...Now our luck may have died and our love may be cold but with you forever I'll stay
We're goin' out where the sand's turnin' to gold so put on your stockin's baby 'cause the night's getting cold
And everything dies baby that's a fact
But maybe everything that dies someday comes back

Now I been lookin' for a job but it's hard to find
Down here it's just winners and losers and don't get caught on the wrong side of that line
Well I'm tired of comin' out on the losin' end
So honey last night I met this guy and I'm gonna do a little favor for him
Well I guess everything dies baby that's a fact
But maybe everything that dies someday comes back
Put your hair up nice and set up pretty
and meet me tonight in Atlantic City
Meet me tonight in Atlantic City
Meet me tonight in Atlantic City

--"Atlantic City", Bruce Springsteen









nine

smoking the rent

Fuckin hell, im distracted. A million roads stretch out from each moment. I’m channel surfing. I’m tapping on my handheld. I’m standing in the middle of Times Square feeling horny, tired, happy, and sad as i try not to look up and get my head lost in the lights.



I look each person I pass defiantly in the eye for a single second before looking back down, stoned and uncertain.



Later on

Alone and unable to sleep,

I head back out into the streets.

In a long black coat loaded with graffiti.

I’m seeing a truth that no one else has ever seen like a neon sign thru the hazy end of a day…the orange glow calls my name, but I can’t read what it says...yet.

My heart's a boat in tow.

I am suffering from post thxgiving stress disorder.

I wanna run around wearing a tall black hat and fucked-up patent leather platform boots.

Not 2amused.

I’m wearing a mask, 3-6-5. It’s like that Outkast lyric: even if I take off my shades and you look in my eyes you might see a disguise.

But with him I’ve let go. I’ve given myself over for a few moments at a time.

And inside each of those moments entire lifetimes were waiting, creamy centers shimmering with the majesty of galaxies beneath those hard candy shells—

He makes me feel like the woman I used to wonder if I was.

Sometimes the day is so long, and filled with so much bland drudgery, that I start to believe that the night will never come…that I’m going to waste away under the relentless radiation (ruling the nation) of the sun.

But eventually, night falls (like a grand piano). And it is in the night that I find him. He is my muse and my hero. He comes into my room and stands over me—the white-nite city glow streams through the window behind him like the light from a film projector. He lies down in my bed and holds me close. He feels so good that I’m overwhelmed. I’ve been aching for him for so long that I’ve nearly made myself sick. Black smoke circles my lungs and there are rings under my eyes…which in turn appear bluer than ever. I can’t hear his heart beating because mine is pounding so loudly in my head.

He takes me out on the city streets…with him I see things I never see. I listen very closely to everything he says. His words fill my brain like tsunamis.



In my life without him I often act as though time has no meaning—as though I have as long as I’d like to fuck around on this big green and blue stage. But so precious are my moments with my muse that I have learned that I have nothing, no time, no spare moments. Beyond our embrace, everything is spinning out of control. The dawn of the real world is like the explosion of a train wreck, lighting up the horizon just behind the town, encroaching upon my freedom...threatening it

(from over the hills and far, far away)



Andy Warhol said that the hottest love affair is between two people who never get to do it…

he was right. It’s the beauty of a secret glance filled with secret meaning…a darkened bridge far in the distance along a lonely highway…

(lighter still grows the sky, the start of the day)

Like an old Prince song played on a brand new dance floor…

Like taking yr skull for a ride even when yr body is trapped.

Like how every ending is a new opportunity…

...what matters is if u got balls enough to take it.







citywide, cinemascope.

Sometimes I feel like there's this whole subtext that everyone else gets and that I am missing huge chunks of, not unlike a retarded child.

In order to make a work that really WORKS u have to be outside of society yet close enuf to keep a choke hold on that shit.

I want my empty v.

I am a slave to my pussy. If yr reading this, u r too.

Xo

There's so much I wanna show u...

I just got high and touched a leather glove on my bed and for a second I didn't know what it was and I freaked the fuck out. Ha. Fello knobbers.

Money, Power, Respect

"i dunno...it's not like i feel like i need to protect myself or something...," i said with a chuckle.

"why else would you want a gun if not to protect yourself?"

"i dunno..." i said, fidgeting in the recliner. I stared up for the millionth time at the painting of the baby in a diaper floating against an amorphous grey background and for the millionth time i was made uneasy.

"just to have it!" i said suddenly--my voice unexpectedly loud.

"you know...to look at."

"i see," he said as his mouth turned up in that funny smile of his.

"i know, i know," i said, waving my hand in the air. "the phallus. i want the phallus. yep. i KNOW."

"i didn't say that."

"oh, like you had to say it! isn't it obvious?"

"well, i don't think so."

"that's cuz you like me and you know i'm broke as a joke so you don't wanna waste time with that elementary shit."

the room was quiet. I could hear the hum of the white noise machine by the door, and beyond that, the water sizzling in the pipes and beyond that, a muffled conversation in the lobby.

i sat slouched with my hair in my face and my legs spread wide.

"i think you want control," he said, finally. "i think that's what you think you're missing on this journey that you're on."

"hmm," i said.

"if this is a journey maybe i should get a car instead."











unwellness

u wouldn't necessarily know by looking at me that im from the country of subculture.

I want u to take me somewhere fancy for lunch and slip me a roofy.

I feel safe in my bed.

For u I lose my focus.

Im on a plain. I can't complain.

Going outside is over.

Yr the first person I ever told about what it was like when c really lost it...how helpless one feels in the face of the unconscious of an other.

I walk up to the bar and stand in front of the door.

Frozen like a statue till the feeling passes.

Oh snap! JFK, Jr isn't dead!! I just saw him on East 83rd street stooped over the menu outside an Italian restaurant. Ferreals--it was John-John. I kid you not. He had a bad haircut and a soul patch and wore a burgundy ribbed sweater that looked like he bought it in a mall and light blue jeans covered with faux "wear and tear". At his side was a pretty, plain girl with dark brown hair the same shade as his. She wore a cheap leather jacket and Aerosole boots and one of those hideous, humungous shoulder bags that women persist in carrying. She was smiling at him, and, as I passed, he looked up from the laminated pages and smiled back at her with his "coulda been president" smile. He was dead and free and ordinary and he reminded me that NYC is not just a place that people go to get famous, it is also a place where people go to disappear completely.

Which is why it's the greatest city in the world...

Too bad I didn't have a camera.


failure

"i can't sleep, I toss and turn, candlesticks in the dark, visions of bodies bein burned..."
--The Gheto Boys,"My Mind's Playin Tricks On Me"

Everything in here is TRUE...

today i googled the name of the guy who raped me years ago and found that he works a couple of blocks away from where i do, in a skyscraper where he has a job that is uncannily similar to mine. oddly enough, i'm not surprised by these coincidences. all this time i felt him nearby--every day for years i've turned corners on city streets expecting to literally run into him. i don't know why i waited so long to type his name into that search bar. i guess i was too overwhelmed by fear, tho it would have made sense, from a safety and well-being standpoint, to have confirmed his whereabouts so that i could steer clear, but "sense" is never something i've had when it comes to him--my former best friend and partner in crime. i've gone thru the last couple of years putting myself back together after what he did to me and what i in turn did to myself to prove that i deserved it. i played out tons of shit on this site, always careful (especially in the beginning) to never give a clear indication of who or where i was, just in case he was tuning in.

i wrote as three people as a way of playing out the past, but also as a way of keeping it at bay.

i was trying spin gold out of hay, instead of lighting that shit on fire and letting it BURN, BURN, BURN.

now, for the first time, i feel like i'm ready to blog ferreals...

hi, everyone.

my name is TRUE.



the ferreally

real bloggers

are real

even when it hurts like fuck.

Cripple Creek

The time has come for me to get a piece. Just a little somethin somethin that i can use in case i need to blow someone's motherfuckin head off.

Any suggestions as to brand and type? Of course I will be taking lessons to properly educate myself.



he has 3 fave rivers

a real life friend of mine

Overripe

When I talk about grammar I mean something deeper than slanted lines drawn under a sentence on a blackboard. Grammar is the foot that connects us to the earth. We walk across this land on it—it’s our way of being in the here and now--of relating to the world and being anchored to it at the same time.

Grammar is the way you see things, it’s the way you understand hand gestures and words people say with chopped off endings. It’s built in to the jokes in television commercials. It’s the way you bring the soup spoon up to your mouth, it’s how you walk through a chain store in a mall and expect similar things to the other versions of the store you’ve been to…grammar is how you know how to tear open the perforated flap on your speeding ticket and unfold it to read what’s inside…

country grammar (like nelly’s), street grammar, cocktail party grammar, white grammar, black grammar, young grammar, old grammar, east, south, north, wessssssssssssside grammar…

Grammar has to do with the music you listen to and the heroes you have, if you have any heroes at all.

It’s about what you see and feel and when you open your eyes in the morning. It’s the brightly lit bridge taking you from the shadowy soft dream world of the night into the harsh realities of the day: of needing to get up and make money and be the person that you are, in the job and socio-economic class and overall situation that makes up the reality of your life.

You can speak the same language as someone but have a totally different grammar. The kids who are rioting in France speak French but they speak it with a different grammar than most of those who are nestled safely within the arrondissements of Paris. The American colonists and their English counterparts started out speaking a like and as distance, time and economic circumstance created a rift between them, the grammar of being English and having the English way of doing things fell off from the colonists like over-ripened fruit falling off a tree.

They were replaced by bright green American buds—symbols and parables—the beginnings of a brand new way of thinking and talking and writing.

Now the fruit is ready to fall again…

u r fonzi

u r a star

u r shining yr light on me

Lie together, cry together...i swear to god i hope we fuckin die together

Moonlight strolls with the hoes, oh no, that's not my steelo
I wanna bitch that like to play celo, and craps
Packin gats, in a Coach bag steamin dime bags
A real bitch is all I want, all I ever had
With a glock just as strong as me
Totin guns just as long as me, the bitch belongs with me
Any plans with another bitch, my bitch'll spoil it
One day, she used my toothbrush to clean the toilet
Throwin my clothes out the windows, so when the wind blows
I see my Polos and Timbos
Hide my car keys so I can't leave
A real slick bitch, keep a trick up her sleeve
And if I deceive, she won't take it lightly
She'll invite me, politely, to fight G
And then we lie together, cry together
I swear to God I hope we fuckin die together

Just me and my bitch,
Just me and my bitch,
Just me and my bitch…

She helped me plan out my robberies on my enemies
Didn't hesitate to squeeze, to get my life out of danger
One day, she put nine one one on the page
Had to call back, whether it's minor or major
No response, the phone just rung
Grab my vest, grab my gun, to find out the problem
When I pulled up, police was on the scene
Had to make the U-turn, make sure my shit was clean
Drove down the block, stashed the burner in the bushes
Stepped to police with the shoves and the pushes
It didn't take long before the tears start
I saw my bitch dead with the gunshot to the heart
And I know it was meant for me
I guess the niggaz felt they had to kill the closest one to me
And when I find em your life is to and end
They killed my best friend... me and my bitch

"Me and My Bitch"--Notorious B.I.G.

Purple rain, purple rain.

Cuisin Art

i was out collecting words on the city streets as night fell over the skyscrapers and the ends of the avenues burned with sinking sunlight like acetylene flares.

i scooped up bits of broken phrases from the litter strewn sidewalks and grabbed full-fledged rhymes radiating off the faces of people I passed. their mouths were mostly thin lines pulled tight. their eyes were mostly downcast.

there was a cop in his patrol car staring at his flipped open celly with a blue-screened face.

there was a well-dressed woman sitting bolt upright at the end of a bar, looking out the open door, and staring forlornly into space.

the words come fast and furious—leaping like salmon pushing upstream

I carried home my catch in my little black book

Sometimes it takes me so fucking long to write anything cuz I have to move the words around, add and subtract, think and rethink.

Other times the right combination comes to me straight away, laid out as natural as flat stones on the bottom of a creek.

Either way, those that make the cut get sent to the grammar cuisinart in my brain for extra processing

Where the illest iron presses them till they’re extra tight

Toastin the edges of nouns and meltin the cheese out of verbs…

Makin dainty story sandwiches that only get sloppy when you try and take a bite.






ill peripheral

science

"So Pre-9/11"

...that's what i think every time i fire up my 5 yr old compaq desktop. once it's past the whirl-clunk-grrrr-wizzz drama of the boot, windows XP plays this happy little jingle that seems to say all is right in the world and especially america, where we have microsoft and dot.coms and billy clint getting his ding donged in the oval office.

damn. the good old days.

sigh.

I know it sometimes seems like im being vague on purpose...and sometimes that's the case...but only about the facts.