February 24, 2003 - 4:25 p.m.
fragments...
lost... truly... thoughts scatter and recollect.. some forever kept, others gone.. into the land of computer errors that seem to eat everything that i think means something.
i wrote about a passage i found and find that maybe just thinking it is enough to work this through... or maybe having lost it all, i will forget what it meant or that i ever thought these things at all..
a napkin, four years old, as young as this moment, kept for reasons i can't remember...
she says,
nao esqueca de mim.. sua amiga de ontem, hoje e espero que sempre...
these things, it seems, mean something...
force me to remember promises i'd forged with open eyes and honest intentions...
in the white light of cold february, i am cast into words alligned with red, red dirt, soil that remains etched in me, under my skin, memories of ties pressed into white hip bones, scarring the naked skin with lines of hot tiles and cruel smiling sunlight that promised her the world...
this is not
what i meant to say..
not what i started to say...
it was a retrospective... about words and what they mean... what they come to mean.. when my fingers hurt from the guitar that somehow found its way to them.. through years of misplaced intention to learn, relearn and express, these thoughts, with me for so long...
when caetano veloso meant nothing and everything to me... finding truth in words by making them mine... making my language loom louder in my own hands, a tua presenca e negra, negra, negra.. i wrote from this fragile blackness, wrote my desire into being.. found words for what i never knew i could feel...
i wrote her love poems in a land far away....
nowadays, we don't put roses on disposables... not on anything we know we will throw away... even dixie sticks to daisies...
and they say... some things change...
these songs i hear.. so real and personal.... individual, familiar yet so ... not ours... not mine to manipulate..
i am disappointed every morning that i wake up,
i am disappointed by the feeling of waking up next to you...
call me up, let me know that...
my sick guilt is so unwelcome, so unwelcome...
i hear the words i wanted to say to you then,
when you told me.. i'd hurt your heart...
i wanted to say, welcome to the world you've built me... but never had the courage to make you see... somehow you found it on your own...
when i had left you for arms that could hold me, with a presence i didn't have to imagine...
i hurt her heart too ... in the end,
when i left her for arms that held me better...
best...
in the end, maybe, i needed to imagine my love in colours that were spelled with accents, because my own were so degraded by vowels that fall like stone... grey... textured but rotting..
you are no blue i have ever seen...
i made my wish that day in that kitchen, on those floor tiles, whose colour has no words that i know...
when for no reason i could understand, my lashes were heavy with tears... because i understood that your presence would never leave me, would shake and unsettle me...
making everything after into some song or other...
making me long to tell it, describe it...
making me see things in pictures... pressed on my eyelids, spilling over my lips...
needing all at once to be able to always remember...
the pieces
