Melancholia in Bluenotebook
i.
I restrict my pen
Blocking every stupid thought
A vanity that hesitates as if there were an audience
No — it's sloth
What I enjoy are reveries — not their record
And yet, in every conversation I’ve had this year I claim to be writing a novel about whatever the fuck we are talking about
Not convinced of my own madness
suspecting I am merely a good reader with a perverted taste
the pages burn
Isn’t it funny how (even in my mind) I blot out pieces of memories
a split second after playing them?
ii.
swollen gums
— bleed
me quiet
I create pseudonyms
to cheat
create a mirror
for the grotesque
create a kindness
for the distance
I don't trust —
my tumors grow
smarter than my verse
iii.
I have an existential crisis everytime I run out of seasons of a show
No one ever sees me falling apart
Lately, the deeper I fall into a thought the harder it is to remember what it was about
Do teary eyes count as crying? I'm watching Grey's Anatomy
From now on, teary eyes count as crying
sobbing = crying out loud
I'm crying
I love this show
iv.
I have three new biographies
Kafka, Lispector, Nabokov
they are such finely made products
I rub my palms over the dust covers — matte
I run my thumbs over the pages in appreciation of the paper quality
but I don’t read them
I sometimes read them — flip to a random spot and stare at a few lines
I panic in silence
riding my bike through Isla Vista (with earphones on)
the muffled rhythm of the chain — the friction of rubber is soothing
looping around the library under a red wing drenched in royal blue
leafing through short prose
checking out one book, demagnetizing the one I want
fortressing piles of books on a corner table of the 24-hour study room
amidst the other insomniacs, feeling productive by osmosis
reading printed out sheets of my own fragments
righteous, repentant, vindicated, inconsolable