the fall pharmaceuticals
three forty-seven for eight seventeen oh four. eh, em?
i've torn the skin from each of my forearms
and tied it up around my wrists,
a new swimmer by the time she threw me,
ripping off her stapled lips.
pushing her hands behind the sand birthed
more shaggy dust for coughing
a moment 'now' forever,
suspended so very quite and slightly
over some stupid 'infinite night.'
she spoke of one per lifetime,
but they bleed for months thereafter,
and- left on the shore for hours to rinse;
those bleeding blue joints.
torn open and hanging,
caught by the hands of her watch,
were strapped delicate to my knuckles and my fist.
we are anesthesia.
on july 22 i turned 18, and spent the day feeling like there was a big brown eyed gift that must have gotten lost in the mail, and there were beers and things but there were less things than things. slow summer semester has ended, i'm in college and im just waiting to swallow more college and i'm ready and excited. there's a girl in college, a girl who deserves a story, some sort of live journal immortalization, and so her slanted tweak-ed shrine is therefore being prepared to be stepped on, so join me as i outline the misery of her invasion on my already skewed lifestyle. this is the story of elaine dyjak...
i met this girl one evening in my usual state: drunk with plans to become a drunkard, and regardless of how cute she may have seemed, regardless of how short her hair was, she was sitting with a spear through her lip and a tattoo upon her foot. she was the kind of girl who would swing her feet while she sat, and was more apt to swing her eyes than her whole head, and sitting at a table while i walked past meant that her eyes followed me closely, her head unmoved, she was stuck to a chair in my dorm's common room like a miserable trophy proclaiming mere mediocrity and emphasizing the most extreme example of what i call the un-delicate female: un-romanced, unfathomable, impossible, worn and tired and loosely based on better things which had once taken place.
regardless of my complete insatisfaction with the less than perfect "moment" i was having with this shaggy brown haired boredom, i was hucking two jugs of wine on my back, and so was justin. almost as four jugs of instant and magnificent indicators of future feelings, my drunken sentiments heaved at my heartwalls and i allowed for justin to invite the two plain and boring "beauties" back to our room. after a few hours of the usual bullshit boring background noise, myself and the present company had grown quite drunk and unbearably antsy, eventually opting for a trip to our friend mike's dorm. most of the walk and the details following our departure are fairly unclear, however it is certain that much of the journey was spent with me pushing elaine to the ground and leaving her wet, muddy and quite tousled. my frustration with stupid and haggard girls was growing with every swig, and was very plausibly mistaken by the dumb bitch as flirtatious violence, when in actuality, my disgust for elaine's miserable personality and uncanny ability to fall short of past love interests was driving my positively mad.
within the hour, mike, justin and myself had stripped down to our bare skin and were playing guitar and singing madly in the neon glow of mike's tacky dormroom decor.
although this chain of events may seem very much in the vain of an effort of boys toward striking up "conversation" with the "female elite" in our presence, i was fairly certain that my heterosexuality was writing me tickets, excuses, reasons and hall passes left and right to hop upon one of my guy friends rather than one of the sadly ruined and miserable girls sprinkled around mike's dull three AM dorm room red light district.
well nobody has ever won the war on alcohol and suddenly mike and i were each trapped beneath a writhing mass of boring girl. homely girls with serpent tongues and lip rings and perfectly plucked eyebrows and denim skirts, each full of sad lines from Story Of The Year songs, girls who were kicking their chuck taylors to the floor and making their way up our chests towards our cerebellums- which were drowned in cheap wine and thirty two suicidal ounces. upon squeaky blue mattresses with the sheets kicked to the floor and bad radio wafting like the stench of boring girl breath from a muffled CD player buried beneath bed linen in the bedroom's back corner, michael and i sacrificed our pride.
eventually the evening made it's own escape and the sun started crawling up the corner's of mike's windows, streaming upon the teenage "lovers" and revealing them caught in a sort of weird and contorted translation of teenage passion: clouded mostly by alcohol, boys with desires stretching for miles in every direction had their hopes eclipsed instead by these goddamn dull-ass damsels twisting upon our loveless torsos. mike and i's regret was framed by the solid sweat and swollen red ringing our eyes, pushing our morning into a weird divide of acheivement versus displacement, later exhanging phone numbers with disgust and spitting on their keypads.
mike and i's mindset that maybe "once upon a time was all" must have been the worst expectation since ben affleck's acting career, because suddenly elaine dyjak was everywhere. granted, i made an effort to involve her with some activities amongst my group of friends, more often than not, the effort was to score a ride from here to there. you see, elaine drives a killer car, a yellow 20th anniversary of the VW gulf or something like that. it's a 5 speed, and there's nothing like a clutch as smooth as the skin around my baby's neck. to tell you the truth, there were multiple times that i found myself in the room across from mine, with my best friends brendan and justin, (elaine dwindling about; drinking and losing sight of reality), when i would decide to climb into bed, only to be followed by the shaggy brown haired boredom bitch immdeiately thereafter. fearful of kicking out what i had begun to recognize as an extremely insane personailty, i simply dealt with her nightly omnipresence while i slept.
most of the time, she would burrow her head into the bunker i would create with my arms to protect my head, begging me to tell her how i felt her, pleading with me to confess my love for her, whining about how miserable i was to her, and bitching, in general, about everything, punctuating each torturous request for an answer with punches, bruises, slaps and kicks. elaine's desire to fight me grew each day, while my apathy was swelling like the blister from a ciggarette, and her driving me crazy with incessant convictions that i "loved her." i made it very clear that as far as fighting me, there were only two girls who could have actually stood a chance at taking me on, and she was not even close, also emphasizing the fact that until she actually COULD come close to becoming a true combatant, she would remain a horrible imitation of a very "comfrtable shoe" (lets just put it that way, the metaphor will stretch far enough for it's recipient to understand it's interpretation clearly) so then, if anything, my realizations began to lean towards girls i must have inflicted similar instances upon, but never feeling that i was guilty of such an extreme case of stress.
and with sincere and severe apology i offer my regret for ever putting a girl through such agony, however, elaine's next calculated move was completely beyond the boundaries of anything i could have possibly imagined or attemtped.
after a night of beers and bongs and all of those things which divide teenagers from adults, myself; while in the presence of very good company, chose to make a morning vacation at denny's for one last meal before sleep. well, although elaine was supposed to be meeting us there, i had grown very tired of offering her directions and repeating myself over and over. parker then decided that it was high time to turn my phone off and disconnect elaine from reality. all in attendance agreed with the notion, and therefore, elaine was no longer up the creek without a paddle, she was simply up the creek with nothing except a wet t-shirt and wet, messy hair, her lip ring rusting painfully inside her skin, and a notion that maybe she would never be loved by anyone ever.
after finishing a delicious meal, the caravan trekked back to our dorms and taylor, who had decided that she would sleep over, came into the restroom while i was preparing for bed. tay peeked in the door, and would then utter the most frightening words to ever rattle my eardrums:
"don... there's someone in your bed."
thinking it must have been my best friend across the hall, i replied:
"who, justin?"
"no, not justin...guess again"
suddenly, my muscles tensed, my eyes froze, a small chill began tumbling down my spine.
"is it... elaine?"
taylor simply smiled coyly and began nodding her head.
at this point it must be explained that although elaine was around quite often, her dorm was located approximately one half mile down the road from mine, and therefore, at 6 in the morning, had no way to access my dorm, OR my room, without somehow breaking in and waiting for someone to open the lobby door. so basically elaine had broken into my dorm and crawled into my bed as though it somehow belonged to her.
college is weird.
my weekly thoughts...
beginning sunday, august 15
I.
chesnuts, pecans
saddles and throatwood
heartswallow ashtins
helms versed in lasting
sweat pours so vastly
creek sags the mast wings.
II.
eyesight and candle-
wax licks the table
-i left most of the label
slip slow from the bottle
morning makes more flings
and head swims in places
much more real
than i'll ever feel
i'm just a fuck
checking my wrist watch
some matches, a lighter
and far too much time
to sit and burn these candles
measuring a wick wrapped in wax
as distance to the panhandle
III.
baby, will you tie this up around your wrist?
the same string that once held up your dress
the one that had hung it from your closet,
and on the hanger, way before you bought it.
the same string i had around my fingers
the one i stepped on-
oh girl you're such a mess.
baby, will you join me falling in the sand?
baby, please don't bother using up your hands.
i'll swing it for you, push you back so you confess,
the last thing you have left are those stupid needles tying off your chest.
and with this tiny string hugging my right wrist
i've become so much more than blessed
passed out drunk,
i'll let you tell me what i've missed
baby wrote that letter trying to teach me how to kiss
IV.
instrumental
V.
sometimes i think that the most of this is just a linear fuck-up. and more often i recognize a bleak future and the emptiest past, it's same time wherever, whenever, without the messy haired beauty rolling in the shoreline and makes me understand loss. without pure happiness we've got no spectrum of misery, and without three days alive i've got not one empty moment of sadness, without a shore to hug or some tousled hair to push back behind an ear i'm just hanging, swinging and delicate in front of some sober eye, no tweaked smile, no dirty dress, no green, no slingshot couch, no nothing, not now, not ever. nowhere to be, nowhere to breathe, no such thing as tired, only yawning to seem sleepy, and only faking sleep to watch the good ones with their eyes closed, touching their hips to hear what silence really sounds like, touch them to make them breathe heavy makes them stop snoring, makes hot breath on the curve in my neck, makes me feel the good one's blood tumble underneath her skin, makes it warm up against mine. so, nothing but blackened fingernails, white knuckles clutch the hem of a dress, white knuckles used to tie off the good parts on the good one's small frame, white knuckles around all the important arteries, white knuckles to hold the visceral moments, white knuckles to snatch up her seams, white knuckles to hold up the heavens; her dreams. one day we'll grow up and shrug at the thought of a lonely year or an eleven hour divide, embracing instead, the idea of a, "once and for all," the one that all the young boys and girls wrote about wildly on the backs of all their folders and in the margins of their homework. and i forgot to tell you, that while our adolescene exploded deep within our hearts, our secret admirers churned beneath our fingernails and so our scalps itching like boys in love with girl down the street who combed her hair fifty times each side for the boy down the road. the street 800 miles long, with no haze or clouds, and a clear view all the way from front door to front door. one day we grow up and that last handheld moment holds invitations of yours and hers, but ours are right now and standing here we're just useless peices of love bouncing around inside, waiting like wash cycles to be worn again forever, favorite shirts and underwear never to be owned by anyone else again.
VI.
so. save yourself, keep your sad slow heart from harm,
sway trees and silent twigs towards your own focus-
hold her hand while they draw blood from her arms,
swallow her gaze up on the ride home,
and with your hands crush her tiny bones,
bigger and well known as much more alone,
hollow, like a bird's and more often flown.
and so you forget why you started-
so much easier to invent a new story, than to find
new ways to swallow her lies each time:
force fed like her tongue, or her hands-
curled around the back of your head,
without which you're just sandy and mostly alone.
grains are friends, and stick around until you've washed away-
so mostly you're at fault,
and mostly it's just your nausea,
and no music to remember like those lips strapped to your neck,
no black tourniquet to take in your teeth,
so you know then it must have been real.
real old. real lost.
and maybe sometime, real wine, bad memories ferment in real time.
there's nothing like a long and miserable drive to perpetuate a long and miserable life.
we're so full of lies, those which the girls have focefed to boys.
VII.
it all happened while wearing polyesther.
the glass had exploded,
leaflets had blown out and tired,
and there were miles of destruction-
hallowed, uncontrollable fire.
so she stripped me, and left me naked in this weather,
calling out behind her:
"if only you had owned some more leather!!"
mixtapes are on the way, my kittens.
.heath
making
millions
off
his
miserable
memories.
i've torn the skin from each of my forearms
and tied it up around my wrists,
a new swimmer by the time she threw me,
ripping off her stapled lips.
pushing her hands behind the sand birthed
more shaggy dust for coughing
a moment 'now' forever,
suspended so very quite and slightly
over some stupid 'infinite night.'
she spoke of one per lifetime,
but they bleed for months thereafter,
and- left on the shore for hours to rinse;
those bleeding blue joints.
torn open and hanging,
caught by the hands of her watch,
were strapped delicate to my knuckles and my fist.
we are anesthesia.
on july 22 i turned 18, and spent the day feeling like there was a big brown eyed gift that must have gotten lost in the mail, and there were beers and things but there were less things than things. slow summer semester has ended, i'm in college and im just waiting to swallow more college and i'm ready and excited. there's a girl in college, a girl who deserves a story, some sort of live journal immortalization, and so her slanted tweak-ed shrine is therefore being prepared to be stepped on, so join me as i outline the misery of her invasion on my already skewed lifestyle. this is the story of elaine dyjak...
i met this girl one evening in my usual state: drunk with plans to become a drunkard, and regardless of how cute she may have seemed, regardless of how short her hair was, she was sitting with a spear through her lip and a tattoo upon her foot. she was the kind of girl who would swing her feet while she sat, and was more apt to swing her eyes than her whole head, and sitting at a table while i walked past meant that her eyes followed me closely, her head unmoved, she was stuck to a chair in my dorm's common room like a miserable trophy proclaiming mere mediocrity and emphasizing the most extreme example of what i call the un-delicate female: un-romanced, unfathomable, impossible, worn and tired and loosely based on better things which had once taken place.
regardless of my complete insatisfaction with the less than perfect "moment" i was having with this shaggy brown haired boredom, i was hucking two jugs of wine on my back, and so was justin. almost as four jugs of instant and magnificent indicators of future feelings, my drunken sentiments heaved at my heartwalls and i allowed for justin to invite the two plain and boring "beauties" back to our room. after a few hours of the usual bullshit boring background noise, myself and the present company had grown quite drunk and unbearably antsy, eventually opting for a trip to our friend mike's dorm. most of the walk and the details following our departure are fairly unclear, however it is certain that much of the journey was spent with me pushing elaine to the ground and leaving her wet, muddy and quite tousled. my frustration with stupid and haggard girls was growing with every swig, and was very plausibly mistaken by the dumb bitch as flirtatious violence, when in actuality, my disgust for elaine's miserable personality and uncanny ability to fall short of past love interests was driving my positively mad.
within the hour, mike, justin and myself had stripped down to our bare skin and were playing guitar and singing madly in the neon glow of mike's tacky dormroom decor.
although this chain of events may seem very much in the vain of an effort of boys toward striking up "conversation" with the "female elite" in our presence, i was fairly certain that my heterosexuality was writing me tickets, excuses, reasons and hall passes left and right to hop upon one of my guy friends rather than one of the sadly ruined and miserable girls sprinkled around mike's dull three AM dorm room red light district.
well nobody has ever won the war on alcohol and suddenly mike and i were each trapped beneath a writhing mass of boring girl. homely girls with serpent tongues and lip rings and perfectly plucked eyebrows and denim skirts, each full of sad lines from Story Of The Year songs, girls who were kicking their chuck taylors to the floor and making their way up our chests towards our cerebellums- which were drowned in cheap wine and thirty two suicidal ounces. upon squeaky blue mattresses with the sheets kicked to the floor and bad radio wafting like the stench of boring girl breath from a muffled CD player buried beneath bed linen in the bedroom's back corner, michael and i sacrificed our pride.
eventually the evening made it's own escape and the sun started crawling up the corner's of mike's windows, streaming upon the teenage "lovers" and revealing them caught in a sort of weird and contorted translation of teenage passion: clouded mostly by alcohol, boys with desires stretching for miles in every direction had their hopes eclipsed instead by these goddamn dull-ass damsels twisting upon our loveless torsos. mike and i's regret was framed by the solid sweat and swollen red ringing our eyes, pushing our morning into a weird divide of acheivement versus displacement, later exhanging phone numbers with disgust and spitting on their keypads.
mike and i's mindset that maybe "once upon a time was all" must have been the worst expectation since ben affleck's acting career, because suddenly elaine dyjak was everywhere. granted, i made an effort to involve her with some activities amongst my group of friends, more often than not, the effort was to score a ride from here to there. you see, elaine drives a killer car, a yellow 20th anniversary of the VW gulf or something like that. it's a 5 speed, and there's nothing like a clutch as smooth as the skin around my baby's neck. to tell you the truth, there were multiple times that i found myself in the room across from mine, with my best friends brendan and justin, (elaine dwindling about; drinking and losing sight of reality), when i would decide to climb into bed, only to be followed by the shaggy brown haired boredom bitch immdeiately thereafter. fearful of kicking out what i had begun to recognize as an extremely insane personailty, i simply dealt with her nightly omnipresence while i slept.
most of the time, she would burrow her head into the bunker i would create with my arms to protect my head, begging me to tell her how i felt her, pleading with me to confess my love for her, whining about how miserable i was to her, and bitching, in general, about everything, punctuating each torturous request for an answer with punches, bruises, slaps and kicks. elaine's desire to fight me grew each day, while my apathy was swelling like the blister from a ciggarette, and her driving me crazy with incessant convictions that i "loved her." i made it very clear that as far as fighting me, there were only two girls who could have actually stood a chance at taking me on, and she was not even close, also emphasizing the fact that until she actually COULD come close to becoming a true combatant, she would remain a horrible imitation of a very "comfrtable shoe" (lets just put it that way, the metaphor will stretch far enough for it's recipient to understand it's interpretation clearly) so then, if anything, my realizations began to lean towards girls i must have inflicted similar instances upon, but never feeling that i was guilty of such an extreme case of stress.
and with sincere and severe apology i offer my regret for ever putting a girl through such agony, however, elaine's next calculated move was completely beyond the boundaries of anything i could have possibly imagined or attemtped.
after a night of beers and bongs and all of those things which divide teenagers from adults, myself; while in the presence of very good company, chose to make a morning vacation at denny's for one last meal before sleep. well, although elaine was supposed to be meeting us there, i had grown very tired of offering her directions and repeating myself over and over. parker then decided that it was high time to turn my phone off and disconnect elaine from reality. all in attendance agreed with the notion, and therefore, elaine was no longer up the creek without a paddle, she was simply up the creek with nothing except a wet t-shirt and wet, messy hair, her lip ring rusting painfully inside her skin, and a notion that maybe she would never be loved by anyone ever.
after finishing a delicious meal, the caravan trekked back to our dorms and taylor, who had decided that she would sleep over, came into the restroom while i was preparing for bed. tay peeked in the door, and would then utter the most frightening words to ever rattle my eardrums:
"don... there's someone in your bed."
thinking it must have been my best friend across the hall, i replied:
"who, justin?"
"no, not justin...guess again"
suddenly, my muscles tensed, my eyes froze, a small chill began tumbling down my spine.
"is it... elaine?"
taylor simply smiled coyly and began nodding her head.
at this point it must be explained that although elaine was around quite often, her dorm was located approximately one half mile down the road from mine, and therefore, at 6 in the morning, had no way to access my dorm, OR my room, without somehow breaking in and waiting for someone to open the lobby door. so basically elaine had broken into my dorm and crawled into my bed as though it somehow belonged to her.
college is weird.
my weekly thoughts...
beginning sunday, august 15
I.
chesnuts, pecans
saddles and throatwood
heartswallow ashtins
helms versed in lasting
sweat pours so vastly
creek sags the mast wings.
II.
eyesight and candle-
wax licks the table
-i left most of the label
slip slow from the bottle
morning makes more flings
and head swims in places
much more real
than i'll ever feel
i'm just a fuck
checking my wrist watch
some matches, a lighter
and far too much time
to sit and burn these candles
measuring a wick wrapped in wax
as distance to the panhandle
III.
baby, will you tie this up around your wrist?
the same string that once held up your dress
the one that had hung it from your closet,
and on the hanger, way before you bought it.
the same string i had around my fingers
the one i stepped on-
oh girl you're such a mess.
baby, will you join me falling in the sand?
baby, please don't bother using up your hands.
i'll swing it for you, push you back so you confess,
the last thing you have left are those stupid needles tying off your chest.
and with this tiny string hugging my right wrist
i've become so much more than blessed
passed out drunk,
i'll let you tell me what i've missed
baby wrote that letter trying to teach me how to kiss
IV.
instrumental
V.
sometimes i think that the most of this is just a linear fuck-up. and more often i recognize a bleak future and the emptiest past, it's same time wherever, whenever, without the messy haired beauty rolling in the shoreline and makes me understand loss. without pure happiness we've got no spectrum of misery, and without three days alive i've got not one empty moment of sadness, without a shore to hug or some tousled hair to push back behind an ear i'm just hanging, swinging and delicate in front of some sober eye, no tweaked smile, no dirty dress, no green, no slingshot couch, no nothing, not now, not ever. nowhere to be, nowhere to breathe, no such thing as tired, only yawning to seem sleepy, and only faking sleep to watch the good ones with their eyes closed, touching their hips to hear what silence really sounds like, touch them to make them breathe heavy makes them stop snoring, makes hot breath on the curve in my neck, makes me feel the good one's blood tumble underneath her skin, makes it warm up against mine. so, nothing but blackened fingernails, white knuckles clutch the hem of a dress, white knuckles used to tie off the good parts on the good one's small frame, white knuckles around all the important arteries, white knuckles to hold the visceral moments, white knuckles to snatch up her seams, white knuckles to hold up the heavens; her dreams. one day we'll grow up and shrug at the thought of a lonely year or an eleven hour divide, embracing instead, the idea of a, "once and for all," the one that all the young boys and girls wrote about wildly on the backs of all their folders and in the margins of their homework. and i forgot to tell you, that while our adolescene exploded deep within our hearts, our secret admirers churned beneath our fingernails and so our scalps itching like boys in love with girl down the street who combed her hair fifty times each side for the boy down the road. the street 800 miles long, with no haze or clouds, and a clear view all the way from front door to front door. one day we grow up and that last handheld moment holds invitations of yours and hers, but ours are right now and standing here we're just useless peices of love bouncing around inside, waiting like wash cycles to be worn again forever, favorite shirts and underwear never to be owned by anyone else again.
VI.
so. save yourself, keep your sad slow heart from harm,
sway trees and silent twigs towards your own focus-
hold her hand while they draw blood from her arms,
swallow her gaze up on the ride home,
and with your hands crush her tiny bones,
bigger and well known as much more alone,
hollow, like a bird's and more often flown.
and so you forget why you started-
so much easier to invent a new story, than to find
new ways to swallow her lies each time:
force fed like her tongue, or her hands-
curled around the back of your head,
without which you're just sandy and mostly alone.
grains are friends, and stick around until you've washed away-
so mostly you're at fault,
and mostly it's just your nausea,
and no music to remember like those lips strapped to your neck,
no black tourniquet to take in your teeth,
so you know then it must have been real.
real old. real lost.
and maybe sometime, real wine, bad memories ferment in real time.
there's nothing like a long and miserable drive to perpetuate a long and miserable life.
we're so full of lies, those which the girls have focefed to boys.
VII.
it all happened while wearing polyesther.
the glass had exploded,
leaflets had blown out and tired,
and there were miles of destruction-
hallowed, uncontrollable fire.
so she stripped me, and left me naked in this weather,
calling out behind her:
"if only you had owned some more leather!!"
mixtapes are on the way, my kittens.
.heath
making
millions
off
his
miserable
memories.