Summer and Warmth

Summer has feverishly swum into April with a kind of fiery madness that likes to knock you into sleep and lure you into the bathroom for a very cool and much needed shower. Splashing water on your face is a nirvana and greedily gulping down a glass of water is a blessing. It has rained a couple of times this past week. I welcomed the rain with open arms, although I just sat in the foyer bobbing my head to music. I am always enamored with the smell of rain. It embraced me through open windows and billowing curtains, droplets shy and lingering. My diminutive friends.

But right now it isn't raining and the house is a furnace. I am roasting. Two stand fans are standing in two corners. I'm about to watch Hannibal NBC episode 4 although the link I have may be phony (it turns out it isn't - yay!). The heat is hypnotizing me into a dreamy state, the silent brr of the fans a cat's purr and the sun a blinding gold and immaculate white. I've been hanging onto winter through Eowyn Ivey's The Snow Child, a wintry mixture of joy and longing, and I can almost taste the dazzling intricacy of snowflakes, the snow angels mirrors of the guardians we can be. 2.30 in the afternoon and I am gasping for a bed of ice, a welcoming reprieve from the onslaught of summer.

But! I love the night, the nights. Although they could be hot and humid too, the darkness feels somewhat full and deep, a mirage of shadows and esoteric magic. I like the night because the village is humming but quiet, a heap of sleepy sighs and breaths or, if not that, a chatter in some certain lots, a feast for the ghouls of night. It's funny how things have an opposite, an anti or a pro, and I like that. It keeps the world interesting. It keeps people busy and sane.

Before I end this shamefully brusque post I want to share with you what was meant to be the whole point of this entry. At first I didn't know what to write about so I liked to enumerate three videos I've been watching/have watched the past few nights while I had my headphones on and felt at least a little bit happy. Mirth. And warmth. Always with the warmth.


1. Call Me Maybe (Hannibal NBC)

Hannibal NBC is very serious and stars enough blood and darkness that make me squirm and frown. So this is a glacial and merry reprieve from all that horror and tight suspense, although there are some scenes that do suggest humor (but that may also be based on who's viewing the show). I am wary of Dr Lecter and my compassion for Will Graham is lengthy in words I can't express. 

Countless of fanmade work make me giggle. This is one of those things.

2. Bastille - Of The Night (Live at Scala)

Courtesy of YouTube user Colonel8Custard who recorded such a good performance. For some unknown reason I can't insert the video here so I'll establish a link in its place. 

I discovered the Bastille band just recently and I am glad I did! They had covered Corona's Rhythm of the Night and here they play it live with zest. The drumming washes a grin upon my face, and as we near the end of the video I cheer along with the crowd because I can.

3. On thin ice 4 

I watch with amazement. I cry because this man is who I want to be when I am 48.

Blow Your House In

I'm going to try to string my thoughts together.

Your cheek grazes the pillow, your eyelashes blink in the blistering sun, your head runs a current of waves, and yet you feel like nothing, like you're moving but you're not animated - your heart is self-destructive and your lungs are ripping open, and you can't choose to breathe or not to breathe, because you feel empty. hollow. and the empty and hollow are spaces for spit and bricks, for dog-chewed sandals and construction sites, for rubble and layers. Layers layers layers to cover up a whole which is you.

Do you ever feel empty
even when your playlist runs jubilantly - and your heart leaps and tumbles across the floor in smatterings - while the seconds pass, and music is your lullaby and it's proud to be. You ponder why. You'd kill to know why the sun likes to grow from dust and soil and scorch itself into your eyes, yet you still feel like ash and stones, and your cuts and bruises can't catch up with the glow that burns you inside out.
Do you ever wonder about what would happen
if your sewing kit would come to life one day, and pools of red thread would run in between your fingers, and your toes ear lobes tongues, without preamble without consent?, and stitch into you, painstakingly one by one, by needles made rusty by Father Time. You'd be resurrecting from a robe of magma, smoke a cough from your chimney throat, delicate in sinew but rigid in stance. Hot angry cobblestones in summer daylight. And you'd be a wall of blood - magnificent, dazzling, stunning, horrendous. Envisage Red Riding Hood, envision her in between Wolf's razor sharp teeth - flesh a palette of striped peach and red good for a stew. You are grisly art.
Do you ever feel like a teardrop
ruminating about falling upon an eyelash, sliding off a cheekbone, the length of an elegant neck, and pausing by the chin to dwell as if in the Father's house. To swell, as a balloon does. To fall in a push, that is after you pop after you run out the door. This is consistency at its best - a million other teardrops line up to rest, by the loops of cursive writing so smooth and so possessive and by the pulse of living poetry so dear yet so dreadful, sinking into a moleskin pad. Suicide by gravity, the final bang of depression. The stains you leave point to constellations unnamed. You are pain at its summit, you are salt, you are exhausted.

You are collected,
but you are fallen.

Another Version

Just
dance.

Break free and spread your wings. I'll dab the ash off your lips and envelope you in ivory, let you rummage through my closet, my drawers, let your fingers slide off the hangers. Pick your poison. I think I'll photograph you -- you in your (my) favorite dress, you in a dream, you fiddling with flower petals, you painting. You are not insipid -- you are the opposite of bland -- like when you dance you are svelte and mellifluous, movements like notes and heels zapping off ice, water falling from a distance, when your nose scrunches up, when your chest heaves up, when my vision is suddenly brimming with electricity. And when you raise your hands I feel a falsetto popping in my ears, notes roasting in my fingertips, keys a ladder to climb.

(fall on your knees

oh hear the angel voices)

I think it's mad to try to tell you how I like it when light threads victoriously through your hair, and some days I want to swallow the sun, and kiss your mouth, and write about how your eyes glow back at you when you touch the mirror. (I'd memorize your laugh.) I like you, and whether you'd be munching off biscuits or talking about politics I think I'd trust my gut and plant a kiss on you just like that, because I revel in those moments when you're caught unawares and you don't know how dangerously ethereal you look, or how my arms miss you and how our jokes don't seem to make sense until you're there to make them more nonsensical. Your arms flower in pen ink while the soles of your feet are earth. The paths of your fingers are tattoos of proverbs. The milk of the skin over your ribs match the color of your cheeks. (I want to inflame us.) (I'd bake you chocolate cookies. I'd cross-stitch for you.)

I want to know where your memories reach their apex, and where they hurt, where they fade, where they turn black and white, and where they burn into paper. I want to know where you (is this allowed?) hate me and when and why. Tell me all your reasons and inflict emotion, but pleeease demonstrate your answer to how, rush an essay in the midst of day. (I'd shop for acoustic albums for you, inquire about dozen musicians to that clerk we promised not to make fun of. I'd study for you, then maybe later I could show you where my heart is and why constellations are the most vulnerable things to ever exist and why they're more awesome than the Venus flytrap your mom owns. I'd learn recipes for you and abandon music class for you and forget the alphabet for you, then learn it again. For you. I'd novelize my reasons if you want.)

I think it's silly that you don't like your freckles because I think they're one of a kind and they're rad and they're lovers and comrades and twins of the paint you unintentionally splatter on yourself. They're also constellations and this is reason #2845 why constellations are more awesome than carnivorous plants.

Fact.

(I think you're awfully pretty, unconventionally beautiful, and it's totally okay if you're not from here. Does your hometown trespass the boundaries maps can't cover? That's okay too... just guide me to where because I don't know where that is.

I think your toes are cute. Shy. But cute. Adorably shy. Hey could you scrunch your nose up again?)