when lights are low.

"Together they are a long skin interface, flowing sweat, close as muscles and bones can press, hardly a word beyond her name, or his...one night in the dark quilt-and-cold refuge of their bed, drowsing to and fro himself, he licked Jessica to sleep. When she felt his first warm breaths touch her labia, she shivered and cried like a cat. Two or three notes, it seemed, that sounded together, hoarse, haunted, blowing with snowflakes remembered from around nightfall." - Pynchon, GR

I'm reading Gravity's Rainbow; therefore, I am extremely frustrated. I know, that's the point, and maybe there is value in that. Every 100 pages or so it starts to make beautiful sense for a few pages and the other 90% feels like I am bashing my head against a wall. I don't really enjoy having to do extensive research every other page. Pavlovian physiology is interesting though. And I'm brushing up on my mythology. And I now know shitloads about the Blitz and other such WW2 facts. But what I love are the little bits of mystic gorgeous descriptions of sex and miscommunication and loss that are absolutely brilliant and wrenching. Still, GR is the opposite of a phenomenological text - ultra cognitive - and it doesn't give you any breaks as a reader, or any place to settle in and get comfortable.
I am listening to music appropriate to Autumn and watching the neighbours across the street separate on their respective porches, letting their children mingle together on their still-unkempt spring lawns. The little blonde girls have so much energy and noise that steadily declines. And their voices slowly quiet down and their little bodies get limp and then the sun goes down and the lights go on upstairs. Young people migrate out of their houses, all heading south a few blocks to busier streets, and the laughter of children is replaced with the cynical, syrupy giggles of drunk girls in stilettos.
Tonight is dedicated to poetry, reads and the mixed media piece I started a few days ago. I wish I had a work room or office to scatter pages around, but presently my bed is my best bet.
I want to tattoo a Walt Whitman stanza somewhere on my body. Which stanza, which poem?