messed&stressed

joanna newsom performs at stormy records,2004. 

I don’t think I actually have to spell this out

but there will be no prophesying, speculating, speaking into existence, etc about next year

My mind knows you’re gone but my body still jerks awake Trying to picture you out there, but failing, you’re fading, Like the red from my hair every time I shower because I spend too long underneath the shower head screaming over my speakers, I play the song to try and fill up the space you used to take But instead, it just personifies itself, takes the shape of your face and body next to me and turns to me, Horrifying, Because it feels like you, but doesn’t sound like you, Like some bad rendition, made years later by someone who never even knew you.

I try to make love to the black space around me instead, wiping my tears so it doesn’t see and calling out into it, Breathing out into the ether and inviting it in, It fragments into obsidian shards and creates its own light, reflects back onto itself, Almost makes a rhythm that sounds like the even breaths while you slept. I throw back the covers and reach for it’s phantasmal coitus, but it turns its faces away from me, a terrible apparition, It’s back, indistinguishable from it’s front, stares at me accusingly in the dark.

Bitter cold walks don’t work. I thought so, though, Wearing nothing but socks that meet the wet pavement, can’t feel my feet, I go out in my nightshirt, my breasts and arms goosebumped against the cotton To feel the cold, it hurts, the collar soaked while I sing the song to myself and ask for you to come back, -The dawn pressing down and around me, smothering me, its scarlet and blue coating and filling me like amniotic fluid- These first few hours used to be so full, dawn being the most pregnant part of the day, It bore you like a secret, But now without you it’s shoved me out of it instead, Splattered me out onto the New Jersey pavement, head cracks against the grey, Concussed and trying to find my way home with your name on my lips.