October 2009
7 posts
cakebeef:
The Avett Brothers - I Would Be Sad
Scrawled in the margins. Page 86.
cakebeef:
“So the parade had to be postponed
So we could watch the balloons ascend
Though we all know that they explode
As they get closer to Him.”
You have always been wrong about my intentions. If I wanted I could fill the basic void with any number of relatively interchangeable women. What hurts, what sits like a hot stone against my chest and makes my eyes moisten, is that I do...
Old notebooks, older ideas.
cakebeef:
There’s this thing that happens, independent of my attempts to control or contain it. There is a brightening of the edges of objects. A photo filter for my retinas which may from time to time apply itself, turning everything mundane slightly magical, or at least unoppressive.
Sometimes, I am in love. It makes me childish, in the good way. I become silly with love. Stupid. I...
August 2009
11 posts
The weather is the weather on either side of the...
cakebeef:
She looked like you. Not in any particular way. Her carriage, the tilt of her head, style without flash, hair in need of washing. I watched her mouth as she talked stocks into some freakishly small cellular telephone. It wasn’t yours.
I had to hold my chest, my fingers pressing this way and that, reaching for the part that hurt.
There is physical discomfort in missing you, which...
“Absence diminishes mediocre passions and increases great ones, as the wind...”
– Francois de La Rochefoucauld (via cakebeef)
Rest/pause.
cakebeef:
You were looking for something. Food, maybe. An ink pen. A word on the tip of your tongue.
Maybe it was just an itch. A couple of eyeblinks. The silence before a commercial.
I am there, in all your brief pauses, in the air between your words.
I love you.
There is nowhere else I can be.
What would it take?
cakebeef:
Just tell me.
Tell me tell me tell me, please. Open up your mouth, not your fingertips or your inkwell. You know exactly where to find me 82% of the time and you know I’d drop everything and come running if you called me the other 18. I’m sitting here in cutoffs and a wifebeater watching Mad Men for the first time eating hummus off little faggy toast points and the fact that you’re...
Fuck.
cakebeef:
I can’t sleep to save my life. I can’t think of anything but your skin, your stinky hair and how much I absolutely and without question loved the shit out of you with every fiber of my being I hadn’t committed to reflexive humor or an antiquated and juvenile sense of survival.
For the first time in a long time I am living life like it still has possibility, like the road stretches...
Hmph.
cakebeef:
I went 21 days without reading your internet diary.
You forgot to forgive, and you offered no leeway for me to change.
I talked to my loveroommate for three hours tonight and all we covered is that I wanted to be the best for you.
These things take time, kiddo. A man can’t change the way he raised himself overnight. Finding one who wants to is like digging for that needle in the...
cakebeef:
Hey, you. This is exactly what I was...
“Like most people, I do not mean half of what I say and I cannot say half of what...”
– Nadine Gordimer (via audj) (via cakebeef)
July 2009
37 posts
Snip, snap.
cakebeef:
My hands are too heavy
and I mix metaphors like a child with paints
I am clumsy with my words
A hammer or a stone against the lock when
I need instruments, wires,
patience and silence and a good florist
After all, they sent you to college
so you could learn to like
better poetry than this.
Not quite lost, but decidedly unfound.
cakebeef:
“We lived in this rundown little two-flat on the west side, and there were those centipedes and the hot water ran out every three minutes but I swear to you, those were the best years of our lives.”
This is a movie cliché. This is something your parents talk about when they’re drunk.
Do you know why? Because of all the prefab bullshit and nonexistent scenarios we chase day in and...
And for my next trick, I will need a volunteer.
cakebeef:
It’s little things. Minutiae.
Every day I wake up, put the kettle on, fumbling for my glasses through a haze of sunlight and color, and maybe hangover. I arrange both pillows, and for just a heartbeat, a knife twist, I think of one of them as yours. Gone before it registers, really. Just a pinprick.
“I like my coffee like I like my women,” he said, ”Strong, black and proud.”
I...
“If you feel it and you don’t do everything in your power to reach for it, you...”
– (via cakebeef)
Gawdamnit.
cakebeef:
I love Nicole Rychel James. I like to pretend I don’t, and I further this fantasy by drinking to excess, reading too many books and watching an inordinate amount of Peep Show, but it does not change. Sometimes I imagine she is having sexual intercourse with a tall, tan man or a negro hipster, and enjoying it. This makes me ill, but does not really “work” for eliminating said...
Mail bomb. Euthanasia. Sharkbird.
cakebeef:
I used to wait for you to appear in the crowd, marveling at how easy it was to find you no matter what you were wearing, no matter how far away. Sunglasses, different jacket, head down or up. As soon as you crossed Monroe you were always glowing in all that drab bustle.
Bombshell.
My heart couldn’t take it. Mortared by the sight of you. The thought of you.
I could find you in the...
Marionette. Marie Antoinette.
cakebeef:
Once I sat on a bus stop for five hours drinking 40oz. malt liquor beverages with my girlfriend. Amusingly, the CTA bus #59 only came once in this entire time. I’m glad they raised their rates. We made fun of ourselves for our ghetto date, of every passing hipster in neon skinny jeans. We talked about nothing and everything. The American beauty standard, the English language,...
Things that are pretty:
cakebeef:
1. Flowers. 2. You.
Trivial.
cakebeef:
What is your favorite cake? I will make it for your birthday. This item is both amusing and useful, and fits some ideal I have of you in my head. I will buy it for you. I remember you saying you liked this as part of a larger conversation about an entirely different topic, so I got it for you for Christmas. I cooked this because I knew you were mad at me, but the presentation is...
Fuck your big picture.
cakebeef:
If you have the rest of your life to do … whatever it is you think you’re going to do but aren’t sure, waste the present with me. Let me love you now.
Let me love you while I love you.
Lover, I love you.
cakebeef:
I would make a bed
(out of blankets and pillows and that
cloud foam mattress cover thing
my mother bought me that I don’t use)
in front of my refrigerator
and keep it open all night
with the knob turned up to seven
(that’s as high as it goes)
if you would just come sleep with me tonight.
Then tomorrow I would buy an air conditioner.
Peonies on the windowsill.
cakebeef:
“Can I ask you a question?” “You just did.” “Don’t be a dick.” “Go ahead.” She was so fucking beautiful. It hurt to look at her. I mean it. Like someone reached in and set a stone in my chest, this pressure I felt just looking at her. A physical discomfort. I would dart from feature to feature, eyes, lips, the small scar on her chin, a stray lock of hair made blinding in the light from...
Loud and plain.
cakebeef:
Caketaker,
I’m all out of olive juice.
Regards,
Justin Michael Valmassoi
Impasse Living Solutions, Ltd.
Chicago, IL 60613
Things I enjoyed:
cakebeef:
[in a semi-particular order]
1. Kissing you.
2. Kissing you in the kitchen.
3. Kissing you in the car.
4. Coming up behind you and sliding my hands under your disintegrating Beatles t-shirt while you rinsed dishes and cupping your breasts, which usually led to kissing in the kitchen.
5. Watching you brush your teeth.
6. Running up behind you whenever you would bend over to get...
It's not difficult, only impossible.
cakebeef:
I made the bed silently. I tucked the sheets just so beneath the corners of the mattress, folding them over so its weight would pin them tight. I folded the blanket, first in half, then in half again, then into thirds. I turned the pillows this way and that, until they were perfect.
I made coffee with trembling hands, the spoon spilling tiny grains onto the countertop, small...
A haiku for you.
cakebeef:
Little broken things litter the hallway and the lamp doesn’t work now.
Only you.
cakebeef:
In my rush to save what I considered important, scooping all of it into arms unequal to the task, there were things, more precious things, whose value I would not realize until after the fire had changed them, shrank them, made them immaterial and dust. I loved you with my arms.
Adieu, whatever the fuck "My love" is, in whatever...
cakebeef:
The thing about everything is that not a lick of it matters if you can’t make it.
Ghost town.
cakebeef:
Any more effort, he thought, and there might have been any at all. As it stood he could recall several pets and the occasional stranger in a CVS who had expressed more of a desire or need for his company or care. Without thinking, he walked into the kitchen and began to cook. The radio was still on in the living room, tinny and distant. He opened the back door, thinking for three...