“I’m tired again. I tried again.” — SPM

Collage P 23, 2009 — K8 Hardy

When words, like locusts, drummed the darkening air
And left the cobs to rattle, bitten clean.
Skies once wearing a blue, divine hauteur
Ravel above us, mistily descend,
Thickening with motes, to a marriage with the mire.
–“Ouija” Sylvia Plath

In Gainesville, i had the luxury of coralling all of my “things” in the pockets of deep apartments and old friends. In Greenpoint, with no attic for my antique velvets and pre-war kimonos, i created this blog. Having forfeited the physical space my coats, books, albums, poems on the backs of old essay assignments and lesson plans, photos, afternoons, cats, library stacks, term papers, and dramatic, life-altering intimacies seemed to require, i began the slow shift from hoarding and private thought to representation. i’m not sure any more if this blog is about holding on or letting go, but my overactive melancholia certainly fueled what i thought it might mean to be a ‘connoisseur of abandonment’.

When i decided on ‘No Vacancy’ i’d been thinking about a Morrissey song, (something i’ve spent at least as many hours doing as i have dedicated to parsing an essay by Judith Butler or skinning a poem by Sylvia Plath), and allowing myself to feel comforted by its familiar recipe of brazen condescension, poetic absurdity, and unembarrassed loneliness. He says his heart is full, even though the song tells a story about loss and separation, blending real and fantasized experience. “A whole house will need rebuilding,” he warns us, and his heart seems to be as full of absence as presence. Emptiness has a way of making us feel full, too. Being full of shit is also exhausting.

A whole house will need rebuilding–this is familiar, even comforting, territory. Leaving. Not even really wanting to, but not knowing what else to do, either. Leaving, but also tending, saving, and documenting the mess–in this way i became a connoisseur of abandonment. Like loft apartments inside of old factories–never the ground zero of a new highrise. Re-breaking a bone to mend a fracture that never stopped hurting. Franken-anything. Easier to love under the challenge of revival. Find something intact. Love that, too. Break it off. Paste it into your collage of the pieces you liked.