remembering MATERIALBUG, part 1

Happy department-store-blues season. Here's a throwback from 2021.

transcription:

Dear Diary,

If you are a ghost, then you are a phantom of whispered winds and chills in the moors, but I am not you and what I am is haunting the department store and dragging my fingernails up and down the jewelry cases and slamming the fitting-room doors and spilling the perfume bottles. I am wailing a song that runs Coke-red like a Christmas carol when it puddles out from my chest- when you are a ghost you are the white space where life used to be but I am not you and I am not empty. I am not you and there is something huddled around my heart, gnawing and burning. 

On the day after Thanksgiving the customers sweep into their anthill, a thousand light bulbs suspended behind their ice-rink eyes, glassy with ecstasy, drooling lipstick prints and hiding their hazy blushes behind their hands.  I pool within sheaths of crystalline light among the bands and bracelets and wait for a shoulder to slip onto- a dark-eyed star, a collared killer, a handsome martyr- and my silver-bell heartbeat growls. I am not you and my heart is a stomach. I beat the stalled glass with hungry hands and I tie knots, leave marks, press kisses.