ratsonjulia

a bit happened last night (mostly in the philosophical arena), but I don't feel like writing about it right now. here's some more old bits & pieces:

............

As heavy as she is.
As much water as she displaces when she gets into the bathtub.
As many words as she has rubbed off the pages of the books she has read.
As many songs as se can remember, or half-remember.
As many wine-glasses as she has shattered.
As much time as she has spent looking out the window at nothing in particular.
As much piss as she has produced.
As much electricity as has traveled through her fingers when she winds her pretty little watch.
As much blood as come out of her nose.
As much cocaine as she has been given.
As many bodies of water as she has seen in the pages of magazines.
As much toilet paper as she has used.
As many different ways of suiciding herself as she has contemplated, & as often.
As many useless scraps of paper as she has accumulated, not daring to throw them away.
As many maps as she has collected.
As many times as she has fallen in love.
As many times as her naked body has been glimpsed by someone who wasnt her.
As many times as she has read the same poem by Emily Dickinson over & over, not really understanding what it means.
As frequently as she thinks about writing a letter to someone she cant really remember anything concrete about.
As old as she feels when she remembers with her stomach that she isnt that old yet.
As many fingers as she has, still.
As much heat as she has produced in her coldest moments.
As many times as her pupils have contracted or expanded in the last half-hour.
As many pirates as she has known personally.
As many decks of cards as she has shuffled.
As many cigarettes as she has inhaled, waiting for something, anything to happen.
A collection of fluids, electrical impulses.
She could not shred her brain into small enough peices to find Hamlet, or Virginia Woolf, but they are in there, somewhere.
Sometimes her teeth are the only thing about her that is real.

.....

A brief history of bathtubs:

How many people have died in one?
How many people have fucked in one?
How many people have painted one?
How many people have melted one?
How many people have beleived they were persecuted by one?
How many people have dreamt of one?
How many people have written poems while waiting for one to fill?
How many people have broken one, in their passion?
How many people have fallen in love with one?
How many people have watched one, hour after hour?
How many people have conceived of, or ended revolutions in one?
How many have been struck, as if for the first time, with the thought of death while in one?
How many people have mentioned one in letters home?
How many wars have been fought because of one?
How many are there?
How many have there been?
What will the brand-new ones look like, two hundred years from now?
Who has built one, with their bare hands?
Who would give their life for one?
How many people have worshipped one, as a sort of a god?
How many people have hated one?
How many people have heaved one out of the window?
How many people have heaved one out of the window?
How many people have eaten one?

...


Dear you,

Atlanta has been put to the torch but Im not feeling so hot myself. The dog brought in something this morning that mustve had sixteen legs, covered with dark green scales with a head like a calf. The damn thing was still alive, spraying blood all over the linoleum in the kitchen, screaming loud enough to set off the car alarm next door. That pretty much set the mood for the rest of the day.
About Atlanta--hell, youve probably read about it in the newspapers. They havent been able to write about much else.
Hows it been with the kidnapping? Your cronies have been pretty tight-lipped about the whole business.
Well go to Paris when its al over, when the ransom money rolls in.
Ill send you some pictures of the radioactive ants that have been stalking the gophers in the desert. Im sure youll find them as interesting as I do.
The dog is still chewing on the many-legged carcass. There wont be much left for me to eat, but I guess those are the breaks.
Theres no whiskey in the house & I think the telephone is broken.
Theres a little girl playing with a Barbie doll in the yard next door. Im convinced that shell grow up to be an axe-murderess, but the police just laugh at me when I try to tell them this. They say that she has to actually axe somebody before they can arrest her.
Thats all.
Love & kisses to all the gang,
--D

...........

This is nothing that hasnt been seen before, nothing that wont be seen again.
A bent trumpet in the sand at the edge of the water & the crab that is living inside it.
A crazy old man eating mushrooms in the forest.
A dragon that lives entirely on sugary things.
Hitchhiking from one war-torn country to another war-torn country.
Places to hide brightly-colored stones.
A neon message projected across the changing surface of a cloudbank.
The stone face of a stone man wearing stone clothes & why this bothers you.
What the crab was thinking when it first saw the bent trumpet it crawled into.
Who will bury the crab when he dies?
Who will eulogize the crab?
What do you say to the crab when he asks you to teach him how to read a newspaper?
Its not so strange that a crab might want to learn to read the newspaper.

While the buildings all burned down, we made kissy face at one another, in open defiance of a lot of empty space.
Then you drew a picture of what you thought my heart might look like, but I think you got it all wrong.

Written on the wall: You are in danger of dying, or at least of drying up.
I dont know if I have anything to add to that. I think that it might have been addressed to the crab, but I cant be sure. I just got here.
The bent trumpet is picked up by the warm water & caryed a little further then it was before.
It will keep doing this all day. Day after day.