For my love, 2004.

This year began in a pub on the Belle Ile en Mer in the presence of French folk and great beer. It will end tomorrow night here in Philadelphia with swirling fireworks and a list of study techniques. I am listening to Ry Cooder and Manuel Galban's Mambo Sinuendo.

I would like to think I am in France now. That this house I am sitting at (which is not mine) could be a foreign location. I take my coffee in the round bottom cups with a blue stripe around the edge. Just like the cup I drank cider out of on the island. I am not riding a bicycle; instead, I am running the old trail down by the Schuylkill River which I ran on all summer long in the intense heat - mostly at night when my core body temperature could remain below 120.

I would like to make some kind of resolution. Resolution? Resolve? Remit? Reconvene? Reconcile? Retaliate? I would like to hear yours first. Then I will tell you mine.

So long for now, from the field, this is Liberty reporting….

Hem (home) a simple history

Here it is. Birch wood floors. Someone came from Chile at the end of the 60's. I can hear the faint sounds in the accent, in the words. There, sitting on the natural wool and blue couch is a woman with dark hair cut straight across. A line falls at her chin. Eva also has this haircut but her hair is white blond. She grew up on Lidingö. The first family with a swimming pool. A swimming pool so you don’t have to walk to the edge of the sandless coast and admire Poland. Constantly covered except for a few weeks in the heart of summer.

Do you hear the percussion? Jazz in Täby. This is the house I grew up in. We move left to right and then back again. Doing dishes after a glass of lite beer and some riced potatoes. No need for mental transportation tonight. I see the advent candles in everyone’s window while walking home. I concentrate on every single light – count. The snow is ice cream, the stones are chocolate chips.

Up and down the felt stairs to rooms of silence and then again. Left and then right again. Night and day are one time. Time cut by a cup of Citron tea – late afternoon, morning, the middle of the night. There is always a wanderer, a neighbor, a closer than close, who wants to hear your stories and tell theirs.

Tonight I will walk down the blocks of cracked and salted streets towards a tea date. There is no snow ice cream here. I have a dog now, she will guide the way. I will try to listen for the chimes on Pine Street on the highest apartment with French doors leading to a porch which is a kind of porthole.

http://www.thesoundofsomething.blogspot.com/

I believe the degree in here might be close to sub-zero. And I am inside the biochem lab, pouring my second cup of Russian Caravan and the sun is glaring in. I fear that the Racket Sports might take over as the more amusing of all blogs. Is there agreement? Divya Victor. Lady of the word.

Coney Island

bump your ass off,
originally uploaded by Liberty.

Don't you wish you could play guitar and wire a light?

I've been looking for this song forever. Here it is on a cd I just downloaded. And boy does it feel like fate. "I keep thinking that time will take them away, but these feelings won't go away." Tonight there is a bouquet of blinking lights overhead. Planes and paling clouds and ice eternal. I bet we really live inside one of those fingers of crystal that grow on the edge of the airplane window, on the outside.

What is on this week’s reading list? The streets are filled with plastic bottles and bags. I want this all over the place. I want a musical implant. You hear that?

My sonic hearing has deadened. Replace silence by the comforting sound of rushing air. I think I was missing the street sounds of summer when it was too cold to leave the window open at night. I live in an artificial environment until spring. Too bad we aren’t all Swedish babies who nap in their prams on the back porch during freezing weather so as to breathe fresh air.

Donut/munk/doughnut

My horoscope for the week:

As I meditated about what would be the perfect holiday gift for you, I kept coming back to the fantasy of a thousand doughnuts. Nothing pleased me more than the mental image of your living room floor covered with boxes of Bavarian cream, chocolate frosted, jelly-filled, glazed, and apple crumb doughnuts. Here's the astrological explanation for my intuition: I think fate plans to blow your mind with sweet extravagance in 2005. Receiving a thousand doughnuts would be a metaphorical rehearsal.

Frank O'Hara

Our responsibilities did not begin in dreams, though they began in bed.


"Memorial Day 1950"

The Apple

She eats an apple every day.

We sit approximately three and a half feet from one another. She chews every fiber of the apple bit until it is pureed to a fine pulp. The eating continues. It is as methodic as any statistical analysis. Bite (very slow), chew (count to 100), swallow, repeat. She analyzes medical data in a spreadsheet all day. Her motions, besides the apple, are solely based on the scroll and right click keys of her mouse. The mouse is dark blue and silver. You can see the outline of her finger, even when she is not sitting there. Click, Click, Bite, Chew, Click, Click, Click.

Circle

So, today in a snotty haze I crossed town in my car which, overnight, had its left-side mirror busted out. It looks like some kid took a stick to it. I'd say this city is going to eat me alive. I wanted to find a new winter coat in a thrift store called Circle Thrift which is on Frankford Avenue in Fishtown. It was worth the trip. I got a coat for a dollar although my friend told me I looked pregnant wearing it and my housemate wondered if I had stollen it off his grandmother. It cost a dollar. How can I go wrong? It's like my brother says, "if you get shit on it, you can just chuck it." Right-o.

I have been obsessed with making anything fit into a poem. There was a piece of waxy paper blowing around on the sidewalk. I thought it surely could be a metaphor for something, couldn't it? I think these thoughts go hand in hand with the latest email I received from my friend Erin who lives in DC. In it, she refered to us as women who hate to hear men say shit like "You'd be prettier if you smiled more."