La Tristesse Durera Toujours

I’m counting down the minutes until sunset in 3/4 time, watching the shoppers waltz from door to door.  It’s Sunday, and my lungs like bellows heat the wintery crucible of cold.  I hold my own hand and sing the crowds of voices to a peaceful sleep.  My mind adorns the green grate iron street lamps with healthy garland and a nimbus of snowy light. I salute van Gogh and let the engines’ hum disappear from the purview of my severed ears.

Smile; the world is beautiful with eyes closed.  The moments are fluid, so let them flow.  "The Sad Waltzes of Pietro Crespi" and a fifth of detached curiosity or a snifter of vague interest, these days wither like film negatives on a clothesline vine.  I sit in stillness but my thoughts take wing and fly.  Have you ever sinned and sinned again?  I have, and without remorse.  Join me, and I’ll kiss so hard your teeth hurt and your heart doesn’t.  Does that make sense?  It does, if you let it.

I am consistently inconsistent, remembering that no pattern is also a pattern.  Concert kids in full counterculture regalia wearing their heartache on their sleeves like crimson badges of courage.  Forget to forget at your own risk; I wore a worn grimace while cognizant that the grin beneath had started to shine through.  My soles (soul) were bleeding, but I refused to purchase shoes.  Van Gogh wanders the wood with a helpless revolver, insisting on insisting; remove the bullet, and it’s just a hollow tube.  La Tristesse Durera Toujours; better to cut off your left hand at the wrist than to waste time watching a watch.

Happy Hollow at a Denver venue and Kasher’s voice clashes with thinly clanging guitars.  The clouds hug the foothills and give gifts of frozen water and fiery dreams; have you ever woken up next to a snow bunny in ski boots and nothing else?  Fireworks for movements and cannon salvoes for midnight moans, the world became something other than that terra firma where I dirty my blistered feet.  Heal your heels before you leave the hostel; don’t forget the way she felt on the outside, on the inside, or the blood you bled when her teeth broke skin.  Have you begun again?

"You know when I said I knew little about love? That wasn’t true. I know a lot about love. I’ve seen it, centuries and centuries of it, and it was the only thing that made watching your world bearable. All those wars. Pain, lies, hate… It made me want to turn away and never look down again. But when I see the way that mankind loves… You could search to the furthest reaches of the universe and never find anything more beautiful. So yes, I know that love is unconditional. But I also know that it can be unpredictable, unexpected, uncontrollable, unbearable and strangely easy to mistake for loathing, and… What I’m trying to say, Tristan is… I think I love you. Is this love, Tristan? I never imagined I’d know it for myself. My heart… It feels like my chest can barely contain it. Like it’s trying to escape because it doesn’t belong to me anymore. It belongs to you. And if you wanted it, I’d wish for nothing in exchange – no gifts. No goods. No demonstrations of devotion. Nothing but knowing you loved me too. Just your heart, in exchange for mine."

Claire Danes is the type of girl you take home to mother, and our so-called lives are so called only when we take a step back and consider them some impossibility, a still-life on a wall behind plexiglass in a museum.  Bronze statues frozen in the first snows, out in the streets with shovels in hands and wool scarves in the wind.  Oh god, the world is beautiful, but I can’t see it qutie yet.  I’d open my eyes, but sights are too easy to forget and too painful to recollect. 

Don’t believe any one thing I said when sober; I meant well, but all that silly humor, caustic sarcasm, and sweetly sour sentiment only dispelled the silence, and never did it appease the mercurial gods of honesty.  Sunbursts to stardust, that thimble of celestial sand’s bright burning illuminates all of spacetime, backwards and forwards.  I’ve got "The District Sleeps Alone Tonight" traipsing through my mind in Ben Gibbard’s binary and I can’t catch a break to save my life.  I remember, then, you have to set a trap or cast a net to catch anything, breaks included.

Oh, I dreamt a grey-scaled supernova and a gong that ends the world!  Pinwheeling galaxies that paint the sky in swirls!  The world in stasis, my mind moved so fast, tiptoeing from smile to smile and sneaking up on every laugh.

A box-like UPS truck crawls across Main Street, and brown can’t do anything for me but play songs that remind me of high school and deliver my packages late and in poor repair.  I haven’t smiled in three days but I’ve laughed inside through the whole damned weekend ordeal.  I’ve got green eyes and a smile to match; does that make sense?  It can, if you let it.

I’m hiding from my friends and letting my enemies through the gatehouse.  Spacehog plays my external bass like she plays my internal one.  Oh, Lordy, I’m singing when I forgot how to talk, neverminding the iris afterglow.  La Tristesse Durera Toujours, until you learn to close your eyes, open your hands, and let the sunshine in; can you measure time in the Fifth Dimension?  Vincent only got through two, ignored the third, was defeated by the fourth, and never countenanced that slippery fish that is the fifth.

In spacetime, I’ve started to grow both ways, both backwards and forwards; does that make sense?  It can, if you let it.  Whimsy aside, I think I built a time machine out of VHS cassettes and "Thriller" in my tape deck.  Acid wash jeans in technicolor and Michigan sand dunes up to my ankles, there’s gulls gathering bread crumbs looking for home, never turning around, never remembering.  I’ve always been smarter with my mouth shut, and my professor asked me if I was a "fuck-up or something."  The jury is still out, and the foreman’s been drunk since the indictment.  Convict me, please, and give me something to do that doesn’t make life a skylark waiting on a nightingale encore.  Does that make sense?

It can, if you let it.

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