Infinite Binge

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It's Not Just a Game Anymore

Dear Rosebud:

The ground has gone fallow and golden, and it’s time to move on.

The caterwauling in my chest cavity hasn’t dimmed any; in fact, it’s grown to a banshee’s wail that doesn’t allow me to sleep at night.  Why only last night, the scent of the candle burning, the angelic whispers constructed into song caught in the smoke about my bed, I was accosted.  Waking life, but not.  I seemed to open my eyes, and feel, and be present, but then not.  Paralyzed.  They sensed my slightly ill head, and the inviting murky music around me, and they didn’t miss a beat.  Granted, I think I encouraged whatever it was to act, since I silently mouthed from my brain cavity “pull the blanket down all the way” and there invisibly went the quilt, the blanket, the sheet…..down to the end of the bed.  And on and off (if you will), I felt everything through the incensed carcass of the phantom liaison that it was.  Sometimes I tried to move away or move at all, but I couldn’t.  They had me.  It ended up going on for hours (it felt like), but when I awoke from it or came to, or whatever the term is, I knew that I was royally fucked.  As it were.  And then I realized in my twilight mist, that I was attracting boundless energy from all ends of the spectrum.  I needed to learn to utilize this.  Own it as my own.  Create it every single day without remorse or the feeling of what was moral, or right.  There was no more looking for the chosen one.  I was the chosen one.  And there wasn’t a speck of ego in that statement or feeling. 

It is only those who lose everything that realize they have had nothing all along.  I learned that I could also impart myself into other’s bedrooms and do the same.  Sidling in, becoming apparent, coming alive with every second of the night wherein the clock does not tick forward.  The clock ticks as I tell it to.  And this prologue has been a grand exercise in my soft claw marks, my letting go, my jamming stakes in the earth only to find it does not belong to me.

You can’t say I haven’t given you the grandest of attentions, Rosebud.  You can’t say that at all.  Even when your creator needed to chase after other words, other inlets, other punishments and rewards, I was here.  I hope you will remember that of me.  Even though I didn’t create you, I certainly helped you keep running as you did, at whatever pace was possible for us.

Nothing is forever, everything exists as long as it lives in the pit of our hearts.  And mine will never burn out, partially thanks to you.  You held up with the best of them, the nameless ones who didn’t belong here, the eyes who watched but didn’t see, the occasional stranger one hoped to impress with the turn of a phrase.  You are an absolute champ.  Sorry we left bruises on you sometimes.  Sorry I got all caught up, and talked about myself so much as I did.  But you made a good sounding board and allowed the trajectory to follow zigzagged through the fracture of stars, as we did.

Don’t know if anyone’s coming back here.  But people love revisiting abandoned houses of old, don’t they? Something about the weeds growing up through the floorboards, the sun catching the spider in its web through air and not glass.  The world moves into us, and keeps its moving whether we want it to or not.  That’s comforting, and also terrifying. 

Thanks for always being there.  Who knows, perhaps you’ll have a visitor again someday...

With love and loyalty,

M. Lucia

P.S.  The final and most important lesson of All:

The Boatman's Call

Each key is played over by shaven wood
homestead marked upon by an obvious ounce of nothing
every world forgotten onto borrowed paper
ripped from the bible pages stuck in a very stuffy hotel room.
One small inch--- carved of line with every good intent.
Protection from sunset; the day ends just and with shadow,
all the same.

M. Lucia

Even Lunar Dragons Brush Their Teeth

The whistling winds outside the windows bred texture into a black, shoot ‘em up January sky, caving in upon itself as the last of its wispy rail clouds bled away into the horizon, suggested but not proven.  She had gotten used to the bright light.  The long days, one professional life into another professional school life at night.  Her nerves had already fired their best, and she began to enjoy the ritual of disrobing after it all, this late into the night – the dangle of her earrings as she dropped them into the silver tray on her coffee table; her feet touching the wood floor, and the thick rug intermittently; the grand sweep of removing the clothes of the lower half first (socks, underwear) and dumping them properly; the release of her breasts from their daily harness, which she mostly enjoyed, but grew weary of by the ten o’clock hour.  Warm home, past all the after Christmas coloured lights strewn across the main drag, designed to keep us going until the light breaks. 

She put her glasses on, wiped away the protection of her eye makeup and thought about the oncoming light of February, the sort nearer to the end of Winter that burst (which she heard in the midlands Irish accent of an old flame of hers, still a friend, who used to strum his guitar and giant headed cowboy hat in late night bars on the lower east side back in the days when she could drink all night and function like a trooper- said like “bourst”) secret parcels behind the sky space of yellows and blues that mixed and separated in a way that made her heart ache in its cavity.  The days would get longer, and she would gradually have more time.  Soon enough, though not soon at all, she would have all the time in the world.  Would she write them a long, thoughtful note when she finally went away? Would it be filled with the usual bullshit lines like “wishing all of you the best”, “so thankful for my time here”, “you are like family”- she slammed the medicine cabinet shut with a thunder clap as she thought of that sentiment.  She really just wanted to take full responsibility for the realization she had all along which could be communicated as such: “I never ever wanted to do this for a living, a career, years of my life.  Never.  I finally got out.  When will you?” 

It was a strange damn place, it was.  As she applied some lavender lotion and almond oils to herself, in the bathroom lit only by a dim nightlight (she hated bright artificial light, but who didn’t…most simply didn’t know just to turn it off), thinking of Rome every single time she did so at this hour- how rough, savage and filthy that life must have been, but how she held that world in her soul (where the synapses fired and the alchemical creations birthed themselves and sidled up to men at the bar for the long haul) and craved the smell of the city, the fire burning in oil, the baths, the depravity, the side by side in the dirt and sky at once axis of living out loud, she thought of this place of work and how, on the smallest scale, they were so afraid of change.  Any change.  Never mind pursuing a dream, recreating themselves on a new path, but also she never heard anyone come in on a particular dull and dry day and remark “I’m learning how to speak {insert said language]” or “I remember how much I loved to paint as a child, so I want again to try”…Try…TRY to create some fucking thing of Beauty out of this day-in-day-out pile of shit those people called a life.  They didn’t know how to speak with exclamation points – no one ever wore a new dress that made them feel really good and want to run their hands up and down their own legs because of it, no one discovered anything – a random, silly old fact or a story about the people from which they in their faceless, nameless American selves came, no woman even dreamt to show up one morning with a new bright hair color, or haircut- anything that would remove them from this low level playing field of the norm. 

Those tiny facts amazed and repulsed her, as she still thought to herself straight ahead in the mirror, making sure her eyes were still her own, open and alive to the world, inner sea and outer realms, about what she might say…..but then the months of realistic calendar days crept into her brain- the order of classes, subjects, tests and graduations all seemed very far off – hiding somewhere in between the leaves of seasons; ready to fall away and rise up at once.  She breathed deeply there, brushing her teeth (which she liked to do before her evening wine or cocktail, which she had damn well earned on this mid weeknight) in a semi-circle, purposely before sitting on the toilet.  A full bladder, and knowing full well she was in that mad mid range time of her womanhood wherein she could hardly sit still in between her thighs, or keep herself without rain.  She tightened in, still getting her molars with the dark pink toothbrush, holding in her breath and getting that tiny rising wave of ecstasy that she needed most every hour on the hour.  It sent her for a moment, and she closed her eyes and thought of him, but the feeling couldn’t keep itself with her, probably because she didn’t let it.  Freedom of feeling requires freedom and even the best fucking doesn’t work through cage bars…but she tried, and got some release from it, opening her eyes all wet to her golden yellow bathroom walls. Dim the living room, sip the wine, turn off the old Christmas lights wrapped around the fire escape which faced the waterfront, only half of which worked- and to bed, to the late night tunes of piano or viola or duduk, whatever atmosphere she chose to escort her into her well plotted and art directed dreams.  Early enough to get sleep, but late enough to wish she could have more.  She always wanted more.

M. Lucia

Sunny's Winter Solstice

Her warm, messy house with too many animals, and smelling of stout on the darkest night of the year. A brief, and holy interlude with the family. Ours. But first, the sister that gets under my skin, the only shorty I’ll allow in my life, is here, showing me her melting snowman cookies and letting her spotty blond dachshund sit behind me, chewing out the heart from a stinky wet fox, killin’ it, as she says. He grabs bits of my hair in his mouth every tenth chew or two. Hurricane tape still on the small windows in her kitchen, various disheveled greens growing sideways on the shelf near to it, always thinking ahead to next year’s garden. But where? All she wants is a farm and not to see people for the wintry five months of the year. She ended up with a southern hick, just like she used to be. One who wears bow ties and writes mild, cold poetry. And takes pictures of nuns when he bikes over the bridge. Two mugs full up of Russian tea – his family’s recipe. They ain’t Russian, though. Pineapple juice, orange juice, tea and Irish whiskey. It may be the ultimate food. Herbals, fruits and citrus, and the clincher. The necessary elixir heated up like a mother’s kiss. They creep inside us and cause a mild raucous disguised by a quiet tipsy sort of feeling. Photos of her Da, who named her after him, Alton, or Al to Allison. I never could quite make out his trajectory – born in Derry, came to Louisiana, and the melding of the drinking problem and the anger, along with her undying love for him, and that photo of him shaving, her by his side. The fact that he moved them to Derry during the Bobby Sands hunger strike – she lived in Northern Ireland for almost a year. I can’t again fathom her prim and tiny mother, a southern, Jesus fearing woman who had a big book of etiquette she pulled out for every occasion, living in any state of Ireland during the troubles. Somehow, he moved them to Central and South America every summer for a good spell as he worked for the sugar factory. No wonder, when she took me out of my mourning and we moved to Red Hook back when, she took all those photographs of the old sugar refinery. It was gone soon after, but it is true on both our accounts that this mad, crooked and secret backwater in all its old, industrial and minute details, would have made both our fathers smile. Mine missed it by just a hair. Just like when Robinson said, a weeks after he had accompanied me to my father’s passing, “I just missed him by That much”.

The night was warm, and we walked down the main street, incomplete colourful lights strung low across the way, and checked in on the infamous light display of the crazy landlord lady across the street. It was a cornucopia of mismatched icons – snowmen, who, plump beneath the night sky, would turn into hungover drunkards by morning light, their bounding stomachs half deflated and they folding in on themselves, close to hitting the earth of flickering lights, wondering how the night kept getting the better of them. Alongside them, and the snowmen, was a complete and munchkin sized nativity scene, complete with the blessed plastic Virgin, the animals, even a full bale’s worth of hay spread out like the makings of a good wildfire. Apparently, right in the center, where the tiny Jesus lays still under streetlights and blinking coloured lights, just about every night in December finds a different street cat moving solidly into place, sitting with paws tucked under and full and still, right in front of the baby Jesus. Red Hook’s notorious feral cat community was a city unto its own. They ate, defecated, and lived alongside us; occasionally we’d bring one indoors, as I did, but they often stared down to those streets and gawked at birds, missing the old game, reformed gamblers or ex cons – the thrill of it all being reduced to windowsills and ends of the bed. It used to be packs of feral dogs, but that was before my time and they sorted that out somehow. Still happens in places like Bucharest, I hear. So then, in the crèche, cradled by the three wise men and the singing snowmen, a strong, tiger print cat with glowing green laser eyes sits like a Savior; the Christ child riding on the back of Bastet, intermingling along the avenue. The walk on the cobbled back street, the lit up row of houses on Coffey, known in drinking circles as the Red Hook Heights – the boom of the fog horns greeted us, along with the increasing smell of herbed fish being fried. A group of kids stood on the corner, making us glad we’d missed the first hour when the families feed at the trough and then back away slowly and take to the surrounding corners and streets. As we approached, the three boys were snapping their fingers and grooving like an old R&B band, one of them in a skeleton costume from the neck down – free as they wanted to be – looking us in the eyes and singing smooth, suggestive lyrics turning dirtier with each line. Allison, still a proper southern girl at heart, put her hand over her mouth and couldn’t stop laughing at them, telling them that they were too young to sing that song! As we walked off, we asked them how old they were, and they said 11. Quick and aggressive, a group of smaller girls nearby, also in a semi circle, yelled to us that the boys were 14! (voices screeching in full blooming). Either way, it was a good start.

Inside, it was Sunny’s as usual; more crowded with a combination of stranger’s faces sitting at tables near the front, and faces behind the bar we knew too well. St. Francis was there, lithe and at work, and Pish, the ruffian barman who moved to Ireland with his red headed spitfire wife, who still wore the same combat boots I wore when I lived there, only to move back to Red Hook, and we were all there still, awaiting them. The thin and the burly, the long beard and the short stubble, perfectly managing each other’s spaces. The best tended bar in the world, I was sure of it. The middle of the bar, where the nooks and crannies begin, the doorway with no glass in its pane leading out to a tiny closet size room with no ceiling, where Sunny, the now aging proprietor, and I, and Wallace once talked about Beckett and Yeats. He didn’t come downstairs much these days…he was getting older, and took care of his very elderly mom who lived there with he and his wife, thirty years his junior and the warmest Missus of the bar you’d ever meet, and their little girl. Sunny was 70 something and had a little girl. The wife (her name was possibly Norwegian or Dutch) sang with the bluegrass band every night. Crammed into the place, you had to watch for the slide guitar, or fiddle or upright bass as you made a trajectory from the bar to the bathroom or out. She sang like a smudged up angel, and there was nothing of the modern world in that place, other than them and our voices. And the ice clinking. Nothing. Opposite to the outside smoking poet's space with no ceiling, was the open window, with no glass, showing us the proper outside space, where the larger, more centered group of smokers and the like could convene, and look in on us. Just underneath said reachable through-to window, on the inside, was the fish spread. Trays and trays of bountiful whitefish, fried up in beer batter (of course), and deep fishy fries, thick and cuddly. Across the walkway, a smaller, satellite bar which I think has never been used for anything except piling the food onto, when it’s there. More food: all homemade by one of the group of characters who ran and ghost owned this place – a sweet, skinny older woman with Mexican braids and a smile so wide. She and others had made salad, pies, macaroons, cakes…..we all can contribute, because this party is word of mouth only, and it gets out. Just on the verge of being too crowded, but everyone minding each other’s perimeters well. Now come the familiar faces, interwoven into the crowds and gatherings…..one moves here and there, and finds old friends, eccentric acquaintances, pregnant women, semi strangers, glances you see on the bus every morning, and more. It’s not a long night. Somehow my experiences of Sunny’s are either end of the night, too drunk to keep going, and a nightcap or final beer, or a simple, easygoing evening. This was the latter. The darkest night being black as it was beckoned as much as home did. We left, with a Red Hooker from New Zealand who had a gaggle of interesting and voracious children. Allison was drunk enough from Russian teas and beers to yell at him “come on, you Kiwi!” She asked him didn’t he know that everyone called him that? Truthfully, it was just her; her notions about many things got lost in the scramble after a motorcycle accident she had in New Orleans years and years ago. She actually forgot how to speak French properly and forgot how to play the fiddle. That portion of her brain just went to sleep, or took to the road.

The Kiwi laughed, as we felt something nearing a summer wind hit us from at least three different angles the moment we stepped outside. Warmer to warm, in December on the longest night of the year. A different group of old men with mad moustaches and kids that didn’t belong to them were straggling their wares just outside – in and around the old green pickup truck from the 30’s that Sunny had bequeathed to Francis a few years back. Smoking, circling, the wind beating beachy mist on their faces and ours. We picked up the pace, as we felt thick, huge droplets of rain starting, just out of nowhere. We knew what that meant; it was about to hit us from the water, a mere twenty feet away. We always stepped lively into a storm, smacking us on the ass like a horny chorus girl's after a night’s maneuvering. Round the corner, and the Kiwi had disappeared for a moment, to try and light a cigarette. No good. She yelled back to him, and he caught up and the rains came. Though the wind was blowing so wicked and whimsically that it didn’t feel all that bad. But, when you looked at the rain falling underneath the street lights, it was a good pourfull. Allison threw in for her last quirky, one in a million fact of the day: “If the sky lights up bright green, we’re fucked. Means a tornado is about to hit in just a few seconds”. No bearing on this storm, but the girl knew her weather, I’ll give her that. We parted at the main street, made promises for pre-Christmas cocktails and I skipped down my long, long street in wet night- quiet, and whistling with the storm and before I knew it, home and warm in bed, the rain beating yellow in a star formation on the outside of all of the windows. Thinking back to the night, to Sunny’s, and thinking about how I hoped more than anything that the place would be preserved and not fall into the changes of this modern thoroughfare we call a home, I loved them. All of the faces, all of the conversations and interactions; the slinging of words, memories and drinks. The way the wood frame house, dusty Christmas lights and secret rooms in the bar and in us all came together, again and again. Real love in the moment, and I wished it would never change. The rain continued, and my eyes tired and closed down slowly. Even the street cats were hidden away. Bet the billowing Santa Claus holiday drunkards bared themselves to the airs and to our superstitious ground, bent over until the morning, the Nativity scene fucked again by the first Winter’s light.

M. Lucia

Office Party

It all started in the ladies room, as it usually does before these office parties.  I had skillfully avoided last year's, blaming my back throwing itself out rather than spend time socializing with these people whose souls with I had chosen to spend my days watch die every single season, every teatime and bathroom break.  Truthfully, there was only one of them, who - it turned out- wasn't one of them at all, in front of whom I could breath, but the interludes of my week or day wherein he would show up had perhaps made the other 80% of the day that much more intolerable.  The golden strength of the sun that shined mainly in his windows just made the rest of the place seem so much more dank, like the bottom of an antiquated ship sinking, down about where the slaves rowed, not knowing that their shackles were locked by plastic toddler keys, and they could go for a swim any old time they liked.  But now it was down to business. Real business.  I heard the swollen, salient laughter of their Santa Claus gift giving game, and each sound was locked up within itself, padding the cell so thick - the so called family life that had them crated in tight, from which they hid frugally behind.  I put on my best face, black eyeliner and shimmering olive green and brown, as if I was going to a burlesque show in the trees, lit up drovers mingling chariots across the skies, if the skies in midtown west Manhattan could even manage to see their way to the ground, to us in our lonely shoes and past those tall, impotent and terrible buildings that blocked out the light.

My dress was tight, and yielding in all the right places. Maroon and black, I tightened up the belted band just below my chest.  It's time I showed them the goods, the way I do every day and night in which I exist outside of here.  The vines climbed with lotus and labyrinth and words down my back and arms with the knowledge of what lay behind me, of every day and second of the ticking hands that I had wasted.  The ones I could never ever get back.  So, then, in she came.  The walking little agenda with the fine dirty blond hair and eyes of a grasshopper leeching air out from the stagnant bathroom mist.  She peddled her own airs, through these all encompassing eyes, and clung so tight to this life that she felt was real, and entitled and so full up with code that she couldn't find her way out if she tried.  And, like most of them, she didn't like me, because I reminded her that her words were written, produced, presented and sponsored by her local advertising ego, and not much more. Boy, I thought, she must sleep soundly at night with all that posturing she had to keep up during the long day.  Like a babe in arms, without a thumb to suck.

She politely told me how she was going to use a curling iron for said party, and confessed that to me with indignation, as I offered her my hairspray.  I escaped, telling her to just return it to my desk, so I didn't have to be in her presence anymore, her voice trailing as I opened the hard bathroom door about how I won't tell anyone about her "natural curls", will I.......I agreed with whatever she said, and let the door slam behind me, trying as I usually did to forget that she ever existed.  Luckily, there was a big bottle of Irish Whiskey tucked neatly in the pink silken printed inside pockets of my open bag.  Every part of this made me smile my big painted up red mouth, and the knowledge that it was too broad and full to waste on this place led to the current knowledge that it sits safely in the middle of my bar/wine rack, where my black cat with mad eyes rolls around in my liquor every morning just to get my attention.

It was righteously dim in the party, and things went more smoothly and less excitedly then I had worried about/hoped for.  Avoidance of those who might steal my soul and wear it as a mismatched pelt did, of course, take place.  Solid soaking of my mouth with good dark wine helped line my insides and protect me against their notions, when they had any.  An Argentinian band played, warping round a rising and retreating swell of mist and ocean, taken in under the floorboards from the steady December rain outside.  Humid, and blue reflecting onto night, they played each man and woman I watched walk past, and cross the small street just outside the restaurant's windows.  Inside, corrugated, iron women spoke, flashy men yucked it up about stories that made me think only of ghosts, stuck in the building where they came to an untimely end, spouting out the beliefs that crossed their minds, crawling beneath their skin and lips when the final, unseen blow took them from life.  Here they were - stuck happily in this darkened, candlelit mass in this corner tavern, mumbling their skill set while I turned my head, felt up the back of my neck, and looked outside again, where the real refrain was playing itself out.  Across came kings and queens, in slow moving steps, buttoned up pant leg, crooked wagons filled to the brim with groceries, getting wet as they made their way across potholes incomplete, red light blinking and beckoning me to come outside with them.  The man in the massive cape like coat, dancing towards 53rd street in his cane led shuffle- he had more rhythm in his stride than this whole room of business formal.  The clown faced man who had just started working here, three chins at once, stuffed his face with free hors d'oeuvres, although I couldn't make them out as he did so with his big fat, overdrawn purple lips; therefore it looked like he was jamming his heavy hand into his mouth over and over - trying to eat himself while we all watched.  He'd open his mouth so wide as he did this, laughing and spitting, as he tried to fit in with the potato faced scarecrow who stood next to him, both of them not knowing what a better world looked like.  I don't even think they could hear the music, or feel the silences or details of what was going on in front of their stretched, shadowy faces inside this one little piece of the world.  The man outside with the cane bounded away from the rain, faster than it seemed possible.

I then absolutely felt the same rain on my back, and the pavement under my feet, as I went with those walking the streets.  Listening to the lullaby making sounds that mocked me with every last breath of wind I wasn't feeling myself be kissed by.  I should have sat down in the corner of the affair, jacked up my skirt around my hips and got to studying biblical verse and human behaviour, complete with a few more bottles of wine, and a gypsy brass band in my stead.  I'd have to tell the corner store girls who set up shop at the tables nearby to beat it - get home already.  The little childlike one of some indistinguishable 'spanish' - she got my blood so up, I think I would have clubbed her to death had I been offered a weapon.  She flirted and fawned like a 14 year old whose father wanted her out of the house already.  Built like the same kind of stunted child, she was far from a woman, and so exorbitantly ignorant that I think she would have grossly smiled her way through being drawn and quartered by troops, blissful and manipulating in each seam of her cheap skirt and tootsie roll face.  She was just the tip of their iceberg, the malformed mast of their ship, which didn't even have the dignity to sink, but just bob there, like the last apple at the children's party after everyone either went to sleep, or just got bored and left.  Grieving souls eating free food, and speaking badly about each other.  I wondered, how in God's name did they exist in a life outside of this one? So much of their energy went into this cattle drive, from birth to slaughter in grab bag and insurance forms, time clock self prophecy and then it hit me.  I was one of them.  I was not different.  I just knew that it was wrong and I spoke this confession, as I speak it now.  A true confession comes of the mouth, then the heart, then the offer to repay what is owed, and lastly, the promise to not do it - ever - again. I slugged my last half full glass of red, letting it flow in a beat direct to my own good heart, and confessed.

I didn't, actually.  Confess like that.  It was days later, when a healer who didn't consider himself a teacher, spoke to me plainly.  Wasted time was something that you can never ever get back.  That party, those people, that hatred I coveted and breast fed every day with loathing and condescending boundaries, it finally reached me.  Its apex, lying there in the middle of that crooked pothole, rain pelting my black eye makeup down my face, which looked up half blind to see a man covered in garbage bags who illuminated his gait and cane into my gut as he simply walked past, knowing full well what he was doing and where he was going.  Courage was a wondrous thing, and little by little it arose in me, the flame of the most buoyant lover, burning out my eyes and making my lips tingle and swollen from the bite of too many kisses.  There is only one way out, isn't there.  Stop feeding the meter, stop getting on the train, stop punishing yourself for that time you sacrificed for so long.  You did it to empathize fully with the crippled, lost and the lame.  It is time now to keep going.  To live the life that your head created years ago, before the face that you chose to be born into had you in its grasp for survival.  There is only creation of a life that will allow you to pass, of an ocean that swallows you up, and all those dangerous, bright eyed characters you once pretended had chased you down a dark street into this bar, into this office party, into this life.  Rise up, your staff and busted black eye, your legs tired from sitting, your eyes worsened from reading words that do not hold worth.  It is always in your grasp to lie down with them, to know their plight and hold their hands.  Then, the sun rises, and the rain splits your grief in two, and you hold the womb of the ocean in your eyes...alive and on fire and invigorated, and you simply turn the machine off.  And leave, never to return.  The countdown has begun, the waves boom against the strong lit windows, the troops storming the castle and in just a few more breaths, you will be up with them, the axis of all gods crossing your sight.  And your eyes, with the fullness of their own world, they just smile as they have never ever smiled before.

M. Lucia

My Kind of Woman

A strike; battle on
the keys clean back and forth. White,
course and limitless.

There is only one battle worth fighting, for this woman.

For all the thousands living inside- sharing, idling, playing with themselves 

to make it through the days into the nights and their liquid highrise 

fighting for the tallest peak, reaching and falling 

(kind of like when your body drops back to the bed, from deep and collective sleep).  

It smiles soft catching your limbs, trunk- letting you know that, indeed,
you live on this side and must come back to it every morn.

Your body is not your own, but you inhabit it and do it down every night

your chest makes fools of all it sees and thighs let in scores of trouble, teeth grating 

leaving marks, also terrifying and bringing to life the many sides of the coin as it dies...

You berate, your challenge, you act like a big man in womens hips

constantly painted lips biting yourself on the inside,
so tight, right? I know. 
It pays to be a whore, and not a slut.  

You're like a little girl, but dirty minded beauty falls into another pigeon hole
grey and dripping sheets form a whole and utterly complete woman,
a person who can tell you the dirtiest things that you want to hear,
fantasies that become real when looking into my eyes, which pool 

their own hard rimmed children; their own deep dark well where a man might 

stash the bodies that he's killed suddenly and needs to hide away...

I take them. All at once- and I like the way it feels, when they're buried forward

into the earth, my clay moulding their resting place, rising up like zombies 

pulsating the lights, the hands maneuvering, all his selves quaking 

me into submission, cause dailylife is the only place I want to make words, 

and raised eyebrows, posturing myself as the most powerful woman.  

It only makes sense, when there is a fight, and I willingly lose. 

A man is only a man when he makes a woman of me.  When the fight is long gone- 

the gamblers rich, or broke- tattering the broken soil with their nimble tongues, 

meandering away from the town outskirts, looking for sunrise. 
Orange and red bursting suns make good their promise in my mouth, and in my wares. 
Tightrope walked, fallen from and the net provided, all at once coming, I am insatiable.
Reaming pleasures, a red arse from a strong hand, and a heart
so fulfilled that I can smile through all the condescending motions of the day.

My cunt will hurt, my pride of head, sweet of heart

strong because it is broken,

by someone who sees her in all her overbearing falsity. 
I am not a strong woman.
I am the strongest woman, because I give in,

reborn under clearest nights of heaven, 
with all that I've got to give.

M. Lucia