As we mentioned last month, birdsong #14 is comfortably sold out, and in case you didn’t a copy, this week’s archival post is “ALIEN ARMS” by Daniel Portland– a little ditty from the issue.
Daniel Portland, ALIEN ARMS
The artist brought out clearly and simply what [s]he wanted.
—Adorno
We are made perfect not by what we do, but by what happens to us. Does this ever happen to you? You are walking, wandering, rambling down the street, and you pass some body, catch it in the corner of yr eye, and it is you in time, in a different time, the past approaching, the future receding, time out of step, time out of mind?
I sit down, and I start reading. (Presumably, as you have done now. Feel free to touch yrself. However discretely or indiscreetly you determine context permits.) Now I am sitting, and I am reading, and I look up, and in front of me, with its back to me (it backs into/onto me), is a recognizable figure — a more beautiful figure of me. He is more beautiful because what is you, but what is outside you, i.e. what happens to you will always already be more beautiful than what you do. The farther away something is, the more seductive it is. This is why we are most seduced by the stars. Turn blue turn fire turn ash turn grey. Keep reading (fidgeting, stretching, checking your phone, checking out, checking in). Who actually is this kid, the other you? The faint semblance is enough of a lure to make us sweat and worry about what is out there. What is out there that is so bothersome and frightening? Do we need some drugs? Are there some already available? Should we have had more of a head start in the opposite direction?
As you get a little more distance from it, though, come to enjoy it more and more . . . You can feel the time and place. Nobody dresses the way we dress anymore, etc, etc, and this is truly a beautiful thing. I do not think it will come out like you intended, but it will be pretty perfect. You can tell that none of us are very cool, you know? Every body just hangs out and is kind of a nerd but also very enthusiastic in a malnourished-strength-of-teenage-boys-from-Illinois kind of way. Wicked gamines, sweet and tender, sleeping in, in heat and hanging out of trees.
We live at yr parent’s house in Northwest D.C. We are 16, and this is the summer in between our junior and senior years of high school. We are 16, and we drive south from Baltimore. We are 16, and we are in the midst of death. We grew up here, and we stayed, and we stay.
It baffles us now, thinking about how easy it was to start, how piece-of-cake it was.
Of course this is a lie. The truth is that we were as distant as could be, but I could always sense a bit of evil lurking on the insides of yr eyes, flashing threats abruptly and resiliently. The best I could do was to squeeze the love stuff in between the cracks. We did not like it, but it was exciting. We knew how to get it, and we got it. All the stores’ doors will open if you say the magick words.
Cuz magick words are magick actions. For instance: I was practicing by myself and some body spray-painted SUCK REALLY LOUD on the door in white jelly. These are magick actions: You sucking really loud and me stuffing the love in the cracks — behind a chain link fence at sunset, on the playground, on the blacktop, on the jungle gym, on the foursquare court — all of these places we had to smash the basement window at night to get into.
First there is something on the ceiling, then our feet are not on the floor. Nothing is making any sense anymore. Yr bottom drops out leaving nothing but this handful of ghastly wounds. It just rips right out and oozes the most pruriently perfumed chrism. I hold yr wrists with my hands and conjure a tiny candle. Outside is a cold that covers us in crimson hypothermia and fright. We become scary little demons stomping in crystallized army boots and shrouded in shredded pajamas, wielding bicycle chains and petrol bombs, torches and wooden clubs, hungry for blazes, digging for fire. We dodge danger on the sly, crouch down and silence our lives, as dense fog and phantoms roam, hunting us off, pushing us to the side, looking for us, looking for their own opportunistic cracks that will allow them to chase us some more.
But really, in a stampede of riotous f(r)iction, you can never tell which side you are on. You will always run scared, without expectancy, without remorse or calm, spreading the fever of fear, fear of skin. You will always do the magick dance in the street, dancing up and down the streets, turning all the musics up, running through the streets with music, beautiful radios. Things never remain the same. Things fall apart. That was April. That was Easter. Now it is autumn. I stand before you in unsullied innocence. I stand before you, befuddled, attempting to pluck my plectrum outta the sea/seam/seem/semen of yr ass. I stand in ruins behind you. You with yr winter clothes — corduroy, wool, flannel (and mohair, for good, rotten measure). The stove is going, but ice is in yr hair. Black hair bound in braids and mother-me eyes. I was trying to recall a language and the only words I knew were HUG and FUCK and DON’T CRY, DARLING. You will never be found, and you will never be freed.
Even if you did not get stabbed in the back, you still slipped in someone else’s blood and fell.
