Seamstress for the Band

Every square inch of your high school bedroom was pasted in color. Magic Marker quotes, Dali and Escher prints, rock stars torn from their glossy magazine spines. Symbols of your rainbow impatience: a combination of everything that you were ready to taste, see, let happen to your vesuvian body. Standing in for real experience were glued drug references, tacked tarot cards, taped photographs of India and Tokyo, fuzzy black light mandalas stuck with sticky. To the left were penciled and inked versions of your name in block letters, in cursive, in a slanted hand that began three inches tall, but then shrunk as if your whole identity had lost its courage and just faded into the paint. It was accidental, unconscious, but it summed you up perfectly. You, who started every conversation screaming. You, red-faced, who quickly realized how little you actually knew about anything. Ending with only clumsy-mouthed words clanging in your head. Life-struck. On your ceiling were the first words you saw every morning when you woke and the last before you slept: a poem by Whitman, who understood your need for fire, and even more, your elegiac desire to remain uncomplicated. How you can never have both.

Every square inch of your current bedroom is white. White walls. White bed. White ceiling fan. A faint grey-brown cobweb in the upper right corner that you’ve been meaning to brush away for months now. White: a combination of all colors in the light spectrum. White possesses everything, but its mind is completely blank. Silent. Whitman is stacked, piled along the wall of another room, along with hundreds of other voices that have whispered along your life, quietly persuading you that it’s okay to be this way now. You are sure that there are feelings inside of you that no one in the world has ever felt, and you struggle to coax words from a thousand unblurred hues to give to them. But mostly you just drift inside this static of pale distance. Anoesis via nothing. Here you cannot hang a single piece of art, or you will have to keep hanging, pinning, frantic, till everything is covered. Empty or overflowing, you can’t have both. You can never have both.

MP3: youth lagoon – posters
this Youth Lagoon album is so pretty it makes me cry. thank you, nick.
posted by rikki.