Below are the 12 most recent journal entries recorded in .'s LiveJournal:

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Wednesday, March 15th, 2006
8:30 pm	Human Contact. The way you and I share words: like careful barbs made to drill into the skin. I lie with one half on my cheek pressed against the floor in a melting night of heat, wet, the faded city sky drizzled here and there with a dirty star. A smell of strong perfume creeps under the door into my nostrils. It is blind hope and it gets me to my feet like a dazed monsters off to find things that will never understand the meaning of my words.
Monday, January 30th, 2006
1:07 am	He strokes my hair. He picks my hair up strand after strand and I am stroked. His hand is large with lumps of muscle and cold, very cold. I can feel the soft veins pressing in on themselves when the backs of his hands rest against my skull. I feel his lips press at the thin flesh above my forehead, against my hair. A gentle crushing feeling. His breath hot against me. A little warm patch, yes. But he does not touch me. I am beyond touching. This is a place of being past touching. It’s like being under glass all the time. My clothes are thin but I am quite literally untouchable. My body is of ice. Only my head remains warm. They say it’s a curse. They say it’s power. This is a strange place. They collect girls like us. Untouchable girls. Some people like to live in a constant state of suspension. I am not one of those people. He is one of them. He is also one of those sorts of people. He finds me in the red room with the fire making violent shadow patterns on my face, the shadows of stories too old for us to read. We can’t understand the language. Here and there he picks out features and I see him hold these parts of my face in his memory the way I hold chocolate in my mouth, on my tongue, letting it melt slowly. It’s not that he loves me. He loves that I am torture, for him. I think he loves that I am trapped. He does not realize that all things he loves are caged (hunting birds, women in rooms, men of this club, always here, their circular handstrokes of our heads). But he loves us that way. So we are in his control, as though held in the palm of some god. But he is no god. Now he slides his hand to trace my jaw, careful not to touch the neck, which is so cold it burns. Only a true masochist could love my whole body. No men here are true masochists. They love themselves with unspoken bitterness. Not love themselves, maybe. But refuse to hurt. They must maintain control, yes. Like a god’s palm. He would like to think of himself as a god’s palm, yes, I think so.
Tuesday, March 29th, 2005
2:39 pm	"No Way Out" It started when I lost the key. It spiraled down the drain with a soft terrible clink. I pictured how it might catch old clots of hair and eventually clog the sink and fill it with rat-smelling water, so the other girls and boys would be unable to wash the cum off their hands after they jerked off their johns. See, I know their faces and I know how this works, because I know my face. I know how I work. The key didn't lead to anything important, it was just the starting gun for the beginning of the end. The half-marathon line was when I burned two fingers on my hair iron, and soaked them in the jelly ice from the freezer while Mary hollered at me for dropping it and making her spend a bundle for a new iron. Her cheeks grew red so the green of her eyes seemed to pop, hair straggling limply on her chin. "I need a real job," I told her. "I'm tired of doing this mop-up work." She laughed at me. "What'd you say?" "Forget it." I took my blue fingers out and put a couple of Band-Aids on them, put on some perfume from that cheap discount place on Powell. My nose was sprouting blackheads and I squeezed them out, leaving red crescents on my face. My mouth tasted like old cinder; I brushed my fuzzy teeth.
2:16 am	BLEH The summer is a mangled season, composed of dry brambles and wood rotting away in the heat. Riley and I go up behind the old house in the middle of the day, sweating and carrying bottles of juice we press against our faces. In the cool of the water-damaged tiles of the old kitchen he lays down on top of me so I can barely breathe and then we rub against each other so I feel like I’m gonna burst open. He puts his hand up my shirt and his fingers grab and rub and our breath is so heavy in the heat of the day sometimes I think I’ll just pass out. He shudders out a sigh, hips jerking into me. He lays limp on top of me for a minute or two, not touching me anymore, then rolls off. We don’t speak. The heat and the soporific whine of bugs and animals lull us into sleep. We wake up in the cool breath of the night. We don’t really look at each other. I put my hand on his shoulder and he purses his lips and shrugs it off. We sneak out into the rows of dry dead plants under a splatter of stars in a milky blue sky. Riley puts his hand across my stomach to keep me from crossing the road when he sees the lights of a car approach. We crouch next to each other behind a tangle of dead flowers and a creeping vine whose leaves have turned the consistency of tissue paper. I rub some between my fingers just to let them melt. The mark of his hand burns through my shirt, and my skin crawls with pleasure. At dinner my mother picks a stray leaf from my hair but says nothing.
Sunday, March 27th, 2005
11:39 am	"I'm lucky," I say. "I've got lots of people who love me." She looks off out the window, pushing fake blond hair the color of nothing earthly - the color of light, maybe? - behind her ears. "Yeah," she says, but I'm not sure if it's an agreement, or if she's heard me at all. She looks at me. "I've got my dad, but he's all the way over in Florida. That's a long way to go for love." "I guess. It's pretty easy to get too lonely, though. But it's better to travel a long way than kill yourself, right?" She smiles a little, ruefully. "Hey, no. I wouldn't kill myself. If I got that lonely, I would just be like, 'Hey God, you better send someone along or I'm coming up.'"
Thursday, March 24th, 2005
8:27 pm	This place smells like heavy musk incense, like boys and the twitching of immediate gratification. The girl on the wall calender has red spangles over her tits in place of raw pinks and browns. Recipes for a new diet and zodiac signs chase each other down at the corner, below the dates and holidays. "You gotta know everything to be modern," he says to me when he catches me looking at the poster, holding the fat of my belly back with my hands. "I'm taking a class on the Modern Condition," he tells me. He turns away and flips the calendar to next month, a girl with little green-and-white striped panties bent over with mouth agape and tongue pressed against upper teeth. It's not every boy who can live the American dream and survive.
Wednesday, March 23rd, 2005
11:39 pm	Maximum Exposure "All Shall Love Me and Despair" Bam. Her face of another goddamned magazine cover, lipsticked mouth shiny and pink as strapped flesh. The camera flash is on, the light turned up too high so that you can't see the pores in her skin 'cause they're all whited out. Ads on glossy pages all lead to the conclusion of her face and her lips and her teeth and her blue Nazi eyes waiting to be emptied. I remember us as best friends sharing secrets, the smell of wet earth and dew and blackberry brambles high in the humid day of summer. We wore black and white pinafores and traded smiles, petting slugs behind the bushes wiping the slime on the lining of our dresses hoping mother wouldn't see. I remember having coughs, sniffles and a running nose, hickeys left from jam jars on my back in perfect rows, the hot medicine of home because then we were small and our families couldn't afford medical insurance. Now she can buy a new color of eyes - remember when they were brown against blonde hair so you reminded me of wheat fields instead of glazed cakes, instead of glass and ice? I pet the photos of the memory of your kisses and the whisper soft against my ear. When we were teenagers doors opened in front of you, the sidewalk seemed to unroll just to receive your tiny perfect feet and the men whispering your name, and the boys whispering your name as we passed along the street in midday. When everyone else's shadows were making puddles around their feet yours walked behind you and was the length of a whole friendship, a whole human history, face thick and awkward, eyes smeared and tired. I wore sunglasses and wrote bitter love poems about torture and death, love poems to you plotting your demise. I loved you more than they did, with your thin airy poems and your gentle long fingers like an alien touch. Though you were never jealous of me you sensed my fury and so you tried hardest to win my love - you only tried to win my love, I was the only challenge. You made me your co-conspirator, bought me t-shirts and sent me over to men to deliver a fatal blow, tongue hissing between teeth. Now I read you and you and you, sandwiched between bronzed women you have tried to become. Now I read you and you and you and I love you more than ever, and I am in despair.
2:04 am	from here: http://www.livejournal.com/community/same_oh/102015.html For the Tired, Restless Chords: You growl in your sleep, your face obscured in the dark humid room, skin smelling of sweat and cotton, slick chest in the heat, a mass of scars. This design of your body is splintered and vaguely tragic, like violence done to a cheap guitar. I imagine a poor man praying over your corpse for you to rise tall on furious legs ringed muscular and dank like a bear's, stars ringing in your eyes, popping like fireworks, and your lips heavy with the chalky wet and vicious smell of bones. They put plates in your hips after that wolf man - he had thick woolen sideburns, smelled of rotting fast food, grease and cheap plastic - made you brittle with one hand and broke your legs with the other. Your eyes turned flat black, like you were already dying, though they picked you open with metal slivers and you lived, you walked. Now you sleep in my bed, and appear to me as a damaged instrument which I hunger to own.
1:30 am	"To speak another language is to live another life." Silence (or) Fuck English
12:14 am	Starting Over Again Melting down the ice box in the motel room, I end up forgetting about it and a stain spreads out on the carpet, brown and gold. My small black terrier, Nancy, lame and blind now, sits there quietly, didn't bark even when the water came to where I had put her down and let her rest, because this is a No Pets motel and she knows she isn't allowed. I kneel over the pool looking down to the rubbed-away bottom, the greasy water splashing up full of sun block and other people's dead skin and too much bacteria for the chlorine to kill, microscopic pieces of the feces of babies and children who have never been toilet trained. I look down toward the bottom and it's full of insects and dead leaves, so I sun myself by the pool using cheap aluminum foil, getting a shiny red burn on my cheeks, my forehead and chin pink with an itchy blush. The motel reminds me of seaside trips with my sister, her big hand clutching mine, her dress brown and lime green against a thick textured white, hair thick sun-streaked brown, large sunglasses on her round fat face, a face like the face I would grow into later. I remember my sister with clear lip balm, smiling at boys who pinched her thick tanned arms while my little face got crisp red as I built sand castles in the salty sand, the wind blowing the smell of faintly rotting barbecues and the sea at me, the little dirty wavelets all capped in polluted gray foam. The carpet is permanently damaged and I'll have to pay for it when I leave. I pick Nancy up and hold her while I watch television. On the news there is a report about a new chemical used in carpet cleaning that kills people. Nancy whimpers faintly. I feel one of her arthritic toes twitching and she whimpers again. Sometimes in her sleep she cries out helplessly in small yelps, and I imagine she's dreaming of a time before her limbs stopped moving. Do dogs dream in color, do they dream nostalgically of better futures? I take her outside to the pool under the stars that night. The night smells like tears and cheap ice and chemicals. Leaves float in it like cast away boats stuck eternally on a calm sea, swaying gently back and forth like an incantation against damnation. I hold Nancy's head under the water until her body stops its trembling. Then I let her float to the bottom. I take my bag, and leave without paying for the stain on the carpet.
Monday, March 21st, 2005
11:57 am	Family Mum, dad, and little brother all had a name for me, one no one else called me. Rat. Yeah, they liked to call me Rat. My face dirty from hiding in the crawl spaces of the walls of our narrow old house, away from sunlight coming in clouded and filthy through windows, the light of early afternoon embarrassingly frank. As a small child this is what I saw through the cracks and holes in our old chipped plaster and wood walls: mum wearing her wedding dress alone in the bathroom, bent over the sink applying makeup, twisting her face this way and that, unzipping the bodice (the white beads on the collar and wrists made a scuttling sound across the floor), climbing on the scale, her heavy body, cellulite thighs, twisting this way and that, the mottled flesh of her large arms I so tenderly loved; her flesh in early middle age was the color of bleached coral shells at the beach. My face is red as I watch her repeat this again and again, despite the things I hear my dad say sometimes this is the first time I think something is wrong with us. Father sat reading in silence, smoking his pipe, paling brown eyes behind huge glasses, in a small corner we called the Study, filled with detective novels smelling of mold and old wood. He read in poor lighting, his eyesight getting worse all the time. I would often watch him, waiting for him to do something strange, to betray himself, but even in his private time he kept himself concealed. Father was a locked box, his expressions bland and unreadable, eyes flat. My little brother built secret things - houses and boats for potato bugs, torture devices for fleas - and hid them under his bed where I would pull them out, full of dust and useless.
Sunday, March 20th, 2005
3:14 pm	The rain outside sounds like butter sizzling on a hot black frying pan, over the smoky fire smelling like grease. Boys dressed in blue shirts, white pants stained yellow, unwashed with that rancid crotch smell like fish sauce and a thick sweat smell and cologne on wrists and jackets. Trading money, trading time, Hell y'all, it's raining today. Half a gram but I'm still bored. It's dark inside, you've gotta keep the blinds down but the door open, and the light in the room is yellow, two walls wood panelled and two white decorated with a faded poster of a girl, skin dark and glistening, bent back far in the shape of a curling C, the bright pink background turned a soft mauve now.