trash vs. time, with sock-em boppers

Decided to stay in and make art for once, holding Greg captive. I don't think he minded too much though.

more new old stuff

I haven't mentioned yet that I have a tractor fetish. Holla holla holla.

posting oldies

I'm going to start posting some of my old songs periodically so whoever comes across this blog can get the full perspective of my inexperience. Oh, and perhaps a picture or two to go along. I'm all about storytelling.



Here's one right now! First song, circa May 2008.
Elephant in the Room

hey ma, hey ma feliz cumpleanos

look what I did, hang it on your fridge

Dr. Seuss

Song time. It's new, it's tapdancey.

"Let's rub our feet together our souls will greet each other, let's walk in the dark till the sun says hello

let's clap our hands together we'll keep the time forever cause nothing else matters with your hand in my own"

Let your hears do the earring
Dr. Seuss

hearts on faces EP

So, I have a band. We made an EP. Greg designed the cd insert and I made it into t-shirts, too.

Check out the t-shirts on his blog! http://gregferris.blogspot.com/

The EP looks like this:

Our website looks like this: www.myspace.com/maidmosephineandtheequines

oh, and sometimes I take pictures.

a day at work. longboat key, dead insects and empty rooms.

sometimes I make pictures

Figure drawing final series. Fun with throwaway materials, acid-inlaid substrate. Great idea for archival art. It's all temporary, just to varying degrees. Right?

co-co-nuts

what I think... a short list of favorites. Perhaps, perhaps.
My favorite song is your heartbeat, singing from cages as we're hung individually from ceilings of doubt, the cap-ital of reservations and shortcomings.
My favorite phrase:
Je Ne Sais Pas.

cats and horses go to Tallahassee

Forgot to post pics from Greg and my trip to Tallahassee (and back again). There is no pictoral snapshot of the 24 hour sleep marathon or the mattress dumping, although I won't easily forget those moments regardless.

music jam sesh at the BlahHa (now a Fine House) house:

And I finally met Lita, whose namesake song is posted below. I think this is my favorite picture I've taken of Greg to date.


My turn...


A little song I wrote on my git-ar for whoever will listen:

Sing Lita, Sing

A Broken Clock Is Never Late

I wanted to kiss you goodbye but I didn’t want to wake you and I want today to start ok
I wanted to kiss you goodbye but I didn’t want to wake you, you had a rough day yesterday
Yes I’ll miss you but don’t know what I’m supposed to do
Can I do anything at all?

A Broken Clock Is Never Late

Santa Claus

It's cold.
Yesterday was spent recovering from hangovers. A lot of them. I laugh at myself, at the ridiculousness I create every damn second and none of it's intended to be funny. Coffee, cigarettes (ineffective recovery methods but ritual nonetheless) and I'm off on my way to do something else somewhere but not there. On a mission, I say, so I can leave without feeling too guilty that I probably won't get to the things I intended to. I'm consumed with thoughts of now, of yesterday, and tomorrow seems so damn hard when today's already dying alone. The ones I wished to share it with are preoccupied.
My preoccupation is them.
Theirs is other people, places, things. So busy. So involved.
The internet. Saw a picture of a future girlfriend to someone out there. It wasn't me.
See how this doesn't work?
I think I need to get a dog (strike that) I think I want to get a dog.
I put too much faith in some, not enough in others, and I'm disappointed all the time by behavior of those so newly placed on my good list.
Santa Claus, Santa Claus, Santa Claus had the right idea.
Always check it twice (spell check Santa, too).
Can I be a word inventor? I mean, is that possible? I invented a lot of them last night being a blithering idiot, recovering from information, from sentiment that left me speechless. I plug my ears; sing la la la, everybody! It won't hurt if I can't hear it.

(Santa Claus isn't real)

Fell into disbelief of love and those little things that won't work in the long run, it seems, because right now it's already tainted. I am shaking my head at myself, preventing my vision from focusing on the reality I thought I constructed pretty damn well. Theme songs, names that don't matter, creatures I've yet to identify, pictures of faces – they're all stuck in this wheel, the man keeps turning it and pulling out letters, numbers, calling them out to the crowd to see if anyone's really listening.
B-I-N-G-O.
I want to find the one that's listening.

Sarasota Short Story: Bry(i)ans

Went to play pool somewhere, location is irrelevant I guess. Was unsuspecting walking in, but that soon ended when one of the 267 "Bry(i)ans" I've met in life came up to hug me. I didn't recall knowing this particular Bry(i)an and had no desire to make him more familiar to me. My non-Bry(i)an friend pretended to be my boyfriend to prevent said familiarity. I loudly called him dear, as if this well-calculated plan would somehow make my life easier.

Met "Will." Will was with his ladyfriend. She was never introduced but I refrained from labeling staggering Will as poor-mannered. I'd give him a chance to right his wrongs.

"See that woman over there? I love her, but she drives me crazy sometimes. Ask her something she doesn't know. I can't ask her anything she doesn't know."

I'm not much help in these situations.
Will, however, was of very much help to me.

"The ball is like a bull. Wherever you hit it, that's the way it's gonna charge. You gotta take slices of the angles, you see, like swiss cheese. Slice slice slice slice slice tiny little slices of the angle, offer the cheese to your opponent. Don't rush it. Just like swiss cheese."

Ladyfriend is sitting at her table, smirking. I am sitting as well, trying not to lock eyes or stare at Will's earring. It is very gold. His eyes are very red.

Love in Three Acts

Love in Three Acts
I.
Dogs with shrunken legs jingle on the sidewalk, rapid breathing oblivious to toxins we put here for him to inhale. We didn't mean to do it, of course. But the only thing I can think about is
"Where did I lose you?"
Where are your footsteps, less rapid than mine but reaching further into the future with each fall?
Where is that place I liked to go to, encased by the simplicity of notes pounding, resonating underneath your fingers?
"I don't know."
I want that again, so fleeting are my faculties to catalog new memories, because I just want to live in those moments that already existed prior to each passing second I breathe in the same air as dogs, cats, criminals.
We all share something (blood?) warm, subzero, pulsing, stagnant, racing, frozen, present, absent, and I can still see. My eyes still function to follow the fall of this pen, the traces of your footsteps that now just walk further away.

II.
I guess you could say I'm in mourning of something still alive but gone from myself. It's the demise of lessons learned in spite of everything I ever to wish to forget.
"Can I have a do-over?"
Because I've learned how to torture, forgot how to love.
I've entangled the best intentions of someone naive, unsuspecting, unspoiled, optimistic, into the twisted pockets of a former misery I'm slowly extracting myself from.
And he was willing, undeterred, because of some unexplained magnetism - love - he felt towards me.
Where did I learn all that?

III.
"I learned it from you."

FIN

nonsense.

I am lost in a fever of gypsies
Selling their wires and candy ropes
I am hoping to buy a boulder
To steady my telescope
I’ll magnify the heathens
And shower in the morning light
I hope I’ll undiscover the traces
Of where I might end up tonight

Sarasota Short Story: Bicycle Ride

I'm in the open air, heat reaches my pores and bounces off. A car rolls to a stop. The driver, a smoker, has a missing front tooth and an artist's beret.

I'm thinking: I wonder what he did today.

He smiles at me, moves his mouth, and makes the ok sign with his pointer finger and thumb. I can't understand him over the smells of summer.

"Nice legs," he says.

Again, I am bewildered.

I've found these holes
where sunlight is sinking in spots here and there
wherever did my sunshine go
i put it on a milk carton
but it never returned.
It must have found a better place
someone to bask in its growing heat
cause here the light is fading fast
and my mind is fading with it.

the rain is coming with valiant flair
i cannot swallow toxic air
if I escaped away from here
would I ever see your face again?

8:25 am

oh mornings
with your coffee and sunshine
and loads of friggin opportunity
though I can't even fathom
what I will do today.

Yes, it's nice to sit outside
right about now
but I have all my stuff here
in my room
and I don't even have to leave it.

Oh, self-induced hermeticism
and lexicononinventism
and blah blah blech
I'm far too tired
to be proper right now.

Sarasota Short Story: Wednesday, Post Nine.

9:32 pm. Man in running shorts, cowboy hat, other acoutrements approaches me. Flip flop noise comes from plastic shoes. Carries an umbrella, tells me I'm "ADP. All Day Pretty." I thank him. He also tells me I shouldn't drink my coffee with the lid on. Something to the extent of "the warmness does funny things to the plastic." Plus, he adds, it will taste better. I told him I have my reasons for the lid.

"You know black Kim..." man at the other table says. Says it costs him twelve dollars a month to stay at the YMCA. The tablemate, a woman's shoulder, is scarred. She wears a bikini top and a gritty laugh. People I know are inside yet I'm out here, withdrawn from something and drawn into something else, a conversation that's not mine. I know I'm avoiding something but I don't know what.

I'm reading "The Me Nobody Knows," copyright 1969. Page 20:
"I am not like all the other children. I'm different because I like to hear birds singing but I don't like to hear people shouting. It is not nice to hear people yelling or shouting in the street."

sometimes I catch people looking
their senses are taking me in
I'm wondering how neurons are firing
make my image permanent?

I'm sitting on a blanket
hitting notes for the turtles to hear
the world is nonexistent
save the space between my ears

"Big Boob Italian Food." Wish I had big boobs.

A day in June, indeterminate numerals preceding.

People people people.
Everything's cool, remember?
The method of paint chips peeling from wood
the sight of a sparrow is changing my mood
the world that surrounds me is fascinating
to see the potential in everything.

Reading "the White Album." Joan Didion. Page 55
"Diane also reports his enthusiasm for the Museum of Man in Paris, which seemed to him to offer, in the hour he spent there, 'a complete education,' the 'entire history of the human race... in summary form. '"

DownTown Universe

Freestyle walking, freestyle breath in
your prowess of droll, improvised speech
(unfathomable, on-the-spot!)
skimming off the top your knowledge of the world
separating it out, collecting what is solid just for me.
I am in awe---> or, you could say
taken aback.

Show me things of the world I do not know,
might never see
(the places that have existed far longer than you or I)
the people that built them,
that founded pieces of our modern world.

I'll show you the colors as vibrant as the objects intended,
light is to be interpreted by your eyes
(yellow yearns to be captured so vividly)
It's not in your fingers or muscles,
it's all about seeing, I say.

But really I must listen more closely to you
hearing what you say between what you don't
(sensing the tension in the air)
the pitch of your exhale
whether the soundwaves confess your bewilderment.

These things are what I know to be truest
most concrete connotation
(the least sturdy in scientific ideology)
they are the constructs
proven volatile by their own volition.

Show me about the movement of time,
of words and their transendence into the world
(I want to know more of your soul)
brushed away by wind or still permanent?
An unmoved nonmass of love versus nothing
traits that know no weight and still
are the heaviest of all.

Marina Far Away

Man on a boat all by his lonesome. Sharks are churning, his heart burning for someone far away. Paddling towards nothing, lost in the current, while a bird flies overhead. The man's vessel, his only companion, is also dead. A bone, bleached white, is the remnant of a skeleton once wrapped in life's intricacies. His stomach is blank again. The mind decays as the wind fades, the stars have all gone home. Rest comes over, eyes closed in reminiscing 'bout the people he once knew. The house that held people, church's sharp steeples impaling those that don't believe. Their souls lie on stakes as examples. The bodies won't wake from a constant state of past. No more worrying.

What is love? (as written sometime in March 2008)

Love is so different each time you feel it, it's caging freeing learning dying outstretched arms, all-encompassing. Sweeps softly, hits hard never know where it's taking you. Guess the one thing in common is that I'm led there. Love always leads the way. Guides me, holds my hand and head when I need it, out reaching branches into a vast void of growing living things, that one tie to the rest of what is good in the world. Seashells and stones, all permanent, and in contrast is me - sitting on such pillars, monuments of that permanence, and all I am is flesh organs feelings temporary. This breeze hits me as a transient voice speaking what I need to hear, love is in the air as they say and here it comes. A gushing, blustery, unfeeling force, cold or hot, gentle or fierce, always changing like love does. I cannot adjust to it, always putting on or taking off a jacket or sweater or sheild from letting these things hurt me or grace me. Locking it all out is what I do, I suppose. Idyllic scenery, tumultous forthcoming of doubt from my elbow moving at the joint and allowing this hand to transcend its own consience and just record what's required of it. It's calming now, is it ever enough? Is this love ever enough for me? No, I say. I must dig, chip away at sedimental impact to find my core, my heart underneath the sedimental accumulation, calloused and hard but yearning to be found. Find a way. Nine more minutes, all I have to this world. What will I say within them? What can I convey while the arms keep moving, how will my words affect this place? They won't. I'm glad. I'm glad my doubts, ruminations of impractical and irrational ideas never reach any other eyes or ears. Don't think about it, some say, but I say think all you want. It won't change the world but it can change you, save you, from diving off into some lost cavernous existence not knowing who you are at heart. Love isn't cloudlike, isn't similar to anything else. Its definition is exclusive to its own vocabulary untranslatable to English or any other audible language. It's soley felt within. I just hope that, amidst all this uncertainty, I can feel it to the extent of sustaining reciprocated love on what I can give to another. I am afraid of giving too much for fear of not receiving it back, but that's how the story goes. Selflessness is the epitome of gifting yourself to someone else. I know one thing for certain among all of this - the one thing in this world that will sustain me is love, always.

myakka's the place for epiphanies

Just Some Thoughts To Start The Morning

Roar of trucks in transport, deliver chairs and papers, with recipients delighting or sighing heavily. What lies within the boxes - a greeting or farewell?

Everything boils down to that.

The envelopes are unopened, stacked and ready for kindling because I don't care what's in them.

I open all the wrappers - they're statements, letters, notices but I didn't care to notice that you were always pulling away.

I felt your vacant stare; your heart was in two states but I hoped I was just imaginative.

My throat is trying to stop this poison I'm ingesting but my mind manufactures it and I must be the one to take the fall for everyone's sake.

Metropolis underfoot. What lies beneath even those dwellings, the mounds of hurried construction, and the weight of their survival?

Kafka on the Shore

"She leaves behind a damp pillow, wet with her tears. You touch the warmth with your hand and watch the sky outside gradually lighten. Far away a crow caws. The Earth slowly keeps on turning. But beyond any of those details of the real, there are dreams. And everyone's living in them."

page 300

sixty three miles and no feet to take me.

The things I have and the things I want are sixty three miles away. I don't know how else to describe it outside of that.

The question of why put to the hundredth power.
Then multiply it over and over again.

If only mathematics could cure the question. It would sure make the boundaries of this hell clear-cut, make crystal out of thin air and close my mind into a box of right angles and the right thing to do in which dreams of being with you run slowly into the ground.

That is
(vaguely)
Me trying to say that I don't very much like living in boxes.
Also,
I miss you.

But you knew that before I typed the first character in this mess of symbols and symbolism.

None are necessary, all are cathartic.
And, in the best world of worlds, reconstructive.

Tuesday morning.

I saw the walking man again on the way to work. Mid-thirties, determined demeanor, arms swinging violently. It was the only thing that made me laugh today.

I also had a nine-round match with a junebug this morning. I was reading, gathering my thoughts before work, and the junebug baited me. I swatted it off my knee, but that was just what he came here for. It was on. I stood up, fight stance, and focused on erratic movements. He got too close too often, but he also took a few good swats with my book. He retreated.

I sat down again to read, but the second round started as soon as junebug lined up his attack. This went on for several minutes. I probably looked out of my mind. I threw in the towel finally and went in to work.

I bet he's gloating.

Sarasota Short Story: Strangers.

10:28 on Monday night and I'm wandering around downtown. For what reason? I don't know. I don't feel at home at my home, and I knew if I went back I couldn't sleep. I called him three times, like a pathetic withering female, expecting him to pick up. He didn't.

A man, rough with life's latest turmoils, stopped me and asked if I knew Sarasota well. I said yes, but he was asking about where all the shelters are and I didn't know anything about that. He said he had an hour to find $10 to stay at the Salvation Army because he was separated from his wife. I told him I understood his feeling of displacement and gave him what he needed. I really hope he used it to sleep somewhere safe.

I ran into three English gentlemen later on the street.
"It must be fate that we have seen you twice this evening," one said, and invited me for a drink.
The older man said that women should be treated like princesses.
"Order whatever you want."

Newcastle, french onion soup, chicken fingers.

He called, and I shortened what would have been a blubbering, too-long conversation into what was necessary in err of being vague and hung up. The strangers and I talked about buddhism, food, and divorce. We also discussed the buoyancy of watermelons and the tall man recounted a too-long nipple piercing story. It was quite interesting.

I must say, strangers make the best conversations.

Insomnia makes me miss out on things.

Bassline: 2 measures alone
Simple drums or maracas

It's the recurring dream that just isn't enough
it's just a crazy thing my sleeping mind thinks up
i like imagining the two of us in love
at least in my dreams

We always wake up in the moonlight
When all the children are asleep
We always sleep through all the daylight
When all the folks are counting sheep

Hello hello my friend you’re always in my dreams
Riding a tricycle or building pink machines
You seem at home amongst the astronauts and doves
And all the crazy things my sleeping mind thinks up
(It might sound crazy but I picture us in love)
at least in my dreams)….

We always wake up in the moonlight
no matter what the time of day
I’m tossing turning always dreaming
To keep the stranger thoughts at bay

Hello hello my friend you’re always in my dreams
Flying a kite or picking apples in Belize
You seem at home amongst the astronauts and doves
And all the crazy things my sleeping mind thinks up
(It might sound crazy but I picture us in love)
at least in my dreams)….

I always wake up in the moonlight
When wolves run freely through the fields
I wish I could go back to dreamland
Where all the answers are revealed

Hello hello my friend you’re always in my dreams
Watching a puppet show or climbing paper trees
You seem at home amongst the astronauts and doves
And all the crazy things my sleeping mind thinks up
My one recurring dream is you and I in love
(It might sound crazy but I picture us in love)
at least in my dreams)….

This sweet maiden
Was locked in a tower
Hoping for safekeeping
By the walls she grew to like after awhile
Enjoyed her prison
As it brought her solace
understanding, she knew those walls
like the back of her hand.
Alas, she was convinced to leave her respite
In search of happier experiences
She found love one day
By a minstrel that played to her window
And wanted to see the rest of the world
So she picked open all the locks
As she knew the combinations
And stepped outside into the light for the first time
Embraced by the man that lured her out.

And now,
The minstrel travels alone
and the maiden floats out to sea.

Vapors

Simple and clean
And unmessed and not perfect
But something to behold.
Keep seeing vapors of you in front of me
Grey, curling, twisting, elusive
Even when you’re far away
Somehow it’s all still there.
So now that you’re here
And I’m weary
Sing me a lullaby, love
And send me off to sleep
So I may see your face there
Exactly as I remember it.

Things

I have always been a genuinely happy person
If I have the room.
Do you know what I mean?

My room to be happy has no walls
except when I need them on bad days
quixotic and fleeting, to fence me in.

The span of my room is just enough
to breathe for myself yet think of you,
brilliant and whole.

It’s the place where I set my keys, rest my head
in that room, it’s all there
I need little else.

Everything else is just things
just somethings and nothings
these things no one needs to be whole.

I had a dream the other day, you were in it too. We were in an elaborate mansion that was crumbling in the corners. The rooms were filled with birds, and each time we tried to catch one it would multiply. There were thousands of birds: in the kitchen sinks, swimming in the pool, on top of shelves. I had a net and I was jumping through the air, trying to catch them as they flew but that didn't work too well.
"What are you doing here?" I said.
"I just want to pet one of the sparrows," you cried.
"Just brooowsing," said the owl, an incredulous stare in his eyes.
"Free as my own species!" said the sparrow.
"I like walking*finding treasure," said the two heads of the crane.
"Missed me, ha!" said the mockingbird.
"I love to sing," said the canary.
Nevermind, I thought. Too many creatures in this conversation. Then we left all the birds in the rooms and went somewhere else. We figured the birds needed some alone time. I wish I could have seen them all in color. My dream was fuzzy so I don't know where we ended up going. I won't soon forget my bird mansion dream though.

Why I work for the weekend

Petting chickens
Heckling Avril
Coincident silence
Sunburns
Google Earth exposure
Cuban sandwiches
Ironing board
Scrabble scores
Movie lullabies
"Thank you"
Gargoyles on carports
Shared stories
Boo Monday.

So much I curse this present, the words flow out from tonsils and tongues within but I can't seem to stop it, anger's my sole defense for such vulnerability. Missed the train, missed the memo, things you say but I don't receive or believe and I'm maddening angering amidst the nice letters strung together that you said to me so long ago and repeat verbatim to me now. I'm screaming, yelling where no one can hear, my ears are the sole audience, the guy in the back of the room saying fuck you, can't you do better? I can't, is all. Can't make you believe it's dead and buried in the ground, falling upon deaf ears these words are. But these words are all I got. I can't make much more than what comes out, can't trust much more than what I have, can't be much more than what I've tried. I just want something more than this, want something wholer than nonsense words and sentiments, words that cut and regret their own existence. You're drunk, more tears fall, I'm drunk, more tears fall, both lone stags in crowded places, different times and faces, and all I do is yell louder, such miles away from you and that's all I know, how far apart we are, how this distance and loneliness is your making. Seek unforeseen solace in strangers, I don't see anyone wanting to be a tangible, talkable friend. Suppose I'm supposed to be living and laughing but I'm at full capacity yesterday or last week or whenever it was I smiled for real. All I can do is think of the words I wish you had told me then and wonder what those are, will I remember, want to forget, wonder how the hell I fall so hard for you then and how hardened I've become. Who the fuck cares, I give up so easily now on new people, wanting to run away from possibility of being hurt so bad, something that already came to my doorstep. I forgot to sign out, forgot to give my name to the man that counts things and makes things count, and just can't comprehend these systems. Systems of games, systems of words based on time, systems of affection based on sympathy, just don't get it. Love hurts and leaves me, I see washed out copies of it everywhere, a skinny promise but it's just a lie, just lost hope. Return my hope.

OUT.

Thinking away everything about you, want to scrub it off my conscious but you've sunk in too deep, my memory steeped in your presence. Want to go to the beach and waste away, have the water rub down to my bones in ideal preservation, be endless in the ocean yet so fleeting to you. Need you to forget me before I get burned again; I don't always want what I need though. I'm bleeding you out like molasses but you're still stuck on every day from now until who knows when. Need my heart broken for my resume; gain the experience, feel the pain of it, to remember how it feels when you're loved and when it's gone. Don't want permanence, don't know alternatives; just want to hold, to love; is that so bad? He held me once, told me I'm spoiled now by something I can't have or just can't handle. How willing I am to offer that love to you, raffle it random on a return gesture; for now I just wish blindly that the vapor of utopia might someday thicken so I can just hold on.