilke, as translated by Robert Bly

---

I can tell by the way the trees beat, after
so many dull days, on my worried windowpanes
that a storm is coming,
and I hear the far-off fields say things
I can't bear without a friend,
I can't love without a sister

The storm, the shifter of shapes, drives on
across the woods and across time,
and the world looks as if it had no age:
the landscape like a line in the psalm book,
is seriousness and weight and eternity.

What we choose to fight is so tiny!
What fights us is so great!
If only we would let ourselves be dominated
as things do by some immense storm,
we would become strong too, and not need names.

When we win it's with small things,
and the triumph itself makes us small.
What is extraordinary and eternal
does not want to be bent by us.
I mean the Angel who appeared
to the wrestlers of the Old Testament:
when the wrestler's sinews
grew long like metal strings,
he felt them under his fingers
like chords of deep music.

Whoever was beaten by this Angel
(who often simply declined the fight)
went away proud and strengthened
and great from that harsh hand,
that kneaded him as if to change his shape.
Winning does not tempt that man.
This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively,
by constantly greater beings.

---

the golden leash in this story bothers me a lot

---

The following is only an obliquely related tidbit, as I really don't consider the above poem to be specifically about men, but about us all.

I read Bly's book Iron John: A Book About Men about four years ago when I was pregnant with my second son. What I remember most about it was the author's conviction that a boy must steal the key that lets loose the Wild Man inside him, he cannot merely ask for permission from his parents. Bly recalled a situation in which a young man tried to persuade him that the boy need only request to have the Wild Man freed from his cage (which had been my own initial inclination as well), but Bly came down hard against that option. I have to say I don't yet feel I fully understand this metaphor, even though it has stayed with me for years and I've poked at it quite a lot, hoping to unravel it completely. Perhaps Bly is wrong, or perhaps I am just too inculcated with the culture of polite consent and working-togetherness to embrace the concept of a necessary theft... even if I've already lived it out as a thief in my own way. (Evidently the latter then, hmm?)

A quote that jumped out at me from the book, interestingly along the lines of my previous post:

A university, like a father, looks upright and decent on the outside, but underneath, somewhere, you have the feeling that it and he are doing something demonic. That feeling becomes intolerable because the son's inner intuitions become incongruous with outer appearances. The unconscious intuitions come in, not because the father is wicked, but because the father is remote.

Young people go to the trouble of invading the president's office to bridge this incongruity. The country being what it is, occasionally they do find letters from the CIA, but this doesn't satisfy the deeper longing...

---

"Brother and Sister" is not a Grimm tale I knew in childhood. Instead I grew up with "The Six Swans"... specifically the sad version of the tale in which the princess isn't able to finish all the shirts in time and her last brother is left with an arm permanently deformed because of her failure. The illustration of the final prince and his poor bird arm was assigned to my birth date in an anthology of fairy tales broken into 366 readings. I remember asking my parents to read that story to me over and over, each time disappointed with the ending, wondering how it was that they all "lived happily together," as the story claimed, in the face of irreversible loss. I was equally captivated by the tale of the girl who chopped off her own finger to open the lock on the glass mountain in order to free her brothers, the seven ravens.

Cruel stories for children, maybe. That's life, though. We give away things (and have things taken from us forcibly) that we cannot ever regain... and we are supposed to gimp our way toward happiness regardless.

(Maybe we'll even make it.)

prestige

Etymology: from Latin praestigium (“a delusion, an illusion”) , from praestinguere (“to obscure, extinguish”) ... from praestringere (“to blind; to blindfold; to dazzle or confuse someone”) , from prae (“before”) + stringere (“to press, tighten, compress”).

Brings a whole new meaning to the phrase "prestigious institution", doesn't it?

september 14 xkcd

...is about me.

I also get the skin-crawlies when people use the word "antisocial" to indicate that someone is shy or asocial. 

As in, "I haven't left the house in 3 days, lol, I am so antisocial."

I realize that most dictionaries do support that definition, but that's not what I was (unfortunately) taught in grade school, so I always think of this:

Here's Johnny! ...just staying home and playing WoW today, with his phone turned off.

they asked us to leave feedback

...SO WE DID.

Also saw these:

seems legit

Ka-ching.

So later in the night he comes creeping up to me in the dark, wearing a pink extension.

"Hey," he says in a sultry falsetto, breathing on my neck.

"What?" I answer.

"Hey..."

"WHAT IS IT?"

".... cacao."

his new ringtone on my new phone

... assigning these things to people is way more fun than i'd imagined

zodiasterisms

(for A.K.)

lioness you said
or phoenix, you amended
vermillion ornis fierce and burning
stalking beasts among reeds

you knew
witch that you were, or warlock, full-handed gleaner of seemingly
barren fields
with your crystals, candles, pentagram-kept-in-jest,
empty room
but for pagan books, a sleeping place, and hash pipe, hemp
necklace with the yin-yang
you never studied and never needed to, it came so easy, like hunger

or did it? 'cause there was also
your ragged pack where you said you hid the tabs you'd do what-with like any nameless street-roach insulating self from nameless dangers
god only knows what was under your tidy bedskirt, boy, I did not
look
but the floors shone where your mother scrubbed them clinical
and forgot
that the world is a story writ by Flannery O'Connor:
in this one a professional mama forsakes her own bundle-uh
that she may carry instead the whole city
on her alcoholic back,
functional-like,
'til for lack of tending you hung
stabbed imbibed shot up breathed in
--what have you?

"I knew you'd be a Leo,
from the moment I first saw you"

you said that, city lamplight streaming down on me and you
(shameless for once)
through the window of the guest room in A. Wonderland's house
(her real name!)
your hands on my bare waist.
earlier you'd watched Thelma & Louise as if preparing for exegesis.

I remind you of a lion? Because I'm cowardly?
"Because you're brave, a huntress."
You only see yourself reflected back at you, not me.
"I see both of us. You and you beholding me. Each a lion, each a bird to be born again."

Nemean lioness, then--fine, hippie star-gazer. I will believe because you trembled with fear and want, guileless in your virginity and we did not fuck at any point because your ancient soul, four months younger than mine, knew better. That's why I
trust
you did not lie when you named me
Lion.
But you were no Archer like your own sign,
Nor any Hercules fated to win and wear my vacant hide, yet
You skinny Buddha, font of calmness, dark and gentle
eyes as placid pools of mu
beatific, terrible as a saint to look upon
thoroughly impressed the fear of the void
into me.

my hair was golden then
and long but i have changed it
it has changed me for i
gave all my crowns to the face-sculptors
who hollowed out my eyes and plumped my cheeks
gave me a stare
you would not recognize
me if we passed in the street,
goshawk,
they have sparrowfied my plumage
and deportment
both

i let them

and i always wondered but never found out
if it was her,
your mother,
the white-frocked one
who paddled my errant father in
his own temples
with a jovian bolt,
to slay or to awaken
(thy will be done, lord, either way)
the dragon-snake that ate us up as babes,
you and i,
while she--again--stood by, unmoved

or was she the one who wrote secret notes to herself
over crossed legs, asking without interest
beneath that painting we laughed about together--remember?--the one of a bridge
with no reflection in the water below it, so completely ridiculous
a thing to hang in a place for the already-disturbed
as if they needed prodding along in getting gone enough to be worth helping back to shore:

What animal, little girl? What animal?

A peregrine falcon, doctor x. Like in the Jean Craighead George book.
A wild-bound boy will steal me from my nest, name me Frightful, feed me
watch me fly free,
keep close 'til the day I'm killed.
But, no. No, no. Not so. Not really. Not true. Not for me.
A bug.
Yes, my final answer.
A tiny, crawly glitch. That I might hide where no one will see me.
A bug. If you so much as move your shoe I fear I will be
crushed
my broken feelers still probing the breeze, vainly,
as my guts and shards of exoskeleton wetly glint,
laid open for viewing and consumption.
For I am twelve and I do not believe in anything so fantastical as human flight, doctor x.

lies. i do believe in flight, but not of the airborne variety
instead a mad descent
scuttling wide-eyed away from your near-limitless love, Garuda,
like a rat from a broom
or as a beetle eschews the sunlight for her dank but lithic sanctuary
down below,
phoenix? yes, dear heart, we are all continually ash-rising from bleak Earth
but I did not let you attempt (maybe, maybe...) to burn me up
so--
my purpose in legend, in your own short book
aborted.

what then?

in the age of tubes in tubes
criss-crossed circuitry connecting
masses mashed up, frigid closeness,
frenzied swarming orgasmic apathy, bottomless and omni-present,
you and I
the both of us, lovers, for the nonce
walked out at separate times, for separate reasons,
from our parents' snow-packed cabin,
trecked through the wood with Gemini gait and
leapt off the edge of the map
into the memory hole--
falling faceless, songless
leaving behind no trails, no cybernetic breadcrumbs
for any circling birds