have you forgotten the alphabet of desire?

later than late rain hangs
loosely in the air, careless like
it may or it may
not although i hope that it does
not let me
down dark air laced with a
wild freshness playing against my
skin at at my lips tired
eyes restless
hands wish i didn't have to sleep alone
tonight.

or something like that.

devendra banhart's new music vid (carmensita), featuring the ever-lovely natalie portman, is worth a watch or even two. quirky but i loved. magnetic.

can't sleep/can't stay awake.
bath and a myriad of candles and the new bonnie 'prince' billy (meg, my thanks again)--an almost certainly flawless cure?
i am hopeful.
gone, etc.
rlb.

fruit and tea:

These days, my dreams have been more vivid; more frequent than usual. In the midst of a night now past, I woke from this:

I am walking along an expanse of beach. My feet are naked, my body draped in a gauzy dress, and my hair in loose waves. It is long, and it is ash-pale. Why is my skin wet; my hair? Is it that I have been slipping like an otter amidst blue-black layers of ocean or, rather, has there been rain? The sky is iridescent gray, like heather, and I notice streaks of water grazing my bare arms--rain. From the skeleton of a house (there are houses in the midst of this solitude; my solitude? I'd thought i was one thousand miles from anywhere...or at least a few planets away...), a woman, aged, traces one hand through the space between us--motioning me towards herself. For some reason that evades me, I find my feet obliging. Moments lace by, and I am there at the edge of her decrepit porch. I am soaked to the bone, and guarded. Yet...her lips curve in smile, and she beckons me nearer. As I draw closer towards her (why am I so unresistant to her will, this stranger?), the thousands of lines carved into her face seem to visibly give birth to fresh ones. Her eyes are green like moss and there is a cat twined against her willowy frame. As I fold myself into the reedy rocking chair next to her, the animal snakes from her warmth and onto the glacial chill of my body. The cat licks my dripping fingers--tasting the rain; the salt of my skin, and seems quickly greedy for more. Its tongue feels like the tiniest shards of stone against my skin; rough and raw, yet strangely soothing. It occurs to me in this hovering moment of time that no words have yet passed between myself and the presence a mere fingers' touch away. Yet somehow, the stillness lacks discomfort. I don't question this; it is a blessing. My eyes flick to the table, low to the ground between us. It is laid with an assortment of tea--two cups, already poured, exuding the breath of heat, and a scattering of fresh fruit--slices of sweet mango, a myriad of grapes, mandarin wedges, and blackberries glittering like gems. She gestures a thin hand--also etched with the markings of a hundred years--over the array, as if it is an offering (has she been expecting me? How could this be? A piece of me feels sick and another feels wonder. They twine.) I feel suddenly vulnerable; exposed. This transparency unnerves me, yet under it all glows a distinct sense of calm. We remain in this silence; the silence we have mutually created. The cat grows tired of the taste of my skin and slinks off into the dark. I reach tentatively for my tea. As my fingers move through the air, the woman draws a long, soft breath in and then I feel her hand, feather-light against my chest. From it, effortlessly (or so it seems), she draws my heart. It is startlingly small...fits like a newborn bird cupped inside her palm. It is cool, like ice, and visibly beating...it is terribly alive. I feel tears pool in my eyes, and my body tense. (What the hell has she just taken from me, and how has she taken it? Is she a witch...a criminal...a fallen goddess? I want to kill her; hurt her...anything it takes to get that shard of myself back.) But my body relaxes; releases as I realize the tenderness and the caution with which she is cradling it, now encircled in both hands. All ten fingers, though somehow, fleetingly, they look like thirty or forty. And before I know it, she is speaking...smooth, velvety words, and I am listening, enthralled and terrified. "This heart is blue...the blue of water and of cold-blooded fish and the sky at the edge of evening. I know this frightens you...how could it not...surely, it is rare. But rest assured, love, you will feel deeply, more deeply than you can even comprehend at this time. In this moment, I am teaching you more about love than you can ever ask or imagine."

____

And then it had vanished, like smoke or melting ice. I awakened to bars of faded sunlight slanting through my window, and the imprint of this dream tattooed on my memory. Haunted by dreams? Haunted by dreams. Though, I'm beginning to believe that haunting is not always a negative experience.

Here are a few other things to share...

***Meg, you've disarmed me with your words. Only gratitude, only adoration. You are a ruby-encrusted diamond in the rough. And let it be said that you are infinitely gracious for sharing Devendra with me...Lord knows he was yours first. Kisses flung across the miles in your direction.

***I had my body ripped and restored by a massage this morning. Liquidy music and dim lighting; cooling heat. I feel lighter.

***I discovered my quasi-dream yoga studio yesterday in a town meshed deep in the Kootenays. Twisted my body through a long-esque class, and since then my breath has come more evenly. Thank Jesus.

***During the last dwindling hours of my departure from Winnipeg, dear Hilary gifted me with Michael Ondaatje's breathtaker of a novel, "Anil's Ghost." I have devoured over half of it already, and am trying to slow myself down so that I can savour what remains of it. Here is my favourite string of words thus far....take and taste...

"At night, returning from work, Anil would slip out of her sandals and stand in the shallow water, her toes among the white petals, her arms folded as she undressed the day, removing layers of events and incidents so they would no longer be within her."

I would strongly reccommend this book to anyone and everyone, along with their respective friends, kin, lovers, and so on and so forth.

This is goodbye, at least for now.
Be.
RB.

lose our clothes in summertime/lose ourselves to lose our minds...

I am perched like a sparrow, tired from fluttered flight, as the night air begins to cool itself over my body. In something soothing a pseudo-sister wrote to me the other day, she included these words: "Go now and be restored." In and out over the fabric of these last days, I have thought often and almost meditatively of this statement. It has become a mantra of sorts to me. And I wonder...in those pieces of time, those smoothing hours spent cooking dinner, sharing wine with my parents on their skinny porch, curled on the floor playing Scrabble with my smallest brother, crafting slow words into my journal, laying trance-like on a stretch of beach, tossing strangely in my sleep, looping the sounds Sufjan/Devenda and other such fantasy husbands incessantly through my ears---is this restoration? I think, in a veiled way it is. Yesterday, at the sun's crowning height, I slipped to a foreign space of park and fell into an infinite amount of yoga. It was just me, alone, and it was very different from what I am used to, but it was good. I felt my body shedding heaviness, shedding anger and shedding grief until there was little more than myself remaining. I felt stripped and raw and, in a way, terrified, but more than anything, I felt back to the sinewy core of myself. I think there is both paralyzing fear and a glaze of exhileration in inhabiting such a place. I am trying it on for size. Currently, it fits...though awkwardly. My instinct fights it...thrashes at it and into it, but I feel a gradual acceptance. There is only forward, and that is the direction where my gaze is locked.
Stability and freedom.
Be brilliant today, as you are.
All my heart/Bisoux.




(good lord. love.)

and i am an alien and a citizen...

Last night I was gifted with an unexpected chance to lay eyes and ears on this artiste:



He is a dream in every sense of the word. For me, there was a completely organic sort of beauty in his presence and performance--draped in raw simplicity and a gorgeous, gutting air of melancholy. I sat, shoes slipped to the ground unnoticed, glass of wine in fingers, curled against Meg...and I think that we both experienced a temporary transformation of sorts. I resisted the urge to leave at times, so great was the depth to which emotion was startled and stirred inside of me. If you are wondering, I did not leave. I remained there, inside of the stunning darkness/lightness of it all...and eventually I felt myself ceasing to resist it...leaving the fear of what I might feel in a shroud of abandonment. I moved into into...fell into it, flowed into it...and found myself free.

So for that, Jose Gonzalez, I thank you.
Merci beaucoups also to Madge and to Laurennnn...down the chain of how that ticket came into my posession...
Experience: disarming, yes...but in a very necessary way. And there is goodness in that.

"I am the silence that is incomprehensible and the idea whose remembrance is frequent." (--unknown)

I am melting away for a pair of weeks.
Open mind and open heart...
rb

tat vam asi/i am that:

how long...so long...too long...
the night is dark like ash and i am post-cafe, post-2 am, post-any remaining streaks of energy. candles aflicker and heart dripping unrest...i am here and "i am that"...tat vam asi...a golden person in my world shared these words with me a few weeks ago...before/before/before...and also enlightened me as to their meaning....that being, "i am that...which i want to be"....translation: all that it is i want to better about myself--i am already that. desire is a powerful thing. and so, by yearning to create differences in ourselves, we are already that which we look towards.
for me, this is hopeful.
hope recreated, and realigned.
heat on my skin like a
second skin like a layer of liquid
energy faint but
real it is there i can feel
it into the velvet solitude that is
tonight don't feel very much of
anything but in that absence there is presence there
is presence it will be
okay.
sadness found me...but reamin in it i will
not cutting it like slender
vines, gentle, spiderweb-light it will
die a little every day i will
dedicate myself to it.
rain and lilacs/lilacs and rain.
for now, that is all.
perhaps sometime soon words will find me again.
rb