New Years Eve, Morning

Ash seeps from your mouth
step up, and out
over the rubble
and make your way
down the streak of sunset
which follows upon your back,
burning through the lines
   of before, and then, and now-
All together,
step upon step.
A story at conception in your heart,
desire breeds sunrise in your eyes.

~ M. Lucia

The year ends....

The Death and Birth of Film

Palms up, back and forth, you found your temples sweating slightly - it was the strength of the cocktails, the garters and stockings rubbing up against you, as you formerly went from being an over zealous guest of the night club to being a proper dancing girl.  Like a red indian tribe on fire, in come the gods, our clothes too much shrouding our primitive selves, elegant in our delivery as always...the swings.  Who would think that a child's swing could  bring a full grown woman, in amongst men who drooled and held dominion over their trumpets, so much joy...to stand up or sit back and ride your tasseled lair around the heavens, catching mist in the ceiling of the ornate, egyptian style pillars.  Even if one knocked you out, they'd still pour liquor down your throat, give you a good going over, re-apply your red lipstick for you and send you into the morning, properly come out the other side.

If you were lucky, it would have been caught on the film camera.  Yellow, grain like the best hooch, dressed up and down in vertical, scratchy lines searing you like a flank steak, serving you and your history up and filling in every dull gap that life could not fill in itself, with noise, visual, striking noise, in texture and colour, and chemical paint.  The ultimate art of liberty.  What would your grandchildren say when they might see you in your hips shaking, smile stretched out across your face, your flask tipping out of your special garter, fucking the coat room man again, up against the back wall, behind the theatre, where the best of the follies played.  They wouldn't hear you, not over that music, but if there was a novice photographer around, looking to play with his new handheld life stealer, re-animator, well, would the thick and viscous apparitions caught on the film bring you new found innocence in your idle late night goings on?  A whole half bottle of champagne in its wayward water ballet in your belly, as he came up inside of you?  Would they look upon their grandma in the same way? Their tired, repressed eyes, having missed all the good times...poor souls.  So disconnected from all the feelings that life is meant to engage you to it with.  Didn't that coat check man make films of his own with one of those cameras too?  Nothing grand, no Battleship Potemkin, or European art films for him, but the film spliced all the same.

You used to visit him in that little room he edited from within.  He'd take a bottle of something or other that you'd order from the telephone number written down on that little piece of folded paper that made its way to you.  Easy findings when you swing and dance and drink and shake your ass for a living.  Men looked so beautiful all lined up in their tuxedos.  Even when they were piss drunk, or fighting or trying to get on you when you didn't want them to (you may have been a looser of the flapper set, but loyal you always were), they looked...just...regal, black and white and gloves and hair set back.  Like kings of their own debauchery.  He used to take films of them too, but it was you and dancing friends he liked to look at most, in the privacy of his darkened editing room.  That machinery he had there -- it looked positively like it could find you in your bed and cut your throat at its will.  It served him.  That you knew...but then again, so did you.  He showed you once, deep into the second bottle, how to cut the pieces of amber and black film strips.  Like constructing a child's drawing with pieces of coloured paper.  He cut himself pretty badly on his fingertip that afternoon - after that, he found he only popped open bottles afterwards.  Blood all over the machinery.  The modern age, they call it.  Still, though you didn't know much (then) about its workings, you loved that film.  Preserved forever were your greatest and latest evenings in the middle of the stage.  Top hats and ankle turns, you were alive- really Alive, Forever.  The smell of it was better than the best opium in town, you'd imagined it tasted like a vim and delicious cocktail, its shuttering sounds finding their ways into your long stemmed glass.  Reflecting off the crystal like god in a pond, smiling back at you from its properly hemmed in place in the final product.

Even the leftover blood from his mishap didn't scare you away from that room.  Didn't you even lie back in front of it and let him have at you, while the films of your best nights played behind you.  This, you thought, in between your moans and breaths, and legs wrapping round him, was the start of something - like living twice.  The pictures of you, moving and dead, living in frozen time behind you, as you lived, in your back room gimmicks, right then and there - your double life, without another bead of sweat necessary...it was twice, but was it as much, was it really better in any way? You found everytime you danced after that, or had him again, or experienced any exhilaration that used to have you in the rafters, bounding around the world in your one moment - after those films came into existence in your mind, you were never really There - like you were before.  Abandon became a second shadow in the back of your head, knowing you were being captured and would have to live the vibrant thing from afar, or from the eyes of others.  Those who watched.  Grandchildren, you and he in your deviant minds, people who moved in that place after you were both long gone - whomever it was, they've been watching you ever since.  Each generation one layer removed from living. Their moment one more world away from themselves, from memory, both real and imagined.

Still, that wall up in the coat room behind the stage would never forget you.  It took a vow of silence to its grave.

~ M. Lucia

A Lesson in the Afterlife

When it is then,
that we all are enlightened?
Bodhisattva stays around
'til the end of the workday...

He/she can go home, and reach paradise,
nirvana and all the crimson fruit trees in existence
made from the pupils of the creator's eyes;

Bodhi stays around, absorbing our tears,
fears, lusts and shortcomings
so we will know we have a friend in Her.

But she is hard to find,
on the lake of darkness,
the black pools of our stupidity,
regrets and gray cloudy mistakes

again and again and again...the wheel runs onto our broken
carcass;
calls us re-born and throws us back into the pit for another go.

Chance, circumstance, the great number of all these souls I have to save-
when will they learn, and when will I decide that it's not worth it
to stay, and ascend to the heavens with those I find level with.

I cannot.
I cry into my wine,
carress all of your wounds, as if they were mine,
cradle you all as my sons and daughters from beneath the ample sky
which fails us every time,
and say "try again, little ones"
you'll make it on the next ride.

I'll keep my wares at the end of the bar,
and stay for another round, embraced in ignorance and sighs.

~ M. Lucia

Christmas Eve Haiku

holiday cock tails:
"we have ways to make you talk"
make merry, me arse.

~ M. Lucia

Christmas Is A-Comin'

Drunks have Christmas too, you know. They might not choose the finest wines, or delight in creating holiday cocktails which warm their spirits, entertain their guests or have cutesy little names like “santa’s sleigh” or even something so delicious and comforting as “hot buttered rum”, but they break out all the stops too, enjoying the colourful lights at their local watering hole, the strung up holly made from aging, bleached out plastic, right down to the big mounds of drunken puke, frozen and transfixed in the snow out back in the alleyway, a mound of holiday regret, which will thaw properly when the first spring comes. You know it’s springtime when the piles of icy puke start melting and seeping into the sewers. Warms the cockles of your heart it does.

Bing was one of those – happy, seeming, jovial and robust. Not in stature, but in character. In his day he sang all the greats, even creating the greats as he went. Cavorting, cocktail in hand, delta shape at his mouth releasing a stream like a bow and arrow, of warm, thick tones and one of the most carefree singing voices ever put down on record. But after work, what was Bing like? When the cameras weren’t on, the Andrew sisters had gone home, and his sweaters needed to be dropped off at the Chinese Laundromat. Those stains are always hard to explain, but the Orientals didn’t really care one way or the other. Long as you paid in cash and remembered them at the holidays, you could bring in a set of underage, blood soaked panties and they wouldn’t bat an eye. Bing always remembered those that assisted him at the holidays. Gifts for the ladies especially, in all forms, shapes and sizes.

Thing is, Bing was a perfectionist. He needed to be in control, all the time. Funny for a man who had everyone else doing for him practically every day. I guess not funny at all, as the man craved the position of director. The worst thing you could imagine is waiting in the dark room for him, panties all a flutter and with the knowledge that this demented and manic man was about to enter “all in” as they say. You’d be happy in the knowledge that you were servicing one of the greats, and that was enough most of the time, but somehow…the alacrity at which Bing would switch you from one position to the other, one deviant scenario to the next, would seem misplaced. You almost doubted that he was even getting any pleasure from any of it. Your humiliation, that is. Oh, don’t get me wrong. When tanked up on martinis and uppers, Bing would come at you from all sides, slap happy and usually with a bit of a jolly, especially around the holidays. Santa Claus just came to town, now flip over and lift your skirt (he ordered them special from the boutique for which you needed the not-too-often passed around business card –red with black lettering, ornate and far too shiny in its lamination. You could see it, in fact, if you looked up from your duties (it’s the singing of the songs during that are the Most hard to swallow, if you will – Jing a ling, hear them ring and all that), there it was. He carried the card in his back pocket day and night it seemed. You’d be there, in your Fräulein outfit, stripped to bottoms only, on your knees, Bing’s bingness practically belting you in its anxious carriage, struggling to hit every part of you it could, while Bing barked orders about calling it “the Big Bing”, “His Royal Heinous King Bing” (HRH King Bing), “Mount Bing” and the best of these, droning in your ears until he plugged those up too, was “Bing’s Drummer Boy” (followed by his hands clapping like a Nazi over your ass always, because Bing only ever slapped you on the ass half heartedly when he was done). The card there, upturned and falling out of his folded pants pocket, was never bent, or ripped, always looking like new, and yet – not even the Chinese wash seemed to fade or tear it at all?

Wish you could say the same thing about your ass, when Bing had his holiday feast at your table. He sucked and slurped like an old man eating soup, and what’s worse—right in the middle of his control freak variety hour, he would switch on you. He’d start to cry, maybe call for his mother, and crawl up into the fetal position like an angry toddler who didn’t get what he wanted for Christmas. You’d have to hold him, stroke his thinning head hairs, and tell him he was great. That rock n’ roll was in fact not here to stay, and that Elvis Presley was just a fad. (Didn’t you know deep down that you would service Satan himself for an hour with Elvis? Some friends had, and they still aren’t walking right. But smiles on their faces, indeed there were). I mean, having to comfort the likes of a drunken Bing as his alcoholic revelry moved its way to a late night hangover, it wasn’t all that bad – his occasional angry fucks were angry to just him. He wouldn’t know rough sex if he tried. Bing had an old man’s soul, probably even when he was 20 years old. Inside he was all wrinkles, and balding skin, a soft gait and a gentle hand which was better with a microphone singing to millions about a White Christmas than it was trying to make you come “that way” since the “other way” was fraught with problems. He saved the belt for his kids, so there was none of that either. Pity, spanking would have been the one thing that turned you on, but nope – Bing didn’t want it that-a-way. And Bing gets what he wants, especially this late in the advent calendar.

This was the inebriated sleigh ride down the dark alleyway outside the bar at the holidays. The dark alleyway leading to Bing’s rotten, fearful soul. The man sure could sing, though. You think of this, as you think of all those other hapless drunks at Christmas time, swilling their cheap whiskey and allsorts down their throats, and trying to cram their manhoods down yours every chance they could. Bing was no different. Still, you never knew the exact level of humiliation, emotional pain or physical discomfort you were in for, when you waited there – in the position, eyes down and hands on the floor, and in the dim light that seeped under the door you felt his tiny footsteps. In the darkness of the room (Bing never let the lights go up, he might implode for all that his fame’s boredom had created that he was afraid to see with his own eyes), you wondered just how you got here. Again, this festive holiday season. Still, the shadows of red and green from the Christmas lights across the street cast some sort of holiday cheer onto you, as his footsteps grew closer, and all you heard in your head, numb as it was to all the sounds and feelings it was about to drown out with your own special elixirs of denial, was that beauteous, baritone voice, possessing that vim and vigour that he always had at the beginning of the evening, when he was still happy drunk and didn’t have to worry about the stains on his sweaters (which he never removed)…that voice, menacing and sometimes extreme in its averageness, singing in upbeat tones…“Buh-boo-boo-bah-boo!”

~ M. Lucia

The Bloody Stump of Christmas Past

The Emergency Room seems to factor into most of our family Christmases. John was always at the forefront. I never got to take the trip (no one asked, and I never offered). The second one was in Florida, on Christmas Eve, late, when he was too drunk and too depressed and basically shoved a booze bottle into his forehead. The first one, the one I remember more clearly, occurred on Christmas Day in Thornwood, when I was 10 years old, and he was 17 going on 18. Taking place in the evening time, in the darkness of Christmas night, just after our family Christmas with the Queens faction of my mother’s sister’s family was approaching its usual, drunken and roughed up end. Full of about 5 kinds of meats (no exaggeration of number), a veritable three courses of meats encompassing just about every end of the Croatian culinary experience – coastal Dalmatian (grilled meats), inland Slav (stuffed cabbage) and northern Austro-Hungarian (Kiseli Kupus (Kabasi w/ Sauerkraut), all of which I am now well versed at preparing, like pulling a rotten tooth from my mother’s wifely traditions (“I don’t KNOW how much; a little bit! We didn’t measure these things)...

Hours sitting at the dining room table, my father’s big jug of wine passed around for all (I still refer to your regular sized bottle of wine as a “skinny bottle”, since it didn’t seem the norm to me at all), along with very possible cocktails (scotch and soda mostly – highballs as my mother and her sister referred to them, for most everyone throughout the day. I would always volunteer to make drinks for the men, which still seems to be one of my favourite things to do with myself. I was even allowed one myself, once I was probably, say, eight years old? I can’t imagine it being before that, but watered down wine was always on the menu for me in our house. I knew then I loved the cocktail, for the amber coloured bubbly sounds it made when I mixed it up good (usually with a silverware knife), for the ritualistic measuring out of a shot glass, or a “jigger” which is a word I still use at parties at which I get strange looks from slack jawed contemporaries who, in their slightly inebriated haze, probably take it for another, less appropriate word. The men usually got 2 jiggers for each cocktail, the women 1 or 1.5 (My mother was a 1.5). I was allowed one, but with more ice and more soda and a shorter glass (they did try to dissuade me in their ways, but I say with glee to no avail).

My uncle would get drunk slowly, just like my dad and the rest of us – there is nothing like the heavy onset of all day drinking coupled with that much meat and food in your belly, and the hours at the table talking, endlessly about the old country, politics and religion of course (but as no one sitting at that table had more than a high school degree (but for my father who had two years studying to be an electrician at Youngstown University in Ohio); in fact, my other uncle I believe dropped out by something like the 3rd grade. My dad would just get “happy” as he called it – I can remember literally on one hand the number of times he got too loud and too aggressive around my mom. She simply told him he was too drunk and he fell asleep on the couch. Literally --- one hand. He was the most joyful drunk ever, when he let it rip on holidays, nights when we decided amongst ourselves that we were eating a big meal and celebrating…something. When money really got tight and he got laid off from his last “real job” around the age of 63 or 64, he brought home something sweet to eat and a bottle of something – but not for himself to drown in or grovel about. It was for us all to share, for him to tell us “we’ll be fine, let’s enjoy what we have now”. Sometimes my brother, father and I would get drinking, later on when I was in high school, and my mom in her half Ukrainian tea totler way would be annoyed and not in the mood. She’d watch TV in the room and come out occasionally – stories and loud laughter and her view of the bottle disappearing would bring on a typical “that’s disgusting” or “you bunch of piacs (Croatian for drunks…she still calls me Pianica sometimes (“little drunk girl”). But we’d laugh at her, and 7 times out of 10 she’d end up out with us taking part, to her own very stubborn chagrin.

So the drink would take hold on this Christmas Day, 1985. My uncle was not a happy drunk like my dad. He was not the nicest of men and certainly a very rough father to have. In summer times, out back in the pool or on the massive hill we had, my uncle’s pass out at some point, and/or wake up to threaten my cousin Stephen with “the belt” (the “shtap”). He would often utilize it, as Stephen was a fat kid who was a terror from the get go. No surprise there. He and my brother turned from little terrors to angry teenagers, refusing to smile for any picture imaginable. There is one of myself and my brother John outside, in the cold, all bundled up, ripping apart our shoddily put together gingerbread house and stuffing it into our mouths (my mother had the good knowledge to tell us to do so outside), and I’m far too busy inserting a north facing wall of gingerbread into my mouth to notice my brother’s middle finger posing for the camera --- stuck in front of my face – While he stuffs his own face. He was never one to say no to sweets, even when his older brother duties to be my asshole required him. On this Christmas, it wasn’t much different than the others with the 5 courses of meat meals, the wine, the highball measuring, my pretty red velvet dress, the constant fires burning in every fireplace we had, the loud and raucous conversations overlapping in a way only another southern or eastern European can understand – I have had good southern girls and WASPS alike look slightly perturbed at myself and family members talking with each other, thinking we were yelling or arguing or upset with each other. When that, my repressed northern friends, is how we talk. In some of my brother’s darker days, we’d argue and argue his worst fears and accusations about us out, taking sides, screaming, crying occasionally, throwing things, and it would be worked out. Then was never any “uncomfortable silence”. To this day I like making myself known about everything I can, since that feeling feels like, I don’t know, the opposite of “home”. It’s not something I ever want to get used to. Throw me down a flight of stairs, but don’t ignore me. I’m lost. Our way seems perfectly civilized to me.

After our dinnertime trek was done, and the desserts and coffee also went down the pipes, when my dad and uncle usually were left at the table talking, my dad always gathering up his crumbs with his hands into a neat little pile, which I of course do, since it feels like a nice gesture, even if you’re not the one cleaning up the holiday mess, and the sound of the dishwasher quietly burbling like a faraway brook underground, vibrating in our massive bellies, our heads cloudy and in need of naps. Evening would come, we would say our goodbyes, and they’d be on their way, down from Westchester to Astoria, often in my uncle’s work van, which had no seats in the back, so my cousins would be bumped and tossed about, like dogs on a road trip, all the way down the insane city highways, since my uncle was an insane city driver. Before this occurred, up from the dark and dysfunctional basement where the boys congregated, came my brother and male cousin. Drunk? Slightly…suffering from aggression, most definite sexual frustration and familial holiday discontent? Definitely. Stephen was careless, and slammed the basement door behind him, right onto my brother’s middle finger (I know, it’s poetic justice of some “fuck you” sort). My brother was not one to quiet his voice when in anger, pain or some combination of the two. The scream was booming, and almost wavy in it levels of pain registering in his finger, rest of body and mind. It was all a crazy haze of half drunken, debauched adults and kids running around, the women grabbing every first aid apprentice and/or ingredient they could (my mom most likely; my aunt was not good in a crisis, whereas I think my mom got off on the sight of blood – a challenge and a call to her motherly duty like no other) and attempted to wrap it up.

Well, my most definitely drunk dad drove my brother to the ER and soon enough he was back, properly bandaged and still, yet more subtly, angry. There was some talk of Stephen doing it on purpose, since he seemed to love destruction and aggression, but I think everyone just chocked it up to a dysfunctional familial Christmas moment. I can’t remember how much longer they stayed, but surely we ate and drank more, and sat a bit more by the fire, or at least, I’d like to hope we all did. It didn’t ruin the memory of that day for me. You’d have to ask John about his memory of that Christmas. For all I know, he could stem every dissatisfaction in his life from that finger bang in the doorway moment. As usual, they piled in the van and drove, sputtering loudly and concurrently down our tall, steep driveway as we all –always- stood outside and waved at them, our dogs running around free as they always cared to be, while my aunt’s family did the same from inside the van. We would even walk about halfway down the driveway sometimes – each of the adults getting in last words of sarcasm and laughter at each other’s expense. As they drove off down Virginia Lane, the final note in this battalion of a symphony would include their honking the horn over and over as they left our sight. We would do the same if leaving their house, and in both cases, the patriarch driving would still be drunk, my mother and aunt often commenting weeks later on the telephone phrase like “I don’t know how he got us home” or “I can’t believe he drove like that”, their voices half bothered by the inappropriateness of that action and half turned on by the danger of their drunken adventure. Nothing like putting your family’s life at risk to close out a holiday, is there? The exhaust heard in between the trees in the distant street, as my brother waved goodbye, the smoke of cold Christmas night emanating from his mouth, and his plump, white bandaged middle finger, waving and wishing a fuck you to all, and to all a fucking goodnight.

~ M. Lucia

VISIONS OF PLUMP LITTLE SUGAR PLUMS

Dad just fell onto the tree again.  That's twice in one night.

The stereo is playing The Twelve Days of Christmas again - this time the Bing Crosby version and all I can think of is a drunk and bitter Bing mentally abusing his son(s).  Bing has this way of singing the "me" in "my true love said to me-ee" that rubs me the wrong way.  He adds an extra syllable to the word--just Bing's way of making the song his own I guess.

Dad just made that tree his own.  Or the tree owned him.  Or the whiskey and the tree collaborated on owning Dad--a joint venture--so much so that Grandma's packing up now for the long drive home, a couple of hours early--the long drive home to grandmother's house she goes--over the river and through the woods, I presume.  Heading back up north she will go.  She doesn't like driving in this weather; it's really just cold and damp and that's "black ice weather" for grandma and you know, "anything could happen."  But "anything" just DID happen with Dad and the tree, AGAIN, so grandma has done the mental calculus and determined the black ice might be safer.  She may be right but I don't have the options she does, in terms of flight.

I noticed the birds down by the river just refuse to fly south.  I suppose they're not supposed to otherwise they would right?  Unlike grandma they have no free will.  What is the instinct to fly south anyway?  How deeply ingrained is that desire in their birdish DNA?  Is there something about the angle of the sun or the temperature that trips the internal alarm and tells them, as a group, fly THAT way?  Or maybe it's the one dominant bird that has the strongest, most urgent alarm and when he flies the others just conform.  Maybe the alarm is as simple as "as soon as it gets cold enough it's better to be flying than not" and then once they're in the air the birds just fly in the direction they know to be warmer, sensing a slightly more favorable degree of temperature in THAT direction (south) down to a hundred-thousand decimal places?  I guess that wouldn't make sense in light of weather patterns--a persistent "lake-effect" warm front could send the ducks to Canada.  An area of high pressure swirling around the Great Lakes sending swarms of geese to Buffalo.

I remember standing in the middle of Grand Central Terminal with my Dad just as flocks of commuters were coming off several trains at once it must have been, all coming straight at us standing in the center of the great hall. "Where did all these people come from?" I asked Dad.  "Points north," he answered not really looking at me, just sighing at who knows what.  I imagined a huge funnel and God or someone pouring this soup of people from a bucket he had by his heavenly throne into it and watching them swirl around, purses and briefcases and dog-eared novels and inky NY Timeses and Daily Newses, ties flapping and skirts spinning as they spiraled down the funnel into Grand Central.  Now, freed, they clicked in their wing-tips and heels at me looking for a crust of bread.  Dad didn't really understand when I threw the stale pretzel in the trash.  I think he might have had a drink then already even though it was morning.

Bing liked his bourbon too.

Mmmmmmmm, It's a Good Cookie

Christmas cookie...

The first time my fucking brother pounded the cookie dough I had carefully shaped in the half-hour my mother gave me to "be creative" because Dad was working late and wouldn't yell at her to "tell the fucking kids to shaddup and go watch TV" and had only left for a quick pee since I had been holding it in for 29 of those 30 minutes so excited for once to be doing something upstairs rather than down in the basement with the spiders and the kerosene heater and the clicking furnace and the whistling winter wind windows and the musty dog farting but I couldn't hold it in anymore and all I had left to do was put the jellybean buttons on the snowman before Mom popped them in the oven and I came out of the bathroom just in time to see my brother SLAM the dough into the wooden table and then actually spit a long-tailed goober right into it and all I remember is what 'sounds' to me like a silent scream but my mother hearing it and smacking his left ear and he cried like a baby but sat on my head later against the cold stone floor of the cape cod we lived in in Peekskill, NY, circa 1973.  That night I drew lines into the condensation of the windows meant to be daggers I wished I could stab into my brothers ears and eyes and hands and feet and even his fucking tiny boy balls.

Then there was the one I had in college right after Jerry--Jerry the Jerk they called him which I knew and understood why but still that night his cock was in my mouth such was my desire to break through with all these people I wanted to be friends with, pathetic as that sounds in a completely movie-of-the-week kind of way but then again they don't make those movies from nothing but at least a GRAIN of truth--came against the back of my throat and it seemed to me to be at least a little inconsiderate not factoring my feelings at all into the equation and just assuming that since his cock was there I was consenting to swallow.  I guess it's a fine line, I don't know, you tell me...I guess that's what a girl should expect putting that thing in her mouth and moving her tongue and her lips around at the direction of the grunts and moans from above taking cues and signals from a moron and known 'jerk' or at least that's what the movie of the week would tell you, right - suck a cock and expect to swallow SOMETHING Mackenzie Phillips might say no?  But stumbling out in the champagne haze I grabbed one of the Christmas Tree cookies that my roommate Mary Alice Gilloughy had made (just to change the taste in my mouth) because "you need something to eat at a party" she would say such was her theory and it was a safe bet that Mary Alice wasn't putting ANYONE'S cock in her mouth unlike me who went from cock to cookie with the skill and alacrity of a $2 whore except for the eruption of vomit soon after of the three C's as Jerry the Jerk called it as it was happening practically--champagne, cookie and cum all over Mary Alice's grandmother's comforter making her actually get her Irish up (said Jerry, again) and call me a 'cunt' which she pronounced with such relish like it was spelled with a KCH at the beginning that I just shut down in so many ways and gave up on ever stabbing my brother in the balls or anything like that and resigned myself to...well, so many things from that moment I can't adequately say.

So now we find ourselves staring at the plate of snowmen and christmas trees and even fucking stars of David lovingly baked and decorated by yours truly in celebration of yet another holiday season in the company of so many recasted characters from my life - there's my Dad at the copy machine and Jerry down in IT and Mary Alice in accounts payable - that had I not completely shut-down years ago I might've had the strength, physical, mental, emotional, to do something about it - like yell at the top of my lungs FUCK YOU ALL!!!!!!!! but instead I resort to rat poison.  In the cookies.  And they come at them like rats don't they?  Can't resist another Christmas-y confection can you Jerry?  God forbid you NOT stuff your face with another cookie Mary Alice...and Dad, yes Dad, I've never seen anyone eat a fucking cookie with such anger.  But then again you were always a bit of a yeller weren't you Dad?  Well Happy Holidays friends, lovers, family one and all.  And just to show you I have a sense of humor, I'll join you.  Nothing like a nice cookie to get the party started.  'Tis the season!  Mmmmmmmm, it's good.

Broken Tramp Stamp

Remember that small, but powerful cluster of set-in scars-
scratches made by city cement, at the small of my back?
This pain doesn't come close to that one by a long shot.
This one- dull, inactive, tight and twisted like a schoolmarm
caught in the doldrums between empathy and utter hatred
for those fucking kids.
Releasing slowly ---sharply---
down my ass and into my legs.
Your wound went upwards, through my gut, eight-fold
reaming my heart
and my head followed.
Small bits of cement still live in there, to remind me
of what fun that can be had for free.

~ M. Lucia

Standing at the Edge of Water

what do I deserve
standing beneath the sun the same as everyone else.
but not the same, or not in the same way.
Sometimes the misanthropes, we
are the very sweetest of all.
We shudder, and shout inside,
we remove ourselves from the great
and expensive
theatre of conflict.
From the prizefights sewn into our bellies,
from the fact that we are afraid of all of you.
We are afraid you will see us there, mask removed,
crying into our wine at beauty which we want to share
into the day, but cannot. 
We know most of you will snub us out, every chance you get.
Most of you take the truth of us and wrap it up in the back
of your hand --- laugh, tease, disengage, belittle.
We hate you, because we do not.
We loathe everything all of you do, simply
because we would absorb the pain along with our own.
Our love to give becomes a sort of blood letting---
and we're let go into the abyss,
but once we are alone there, in the dark,
we see it goes only to our knees.  The black water-
smiling up at us, our friend.
We then turn back to you folk and your perfectly happy crowd,
laughing like idiots, remarking not of the fact that we All-
were born under this sun,
and we all deserve--- Everything.

~ M. Lucia

Riding the Narwhal

It is official
Behold! Soothsayer, I am!
What? No assfucked whale?

Breakfast: A Guide (From the Grave of Henry Valentine Miller)

So you see, eating is an art. Just as fucking, and letting your heart go does, before it kill itself and bleeds onto all the onlookers while they stand at the side of the road, staring down at their shoes and wondering why they feel so damn Good when they first put a pair of new shoes on. Like a duck in the bath, sloshing its ass around happy as the yellow in the sun greets it upon ever single new morning. So mornings and breakfast. One of these things is wonderful, the other not so hot. While a sunrise is something to see, it never fails that your seeing it through hazy, cum soaked eyes of glittering, viscous adventure and filled to the lids in the best array of liquors the world has to offer you for free is the more preferred way to see the sunset. LE SUNSET. It’s not as routine as the overly self-aggrandizing motions of getting yourself out of bed after a full night’s sleep in order to stand with your un-spiked coffee at the window, looking out onto the sun. He’s around the corner, beating your better intentions and pointing out how you are an embarrassment to the natural order of things, the meals, the drink, the fuck, the rage, the fanaticism. Oh yes, all meals should have some level of fanaticism to them…like a good Pentecostal snake charming service, tongues wagging and licking up the Lord as he bears down on you, in full glory through the tiny, dead eyes of the otherwise unappreciated garden snake. So there should be revelry, torn clothing, at each and every meal, even if you dine alone. And always a little something to tickle your insides with liquid-wise. Something delicious and open hearted.

Therefore, leading me to breakfast. It has its place in the day, but I find enjoying it at or just after noon is the best way to truly savour its specialties. Your mouth is awake, hopefully has enjoyed a rollick good go at it in the bed, on the table, in the window (remember, they’re staring at their shoes and they want to be looking at you, so make it good. Give them something to see, before the blood nicks them in the corner of their leering eyes. Under their hats and above their fears of themselves and who they could be, if they didn’t let the world cage them in so. Your mouth is open, you see, alive and tasting all that it can, not like a numb cunt too late at night sloshed on drink or too early in the morning, before she’s had a proper amount of time to wake up – all closeted and bundled up. The lights are on, and it’s time for breakfast. What a wonderful array of food items one can enjoy. If there is any way to avoid the idea of lunch, your world will be such a marvelous place. Lunch is for chumps, you see. Suckers, and life peddlers who mock at the idea of actually Enjoying something, but doing it, going through the motions, because it is time. The act of eating lunch is an act of true depravity. Nothing noble, or giving about it. No heart to be found there at all, in that black pond of filth and muck lying at the side of the highway. You might as well be on a desert moon trapping gazelles for all the life lessons and pleasure you could get from a lunch. You hear people talking about meals they had out – grand, fantastical meals that sound as if they got fucked up the ass by the whole theatrical cannon of the western world. And then got served a dessert on top of that.

And those about breakfast, the Right ones, they lay in bed or put this ransacked, alluring meal together when still drunk, or so sick they can’t see straight – Then they taste the glory in their food. When it serves to lift them out of the pit of despair they have carved out for themselves, thought by thought, regret by soulful regret. Seeing their sunrise in the midday, glaring and warming them from the inside, secretly hiding away from the demons of the daytime with their lover, never to get out of bed, while downing canyons of coffee, cathedrals of sweet bread and syrup. Dousing themselves in bacon grease and sliding their day into oblivion. That’s breakfast, my dear. Be sure not to miss it next time it comes around, even if you’re about, say, 6 or 7 hours too late for it. And the champagne! Oh, the absolute mindfulness of bubbles rising in your glass, your cunt, your stomach. Like a slow orgasm rolling its way up the sides of the flute (even that word speaks to God --- drinking out of a Flute for heaven’s sake!). Of this specific diet is no one thing, but many – preferably a combination of meat – the baser and dirtier the better- just like whores, you want the ones who know that a good debasing is a mass at St. Peter’s undone. Sausage, bacon, I like the back bacon – Irish or Canadian style. Thick and chewy, where you can taste every inch this animal struggled through, and his pain and grief at the death process, he is alive in you and oh does he bring you good tidings. Double smoked, applewood…you can’t fail with a start like this. If you did your head in the night or morning before, then this is the most surefire way to slap yourself in the ass and get going. As your own pace, of course. There should be butter, or jam (both is a wonderful thing to have together, on good crusty loaves of bread. Give your bacon something to bounce up from as it acrobats into the stars found just below your lungs, in the sky of your belly’s celestials. This should be done slowly, chewed, swallowed, engorged inside you. You need to know every moment of your life is coming together in the moments to come.

Eggs are optional – they fit or they don’t. I love a good scrambled egg, cooked in butter with chives, dill, maybe a little tomato or red onion if I’m feeling frisky and progressive. They can be another, more civilized layer to this breakfast of the daytime, creating colours and pastels in your fields at play. Also, a well made sunny side up (or down, as I prefer, I like poking it and seeing where it’ll leak, almost like reading tea leaves in the shady dealings of a gypsy- taking your money and not even giving you a good fuck. What’s the future worth like that? If you are a real zealot, I mean a foot soldier in the legion of Living – someone who knows that the light in someone’s eyes can annihilate you, or muffle your screams in their adeptness, that the mountains are all the walls of your body, the one we are now feeding, at the table, with the fork and spoon…someone who can see themselves, and the world for what it truly is. Devastating, inept and beautiful, and alive. Then, my dearie, will you know what you have gotten yourself into here, the bacon almost gone and the eggs and their maddening colours and textures making you cry. Also, there can be a trade off with the butter and jam, and the runny golden juice of the sunny sided egg. Your choice. I like an ample supply of bread to cover all three, sometimes separately, sometimes all at once. Now, the final gorge. If we were in Rome, it’d be time for the tickle of the feather, probably along with a few good slap and tickles, because when in Rome, do as the Romans do (especially when there is almost nothing that they won’t do)…you know, the good upheaval of the contents in your stomach. Most nowadays don’t go that way, and I only do when I’ve hit midnight too hard with brown liquors and forgotten to eat a meal. Myself, I keep it all in, a packed house for the opera and its ultimate climax. Something sweet and bready, pancakes, French toast (my favourite), waffles, anything that you can drown in terribly sugary chorus girls singing your body all the way home. This is the kind of meal you won’t need to supplement with snacking before you start up again for supper time.

Of course, I don’t even have to mention that the champagne is flowing through you like good biblical verse, Jesus coming into Jerusalem to be crucified, riding on an ass, green palms rattling in his terrified face. Bottles should come neatly, one after the next, with no cause of stopping until it’s a natural act having nothing to do with the supply. White wine, Lambrusco, sparkling rose, anything like this will do. You’ll have your choice of afternoon drinks later, long past the time you sleep all this madness off, and look your cunt in the eyes again, bellybutton first. Lastly, this ritual is only complete with a good, strong coffee or tea – black only, caffeine always, and don’t you know, always tipped with a little extra something. Be careful here. You don’t want to fall overboard from too heavy a pour of whiskey or brandy in your coffee, or in your pot of tea (always a pot, never just a cup. It’s bad luck, or so the gypsy told me before she fucked those sailors for free. Wonder if she saw them coming in her crystal ball). Savour this last piece of the pie, it will stay with you, allying you throughout your day, here on this earth, creating and destroying yourself, your gods, each other and the light inside the darkness hour after hour. There is always time for a surprise crucifixion and you, dear one, are now ready for it all. Old Testament and new, birth and death sacrament, tongues inside you and pricks making their way up your river Nile…the deed is done, the first one and now all the rest can follow.

Most importantly, make this breakfast last as long as you possibly can, preferably do it with people you love in one way or another (but by yourself has its place too, long as there is love, acceptance and a rough and ready desiring). Stand up from the table, and if you’ve the courage, recite some words which construct inside your esophagus, the sweet, the bubbles, the fallen beast, all mingling and creating a poem that God himself could not pen without this call to the sun to move his teetering ass across your sky, since you are already riding him from behind, belly up full of taste and fanaticism. Get up and shit it all out, and then make your way into the world. The sun’s not going anywhere just yet, and we still have supper to consider.

~ M. Lucia

Wow, nice ass.  Bicycle pants.  You don't see women wearing bicycle pants that often.  At least I don't.  And not this early in the morning.  I actually knew a female bike messenger once.  She had a pretty nice body - fit, you know, but nothing really sexy about it though--like not anything you would fantasize about.  Not like this ass here.  And maybe it's the way she's pulling at the Spandex, adjusting it there standing at the phone booth.  Not many phone booths anymore and none really used as phones either.  Like this chick here, using it as a changing room.  Is she getting changed?  Did I miss an even better show earlier?  Like pulling these pants up over onto a bare ass?  Man, look at the way she's smoothing the material across the cheeks.  That's right baby, make it nice and tight.  Look, even that woman in the bank window is checking it out.  I always found it funny these people with their desks basically right on the sidewalk except behind a window.  Must be weird to have people watching you work all day long.  Fucking tourists traipsing by the window on the way to take another picture of the fucking tree, just looking over your shoulder at the spreadsheets.  And weird that tree, right--how popular it is?  Like a city as amazing as NYC and the tree is a destination.  It IS a nice one though this year but why is it I always feel bad for the tree?  How do people just give a tree in their yard up for sacrifice?  Man, I wish she would turn around a little so I can get a better look at what else besides the ass she's got going on.  Just let someone come along and cut a tree that's been around for, what, 100 years down?  The only upside for the tree I guess is that it becomes "the most famous Christmas tree in the world."  I wonder if the tree finds that a consolation.  I wonder if, given the choice, the tree would opt for death knowing that it would be famous in death - and beloved even, and become the background to hundreds of thousands of pictures in photo albums - OUR CHRISTMAS TRIP TO NYC!!!  What's with this bank woman - what's her problem?  Fucking women - so catty and jealous of each other.  Can't let a hot chick strut her stuff a little without being a hater.  What if the shoe was on the other foot and it was the trees that controlled everything and all we did was photosynthesize carbon monoxide all day long or whatever trees do.  And the trees had some annual celebration where they took a human and propped his dead body in their public square, hung lights on him and took pictures for a month before grinding him up into mulch.  What human would opt for that honor?  I think there might be a few takers.  A blaze of glory after all as opposed to the slow march downward to an undignified end.  Maybe it's sounding a little attractive?  Live fast and die young and be the center of tree attention for a moment?  Well, I know for me, I take too much pleasure in this life.  Like this woman here in the bike pants.  Who would ever want to give it all up when there's this to look at?


Wait.....


OK - full disclosure time.  I'm a block away now looking at the damned tree.  Turns out the bank woman wasn't far off.  I didn't catch the curly grey hair coming out of that skinny MAN'S (that's right, it's a man baby) bike helmet.  Grey hair because my hot chick was actually an old MAN with a nice ass but clearly not my kind of ass it turns out.  Either way, no big deal.  The big deal is that old man - he didn't really look like a crazy man or, like, homeless or anything like that - anyway the big deal is the reason he was in the phone booth was because he was fucking the phone for some reason.  He's standing there with his wrinkly pecker stuck in the coin return slot, like banging the phone.  Jeez - never mind the gaddamm Christmas tree, what about the phone?  How do you think the phone feels?  

Little Boys Are The Toughest

Or so they say.  I hold you, little girl, and I could sit with you passed out in my arms for a good one hundred years.  You, with the dark and stormy blue eyes, your quiet, supple and gentle limbs (when you are not squeezing my finger with your full fist of fury, or kicking with the best roundhouse a little girl could bring to this world) and your absolutely tuckered heart, sleeping and beating and storming castles in her dreams on my belly, against my chest.  One of our friends asked "what do you think she's dreaming about? All her adventures she's experienced in 5 weeks of being here" with full sincerity and in all seriousness.  But. I knew it was so much more.  She knew my whole life, all of the bullshit we encountered, all that we lost from each other day by day by day...she knew of the heavens, and the pits of self made despair, the weeds that grew from the art we drove from ourselves with complete destruction and non-intention, she knew of it all.  She lay slumped against me with the un-held weight of a body not yet knowing how much it would cling to itself, to all the fears and fright and unaccomplished storytelling that she didn't know of yet.  She didn't know about the raconteurs known as angry young men with blue eyes.

They came to you in the night, when they remembered that they had no one else but you who believed in them.  It was a balmy summer night --always-- when they finally succumbed.  You had been out, one of the last nights out in your 20's...with the ridiculous one whose presence was there only because you let him be.  The other, was the dirty tipped angel, tough and scabbed thick fingers, and the skin of an old man in a boy's body, helter skelter all summer long and guilt and the ability to have mormon love running through your blood and yet never possess it.  It finally happened.  He finally (again) kissed you ferociously in a bar, on 3rd avenue, then tried to pick up the homely bartender, because it would prove something and be easier.  Then he ran away in a cab (he couldn't walk; such a lightweight) and told me to ask "him" why he had to go home.  Me and the lesser one were at my home within the hour - he thought he was going to be sick out of the cab, but made it home to astoria (my home where I took care of him and he didn't belong, to my body, soul, mind or heart), and puked repeatedly -- I couldn't stop thinking of him - the other with hurtful and innocent blue eyes- all night, and I passed out on the bed with this one.  This lack.  He was down for the count.  The tv was still on and I was relatively drunk, just before 30 in a way I cannot repeat now.

He had a special ring back then - it was "Mama's, Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Cowboys".  It was right for the night, and for my re-telling on this night, in nearly winter.  Electric lights bounding around my heart, cavalcade of deities.  Pulling down on my lungs, stringing me to my past and to who I am being tiny shards of who I used to inhabit, in every pore still me as ever.  My little boy came to me.  I woke up, after him calling me with that repeated song about 10 times, and the other one never woke up (in so many ways) and I told him, to come here. He had a bad fight with his brother in law, a good man, and there was embarrassment, violence and already forming the foundation of regret.  He was on his way.  I lay on the sofa, in the dark, waiting.  He came.  He grabbed my shirt as he walked in --- utterly incapacitated, and devastating.  We sat on the couch and he told me to lean on him, as he told me how when he met my parents, that they would love him, they would.  We talked soberly, and I don't remember who kissed who but I had him in my arms, and he had me under him, and then - we left.  We went upstairs to the 6th floor rooftop, and his strong arms broke the lock.  We were alone up there, and we stared at the stars, and he fucked me up and down, and I tore him apart, and he came on top of me, with no ego, no stains and no life experience- just the bare nakedness of innocence, the tree growing up straight with no women, apples, serpents or creeds, in his deep asunder of blue eyes.

We slept there for awhile, on that chilly, hard cement rooftop, and one blanket.  That strong, self made man of a little boy and me, 9 years older, and not a day's worth more mature, in each other's arms cradled - with no heaviness, or knowledge of how to make this continue much further into the future, or much sense of reality - under an utterly imperfect, navy black Astoria sky, I feel alright in New York City, Finally.  In his warm, soft Arizona arms I felt right.  And I cried, for my first happy night in the big city under the skylights of the warming stars, in the same building as my mother went for her doctor's appointments, my aunt, now gone, would escape her agoraphobia to run by and say hello, my dad, now gone but not away, took 5 trips to my old apartment to help move me into this new place, sickened and tiring as he was, with not a moment's complaint, in this place where I learning to stop running, and slept for a short while.  We went inside, we kissed goodnight, and I woke up next to the wrong one, and told him that the young boy and I had finally had our night on the roof.  He didn't get it.  Some are born clueless and there's not a wise word what can change that.  I turned 30 with them the next night.
 
So, my cotton ball soft, long worked for little girl, with the red-dark hair and the old junkie's stare, you are perfect in this world, here with us who stuck it out.  Our words might not impress you, and our excuses none but lame, but our worlds collide in your nap time dreams tonight ---beware of blue eyes, girl, they'll slaughter your every name.  They might kill you where you sleep, infect the textures of your dreams and take you...as you fall sweeter and moister into the crook of my arm, asleep - be glad you were born a girl, in your ability to fall against me with complete abandon, and pride.  Keep wriggling, to bend over the tide.

~ M. Lucia

THE KING--AN ORDINARY ODE

There's a picture of him that I have and keep out.  He doesn't know his photo's being taken.  He's coming home from work.  His arms are laden with papers, books, folders and for some reason a large cardboard tube askew to it all.  He's wearing a windbreaker/rain jacket.  It's green.  I know it's consignment.  I know it has chalk in the pockets.  Did I say he doesn't know the picture is being taken?  Someone - the photographer - is peaking out the living room window, an anti-paparazzi.  Anit- because no one would ever pay a nickel for this man's photo.  No one wants to see that face, with the weight of the world just barely poking through that look of determination, in any magazine on the doctor's office coffee table.  He climbs the front steps the way he has a thousand times before to join his wife and five children at the dinner table.  The house, the table, the food, the electricity, the beloved TV, the absolute sense of love and security all there because he climbs up and down those stairs and drives back and forth on the highway day after day.  So much so that the momentum of going and going and going sustains him even to this day into his seventies.  He hasn't stopped.  He hasn't been able to.

Always, on top of his duties, he maintained a belief in humanity and its basic goodness.  Assailed constantly for his moderate voice, and by jealousy of his instinctive ability to know what it was like in the other guys shoes.  Despite all of that he was optimistic.  Optimistic about the people around him, none of whom were fit to hold a candle to him (or whatever the dumb expression is), who criticized him, who called him a moderate--he believed always that they meant well and he knew that they struggled just as he did.  Maybe they weren't equipped to handle it as well as he was.  Maybe they didn't have his gifts.  He knew his ultimate duty, to himself, to his family, to his community and to the God he put his faith in despite having the mental capacity to know better, was to lift the tide where and when he could.  Add just a little water to the ocean and we would all float a little higher.  The King and his subjects.

I have my own gifts, my own passions.  One of them is the perspective to know that the footprints on this path I'm walking on are his.  My inclination is not to believe in my fellow man the way he did--the way he does, even now as death's indignities are raining down on his friends and life's ultimate betrayal is coming into sharp focus.  Having been loved the way I was I walk with a confidence that only can come from the sure knowledge of own worth - knowledge I only received because of close proximity to him.  And so I'm over-confident.  I'm cocky.  I sometimes think I'm better.  But I am his princely son and have also been inured with his instinct for taking the back seat.  For discovering the beauty in my community of mediocrity.  For celebrating the ordinary all around me.  And in that way becoming ordinary myself, but I belong, and by belonging I make the group better.  There's virtue in giving your life for your brother, even when he doesn't deserve it.  If only because that act in itself is uncommon.  It's radical even.  Most people are too scared to do it.

I know how he feels now, the King.  I know that look on his face when he thinks he's alone.  We don't want pity, we don't want glory.  We want the path.  We want the journey.  We want the struggle.  It ennobles us.  It makes us kings.

Double Reed

The vines always locate me, in the outer reaches of my deepest theta states, warm and comfortable, well at rest, stepping off the edge of the cliff, in tandem.  The song writes itself from the growing and blowing breeze insides the holes in my arms. I should explain how they got there.

This was not the ultimate trip back in time to the ancient smell, dusty, sex stinking, fanatical and livid that I had hoped for.  The aesthetic was not right at all. Not romantic, like I had hoped.  No swept up hair, no kohl marking my eyes for the slaughter of the sort of love affair that I would gladly follow into the grave, my own or any poor bastard I had to kill to please my love.  Yes, I know I've always been that sort of woman, in this or any incarnation.  Anything for the man, the woman dies by my hand.  I never made that decision, but somehow it seems it was made for me, like a cattle being stamped for her master.

This was some kind of mosaic - a no man's land of my past, the childhood, the other in between mundane worlds that gripped into a fist all my most recent, imaginary or made up memories, and images and sands of electric light on a wall.  I fall with full force every time through this wall of sand, of glass, of television light--the sort reared in dreamland.  Lately I have been attacked.  A good deal of it has produced a fever; a running, a constant paranoia, a mental overload of people just trying to put me in the ground everywhere I turned.  But somehow, amongst this constant battle for my dream body, there was no fear.  I always seem to know it's a part; there is the feeling of people watching though I cannot see them, and the sky no matter where or when, feels endless, like there are worlds outside of, beyond and in front of it, all sides now beneath my feet, kicking the dirt of my daily life (this one) about the plot I am half-constructing, half creating and half ruled by.  My ego has no place here.  I am simply a grain, washing up at the foot of God, he a grain at my feet, the abyss there right next to me all the time.

There were elements of the ancient world.  More the words used to describe the scene than the feeling and details of the scene itself.  Ships at sea, waves tossing and turning.  Made of wood - creaky, planks, wet wood soaked to the brim, but dry inside where who but members of the Velvet Underground lived, played and rehearsed - here in this boat, which I find myself upon.  He is blond, attractive.  I think to myself that I don't usually think this of the yellow haired ones, but he has a familiarity.  Then again, I cannot think who in the world he is.  There were no blondes in the Velvet Underground. Save Nico, and I don't like the ladies nor was she anywhere to be seen.  I thought, is it John Cage?  He's dark haired and Welsh.  I stopped trying to figure it out.  An older, skinny man who seemed to know more than this morose, bohemian lot of figures knew, he was around in the peripheries (he had been part of the dream before this one, where I was having to climb a big tree outside the back woods of my childhood home - it seeming huge like the soul castle.  A killer was after me, then I was he - a cat climbed the tree, became him, became me, and I escaped, cutting a thick rope and swinging pirate like back into my old bedroom window.  He was there, but I don't know if he was the cat, or the killer, or me, or the police sent to find me).

Back to the tall ships.  There is no modernity without a feeling of the profane, and oh did I allow the profane to rule the day.  Once the skinny overseer left (by, of course, silently diving into the impossibly tall waves and finding his connecting ship nearby, out of frame), we took this decadent party to nothing less plebeian than a trailer/RV.  The rest were gone, and it was our turn to act out the plot.  It played like the usual porno, we fucked this that and the other way.  I could sense, feel and exalt from everything - the viciousness of him pulling me close to him by holding suddenly onto my hips and then, my wrists, as he fucked me harder and I started to come, and then, in between the drivers and passenger seats (what a equanimous relationship this was), the blond and I fucked against each other, tongues, hair and sweat my newest cavalcade of connection.  It was something else.  After it was all done, and it did seem to keep going on and on to which I had no complaints, a woman seemed to appear out of nowhere.  She was average, and dressed more like the modern day (I wouldn't know what we were dressed like, since we seemed naked from the start).  I felt heavy with his fluids, and my own, and there she was, meek and bothersome in the corner of the vehicle, trying to get him to seduce her.  Knowing myself, I was having none of that.  Let her find her own way to the pornographic epicenter of the romano-modern-white trash-rough fuck-no frills world in which I had found myself.  Let her sail her own ships and make her own story.  I didn't so much throw her out of the trailer, as I just opened the latch of the door behind her, and the bitch just fell on out.  

Well, this skinny little thing set upon a rage at us both.  I yelled at him to start locking the doors, since she was out to destroy us (funny I had missed her stalking presence when I was in the trees in childhood).  We both started securing the vehicle, but somehow there were so many steps to doing this and reaching outside became a part of the locking up ritual, so there were ultimately loopholes.  She grew like a stunned animal outside in the dirt, and flailed at us, mostly at me, in every moment she could find a few inches to snub her way into, on the inside of our fucking contest to ride shotgun.  Soon, we seemed to have escaped, and I was up high on a large platform indoors; still a sort of audience nearby, small, meaningless, silent, watching.  Her, not me.  He tried to get the knife from her, but it was Huge and she hurled it up at me, from right below, so she couldn't miss.  It seemed to penetrate my right upper arm, at least 4 or 5 times, in and out, like a sewing needle raping my outer layers of skin and tissue, muscle and blood.  I recognized that she "got me" but then, somehow, even after she was chased out by the now woman in charge (business suit and all), no one payed me any mind, but I wanted them to.  Because I was ok.  My tattoo, the roman one with the vines and the provincial words usually found on my upper left arm, was now on the right one, where she had landed her steel into me (and out of me, since I had ripped it non-chalantly out and dropped it onto the floor below.  It had made a definite "ding" sound on the floor).  The wounds were incredibly deep, but somehow, like certain puncture wounds are, complete in their containing of the blood that I had thought would have flowed from them like merlot, the cheap, thick sort.  It didn't hurt, and she was gone, and I had smiled at him, since our good time was un-affected.  You can't take back a fuck like that one. 

Somehow, after a few more tosses and turns, elysium took me one step further removed from action, and people, and the story, so-called.  I was travelling up the mountains far upstate, and the colours were achingly beautiful.  I knew my father was farther up, along with so many others whose atmosphere was not allowed to mingle with ours.  Maybe it was he, and they, the invisible ones, watching me all the time, standing beside me in all my adventure, crudeness, foreplay and denouement.  Always there, in the brightest of colours, blinded by sunshine, just up and around the corner of the mountain.  My last thought was one of houses, always in my familial mindset.  I would have to buy an old one, made of stone, not of wood, since that far up the mountain must get really cold in the winter, so we would have to have one of those to see us through to the new face of Spring- bounding plot lines, revengeful women, lustful men and myself being the same in all of these worlds, complete in each vine, wrapping further through me in my quiet trip up and around the mountain, wrapped in a shroud of my own ego, and my own making.

~ M. Lucia

Mild und leise

It's all very amusing.  You think because you've seen a few movies, a few TV shows, maybe you've read some books or a magazine article you think you understand.  You think you might have some insight into what makes me tick.  You think my mother complex defines me.  You think my abandonment issues inform my actions.  You think what you interpret as my indifference to human life must have some basis in childhood events, some signature moment when I was exposed to death at too early an age.  What is the right age to watch something/someone die I want to ask.  What's too young?  What's old enough?  


You stare at me confused.  Don't worry, it's a look I've seen before.  Don't be embarrassed.  Despite all your schooling, the books, magazines, movies and TV shows, I'd venture you've never met someone like me before.  And I know I lot of people might say that.  Expecially people with my healthy ego.  (I know I misspelled that word back there believe me.  I like to see it that way.  I like to hear it too--EX-pecially-- but the visual just toots my trumpet.  The "X" in the word--it reminds me of Sue Coutes in Racine Wisconsin.  It was a business trip and I met her at the bar in a restaurant called...what was it?  The Yardarm!  That was it...Bar and Grille, with the "e" there at the end.  [I feigned a poor recollection just then; it was an effect for your benefit.  It sounded stylish somehow.  Truth is I remember EVERYTHING from that night and all the others too.]  She (Sue) ordered an "EXpresso, please" and I felt a stir in my boxers and no amount of whiskey then could stop me, poor Sue.  In the end Sue looked confused too but eventually she seemed OK with it all.  And here, in a movie, the "killer" would say something like "I never heard her complain!" and laugh maniacally, but didn't say anything like that.)  


So, my ego.  It's something I hold tightly onto.  And I'm well aware what happens to me when it slips.  It's not necessarily a "looking on the bright side of things," the ego, but it is close.  Anyway, I just know that it helps me to keep up an outlook of self-encouragement, one might call it, and not give in to negative thoughts.  I don't know if you're thinking that the ego is the thing that keeps me out of trouble; that the positive outlook and my conscious aversion to the "down side of things" helps me function "normally" and that the occasional slide into a kind of loose, non-clinical depression might be the thing that brings about the bad stuff.  And by "bad stuff" I'm assuming that by now you know what I mean.  Anyway, though, the truth is it's the opposite--I think it's the ego that makes me immune ultimately to those feelings that might otherwise prevent someone else, someone not me, from relishing the feeling of someone's heartbeat conducting through certain kinds of wash-line rope being pulled tightly enough around a neck, making an X with the twine from behind, you know, to constrict and limit ones intake of air to a level low enough to cause slow death.  It's like a telegraph, the stutter-step blips of panicked heart beating vibrating through rope, but you have to listen closely.


And so it's the old him or me scenario, back to questions and statements of ego.  (Mostly though they're "her or me" scenarios in my case.)  But what I'm saying is that I could suppress my ego and just feel sorry for myself.  Maybe that would help stop the killing.  Allow the remorse to overcome me when it peeks in and makes me hide my face in the bathroom late at night; early in the morning maybe that's supposed to be, while I'm pissing in the dark, listening to the sound of water on water, and the memory loud enough in my head to sound like it's coming from behind the shower curtain, of Sue Coutes saying "expecially" right before I did what I did to her because right before I did it she was just talking on and on even as I started taking off her clothes, (and in this exercise she helped me, I guess she was into it for a time) and gabbing away even as I made fascinated circles with my finger tip around her huge left nipple protruding through the tank top I left on even after she was dead, part of it yellowing in the gathering pool of urine.  But I'm not willing to live that life.  I'm not going to crawl in the muck of my insecurities and second-guess myself constantly.  I do what I do because it brings me joy and it makes me feel alive and vital.  The alternative is death - living death but death all the same.  And it will be me that dies.  So I'm not willing to die.  It's her or me.  


I've read all the same books you have.  I've seen the movies.  It's not at all like that and you don't really know me.  I'm here, among you.  Sitting in the next office, riding across from you on the train, sleeping in bed with you at night.  I'm here and I'm alive.   

THE DRUMS OF WAR

Our troops are gathered at the border.

This is the moment I was made for.  Leading men in battle is my destiny.  Why then did God make in me the heart to reflect on, and fret over, the consequences?

Even now, after emissaries have returned, two riders to a horse, our enemy having ignored the ancient rites of chivalry--they have taken the young one, so the report reads on the table before me, and spilled his blood, dishonored his corpse and sent dignified men, outraged, in hasty flight back to camp as an effrontery to my person and my royal office--even now I question the righteousness of so much death, death surely to come, one way or another, the moment I stand and exit this tent and mount.  Just showing my colors will join the battle.  This head, sheathed in the metal and mail of father and grandfather, and his before him, a deadly signal to the hoary grey-hairs, veterans of the majestic battles of old and keepers of the order of knightly conduct, and to the quickened tempers of the hot-heads, the youngsters, all hoping for glory and spoils.  No one out for death.

But it will surely come, and perhaps to me too.  But I cannot linger any longer.  The field is before me and has yielded already to the promise of my march, as it always has.  I know not why, this time, I presage disaster.  Was it the bird and her perch atop the standard pole, a dark shadow, a soundless dark void, unmoving day and night, sun and rain?  Was it the downcast to the queenly countenance, barely able to meet my farewell gaze, perhaps sensing more deeply than I the coming doom?  Was it the impossibly cheerful prognostication of the soothsayer, for victory and the subjugation of the enemy, an unprecedented auspice for conquest?

No matter.  I can set aside these harbingers, these second-thoughts, this weakness of spirit, for that is my other great gift, besides an instinct for warfare--I can walk the path, mindful always and completely of my duty.  As I ride forth, this coward I see before me in the glass will sink back beneath the muck and grovel in the hodgepodge.  Soon the memory of this "other" me will be more than a distant one.  I shall rake the offending assemblage of our enemy and carry my countrymen into the naked horror of the skirmish showing full the face of imperial war.

Oh honor--spread your cloak of exaltation and consecrate my sword for the bloody blessings it will bestow.  I am your servant.  Do with me as you will.

PHANTOM LIMB

The pavement seemed irregular.  There was something off, in the pitch or the texture, he couldn't place it.  He felt as if he would tip over, or that he had to work extra hard at walking straight.  And he was hot as hell, though the day was bitter and icy, and the wind had probing fingers.  Everything was just a little different.

In his pocket was the rock she gave him.  She didn't say where it came from.  She wouldn't, but not out of any penchant for mystery or secret, more that she was, "less" that way, which of course ended up being "more" according to the old adage.  She handed him the rock from her own pocket and looked straight ahead.  He wasn't sure if she meant him to keep it or to just get the feel of it for a moment.  She said only "check the pockets of any coat of mine and there'll be a rock somewhere in there."  He chuckled trying to maintain the same sense of ease that she just carried without effort.  He hesitated for a moment and then pocketed the stone.  She just took it in stride like it was what she had intended although he had no way of really knowing.  

Now, later, he still walked in the winter sun, after she had left him on the sidewalk.  The rock was warm in his pocketed hand.  The buildings glistened all around him.  The sun reflected off, what, the 30th floor of a black building high above him.  He felt a surge of strength like something out of an ancient Greek tale of heroics, like he was suddenly at the center of an epic struggle, the battle formed around him, the cell eye of a thunder cloud.  The cyclops stared down at him, into him, knowing his every weakness, anticipating everything at once.  The monster owned him, had been awaiting this destined stand and had angled for eons back into time to engineer every advantage up to this circle in time.

Except for the rock.  

He arched his arm behind him, like David's sling, and sent it perfectly aimed upward but expecting, in an exquisite moment of reflection that encompassed the sum of all his hopes and fears at once, the rock to humpback and fall, but it lasered upward instead even as the sun eye widened in knowing surprise.  They regarded each other as the rock between them moved from one to the other, for an eternity.

Haiku in the Name of Beauty

Russian rena rips
me; small talk over crass cunt-
sealed with a wax kiss

~ M. Lucia

Valve Release

I have achieved it.  It is accomplished.  I can now do my job, as it were, as I might refer to it in a beggar’s paradise, halfway to lying down.  Like a new slice of easy going heaven for me, this pathetic dreamer, non-achiever, in the work-a-day world.  I look forward to those bodies, who idle in the same fashions as I, nearby and far far away in their caricature worlds of holiday and dinner commutes, gazing upon This – my half elated, half fearful stretched out form lying back with my pretty little head just a few feet from the radiating bliss emanating from my colour printer, the one it took six months to get moved one desk over to mine.  Now, I can lie back, eat my bon bons, read my Sade and put my feet up (I will have to secure a foot stool of some kind, preferably one with golden tassels around it, to match my demeanor and mood) while my heavy, fulfilling mind sleeps the sleep of drunkards on the cobblestoned alleyways that exist just atop this loud, sleepy printer.  The yellows of its radiations reminding me daily of why I am here; a simple pillow for a wayward girl, and me, in my kimono robe of red, creams and black silks, taking a nap poolside.  The trees gently swaying above me, the sunset I have never been allowed to see here, always and forever out of reach. 

I dream of that day, when my witchy gypsy medicinal fact sheets are checked, my hands their most adept, never cold again, when I can stand up, in the robe of course, flip off my crystal clear high heeled slippers, knocking every other person who irked me in their eyes, circle my model graveyard of places gone and picking up the bon bon wrappers and the old coffee and tea cups (my god, how many of them would there be by now, if I counted all of them), climbing upon the high level shelving all the way round the place, like a mangy cat in heat, and walk away, going the long way, gazing with a grin at that warm, golden orange sunset though glass, misting in between the panes at me and ushering me onwards, away and beyond (but actually away and beyond, not just the away and beyond which exists in my head, pulsing with an anxious heartbeat all the time….like when you can feel your heart beating in your arms and legs; you want something so badly…when your body tells you there is not another way).

For now, I rock back and forth, a traumatized queen of circumstance, and sip my 3^rd hot beverage today, happy to think about blue waves, and French wine, and those slippers I still have to buy.  My chair moves in all directions, now.  Soon, I will follow it and spin myself a new tale, spin myself some comedy gold – right into every freedom I can still recognize.  Eat the dust that kicks up as I leap out of here barefoot, you motherfuckers.  Sorry the circumstances under which I exist here force me to never allow you people to see my softer side.  Better to hide the softer side, than let the mean, hard one out when people least expect it.  As I suspect more of you than not, do.

I have cried, laughed, been dejected, mourned, celebrated, aroused and numbed myself in this place…this chair is going to shoot straight up to the heavens, in those holes between the stars and the atmosphere- billowing blue smoke expressing itself from the truth, catching itself in my lips as it exits my mouth and cascades me past the dirty carpet.  I’m taking the chair with me.  

~ M. Lucia

Thanksgiving Haiku

quiet, then vicious
raining as we walk the streets
yet never absolved.

~ M. Lucia

Two Straight Lines Make a Circle

A pounding pain in my head brings me back to this place. A wet blanket cradling my extremities, as they grow warmer and warmer with each passing day. To match the powerful center flame that threatens each night to put me out in the rain again. In our naming of ourselves, we lose contact with the meaning. We lose contact with the meaning in just about every area of our lives – one bold, and flesh eating thread pulling us out of ourselves in a straight, un-ending circle (not a line, as most people think, but a circle, which can mean the opposite of infinity in the mundane shadow of a day) thwacking us on the back of the head, right beneath our remaining Cro-Magnon ridges where our necks meet our craniums, upwards and into the brain like an old Italian mother who didn’t need threaten you when you weren’t doing right, or a handful of a woman who followed her impulses one act at a time. Back upon us, back into us, the thread circles round and removes another layer of memory, of passing, of creative imagination which we once gathered loosely round our hearts. Remember what it felt like to be twenty years old? The meaning was so close. We didn’t know fuck all what to do with it, but it was right there. Alongside. The thread hadn’t sprung up from our coverings yet. All that pacing, and wasting and wanting got us here. Then, one day, it happened. Didn’t even notice it for a good number of years…took it for “maturity” and a life less chaotic. By the time the occasions would grow closer to each other, when we suspected the run had started in us, it was too late. Like telling a woman in the throws of birth to close her legs.

Then, after you’ve consigned yourself to this place and try to find all the good within its walls, just as occasionally you feel, in the midst of an auld song or photograph or even just the smell of a place, in the crook of your elbow, the coming of winter, the home fires burning somewhere else in someone else’s home, you feel it. Zing, like a shot up your veins and bursting through the doors of your heart. You are in that youthful place, but now with this knowledge, with this regret, with this experienced energy. It doesn’t travel alone, though. Never again will it come to you by itself. Accompanying it is its twin- the loss, the pain of nostalgia, the straight line (which the thread, feasting and devouring and circling through, doesn’t let you know it’s after shape-wise). The straight line comes down on your chest like a mallet, beating out the feelings and the moments and the now of things and the Meaning. Gone again. Into the cold, teal and rainy night. It leaves you with the rain, viscous and comforting, gliding down in a sheet outside your eye sight. The best part of this ritual is that you don’t know when it’s coming, where or how and if it will ever show up again, around the bend of a summer’s day, the same home fires burning in the heat of the evening sky. In this loss, something is gained --- always. Your name remains the same, whatever that means. Your name comes from your parents, your family, an actress your aunt adored…those sounds come from colours and metaphorical pictures of things we cannot say to each other. That can also be reduced to a lineage, a grouping, a set of human beings cut from the same cloth --- from which we all were nipped from.

Most people cannot abide this deconstruction and hold on so tightly to this name, to this persona. I hold onto mine but let it slip in and out betwixt my fingers, as if I’m dancing and its going out for the night…it always comes home, a little drunk, a little world weary, often horny and needing some sense of satisfaction. I take it to sleep and dreams with me, set it to vacations in the other worlds of my psyche, so-called, and let it weave its wonders around the cracks and fissures, bouncing its way into people and back down to earth again, across the nebulas in the needle’s eye. Prying open secret doors and alleyways, roads that keep travelling round again. Always around again. My sense of identity in this place, in this body, in this space and time, is both veiled in strength and completely raw, Because I set it free to re-create itself in the colour of someone else’s eyes, in the empathy for which I feel like a piece of flint for not rising up to my best of natures, in the desiring which I can and will never detach myself completely free from – not free just yet. There is so much more work to do. It’s as in a horrific nightmare: when that thread lurks behind you and you get that sinking feeling of it coming after you again (shielding the back of your head and neck, cowering over your chew toy heart, chewing your lip with each passing second you’ve missed) and you could try to out run it. Send it away, as I have often done. But every now and again, you should stop in your tracks. Turn around, and look him in the eye. He’s following you; he has been all of this time, because he emanates from you, between your legs and in your brain he grows, and finds his voice to counter your own. Smile at him, from the very primordial place of who you are. He will always recognize you, there, as yourself. Put down your dukes now, gaze on out and then in, and learn to abide.

~ M. Lucia

Orion's Belt

boots unzipped--- snarky;
you'll be quite the man someday
remember me, still.

~ M. Lucia

FOXWHOLE

What of memories from the foxhole?

What about those days spent in the mire, muddied and manly, yet unmanned by the free flow of fear forming and foaming in your pants.  We happy few indeed, we branded brothers, with scars to prove it inside and out.

The only fully-formed memory I have is of that guy Marty.  He was colossally uninhibited.  Even when he didn't have to shit on a shovel like we did most days in the hole he would anyway, no matter where he was.  Even in the mess that time.  He took a mouthful of 'stew,' got up, pulled the spade out of the sergeants kit by the wall, dropped his pants and shat on the blade.  Huddled in the hole with your head down this was the easiest way to get rid of shit so it didn't pile up around you.  You just dumped on the shovel and heaved it like a hunk of dirt over the wall.  Preferably in the direction of the cock suckers trying to kill you.  There really wasn't any reason to do it in the mess hall with the latrine out back.  Marty never liked the latrine though anyway because it made him feel trapped he said.  I never felt trapped in the shitter though--it was the one time I could really let it all go so to speak.  Can't tell you how many times I cried in the john back then.  Now the tears just don't seem to come.  Anyone tells you they didn't cry in the war is a liar.  We all cried like babies.  Dying's some scary shit.

So Marty--he crapped and pissed in front of everyone like I said.  I mean none of us was shy about that kind of thing but Marty wouldn't even try to maybe angle himself even a little bit to avoid full-frontal.  And he'd moon anyone any chance he got, especially jerry (by which I mean the Germans) across the wire.  We saw his pud up close when he showed off the purple scar on his nuts.  His teeth, his toe nails - even all the stories about his father and the car dealership and the cabin in the Kentucky hills.  I think Marty never really had anyone in his life maybe so the war was like his one chance to have someone to really talk to.  We were a captive audience most of the time.  There was nothing else to do but be killed.

When Marty got it funny enough you couldn't even tell.  For someone who showed everything it was weird I thought later how when he died it looked like he was sleeping.  You would have thought someone like him would have died with his guts hanging all out--sharded bone and deli meat.  I'm still not sure where the bullet got him.  I only heard later he got shot after they took him off.

Oh and I remember Frankie Wolff--he was the fattest fuck you ever saw leave basic, like Paris Island went in one ear and out the other at least in terms of getting "battle ready."  That didn't stop the Corps from sending his ass to the line ASAP though.  War though, war straightened ole Frank right out.  Scared the fat right out of him.  He never looked better in his life right before he bled to death out on the field, the last of him just leaking away by the light of the flares.

What about that foxhole?  What's the difference now?  I talk to my dog about it from time to time.  She doesn't seem to mind.  She's a good girl.  I named her after that whore I spent the night with in France that first summer I was there.  I can't remember the whore's name but the dog's name I know.  I keep it secret though. No one needs to know about that stuff.

Ward 21

I am not amused.

I do not enjoy collecting myself to the nurses' station, banging quietly on the glass asking for my pills.
Watching the janitor have to take the back route in order to drag his bulbous mop and bucket with him, disguising his steps because he is not "one of us". 

Eating the cafeteria food which is served up with a heavy dose of arsenic, bubbling from beneath the crumbs and the complimentary beverage.  Looking into the colours of the wall and dreaming dreams I might not have a right to be dreaming.  Examining the closed up sources of power which dwindle from the bodies seated near me, and feeling like I've stepped into the wrong room - again.

Thank god for the doodles I make at night, in the stolen notebook I keep beneath my dirty pillow.
When the lights go out, I make worlds and adventures and pathways that they could never find their way to.  Thing is, I would Want them to, if they really wanted to, but they don't.  WANT to.  The pills, the slanted view, the old soap opera reruns on the rickety old TV near the ceiling, hoisted in the corner.  It plays stories that have happened already, interplay between TV stars who have died, or divorced, or had breakdowns themselves.  Maybe one of them might show their face here, in the "rest home", one day.

Thing is, the beds are pretty comfortable, you get to make the occasional phone call, they let you walk the grounds (supervised of course), even on a weekend day, if it's sunny, there are trips to the nearby museum, where you can see the colours of other people's pretty artworks, and keep doodling in the dark, messing with yourself because you need some kind of release in this place.  The bathrooms are good for that too.  Just don't let the guards catch you doing that.  I think they prefer us to be as pent up as possible and don't realize that making a self imposed stop over the rainbow (it never rains anymore here, like it used to) is good for us; they don't like the glimmer of sexual freedom in our grins when we emerge for a moment, before the afternoon nap settles in.  It's like being in kindergarten for Christ's sake. 

I don't think it matters that much, in the end, if my notebook of doodles is seen by them outside, those not in the ward. Well, it could die as happy as sunshine unbridled, in the shadow beneath my pillow, the sheets never getting changed.  But it must live out there, stand unabashed in the middle of the open field, with the breeze kissing every single page, bringing every word to righteous climax again and again in full step with myself.  And there might be a spectator or two.  People like to watch, even if they know they shouldn't.

The janitor just slinked outside the back door again.  The soaps are over for today...guess we'll have to wait until next time to see if he'll ever find out that "the baby wasn't his".  Granted, the others here love to watch, even though they already know the end to the storyline. 

Sometimes I fold up my doodles and stick them under S's door across the ward.  S had found ways to sneak in contraband to his end of the ward.  Whiskey, cigarettes, magazines....I myself keep a tiny hip flask tucked in the tank behind the corner toilet.  Good to keep all your vices as close to you as you can.  S got busted for his, but he tries and won't be dissuaded so easily.  No one's found me out yet, but I hope that janitor doesn't catch wind of it.  He'll sip it up like there's no tomorrow.  On his salary and with his life, he needs it more than me. 

I know I'll get out, and I hope S does too.  This is no place to grow old, when there are fields to be run miles and miles away, and even just outside the recreation room window.  I can't keep letting the sun set in fanatical colours and me not there to see it, my feet sorted in earth.  Whoops - time for my 5pm medication.  Should kick in by dinner time.  I think it's chicken tonight.

~ M. Lucia