Half auto-fiction, probably three quarters escapism; some weird disfigured context of declaring that David Johnston had the hardest year last year.
By: David Johnston
Drink more water eat slower apple store earbuds dish soap green tea waters cloudy dull flora and mud honey soup swamped sticky plastic wrap curtained over see-thru soft bike seat backlit LED neoprene thermal running against veins of building walls under the grain of the sky fumbling through threading hands cardinal dopamine patterns of the whereabouts I go; whole city’s in a soap sud bath lights at tops of the skyscrapers thrown out over fog in a drunk guess glittering bubbly trash people still on benches like mushrooms guessing the right words the pollen painted lamp bulbs blinking dumb mango hazel whole angry banks with sedated colors waiting for a nasty city grin grasped pulmonary failure polyglot Penn kids running over sidewalks telling the future
The mucus runs down my throat it smells like fall bless you Rite Aid’s playing John Mayer lavender lilac refrigerator ice cracking the tea Can’t Be Sure by The Sundays adding in a new thing replaces the others and we give but we take from each other too wonder what a replacement I am I wonder what I am for you
In the wilco basement party, drawing strawberry peaches strangers strangling lips and noses strange tastes, and bottom of the barrel reports to the soul, people watching the movie yelling turn out the lights others yelling turn them back on both so drunk and sincere get full on boxed wine close your eyes, hear the beating heart fragile little capsule slip down crying mucus stream ghost teeth filed down into coke we snort eyes like buzzing caffeine candles left lallygagging forever
Eat me up time, suck my breath and blow me out in wisps, chew around with swallow these people around me and grow them into me, stretch my house to theirs, across ceilings and floorboards, their body and smell, pull like a string over a map and pin me up, hold me up to the light, a magnifying glass, and burn me dirty with the concentrate of your jagged sandpaper grain and batter me through the blind wash sweet and doughy like peanut butter over jelly, and eat me, but let me eat the time of others, let me swallow their hours, suck their mouths, taste their words and eyelids squeezing together lines in foreheads of some kind of half life writing out long spindles and scribbles of stained memory, I’ll clap for the whole grey haired performance, watch their pilot years take the first steps, but let me keep the lights in their room, I’ll let everything else go in midnight, I’ll give away their dogs, float their lies along, return the days to their number, the words to their places, the flushes to their chests, the blood to their wounds, round the last corner, paste as formatted, release the floodgates, quit without saving, abandon, sleep, and most importantly, forget, let me forget their faces and names, as I do you, and you do me
Crying sober and special and important, intrinsically physical and visceral, all the words I use standing at the doorways of our rooms into the hallway with each other talking about how we’re becoming our parents in a house built a hundred years before we existed in some childishly dizzying adult game of sleepover in little rooms only a few feet from each other I’m supposed to believe that this is some serious thing we’re here doing, well I don’t care I’m in a fantasy dream living with my friends
I don’t mind being early for you,
I whispered on the phone drunk last week, we were the dumb people on the phone
I tried to remember the specifics, tried to remember the ceiling was rose, your nose was wind and your lips were water, the occasional hums accompanied by a sweetened lapse of light under your phone
but I didn’t want to smoke it all away, and yet we drifted into the foggy darkness
Enveloped, collected in the heat of clothes
Sometimes
I think I get to see
Things that are really beautiful
And all other things fade away
Like forgetting a name, like falling asleep
Fuck it’s morning
i need coffee
how do I write forever
⋅•⋅⊰∙∘˗ˏˋ ˚₊‧꒰ა ☆ ໒꒱ ‧₊˚ ˎˊ˗∘∙⊱⋅•⋅
David Johnston is an artist and writer in Philadelphia who makes music under the name Love Beat. He runs the Machine Music and Arts collective, but mostly he dgaf.
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