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boats

this
i fear
is my last chance
my elbows on the table
and i don't touch you
with my lips or hands
but like a fleet of boats
poised
in one direction
my heart is full of words
and movements
sharply
drawing the bow right back.
i think that urgency
is a beautiful language.
and nobody wants you more.


a.w.

outtakes

lyre

i want you to know
i am not bouncing sound off walls
echoes in chambers
or lyrebird calls
a parrot collecting
the sounds of the earth
and reflecting them all.
instead i am trying to start
a fire without a match
and no one taught me how to do that.
that i am thrown from ships
tired and trying not to slip down
in unnamed seas
but i still know where you're at.
what i want to say is
that i am somewhere in the depths
that when i tell you things
they are coming from my depths
that my voice is pure
and that it might be best
to mark my words.
because i am no kind of poet
and no kind of bird
i won't say i love you
because my love deserves
to hear sentences
that no one else has ever heard.


a.w.

parts of snow

the night goes dark
while i listen to that one wave
that keeps heaving
on the same pile of stones
like a long sweet heartbeat
i picture you turning your lights off
and sighing in the blackness
you don't picture me,
that is the difference.
i am trying to marry two words
craft some sentence
trap the right notes in ether
to some extent
in every moment,
to woo you, love
to swivel your chair half way around.
i remember each thing you have given me
do you want me to list them
i want it to be impossible
for you to be able to chart what i've done
beyond a steady watch ticking
the feathers in your pillow
love should be an avalanche
and all of its parts of snow.
do you want me to tell you,
or is it enough to just know.



a.w.

grenades

i have been here long enough
to know how to weigh sentences
as they fall from the mouth
like invisible powder.
some things we say with our eyes down
or our cheeks warm
some things we whisper
like a secret we were supposed to guard
some things we shout down a hallway
or up a staircase
over cables
and lightning bolts.
no one collects them
or translates them
and i have been speaking long enough
to know that they all weigh
just the same
whatever the color
or sweetness
they had on our tongue.
i have found myself dropping grenades like
"i was starting to love you"
but the grenade never goes off
it doesn't even tick
just falls like the same powder
that fell from my lips
when i woke up and said
"i wonder if it's warm outside."


a.w.

book no. 2

many years ago, about 10, i put out a poetry and songbook collection called split infinitive. in the next few weeks i will finish editing a second. it will be in three parts, three stages of my life from the past decade. mostly poetry, with some journal excerpts snuck in. since i've been struck down by tendinitis these past few months and haven't been able to touch my instruments or much else, this seems like the ideal time to focus on words all by themselves.

the little mermaid

“But if you take away my voice,” said the little mermaid, “what is left for me?”

in the night i go sailing

my night is a restless
whispering thing
at my ear
like a ghost
tireless in its haunting

if i try to love you
as hard as i hurt
something to rise to the surface
a white preserver
sprung from the black night
will you let me cling

if i scatter more touches
this time, than last time
will you please read into it
you know the touches i mean

i think if you find me sleeping
at last
it will be with your name
like a wreath in my hands

(it is not the things we take with us
to the grave
it is the things we weigh our boat with
to get to sleep)

the night is a push
from the harbor
the sound of calm water
the ache of trying to translate
the new language
of your scent in my hair
even though i can't remember
the last time you touched me

the long wandering of bare feet
the eternal wait for your response
it pulls
like the sleeves of my sweater
that i clasp in my fists
as i warm my palms

are you going to let me keep clasping
let me close my eyes
let me push the boat out
to somewhere that is still enough
that the first thing i feel
when the dream starts
is your arms
because i've waited long enough
already


a.w.

revive

i write you off
but the ink is invisible,
will always be.
whatever your last word was
it will stay on my skin
and shiver
so i hope it is no word at all
but a touch.
do you hear me
when i curse at you through walls
for never catching
when you could have
when my heart falls.
but i can't wait
for you to hook me again.
breathe me with life
so i can die again.
i'm quite sure that you know
where i'm hiding.
waiting for the touch on my shoulder
has me trembling
and alive again.


a.w.

wax orchards

i will save a place for this
with the certain words
that my memory likes to pet
the street names
and lake names
and foreign words for avocado
china mountain
wax orchards.
i will cover you with tags
a bit like an autopsy
a bit like a charm bracelet
and the whir of the wind
will flap them
but not shake them.
i have my ways of keeping track.

i know what medications you're on
i will not mix the right moment with the wrong touch
i am like a pharmacist
in that.

if i tell you my favorite flower
and you never hand me one
does that mean you don't love me.
i should not think like that.


a.w.

extra covers ep

like a tire

somehow i know
there might be nothing
worse to you
than being cared for.
i turn this thought over
on the nights
when i need more air
when you've made me a fish
on the carpet
yet i am the one
wanting to save you
in my fantasy
still.

i was falling in love
but i promise
i stopped,
like the staccato violence
of a baseball in a glove.

if you had wanted sacrifice
instead
i would have slashed myself like a tire

if you had wanted breath
i would have given you my deepest one

in moments of the night
i may find myself grateful
that you didn't want these things,
that each beat of my heart
is another beat you let me keep
another sleep you let me sleep.

because if you were thirsty
after your bad dreams,
some of mine are sweet
and i would have found a way
to siphon them
like a worm into your ear.

i saw pinholes in you,
i wanted you to be the slits
of silver that came out,
that one time your heartbeat sped up,
that is the you i wrap myself around.
drink enough and you will surpass
even my most exalted statements
spool the night out
and you'll break all the encasements
but it's just pinholes and whiskey
and if you wanted to be here
you would be here
where your place is.

i only want the bees and butterflies
who found their own way here,
i never armed myself
with any pins
to put in their pretty wings
because it's not the same thing.

i didn't say anything to trick you.
did you say anything to trick me?
my love, i don't mind.

bookends

the song i would write you now
is different
because my hands have broken down
but not just that
it's that all of me
is humming in lower sounds

there were days
when you were too lovely to write about
and my hands instead
were the ones trying to tell you
what was in me
trying to get out

but the rest of the time
i was diligent with my homework
trying to be a healer and a singer and a poet
anything that you think
we dropped behind us
i went back and got it

anything you haven't figured out yet
i already knew it
and forgot it

the girl writes the poem
about the first touch and the pet name
about the morning
and the kiss in the rain
and even about the broken glass
and the heart pain

but not about the first day
she forgot to think about you
and everything went on just the same



a.w.

thunder

last night
the sky made thunder
like sheets of metal
thrown down the street
toward the lake
and if there were a glass of water
beside my bed
i believe it would shake.
and even when the sun was dim
a different green plant
suddenly turned red or purple
unwarned in my own garden.
how dare you
i've been keeping my earthquakes
to myself
and all of the colors i would have turned
instead i held my breath
i watched you
just wrote some words down
and was like a leaking tap
that could've filled the bath
but instead whispered
down the drain.



a.w.

in dreams

if i could sleep
i would use my dreams
to summon you to me
that fish bowl of the night
that you can't swim from.
that power we think we have
in dreaming of one another,
as though you were sleepwalking
and now you will never know
the things you did
that i have seen...

but in my day
and in my sleep
i don't get to do the things i want to
except in those last fleeting moments
one two three
when my eyes start to see
things that aren't there
but my heart still feels
full of real-life.
blur my worlds together
and bring you to me.
i wish i was better at this.
i could make it last longer.

i think the fiercer
i encircle you in my sleep
the gentler i touch you
in the daylight.
the more i pull away
the more you will know
that you have me.
every night
as i drift off
like a good-bye
on a platform
and i can't say anything grand
if i don't know where you're going
because i am careful with my heart
but i am not careful
enough.

one two three
is all it takes
to wake up with my heart
beating like a race horse
that ran all night long
while i was sleeping.

it is written
like a fortune.
constant as a pulse,
crushed as my pillow,
and as sweet as sleep.



a.w.

torches

i miss being
in the front
of each others' minds
knowing we privately smile
at the same time
the draught in this house
puts all the candles out
faster than i could ever light them

it's the same with kisses
and escalators
if you wait too long
it will never be the right time

the light's changed
we never took the polaroid
we never accidentally fell asleep
on the sofa
i never found out
what you would call me
when you open your eyes in the morning
i had guesses

but even i
have no interest in torches
that have fallen into the water


a.w.

blood poem

bend the space
for me
i don't want to be
opposite corners of the fitted sheet
don't make me have to memorize
your colors
don't want to be the one
taking minutes
because the point of being with you
is being with you.
i thought i told you
how i need your blood
how just mine pumping
doesn't push enough
and just like everything
with you is,
one drop is enough,
is all i want.
the promise i make
is to only take
what i need to keep breathing
i am someone to be lost at sea with
all of the rations are yours
except for that one drop
my love.


a.w.

purple juice

i have come to learn
that you don't know how to take me.
if you were picking blackberries
you would have the purple juice
all over your fingers
that heartbreaking moment
as a child
when you tear your first leg from a spider
all by accident
with the rim of a cup
that you were trying to save
i'll pretend
pretend that you're heartbroken
by the things you've spilled
the moments you kill
by laughing
out of the corner of your mouth.

i hardly ever fall
but when i do
i expect to be caught.

a.w.

spokes

there is no such thing as a long night
or a short night
each minute is the distance
of eyelash to eyelash
dandelion spokes
everything in nature is even and steady
like my fingers splayed apart
but some of the minutes hurt
and some of them are saccharine
and some of them i would've looked at so much harder
like you just laughed
and i was listening to the sound
and i didn't count the lines at the corner of your eyes
and let me relive it now
again
for each of the senses
and let me see both sides of your profile
at once.
they won't replay it for me.
but i do.
that is love.
taking one moment
and bringing it back to life
like a vampire.
knowing you touched me
and knowing it must've been the warmest thing in the world
but i was so busy holding my breath
i didn't even get to feel it.

a.w.

stolen

Covers album out June 1 on Saint-Loup Records.

Stolen:

Falling Snow (Damien Jurado)
Flume (Bon Iver)
Wait For Me (Motopony)
Hur Jag Fick Dig Att Alska Mig (Kent)
Fake Empire (The National)
That Look You Give That Guy (Eels)
Let's Go to Bed (The Cure)
Stolen (The Bleachers)
Earlies (Trash Can Sinatras)
Flirted With You All My Life (Vic Chesnutt)
True Faith (New Order)
Leif Erikson, Type Foundry Mix (Interpol)



Extra Covers EP:

Eyes Without a Face (Billy Idol)
If I Were (Vashti Bunyan)
Halo (Beyonce)
Harmless Sparks (David Bazan)
Black Metallic (Catherine Wheel)

lotte kestner b-sides album

stranger

i can watch you now
like someone who has not touched you,
i can wonder at what color
to call your eyes,
now that the taste of your mouth
has slipped from my remembering
or has melted and changed on its own.
and you could laugh at me
because i spend such moments
imagining what it's like to be part of you
or what we would whisper about.
or would you squint gently
at the curiosity of my new eyes
- to which the shape of your neck
is a new line to trace -
and with the scar of your expression
nudge the past gently across the table
toward me,
some truth that allows your beauty
to scald like the beauty of a stranger
even as it is true
that i have worn your clothes,
and i have seen your shoulders bare.

a.w.

stumble

the room is speaking your name to me,
so i may not lie, pretending that
i think of your face when it is before me, only,
and i cannot recreate your voice in my mind.
the room will tell me things
that you will never tell me,
for i am no striking light for you
that fills your eyes and leaves a stain
that you can sense wherever you move,
like how i sense you.
i do not mind being foolish
and so vulnerable - i cannot
imagine your love, but then cannot
imagine not seeking it,
the smooth color of your lips
are a summons.

i make sure that you know where i am...
i will leave fragments of my wishes
about your room, and inside your pockets,
that one day you may mistakenly
stumble upon my love for you,
that one day you may mistakenly
stumble upon your love for me.

a.w.

thousands

you will never be as beautiful
to anyone as you are to me now -
and i tell myself that for that
you should love me,
for in my eyes is half of where you live.

i know how my heart can paint
new colors in a pair of eyes and
new flavors upon your lip and
find your body - just as it always has been -
so gold and smooth and a perfect fit for mine.
i ache too hard and love too hard
but there is nothing so becoming to you
as the way i see you.
and all i can ask is that,
if you will not kiss me,
then please do not smile, for it makes your eyes
too bright, and do not move your face too close,
for it makes my chest tight and weak,
and do not laugh when i explain your beauty
in thousands of words
as if i were a poet pretending.

a.w.

are you alone

are you still alone?
my heart will turn pale whatever you say,
i who lug the burden of love to bed with me.
do you wake from your sweet dreams
with your lips heavy with kisses
and no one to lay them upon,
do you sometimes feel beautiful
and have no one to tell you
you are right,
that your skin is soft and your eyes
are the color the world ought to be.
and when your dreams are colder
and you wake with a soft moan,
is there no one to rearrange the sheets
and rest their mouth upon your forehead
and whisper your name.
this punishment - that i lie with the darkness,
that i lie with it as though it were you,
wondering if you know that you need not be alone
and that i have thought of you
as the fragments of night scrape
slowly past.
are you still alone?
i know from my love how easy it is to love you
why wouldn't others find you as beautiful
and gently remove from your night
the memory of loneliness, with their fingertips.
...only if they love you like i do,
that their lips upon your mouth
seek your breath to live off of,
that when they are woken from dreams
by an unfamiliar noise, a creak, a clock
they savor that moment like no other,
to memorize your sleeping face,
that when they leave you they begin to ache.
oh i would sooner see you in those
stranger's arms
than for your body to go untouched
and your breath cold

but i cannot doubt, it will never be
that they will love like me.

a.w.

Sadistik - two Identity Theory interviews

Seattle's best rapper, interviewed while watching American Psycho.


This is the film interview

This is the music interview

Some are Dead and Some are Still Under Cups

There is a strange thing in my head that happens when I look at my phone. And realize that by punching a button, it most certainly will change everything. I hold that fear and power all the time.

I read something I wrote a long time ago and I am reminded that you hurt me too, sometimes. I guess it doesn’t compare but it makes everything suddenly real and strange. You were actually real, you didn’t just upturn your small features and radiate this beautiful goldenness on me all the time. That’s how I remember it though.

I remember sometimes I got sick in the night and would go into the other room and sit on the small love seat couch that was green and had plaid pillows that you gave away to someone after I moved out. I would have a sore throat and couldn’t lay down because I couldn’t breathe and would hate you just a little because you were sleeping in the other room like I was there.

The first time I got sick was different. Once I had cramps and I just lay there while you went to the store and came back with some expensive pills for me to take. That was at my place, where the mattress was just a blow-up mattress and after a while it started losing air. You could feel the floor through it in places. Except when there were two of us to balance it out, but then we couldn’t sleep in each others’ arms.

There were crickets in that house. At first I would obediently squash them or put a cup over them and take them outside. But then there were too many of them and I would leave several crickets under cups around the bedroom and deal with them later. Once I tried spraying bathroom cleaner on one like Raid, but it just made things worse. The cricket started jumping really high and I felt cruel. I remember sometimes if you watched long enough you could see a cricket come in under the door from the kitchen, and it had all this personality like it was from a Kafka story. Until we fixed the weather stripping and then I didn’t have to shake my sheets out for crickets anymore.

You cooked for me there for the first time. Not like me making you spaghetti in my first apartment, just spaghetti all the time, listening to a U2 single on repeat. The time you spilled hot water on your jeans and by the time you got them off there was a big burn on your leg. You made me chicken and pasta and vegetables I had never tasted before. I had never had food like that. I tried to make it once then when you weren’t there and it was watery and inedible. But recently I made something with some of those ingredients and that smell of you cooking came to me, the smell of capers and olives and bay leaves simmering together. It had been years.

You were the kind of boyfriend that people would tell me you were cute, or even beautiful, a lot of the time. Somehow they knew they could say that. Maybe I should have been bothered, but you were all mine. A stranger told me in a bathroom of a restaurant once that you were beautiful, and I said “yes he is,” and I came out and told you. I took so many pictures of you. I’m sure you knew I thought you were exquisite. After we broke up, we were sitting over slices of pizza that I had paid for and I told you you looked like a model. Then I saw you blush. Then it was different. Then I was someone distanced from you, that you weren’t going to spend the rest of your life with.

I bought you the most expensive blended coffee drink in the store, and then gave you my started Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf punch card, like that would make up for ruining both of our lives.

We went to see a movie, like two small ghosts sitting next to each other. Feeling strange that we didn’t feel more strange next to each other I guess, there were still so many of those old threads knitting us close. But there was something wrong with the seats in the theater, and the movie was so long. Our necks were angled uncomfortably; we tried changing seats but it was the same thing. But we both cried at the movie.

When we were together I remember I had to run to work from the art theater where we had seen Virgin Suicides because we had decided to go to the movies even though we knew it wouldn’t finish in time. Because going to the movies with you was so fun for some reason. Like I always knew you were having the exact same experience as I was. I don’t know how many blocks I ran.

We went walking on Melrose after we broke up. I was wearing this perfect jacket that you had lent me because I just had a t-shirt on. Every time I go to buy a jacket that’s the one I have in my head that I want but I never find anything like it. We were both different from the people we had been, but only in the superficial ways. Like I actually looked through the electronica section in the used cd store, which I never would have done before. And you started talking about an artist I had never heard of whose postcards you had up in your new apartment.

We sat up on the roof of your apartment building and you told me stories that were hysterically funny but I could only laugh a little because I kept thinking that this is the person whose heart I broke, who is so funny and whose perfect jacket I’m wearing, and who doesn’t have any of the same brands in his bathroom now that he doesn’t share things with me. And doesn’t have any food in the fridge. And who has incense burning and is telling me about all these concerts he’s gone to of bands I had only vaguely heard of, some of which I didn’t like, but I didn’t tell you.

I remember we got into fights when we were together, but they were always theoretical, impersonal fights. Like I had a problem with the end of the movie Seven, both times we saw it. And some philosophical arguments that I can’t even remember now because they had nothing to do with us. Other than that, we never fought. I know after we got back from our cross-country drive I couldn’t believe we never fought. And we made love in all the hotels even though we’d been dating for years. And you let me sleep a lot of the time while you drove. We were small enough that I could lay down curled up with my head by your waist in the front seat of the U-haul. We were driving furniture to our first apartment together. Beautiful cherry wood furniture from your grandmother that got sold for a hundred dollars or something after we broke up.

We hit a bird with the U-haul. This lovely red bird. It flew right into the windshield.

When we lived upstairs in the attic-shaped room in R’s house, there was no door so there was a thick rope that we would tie around the banisters downstairs when we wanted to take off our clothes. I would have to get up early in the mornings to finish my college essays and i would sit indian style on the floor typing while you slept. We kept Red Bulls under the bed.

I said that I wanted a blue and white striped couch someday, so you bought blue and white striped sheets for the bed even though the pillows and bedspread that you already had were green and busy and didn’t match at all. Like some promise of a blue and white striped future that was never purchased.

For some reason you always asked me for help on your homework assignments even though you knew so much more about all of the philosophers and in general knew more about everything than I did. We would sit at Elysee over a piece of cake that I had bought and speculate about all of these great things that I only knew little fragments about. My head would start aching in this wonderful way. I would read you everything I had highlighted in my Campbell book and you always understood everything I said.

I went across the street to Penny Lane and bought you a bunch of cds, cds that I already had but so that you could keep them in your walkman and listen while you did your homework, since I didn’t like music playing when I was reading. But then I started buying you more cds that I already had and you started getting sad and scared that it was because we were going to break up.

When I would drive you to school we would sing all of the songs in the cd changer. We would sing the two different parts to Hard-headed Woman that overlapped. You would walk to my work on my dinner break even though we lived together and saw each other all the time. Sometimes we would eat slices of pizza on the floor behind the register if the store was really busy and I couldn’t leave. Yours always pepperoni with something, mine always tomato with something. The night I had to stay late while the store got vacuumed, you stayed and read magazines with me, our feet swinging from the countertop we sat on.

You said after we broke up that you spent a fortune at a cd store trying to buy everything I’d had. All of a sudden most of the cds you loved had just disappeared with me. And that you bought the eye cream that I used because you had gotten used to it being in the medicine cabinet. I remember when I got locked in the bathroom somehow, the bolt got stuck, until you managed to get me out and then we stuck some tissue in the door jam so it wouldn’t happen again. And when we got locked out of the apartment with all the bars on the windows and somehow you still found a way in. Like you found a way in when we were locked out of the San Diego house and you removed the window screen because we had a hot pizza and a movie rental and didn’t want to wait for Jenny or Brian to get home. Although you were this sensitive person in this fragile body, I still always felt safe around you. You were smart and sensible and didn't get angry.

I used to think that love was writing poems for someone, or finding a perfect phrase that would absolutely convince someone in that moment that they were truly beautiful. Enough that they would keep believing it. Or wordlessly holding someone for hours. Focusing on all of the subtle changes in the ways that you slowly touch each other. Now when I think of what love is it is a very particular memory. There was a coffee shop that I used to sing at that would give me this delicious meal for free when I played. I guess that after a while the policy changed but you didn’t tell me, and would pay the waiter while I was singing so I never knew. And I kept getting my free meals. When I was moving out you told me this, and it was like the middle of my heart was gently tugged out.

The only thing you asked for back when I left was your grandmother’s necklace that I had worn every moment for four years. Now when I see it in photographs around my neck I can’t imagine what it was like to wear it. I remember I kept playing with it when I was recording the first album in the studio. I wondered if I listened close enough if I could hear the sound of the gold heart pulling along the length of the chain. The back of the heart had a couple of grooves in it, imperfections. It would remind me of stories of men who were saved by some medallion that had shielded their chest when they were shot. These little battle wounds. After a few years the clasp kind of weakened so the heart didn’t close all the way. I had never put anything inside where photos could go. Maybe if I had it wouldn’t have been so easy for you to ask for it back.

We shared clothes and we shared furniture and we shared soap bars and everything. When I moved my things out of the apartment I think I unhinged something. Separating things that didn’t really belong to just one or the other of us. Splitting up collections. I left you the fridge and the bookshelves and even the piano that you had gotten for me. I left you a lot of the good movies that were mine. Separating the dirty laundry and taking my items was the worst part. For some reason I threw all of my bras into the dumpster. While I was packing up my things I was making you a tape of some songs that I couldn’t imagine you living without after I took my cds away. Like the one song that we recorded together for my audio assignment my senior year. The “love theme." If we were ever in a small argument I would play that tape and you’d know I was sorry. We would dance together. There is a fear in the deep of my bones that there will be no tape players sometime soon and I will never hear that song again.

And that is only the beginning of my punishment.


Anna-Lynne Williams, 2004.