love letter, love letter...

I'm not going to start by telling you how I've never felt this way about anyone before oh how I can't live without you total eclipse of the heart 80's power ballad hooo.

I can live perfectly well without you, I did before I met you, and I know I will long after we eventually implode, as everyone with sense does eventually.

I will tell you that I love you, but the value of my words fluctuates daily. But when I woke up last night without you, I had to fight the hollow, sinking feeling that replaced you. Half of it was my body aching for your long, sweaty back pressed against mine, but the rest was the awful feeling I often get that I will replace your back with another back of a faceless, nameless drunken fuck.

I won't pen you songs of pink-eyed pigeons or jilted lovers, but I will realise at two seventeen a m on a wednesday morning that everytime, I will write you a valentine in blood.

Maybe one day you will ask me to marry you, and I will say yes through lack of anything else to say.

And then maybe one day after that we will move into that tiny apartment you know I have always wanted to live in, in that city I love to live in.

And maybe I will give you two wonderful children, a boy and a girl - each dark haired and hazel eyed. And we will love them and raise them perfectly and live beautifully until I die of lung cancer and your prostate turns against you.

Then maybe our children and their children in turn, will mourn us and hate us for fucking them up so much as all parents do.



But then again, probably not.

did you know

that some nights, I lie awake, enraptured in girlish, hot-lidded crush - just thinking about the brush of your black hair across my shoulder. Have you heard, all those familial miles away, my wordless, lust driven compulsion to imagine your coal ribbons melting in my bed.

I have watched your scabby, hangnailed nicotine finger flick the end of that same cigarette a hundred times, and each time I want nothing more than to put that same crackled digit in my warm, wet mouth. Then I could taste the hundreds of groupies - the endless taste of tight teenage girl.I would taste all your years of smack, each one held in bitter cellular memory. Every broken promise and every one yet to be made.

The way your bottom lip does that thing, you know the one I mean, won't let me forget you. I hope you are so very bored. The things I could give you, the things I would, sure must be more exciting than pushinf a double pram down the High Street or through B&Q on a sunday to buy coving for the newly redecorated front room.

Don't you want to come into my red room, with all its hazy light and hazier morals. Don't you want to live again, instead of the sterile existance you find yourself in now. Have you forgotten what its like? I wonder sometimes if you've just burned yourself out. Maybe you just don't have it in you anymore to smack yourself out of your head and spend three days fucking girls you could probably get arrested for fucking.

Maybe you are meant to be like you are now, and maybe I will finally realise that you are old older oldest, too old for me anyway.

Its a shame you can't see what you're missing out on.

I'll watch you for hours after you fall asleep.

Sometimes I can see your face change shape in the darkness. Like when I was a child and I thought that the pictures in my room came to life when the lights went out. Through that same trick of light I can almost see you change from your beautiful pure self into something wicked. Your full mouth, high brow, distending into some ugly misshapen mask. I can hardly recognise you sometimes, as I watch you for hours, the bones of your face shifting with the car lights from the street outside. The sick yellow glare of the streetlamp merely adds to the Hades effect. Sometimes I would drive a stake through your heart, but I fear you don’t have one.

everyone i like is dead

why the hell do cool, talented, most excellent dude people have to die horribly and before they should. i was watching totally bill hicks last night for the twelfty billionth time and for some reason this time it just fucking depressed me. that dude there.. that one with the brown teeth and the lung capacity of a two year old.. the only man who’s ever made me laugh so much i maybe peed a little bit… that dude has been dead for almost eleven years. that dude has been dead more than half my life. how thoroughly depressing is that.

fuck it, i’m going to listen to some jeff buckley.


(I love you goat boy, you shaggy ol’ thing.)

when my father died

When my father died, I was six. He didn’t die right away, and he didn’t die with dignity. He was torn and cut away from my heart in tiny poisoned pieces. Bright severed strings of flesh that once connected us now lay against my sides like jellyfish tentacles, and every touch leaves a welt that won’t stop hurting. Sometimes they hurt so much I think I’m dying. And sometimes I think I’d like to die but it’s never quite enough to kill.

He was like a lover who left me. Blasting me in two for no identifiable reason and with no apology. Like an acid burn that doesn’t hurt at first contact I carried on thinking I was okay. Blinked and touched and smiled and fucked my way through a thousand other fathers, every one never quite living up to the original. Every one was just slightly wrong. None of them were him, but I’d keep looking.

Some times I think I’ll just never get over you.

love it.

you can tell
from the scars on my arms
and cracks in my hips
and the dents in my car
and the blisters on my lips
that i'm not the carefullest of girls

you can tell
from the glass on the floor
and the strings that're breaking
and i keep on breaking more
and it looks like i am shaking
but it's just the temperature
and then again
if it were any colder i could disengage
if i were any older i could act my age
but i dont think that youd believe me
it's
not
the
way
i'm
meant
to
be
it's just the way the operation made me

and you can tell
from the state of my room
that they let me out too soon
and the pills that i ate
came a couple years too late
and ive got some issues to work through
there i go again
pretending to be you
make-believing
that i have a soul beneath the surface
trying to convince you
it was accidentally on purpose

i am not so serious
this passion is a plagiarism
i might join your century
but only on a rare occasion
i was taken out
before the labor pains set in and now
behold the world's worst accident
i am the girl anachronism

and you can tell
by the red in my eyes
and the bruises on my thighs
and the knots in my hair
and the bathtub full of flies
that i'm not right now at all
there i go again
pretending that i'll fall
don't call the doctors
cause they've seen it all before
they'll say just
let
her
crash
and
burn
she'll learn
the attention just encourages her

and you can tell
from the full-body cast
that i'm sorry that i asked
though you did everything you could
(like any decent person would)
but i might be catching so don't touch
you'll start believeing youre immune to gravity and stuff
don't get me wet
because the bandages will all come off

and you can tell
from the smoke at the stake
that the current state is critical
well it is the little things, for instance:
in the time it takes to break it she can make up ten excuses:
please excuse her for the day, its just the way the medication makes her...

i dont necessarily believe there is a cure for this
so i might join your century but only as a doubtful guest
i was too precarious removed as a caesarian
behold the worlds worst accident
I AM THE GIRL ANACHRONISM



copyright 2002 amanda palmer

come with me.

I will take your little hand away from your mouth. Wrap it in mine and I will open the door and lead you out. Into the cherry blossom garden of this tiny cottage in this tiny village. Down past the vegetable patch where you think the rabbit lives. Through the grass so manicured by that small foreign man whose name I have never cared to learn. We will move slowly as you’ve only just started to walk. You’re not quite sure where your feet end. I should be proud of you, your little powerhouse muscles propelling you forward of your own accord but all I can think is hurry up hurry up your father will be home soon I should have started this sooner.

We will pass the play house he has had built for you. In years to come the two of you will probably have it knocked down as I know you will never use it. The frill curtains will remind you of the delicate white flowers on the tips of all the branches surrounding us today, and you will think of me and hate me.

Your tiny jam paw is hot and moist in mine, grasping and desperate. I will never let anyone ever know that on some level, the feel of it sickens me. I feel like you are devouring me, drawing me under in your unselfconscious, unconditional need. From the first moment you were laid onto me. That very second with your high pitch scream and mucous covered body with me half alive and bleeding to death I felt a wave of revulsion at the sight of you. Looking at the doughy indistinguishable faces of the nurses, with their sycophantic expressions and mouths forming words I couldn’t hear all I wanted them to do was take you far away from me.

We will go to the old cherry tree at the bottom of our English garden. It has taken us a long time to get here. I should have carried you but my hands are full carrying the things I need. You try to climb up on the swing that hangs from the thick branch and for the thousandth time I stop you because you would fall off and hurt yourself. At times I have wondered what would happen if I just let you fall.

I will give you your favourite toy. The elephant your father brought back from India. It is missing one beady eye and is looking frayed already yet you have only had him for a few months. The powerful destructive force that you are astounds me sometimes. You sit at the thick base of the tree and become absorbed for a precious few moments. I don’t want you to watch me, although I know you won’t understand. I don’t want some hack psychiatrist to pry repressed childhood memories from you many years from now. They always blame the mother anyway.

I’m trying to picture the next few moments. All I can seem to picture is you at your wedding. Your English rose bride swathed in white next to you and your father standing solid behind you. I wonder if you will be embarrassed at my absence. If you will look to your new wife’s family and wonder how their nuclear normality survived. Will you flush hot-faced at a simple question from an orbiting relative? I hope you won’t be sad and I hope no one mentions me. I hope your father finds someone else to be his. I hope you find a way to put me out of your mind. It would be better if I were just forgotten.

ideal life.

it starts in the morning. i am asleep in bed. the room is all white linen and bright white light. the bed is low to the floor and there is a floor to ceiling window on the left hand side. i wake up slowly and stretch. my toes brush against the legs of the man in the bed with me. he lies on his front buried in the sheets, black hair poking out.

i get up quietly and put on some clothes, no shoes. the plain wood floorboards are hot under the sunlight. i make my way down the first flight of stairs. out the front door. its early and it is Sunday , everyone with half a brain is still in bed recovering. on the corner is the tiny shop that smells eternally of curry and parsley.

one Sunday guardian, twenty camel lights and two oranges later i am back at my door. it’s neon blue, something i thought would be cool at the time, but everyone hates. bah.

in my living room, there are bookshelves reaching up the high ceilings. a dark grand piano with more books on it. i haven’t played years, but he insisted it come with him when he moved in. piles and piles of notebooks on the desk next to it, covered in my weird black chicken scratch that no one can read. half a dozen black pens and various ink stains that will never come out of the wood.

i sit cross-legged on the floor in front of the long white couch. there is a ritual to reading the Sunday papers you know. i take every section out and lay them on the right, fanned out like a deck of cards. the ashtray goes on top of them, then the oranges. i have to spread the paper out like a small boy from the 50s with a comic, as i’ve never been able to do that foldy broadsheet professional bollocks.

oranges and cigarettes and current affairs. then i hear him get out of bed up on the third floor. he’ll be standing at the mirror on the dresser right now. convinced he looks like an old man more and more every day. we drank an obscene amount of red wine last night so he probably looks worse than he should.

ive got half an orange in one hand and crush the last of my cigarette out with the other. he gets to the front room. he wears a white shirt, open. the one with the massive collar that i mock him so for. skinny spiders legs that he hates and i love.

he collapses into the couch and stretches his foot out to tickle my exposed back with his toes. i look back at him over my shoulder, orange still in hand.