crying wolf

"for everything i
gave up, i
was angry and resentful..."
your words, yours,
which hang heavy, a
mouthful of nails, lips
lined in silver
as the rainclouds
passed over your tongue
and into my mind; worried...
no, you
gave me up,
no one twisted your
wrists, and
called me with words
drenched in apathy,
cancerous cysts...
you walked into my
corner store, smiled
at me in the eyes,
and stole my advice.
here's your cake;
he's your cake,
he's your calories,
he's the hands you
let down with a kiss
that day on the couch.
the tears that streaked
your cheeks
a couple tuesdays ago
are slick with confidence,
now, shiny with
this naive hope
that next time, oh, next time,
there will be a
next time.

that was your
next time.

k.

151 days

i guess it
affected, you.
and that sucks,
that i have to
presume...
five months is
151 days; not
half a year, exactly.
but it's too long
for you to do
so little, so
politely.
i seem shallow, so
transparent, so
selfish.
but it's because
i can't keep reading
the dust jacket
for the next 151 days and
beyond it...
if i can't turn the pages
and i can't turn back clocks
i have to turn back
to me, lost
in music and movement and
more,
more,
more.
i need more.
open palms,
willing eyes, to
turn
letterstowordstosentences
to paragraphs about you and me.

so for now, i guess
i'll wait
and dance and
try to smile.

for the best.


i'm disappointed. it sucks having to come to conclusions and make grown-up decisions. this has most recently translated into me losing friends.

when we're young all we want to do is be an adult. and we scoff at our elders who tell us to enjoy our youth and not try to push the hands.

i always respected it when they said it, figuring they knew what they were giving up upon gaining the numbers to drink legally and fuck whoever you want.

taxes. disrespect. complicated relationships. bills. bills. bills. std's. groceries. dating. hair appointments. chasing dreams. making a living. a compulsive addiction to leather boots.

these things all blow! and they're all why "experience" equals "knowledge" to me. when did this road get so bumpy?

le sigh. chin up, buttercup. the decision was already made up.

k.

residue

tossed aside.

a sopping wet towel on my bar, wrung out seventeen thousand times just to mop up some other wall street hag's disgusting kiwi flavored frozen margarita.

a bill on my nightstand, behind my lamp collecting dust because i know if i pay it i can't afford to pay my landlord rent.

strips from the photobooth lodged in the the back of my journal, eulogies to my many failed relationships.

the paintbrush on my floor, because even though you would think it couldn't take more than six months to paint a bathroom roughly the size of a coffin, it has, because it seems subliminally i don't really mind painter's tape as a decorative procedure.

the yoga mat on the floor of the kitchen. maybe by looking at it, natalie and i can claim yes, it has been used, so recently that we don't even move it because, why put something away if you use it that much?

i have become so accustomed to my style of hoarding that it just seems normal to find a nice, neat place for something that i may use in the near future; as if putting it away would somehow usurp it's existence. that's not true, of course, as those fuckers from american express have so relentlessly reminded me over the past year. but it seems that by moving something to the side makes it less real, less able to interfere with your everyday life.

and of course, there are always those times that we put that sweater that grandma knitted for christmas away for so long, that upon finding it, understand that we have no use for it anymore. until that damn "awful christmas sweater" party comes along and you have to go out and buy one from a vintage store, only to repeat the cycle all over again. i mean, it was a lousy seven dollars, but shit, that can buy a shot of jack daniels and a pbr at happy hour down the road from me. wasted. on the sweater, i mean.

on the opposite of that though, are the first edition coins a great-grandfather left you in his will, which, upon recovery, turn out to be worth four hundred dollars and fifty-eight cents. i never knew you, gramps, but you have definitely contributed to my full-sleeve tattoo. i know you'd be so proud.

when i was dating the kid, i was head over heels impossibly corrupted in love with him. granted, i had just come from a relationship with mooseface that was so holy the pope could have used it to masturbate into. i wanted something pure, and quiet, and simple. something my heart would recognize. something that was so grounded it was covered in dirt.

and so it was. i breathed him for several months. six, to be exact. i was to leave the day after valentines' to teach in san francisco. everything was as planned. i took the train to the airport, got on the plain, flew seven hours to cali, and went to my hotel room. all with no word. after calling his roommate and finding out his phone wasn't broken and that he wasn't dead in the gutter, i was bludgeoned with the realization that, he just wasn't really that into me.

i had been used. and tossed aside, limp as a noodle and less aware than anna nicole smith, well, ever.

me, used? no. there had to be a reason. there had to be something i did... something he did? wait, did i even do anything to deserve this? think, now... think. i bought him dinner, drove to his house almost an hour away from me, gave him a killer photojournal for valentines... no. there was nothing i did wrong.

so what did i do wrong?

we patched things up, just to come unsewed several more times, and eventually, fell apart into shreds. we were the favorite jeans that fit so well to begin, but the seams on the legs just start to unravel, and fray. we were the great pair of boots whose heels are bore down to the concrete underfoot. the white shirt you fatally wore to the red wine tasting.

but when it comes down to it... i was a way to make someone feel really good about themself. which, really, is quite flattering, but at the end, it eats away at you.

and it's not just lovers. we do it to friends, we do it to family, and we do it to people we work with... unfortunately, at this point of the world, after all of the stories over the years of divide and conquer... some of the best kingdoms have come out of this betrayal. and although i would love to be able to say, "well, keep your eyes open and it won't happen to you..."

i can't.

i thought that after years of dealing with this from the kid and assorted other lovers and friends, i would be able to tell if someone wasn't who they were telling me. i was all hyped up on me for being so good at "reading" people. right. it's only been a year since last i experienced it and i'm still walled up in my chest, protecting the one thing that i've always wanted to be someone else's.

but that's a different story, a different novel, i will have to cover sometime else. i don't feel like moving those mountains tonight. ugh.

i guess we really don't have a choice. we have a chance. the choice comes after the pitcher makes their move, and i'll be damned anymore if i decide to wait on the side of the bar anymore to mop up someone else's mess.

k.

30,000 leaugues above the sea

I dream about water almost every night.

It's always turbulent, although I never realize it until I wake.

And when I do come out of my silvery water dream world, I have a sinking understanding that water, as beautiful and flowing and calming as it is, can drown even the most powerful of swimmers.

K.

10 THINGS THAT MAKE ME WISH I HAD A WELL-PAYING JOB

ten. raising my children in a castle.



nine. driving this to work.



eight. commissioning a statue of myself and placing it in the harbor next to this old thing.



seven. the ability to buy my own islands in the shape of my name.



six. being able to go to space. this guy did it, and he looks mildly retarded.




five. buying a boat that looks like an eel and is bigger than most common people's homes and naming him oculus yachticus.




four. being able to call a renovated firehouse (with an ACTUAL FIREMAN'S POLE located in your study) "home".




three. fucking private jets, man. private. jets.



two. finally being able to release my brand-new number one single. and all it took was paying people to make me sound completely different than what i already sound like.



one. at last!!! getting around to landing a deal for my new york times bestselling book. fueled by patchy psuedo-wisdom and written by someone else.

the yesterdays

running in puddles
shoes slipping off toes,
nowhere to go but
small alleys between
buildings to catch
our breath, skin
wet from the
outside in;
smiles splashed across
faces that make spaces
for teeth to grin...
it's days like this
i like to live in.

k.

t-minus 12 days to brooklyn bowl

for my upcoming show, i have decided to create several different pairs of pasties to sell, alongside of some of the leather eyepatches i have been designing over the last couple of months. alongside dead bunny tank dresses, bunny thongs, and bunny ears.

i started today. i got a good chunk of it done... eight shirts, and a pair of custom white bunny tassel pasties. normally, tassels are not a problem for me, because i mainly use a silk or sequin-spandex blend to cover them. this time around, however, i decided to hand-spiral the sequin seam, which is what i could easily compare to trying to grout a simultaneous string of legos to a bathtub the size of an areola with grout made of molten lead, making sure never to touch the shower curtain which actually is hung from the ceiling of the tub. did i mention that you have to rotate the tub by hand and not lay the legos down individually?

royal. pain. in the ass.

especially since after getting the first one all the way sequined, even over the ears (which happened to be too small the first time around so i had to enlarge the pattern and cut four more out), i realized i had gone seaming side up on the string of sequins, which made the pasties look more like a thanksgiving macaroni project from the second grade than a sexy pair of doo-daddles for burlesque dancing.

damn you, marijuana.

rip, rip, rip... sequins off, cut a new circle from the birkin, slice it, layer it, glue it, and string it. burn my fingertips from hot glue. brush away the sticky spider-web filaments of the glue from the sequins, and try to get it off my knuckles in return. snip, overlap, glue, repeat.

whilst letting the glue dry, i was silk screening t-shirts from a screen that josh created for me. i did better than i thought i would, cause as my life goes, i can fuck up even the simplest of things. but what's nice about it is that even though it's not like a hot press with perfect cut letters and symbols... it represents something i do very well, which is make something imperfect into an entirely new fashion statement. i think that's what it's all about, no matter fake plastic flower from your mother's kitchen arrangement or a busted up key chain into an earring. i think you should be able to wear anything from any room in your house, just so long as you rock the shit out of it.

so, after about three and a half hours of back and forth between silk screening tank dresses and burning the shit out of my fingers, i got most of what i needed to do finished and planning on moving ahead with the rest of costumes this weekend. by next week i figure i'll have everything done except accessories and props which will be a breeze.

oh, by the way. does anyone know anyone who has downs on a shotgun? like, a rifle? no bullets, you can flip the cartridge out (it is a cartridge, right???)... i need one stat.

but honestly, it was nice to get lost in the creation. and the sole fact that i was working around all of my friends from the House of Yes... they are all so inspiring and uplifting (and hoarders... they have everything under the sun all over the house and on the second floor in Make Fun... special thanks to kae for the trim and josh for the silk screen 101).

lately i've been thinking about the past year, as it's my first anniversary in the city on the date of my first produced show at brooklyn bowl. i moved here with such a different picture in my mind, from who i'd be in love with to what i would accomplish that could make me proud. i unwound a seam of sequins grouted in dried glue and tried them again, only to realize the embellishments were too small for the final outcome, so i chucked it and started from scratch.

i watched the paint stains of love bleed into the ribbed fabric of this year; tried to helplessly blot them out... which yes, made them fade, but unfortunately could never bleach the color from the fibers in a million years of laundry cycles. i hung the finished dress to dry the fumes, inevitably going back to it to check if the color would still rub off on my skin.

on this one year anniversary, i will have accomplished the first thing on my bucket list for new york, which was to have created something big and beautiful and doing so within one year of being here. it may not be broadway, baby... but i have a couple years. who knows what can be attained in a couple more?

k.