Friday 23 July 2010

Looking

He looks at me like something and I back myself into this corner and he laughs
I move my hand like he does
Slide down the wall like this; legs splayed at some awkward angle, not because I have to but because I think he might like it
he leaves the room

I am lying on his floor strewn with some kind of rubble and other things, smoking a cigarette.
I look at him with this extensive list of desires or maybe needs.
I am trying to burn them into the back of his neck.
"Fuck off" he says, without turning towards me.
"I'm painting"
he is removing the caps from various tubes of paint, sniffing them tentatively and/or squeezing them onto the back of then -based on some mysterious assessment of the results - he throws them either into a green shoebox or somewhere over there towards a dark corner.
I smoke my cigarette
only it isn't a cigarette
I smoke and feel this overwhelming sadness for the discarded paint lost to that corner.
later, when he's gone out, I gather them and I place them with some care in a box of their own.

His chest is bare and the tattoo of a feather curls across it from near the centre
just here, the place you touch to signify your self
To the right, this delicate arc above the nipple.

Something like dancing
an intense, damp heat and a bass that reverberates exhilarating in my ribcage, my heart and I sway against some arch blond boy wearing mostly white
He pulls at my arm, pulls me outside and the air is cold on my hot, damp skin. I breathe for the first time. People are smoking and there's that smell and there's others - like rotting yeast and sugar, drain and city rain. Around a shallow corner he forces me backwards, my feet disturb bottles.

Now he is looking at me the way I want him to. Like this arrangement of skin and flesh and bone speaks to him about something mysterious and valuable
I don't know
Pupils dilate, a star right there burns and then blur and when I am mesmerised then he falls on me.

Growls obscenities close into my ear until my knees buckle. This, and the bright pain of my arm forced upwards behind my back empties me sufficiently. I am a space, a cypher he can use in order to understand something about himself; blazing there inside me
I am still there resting in this empty space
"Don't -" I whisper, much too late and he makes a fist in my hair and slams my face into the wall. He looks intently at this work, but it's too dark.

At my home I sit on the table and he puts iodine on the cuts with a pale blue handkerchief. He turns the lights up very high because, he says:
he wants to see more

5 comments:

  1. WOW!I think this is my favorite piece so far. Beautiful!

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  2. you think so? i don't know - but thank you

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  3. Okay... at least I think I understand this one again. Well, somewhat. The next two (I'm going through them backwards) had me completely puzzled... I'll have to mull them over. I like the mood and the scene. Anasını satayım, I still don't even know if you're a dude or a dudette. And it bugs me like hell that I can't figure it out from your writing.
    What struck me most about this one is how, well, I was first going to say "passive" your narrator is. But that's not even it. It's more... it's like the narrator is more of a stranger than the painter. The painter is mysterious and wantonly cruel, but I understand him somewhat. The narrator... says please don't, but stays. Thinks about the discarded tubes of paint but not about him/herself. I think I was less horrified about the violence than about the childlike, puppet-like way the narrator let's him patch up the wound in the end. Makes me think of a line from a Neal Stephenson novel: He was watching statistics of his own death, as it was happening to him. Looking. Aptly named.
    "I am a space, a cypher he can use in order to understand something about himself."
    Spooky. Beautiful.

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  4. it's so cool to chance upon your comments dropped like this. I really appreciate time you spend reading and trying to decode + the Turkish swearing - i don't know what it says - something about your/my mother's whore?

    It's kind of hard to respond to your thoughts about the themes here - obviously there is a whole bundle of experience that I know my narrator/self is clutching that no-one else can rifle through so easily. I guess I'm just exploring notions of power and identity - but I'm more interested in the reactions and interpretations of the reader than any original intention that might have been there.

    You know, I never considered that my sex might be ambiguous? not sure how I feel about it. I just read through the stories on your blog and there's only like - one place - where yr explicit about your own. Never read Neal Stephenson - don't know who he is - should I?

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  5. Re: Neal Stephenson - only if you like intelligent albeit adolescent, postmodern yet commercial scifi... ^_^ (Cryptonomicon and Snow Crash are the best to start...)

    Other than all the other intellectuals in Mr. Coopers fascinating circle here, I really don't know anything avant-garde, I have no appreciation of poetry past emo-mainstream like Baudelair, Villon, Auden or even total mainsteam like Tennyson. (I LOVE Ulysses.) Almost all those artists whose names are banied about on DC's blog I have never even heard about. You can see my reading list (and films and music choices) in my sidebar. I'm totally gauche and bourgeois. But I love to take something, anything, and just think about it, and try to figure out how it works and what it does. Like, I don't know, the emotional equiv of a watch - take it appart and look at the little cogs and wheels that make us tick.

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