swans

"Doesn't really matter, you know, what kind of nasty names people invent for the music. But, uh, folk music is just a word, you know, that I can't use anymore. What I'm talking about is traditional music, right, which is to say it's mathematical music, it's based on hexagons. But all these songs about, you know, roses growing out of people's brains and lovers who are really geese and swans are turning into angels - I mean, you know, they're not going to die. They're not folk music songs. They're political songs. They're already dead."
Jude, I'm Not There.

Illustration of goose from here.

Thursday, April 21, 2011

Jupiter

She is like the greatest of planets: grand and made entirely out of gas. Spinning, and pretending to be solid. She is a carcass of dreams, and all her heartache pools into her empty ribcage and freezes into a heart. It beats soft, but resounds vicious, like the growls of wolves' footsteps when they rush away from hunters. Hunters.

She is a sky of shards of everything. She is a piece of clockwork, ticking away the (star)dust of her eye shadow, and everything else she hides behind. She is a crumb of all the food she didn't eat, and a bead of all the sweat from all the sex. And just a bit of the bones she breaks every damn day.

Her hair strands are sharp and cutting like the needles from syringes and the edges of the words she wishes were spoken to her – sweet and kind and gentle words they are, but cruel in absence and longing. When she runs her hand through her hair, there's a chaos of new scratches on her fingerprints.

Who is she, now, then?

She sways to a song that thuds like thunder, wearing smoke like a second skin, like an atmosphere of cigarettes and no-hard-feelings. She is like Jupiter: great, grand, and made of gas. Just spinning and pretending to be solid.

angels