stand still.

i always have the best intentions of resisting you.
but you show up in my dreams and drug me with something where the dose goes from a needle into my eye. it carves what i see into delicate red lines. you tell me, 'i think i'm going through a phase.' you tell me that in the dream but you must mean it in real life too.
your novel isn't out yet.

i'm fairly certain this dream means i need to write more. put everything else away. or it might be about how we argued about the right angle for a tattoo that is text. i remember the first time i saw your chest with that written across it. we were in a cab and you'd come back. it was november and you were wearing a sweater and i must have seen one of the higher letters. the d maybe.

oh, pre-rain valencia in the morning.
her name. and mine.
hearts hanging from the telephone wires.

just because i think this doesn't mean i wish it. i know about the neck and every tilt of it. and what the tilting means. i know what i'd be willing to give up in an instant.

oh, and there is also everything i know about dying.
it's an interesting side effect though, isn't it? you didn't mean to show how much it meant, or what it might reveal. but it did. it seemed like something little and it peeled back, then peeled back some more.

i think i might be in love with henry miller. imagine you could order the world, he said. what would you really do? respect the privacy of the other person's soul and then you will know how to love them. i like reading his words out loud at midnight before we watch the daily show on my computer.

'listen,' i say to you.
'what do you think it means?' you say.
your head is on my lap and i can picture your private soul like this crackling, burning, circular, magical, wild, and encoded thing. so it means that.

it isn't enough to be happy.
i love indecipherable french movies if i'm in the right mood. chandeliers and dresses with lace backs and murder and gardens where the shadows are cast the wrong way and monologues in french detail the waiting, passion, death.

i took a series of polaroids of the ocean and the sun and you. they all developed into a spectrum of blue before fading to a pale yellow. we walked along the beach, along the graffiti of bison, along the tide coming in like we always do. we face south toward the glittering beauty of all that pollution. everyone has always thought doom was coming. the surfers so far out, but only up to their knees at the sandbar. living in europe between two world wars. either i can get my money back or frame all eight of them, in varying degrees of their faulty development, a thumb print, the shadow of your profile, what should have been the sea.

'what are artifacts?' he asks.
'why did they bury weapons in their graves?'

put everything away for an hour. even my writing. the pursuit that gives me my shape and my meaning. scan my brain for dreams in the morning. cork my sedatives. i pour wine on our house plant. it doesn't get better than this still life: pasta on thrift store plates of sunbursts, wine with a pretty font, my computer with my spy story up on the screen. i'd also made a list to include the 18th floor, and us in our best, and manhattans in candlelight. my skirt is belted high at my waist and gives me posture like my great-great-grandmother might have had. we know a tiny bit, but the more we grasp for it, the further fictional it slides.

i drive highway one in a car that isn't ours.
'it's too fucking beautiful,' we yell at the turns where we come upon the treacherous opening up to the water and down. we listen to thrash and radio shows about capsized ships. it takes a boat an hour to sink. we disagree over the part where she drowns or swims to shore. i'm pretty sure she drowns.

also:
-beer in giant glasses on sunday with the golden globes on silent and the bartender with a broken arm.
-'my wife lost her mittens,' you tell the ticket taker. sometimes i like to hear you say, 'my wife,' and stand near you and just hear the phrase in the air, like in the air of the movie theatre. and i am the wife who lost her mittens in the theatre, and i need to go back in now with my husband to find them. and then we will take the train home and we will talk about our day and we will say, 'i had such a nice day with you.'
-plenty of this is hard...looking for jobs and going to job interviews, having jobs, and counting our money. ezra pound sent henry miller a postcard that asked, 'do you ever think about money?' it would be interesting to be a very poor person who never thought about money.
-or you could look at it this way: today is the only thing. it's like all days in that way. each one of them, in their turn, are the absolute only thing.