tuckova

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Interests: Alfons Mucha, Archibald Leach, big words, Bob Hicok, Brian Eno, Cat Power, Charles Bukowski, Charlotte Masaryk, cheese, clarity, dark chocolate, David Byrne, David Foster Wallace, Dorothy Parker, Douglas Adams, Edna St. Vincent Millay, E.E. Cummings, Frank O’Hara, Fred Rogers, garlic, Gaudi, Gertrude Stein, ginger, Gustav Klimt, Iva Pekarkova, Jane Austen, Jaromir Nohavica, Jeanette Winterson, Josef Skvorecky, Joseph Campbell, Joss Whedon, Just a Minute, Kate Bush, Kurt Vonnegut, laughing until it hurts, Laurie Anderson, Leonard Cohen, little kids singing, Lloyd Alexander, mandarin oranges, making lists, Margaret Atwood, Miss Manners, New Yorker, Paul Simon, performance, P.G. Wodehouse, poetry, Rebecca Solnit, Rob Brezsny, Robert Anton Wilson, Robert Creeley, salt, Salvador Dali, secrets, silence, Star Trek, Stephen Dunn, Talking Heads, Terry Gilliam, things that stain, This American Life, Tom Waits, T.S. Eliot, vegetable juice, veiled cultural references, vinegar, water, wine, W.H. Auden

you’re good to go

A long time ago, we used to be friends

Well what is a long time ago? Less than half a lifetime. How we talked late into the night, stretched beside each other or whispering into the phone, or email with its glorious disregard for time and time zones. A friendship that ended and started and ended and started, each time sweeter, each time like finding something I'd given up as lost, my silver necklace returned to me on the tide, the sparkle through the water, the glint and hope and the waves pulling back to reveal what is more precious for having been lost.

But I haven't thought of you lately at all

This is a fallacy, since obviously I'm writing about you so I am thinking of you, lately. The late you, reverof enog. I think of you when you occur to me: hear you sooner or later on every eighties station, the smell of almonds from a roadside stand, hotel soap, the particular taste of coffee in the morning of a day that is not yet hot, but will be.  

If ever again a greeting I send to you

Don't worry I won't, though your birthday comes and goes and my lips itch with what I want to say, the words that would unlock you, the key I could pass with a kiss. The only way to get blood from a stone is to cut your hands on it and my hands have scars enough. I have been one to hang about graveyards, rubbing my name off the grave, pressing forehead to headstone, but those days are gone. I only visit what I've buried in my heart, now. The dead don't know you're there, anyway, and there's no point in talking to them unless you're asking them to keep a secret, and you already have mine.

Short and sweet to the soul I intend

And what would I say, anyway? That I loved you then and still? You knew it then and probably now, too, if you think of me where you are; I remain consistent. I said run away with me then and I meant it, but if you had said yes we wouldn't have been running away together, we would have been running away from home, badly packed suitcases thumping against our scabbed knees, and every time I thought of it the suitcases became heavier and filled with more abstractions: partner, child, mortgage, responsibility. Finally they couldn't be lifted at all and it became almost impossible for you to even talk to me until almost was perfectly.  

Come on now honey

Oh never mind I get it. All I ever have wanted to be was good and I am still practicing. It's just the times when someone puts their pillows in the window for the morning sun to freshen them, every time I use that bottle opener we bought for the wine, the afternoons when I want to use words like malinger and find I have nobody around to say them to, the way your neck smells just below your ear, how it feels to walk down the middle of the street at night, like when we were rockstars, remember me when.  
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