The Midnight Swim

dizzying flowers in her dampened hair,
anna livia’s gone swimming before her man returns,
the moon breaking into her minimized sky –

regretful of her purchases.
the names that the customers offered her;
when she let a pack of cigs their way for free:
hand still, clutching the pack, waiting-

a wink and a misused grin
ushers them far from her burning stars;
chased between the backwood waters,
her soul robbed of her . . .

drowning in the swagger of a rare, real man
who’s off to play cop for the swimming ladies
after running away with their swollen fireflies;
pilots his rustling chariot, roars off in dust
to wear the saving grace, crown of the undressed gaze-

touch them and they quiver beneath
barefoot glow encircling at his feet,
touch anna livia underwater and she drowns,
stung by the tangles in her foolhardy hair.

~ M. Lucia

Venus Born

She walks to the water, some combination of immodest modesty, looking forward I think to the anonymity and cover of the ocean.  


Walking along the hot beach, it's as if she stoops against bumping her head on the invisible floor above--the life level where she's expected to participate in the world she's only now just learning about (and doesn't really like all that much from what she sees), where expectations hinge on book covers,  where grown men will no longer just wish she were a little bit older so that looking at her wouldn't be so wrong.


He watches her walk believing completely in her ability to navigate outside the ocean's water--he's seen her act a million parts in and out of the waves--the one where she plays at tragic circumstance, put-upon by unjust events and biased third-parties, milking applause for even more sympathy; the one where she takes on aggressive words and deeds with action, vocal and physical, of her own; and the one where she pretends to be dead, afloat in the sea foam.  He only marvels at where all this ability comes from, but never wonders whether it will make a difference and keep her afloat.  It will be enough; that much is certain.


If  he could he would give her wings to fly above it all and leave the beach behind. That is all false hope though.  It is not for him to take her away from it or even to buffer the waves.  His lot is the one he threw in for a lifetime ago; to witness.  To see the leers turn to shame realizing her years.  To see the ones that don't.  To see a cousin look up at her and realize how tall she is, how straight she stands.  To see her step aside sometimes and march right in at others.  


He sits and reads his book.  He is a witness.

Eye of Bedtime

The conversation started innocently enough, degraded with some haste, and then surprised with its usual language metaphors...or just words, like all words, that might have meant nothing.  She couldn't once again bring herself to think about the possibilities.  

"Thanks for all the sundries from your garden, and for being so sweet to my mother".

"Mom got pepper home ok"?

"Yes, I packed it for her and she got it".

"She got my sweet long pointy pepper"?

He hadn't dared make a dirty joke to her in months and months...still they walked upon glass around each other, a kind of forgiveness mist which clouded their visions, and the sharper parts of their memories of each other.  She had to play along, to a point.

"You have to ruin ever nice thought don't you (or make it better but still...), yes, THAT pepper is in her hands, or her mouth".

He could be depended upon to be subtle and brutally funny in his sparse retorts.  He towed the line, even now.

"Well, I hope she enjoys my pepper".

She thought up the most colourful reply she could.  "Most likely it will choke her momentarily, and then she'll speak well of it later.  If it helps, I stuffed it inside a box of fancy black licorice I bought for her.  It helps".

He had then drawn her a picture, in the feeble pencil sketch hands that even a 3 year old could improve upon.  Almost disturbing in its stupidity, but coming from his mind, it forced her to laugh loudly and with a crassness which they once enjoyed long ago (he made her laugh in bed like this too, which she still missed on some summer nights and around Christmas).  She came back to him.  "Your artistic skills are sick as they say and wow, my mother's and my tits combined don't equal the tits you've drawn.  Still, you show guts and the placement of the pepper is menacing, and well framed".

She felt that was the verbal equivalent to the supremely ridiculous pencil stick figure of his which depicted (seemingly) her mother, busty for some reason whilst maintaining the stickness of her figure, along with another of his garden peppers, pointing in between the stick figure legs...something about the shadow of the pepper on the stick figure paper kept at her, and made her grow giddy, and trusting, which scared her somewhat.

He replied with "thang", but clearly meant "thanks" (which he himself corrected the very moment it was uttered).  She decided to continue with the playful irreverent meanings of the sounds of these words.

"I prefer thang.  You have made me laugh, and now I sleep the sleep of drunkards.  Thang you too.  Slap echo good night on the arse"... Echo was his white pit bull, anxious, loving and masochistic like he was.  Loyal, with a smile from ear to ear, and rarely knowing how to be still, or be calm, or be dull.  That dog had invaded her dreams on many an occasion and she was convinced Echo was her shamanic familiar in the world of visions. 

Quickly again, he did her bidding.  "Slapped.  Called out your own name.  Now sleep".  Maybe she'd said too much and he wasn't in the mood for this talk anymore.  She thought to herself that this was the final goodnight, but she couldn't resist a nod to Finnegan's Wake - his Bible, his right hand, one of the only places his heart found home.

"Exactly.  Sleep oncoming...dream of 32's". 32's were everywhere in the Wake, and in her life for every moment since reading it.

He suddenly switched gears.  A photograph of a very substantial symbol of sacred chaos, the arrows neverending.  It was resting on his arm, she thought, his skin and hairs framing its mild perfection. This was a symbol that they shared and would always share, even if they never spoke to each other again.  One which removed the need for words, or ideas, or destinies.

"Didn't know you had one of those outside your skin [she referenced his only tattoo]...I might get one, one day, didn't your boss [his now business partner, but still "boss"] get you one of these"?  She had offered up a photograph of her own of an Eye of Time, which she knew he was gifted from his former boss.  She knew he would appreciate this coincidence.  "My closest friend just gave one to me for my birthday after we got home from your place...funny".

She and her mother were, in fact, just at his place earlier that day, saying hello.  In addition to the obvious completely inappropriate verbal play he enjoyed making about her 72 year old widowed mother, who had kidney failure, but still the sense to know she liked the company of boys more than women, men more than girls, he had always expressed a respect and concern for her mother which couldn't help but touch her occasionally, when she wasn't trying to be so hard.

He kept going, which again took her aback.  "Yes.  Eye of Time from boss.  Have not worn my sacred chaos for some years.  Too long".

She couldn't help but second guess every word, and thought was it too long since he had worn it, or was the rope it hung upon too long? Was it indeed what he was talking about, else what was this sacred chaos to him? She really thought she ought to go to sleep, but couldn't resist.

She said the next line too quickly to process the obvious innuendo.  "You should wear it.  Take it to bed with you".

He didn't disappoint.  "It is comforting and warm to the touch".

She maintained her solidarity with the actual idea she was thinking about, but also allowed her reply in the positive to work itself as far into him as she could still manage to.  "I know.  I agree.  Nothing is so comforting as the chaos".

He hit that secret part of her in his overtly quick replies, for two thoughts came back to her.  "I'll not remove it again for a while".  Then, as if that wasn't enough to jog her memory, tug on that innocent, pure part of her which she knew he revered, even if he couldn't look into its light (or perhaps he revered it because he had to avert his eyes so much), he completed that last real thought with "It's a comfort to have it again".

She didn't say enough back.  She didn't have other words.  Little tears even formed in her eyes and their hard to reach corners.  Everything opened up, and she knew it could, so she allowed it to.  She smiled, if only for the past and the eternity that he and she would always share, even if just in their dream worlds, their secret selves talking in a language no one else could hear or understand.  Skipping along their 32 rivers, tending them all at once, on the inside.  What happens on the outside can never be counted upon.

She knew there was no continuing on this side of things tonight.  His final word to her, demanding in a way she allowed him to be, yet said with the acquiescence of someone kneeling at her feet, bound the last knot.  "Sleep".
 
She had to have the last word, and she knew he wouldn't mind.  "Am.  You too".

As she drifted to sleep, her heart wet with the purest impossible memory, which was too fast for either of them to catch, she cried slightly, thinking how she had planned to take her father to the opera at Lincoln Center in the last years of his life.  But money, time, those bastards, she, hadn't allowed it to happen.  He loved Italian opera, Madame Butterfly, Tosca especially.  Enrico Caruso was his favourite.  She would have loved to see her father's face.  She thought of this, as she drifted into sleep.  Their bedtime conversation now in their lowering lids, and invisible theta trails...

~ M. Lucia

Midnight Mass

I can smell every catholic church I've ever stepped into. I feel some fear about the limitations of the images -- but the grandest osmosis seeps into my skin as I was born a Catholic.  It does not show us the invisible feeling of all that is unheard, when raindrops culminate into one- swallowing you whole in its indescribable nomenclature. That is not here. 

But you can dissolve, leaking ceiling pipes into the chipped, asbestos paint cracking from the inner thigh of Christ, his mother holds him there still- flakes gently, over your face as you look upwards and pray - open your eyes - the light inside the paint; the eyes of love with this we see.  Comforts in the limitations of its silence, its rules - keeping me to myself. 

Is it wrong to want to fuck in a Catholic church? This religion breeds fantasies of nothing else. Wafer on my tongue, evil at my back, redemptions between my legs, by candlelight.  Stone of statues, stains on glass gazing with desire at every secret show. 

Rarely, without guilt, I was raised inside this catholic world.  Most assuredly, it informed my deviancy, put it in its place.  Gave it a home, a consequence and a name. 

The incense melts my skin, its original plans and that which invades my prayers.  All the flames afire, her eyes look upon me, his forgiveness abides, and I walk on, without a regret in the world. 

Song of songs playing chorus to the din of the dusk, as you scrawl X's on all the advent calendar days.

~ M. Lucia

TEMPTERS OF FATE

Looking from the inside out he could tell the clouds rolling in were coming from somewhere deep and hidden; somewhere secret and kept that way on purpose.  The black rolling horizon was his fault, he knew.  No one else realized it.  They all incorrectly attributed the misting rain and bubbling grey sky, the gathering, marching fog, to storm fronts and falling barometric pressure.  But that side of him had taken on a life of its own and was on this walk, along for the ride with him, following closely and making occasional observations.

For instance, he was the one who first pointed out the thunderhead in the distance, the one that would soon bring sheets of rain, though they had little recourse, his mother, daughter and he, against the coming soak, having already consented to this nature walk and committed to going wherever the path along the rocky coastline would take them, being thus, as was family tradition, tempters of fate, flouters of convention and general ne'er-do-well's, as a rule.

"That's an interesting formation," the other said, pointing to the clouds on the horizon.

No one else could hear him, he knew, though not out of any magical occurrence, he was no secret and private ghost/guardian angel, silly notions all.  But for the rest of the world he wasn't "real" in the conventional sense.  But "real" was a wholly arbitrary notion when you got right down to it because he was completely and quite powerfully "real" to the person to whom the comment was addressed and his ability (the other's) to effect his behavior, his moods, and sometimes the things he actually said were already well documented and an accepted part of his life, so much so that he had long ago stopped thinking about how strange it was to have someone who looked, acted and sounded exactly like him, a virtual double, along with him wherever he went, no matter what he did.

"Is that rain, you think?"

"I don't know, it might hold off," his mother answered though not realizing that he wasn't speaking to her. 

"She's right about the first part, she DOESN'T know.  It'll rain for sure."

"Hmmmm, that could be," he answered them both this time.

He had gotten good at that too, that pitching of his replies, through word and inflection, in a way that was general enough to answer as many questions or comments as he could at once.  In this way though he had begun to fade a bit, to diminish as one might when committing to being less opinionated, say, or to going more along with the flow.  This habit of generalization had muted him and flattened his resolve.  Maybe this was, in itself, the thing that brought him - the other him that is - out in the first place.  Maybe it had something to do with Newton's physics, about equal and opposite reactions or matter not occupying the same space at the same time.  It was something in there he suspected as he watched the curtain of rain actually move across the bay and hit them all full in the face. 

"So much for holding off," his mother chuckled and then slid on a wet rock losing and then at once regaining her balance. 

The other him snorted over what though he didn't know.  It might've been about having been right or just as easily been about his mother's slip.  He had a mean streak, the other one did, and found people's misfortune amusing in an almost sinister way.  But he was never that way with him.  He was loyal to a fault in matters related to him and came vigorously to his defense at the drop of a hat.  The motive behind this attitude nagged at him though and he was never able to unlock the puzzle.

The others moved on briefly leaving the "two" of them alone with the view over one particularly sheer wall down to the boiling sea.

"What would happen, do you think, if someone jumped over this wall?" the other asked using one of his more innocent tones of voice--he had a library of them and their astounding variety was a source of pleasure to him (meaning the "real" him, in this case). enjoying as he did, virtuosity wherever he found it.

"Well, you would fall, for starters."

"Yes, I know, but what do you think it would feel like?  I mean, if you fell straight down, feet first, you'd surely break your legs initially which I imagine would be very painful, at least for a second."

"This fall isn't really high enough for my taste.  I mean if you're going to jump, to your point, ideally you would want to lose consciousness on impact, if possible."

The walk carried them along a rocky beach with gigantic stones in a crag of prehistoric escarpment.  He had an overwhelming urge to lay down there and just surrender.  Even the other him had already negotiated half the distance to the bridge built to pass from these stones to the more evenly paved continuation of the three-mile trail they were on, in the shadow of seaside homes and long-defunct vacation hideaways for the idle rich of a bygone era.  His mother and daughter stood, he could see at a distance, for a moment gazing up at a stone mansion of rough brown, sitting in its own harbor of green manicure, the empty windows looking back down at them, impassive yet jealous of the life between them.  They, in their turn, imagined, perhaps, a happier time--gay balls, lawn tennis, petticoats, servants bearing intoxicants, secreted romances and manhandlings suppressed and choked-on across the years, a long dead poison even the grass found a resistance to. 

He stood wanting to lay, to stop, forever, to come to an ultimate rest already, an early end to a now pointless journey.  What better place to finish, here with the oceanic omega.

"I wanna show you something."  The other was back again in an instant and then leading him along the path, past the women, and to a bridge over a canyon.  The bridge was a gentle arc over a steep vee of smaller stones.  At the bottom, a lick of ocean waved in and out, indecently he thought, a relentless fellatio, though cold and foamed, rabid.  The surfaces of the arch were unadorned except for two grey stone pillars at either end of both bridge walls.  Standing, the two of them again, leaned on the outer wall, facing the ocean which plained out to a dark, setting sun, muted by the uneven cloud forms, the wind gusting stings of rain against their cheeks.  They paused in silence, side-by-side.

"Remember the guy who hung himself in that movie?"

"Godfather 3," he knew instantly the reference, part of the stupid and useless knowledge at his fingertips for no apparent reason.

"Yes that's it!  You couldn't do that from this bridge."

"ONE couldn't."

"Indeed, 'one.'"  he made little quotation signs in the air.

"I suppose not."  He looked around at the bridge.  "How would you tie off..."

"Exactly what I was going to say.  There's no where to tie off the rope.  Although I suppose you could rig it so that..."

"Dad?"

He turned to his daughter, interrupted.

"Granny can't make it over the rocks."

He turned and looked off to where his mother sat on a big boulder.  She wasn't so much frail as unsure of her balance from time to time he knew.  She sat there looking severely out at the ocean, taunting it almost, her white hair like a cloud of bonfire ashes in the wind, haloing her head.  As he approached her she said "this is the last time I'll be out here I guess."

"Wrong again," he heard his other say back behind them as he offered his hand and helped guide her along the troubling section of rocks.  His daughter climbed on his back and they walked, the three of them, without destination or schedule, moved and gusted by occasional forces of rainy wind.  He didn't look back but he knew the other stayed on the bridge, figuring over the placement of rope, in case it might be needed. 

The Moving Box

In the last 37 minutes of sleep, when my brain fixings halt, too nudged, bladder full of piss and head full of troubles; alarms and men backing their trucks into nowhere and the silence before shoppers make claim; steak dinner on the waterfront, bed I hate to get out of, there was you.

I was flying in this dream, but that’s not right. Soaring down escalators in a far off city of tin and business bullshit. Mine, but elsewhere. Couldn’t get downstairs and workday was long done. I managed to glide down, impossible lengths and stairways, thinking I should die if I don’t land right, but I always did. No one else had this but me. Thing is, no one really looked over to notice the girl bearing past them, the wake in my breeze offering up some scent of “away from here”; the impetus to shout “run!”. They just kept chatting verbiage from their old bones in young bodies, their smoke breaks and their puddles of shitty brown complacency. That This is just fine, and That is not something to think about. The easy life.

For our bodies to function as they do with this clearly schizophrenic can can bonanza of a mind, percentages go dying or stand dormant under the covers, while we inject it again and again with routine, and facts and ego. That ridiculous thought that you are…..actually in control of the life. Victor Frankel, not in my dream but always sitting just behind my judging glares in bars to people left lonely, tells me everyday that asking what life owes to us means nothing, but what are you giving It, elevator enthusiast? I’m flying overhead and landing just fine, even when the fear takes hold. Stop pressing the buttons and riding to the top floor just to feel the selfish thrill that you may fall off, stop sliding back and forth to the usual place of employ, when you don’t even work there. Coffee machines and lunch hours, paper clips and water coolers….the same dull blade but without the thrill of drugs, the mystery of the sailing ship or the multi faceted sweet face of the wandering (no desert required).

After all this, there was a house. There is always a house, the soul one single diamond in the castle with many rooms to see. I woke up, but I wasn’t awake. In a bed, in a cottage, not here but in the country. Which country? THE country. I felt you with your arms wrapped around me, half-asleep as you are now, trying to budge and wake up. I spoke, but you didn’t answer. Still, I was afraid it wasn’t really you. But I looked down in a lucid spell of a focused dream-eye, and saw your arms. The arms I have memorized. The scars, the hairs, the skin, the hands. Wrapped around me so tight. There was some comfort in that. A bandage on the right hand and wrist told me for true. Still more movement, still no talking, but still you wouldn’t wake up. But you seemed to hold me to you just the same. I looked up at the Lollygagging lady who passed in the doorway – looking at me and smiling and making to leave us alone as she always did.

I caressed your hands as it was the only way to speak your language. I wondered if you’d figured out that the elevator trip takes you nowhere, and is only popular as it’s what everyone else feels they have to do. I leaned back into you, so I could rest in my final moments before the alarm would go off, as my mental fact checker would always wake me in time. In that comforter of your body and mine, I silently hoped for your fears to leave you. That you’d know you could rocket to the stars, down through the dirty underworlds and up through the skies and treetops, taking every fragrant noise with you, if you just knew that you Could.

~ M. Lucia

7th Cavalry

A fellow gypsy once spoke from the waves, calling himself the seagypsy, shouting the tenets of the 7th Cavalry of Truth. He had a lotus flower growing up from beneath his track marks. They never leave you, no matter if they are etched onto your skin, your memory or your soul's perimeter. Might as well grow yourself a garden to climb on out. You can never forget that it rides down in addition to up. Most people make this mistake.

He spoke of the universe not letting you get away with lies. Lying to yourself is worst of all......

Do you really think you can keep this up? Playing personalities off of one another through your secret chess game between mistaken identities at your own tea party?

Your looking glass may be dirty, but I can still see right through to you.

One thing at a time. One feeling at a time. Not every idea and action can be forgiven by immature circumstance. Those chess pieces are going to boomerang right back to you and knock you across the base of your skull. One by one.

I didn't come here to judge. I want to despise, conquer and deliver the world entire. But wrapping gauze around your wounds, your ego and pretending from crack of morning sun to truth telling lady moon of night, I can tell you, it won't work. No matter how smart you think you are.

It will catch up to your skin and your insides one day soon.

(Hear it?)

.......the quietest whisper of a march.......

{Rumble, rumble}

Dust gathering, feet stomping louder and louder.>>>>>>>}}}}}}}]]]]]]]

They're coming for you.

You can't stop the 7th Cavalry of Truth.

And when you've been warned by a seagypsy whose seen the depth of the ocean floor, and the darkness sprouting beneath, disguised in ego by the grandest clouds of the false skies you think you know, you think you own, you know its no lie.

Be sure to expose your hissing holes, smile without fear, and outstretch your arms wide when they reach you.

Seems like there's no way out of it.

~ M. Lucia

Nothing but Blue Skies

"You're an old slut on junk!"

"If you're gonna quote scripture to me at least try and sing it."

"Fuck your mother."

"Well at least it's better than fucking yours."

"You're such a stunning wit, too bad you have no beauty to dilute your venomous swill - you're just a fucking ugly bitch from the inside bleeding out."  Drew dismissed her with his hand, a decidedly feminine gesture, and turned toward the pristine window.  A bird slammed into the window right between his eyes, he felt the breeze a beat before Mandy's hand slapped the side of his head.

Mandy was muttering in Portuguese, it was such a release, she didn't have to choose her words and Drew wouldn't get most of it.

"Stop it with the windows already- you've killed another one.  Everytime someone in your family drops by, what is it? almost everyday? we don't have to be in a state of perfection- I can't live like this!  Why are you such a whore to their ideals?  When do you quit being their Portuguese poster child and actually live a real, messy life like the rest of us?"

Mandy glanced at the wall clock and pressed her lips together.

Drew moved toward the back door- he needed to lie in an endless, warm field of sratchy dry grass and crickets, where it took two days to pass one.

Mandy strode over to handle him.  She grasped the front of his white button-up shirt and smoothed the hair over his bald patch.   He wanted to spit in her capable, dull eyes.

"My mom will be here any minute, I think my sister is dropping in too."

She cooed his favorite Portuguese endearment, meaning "my little roasted rabbit" - somehow flawed in the translation.

He flinched at her purring and misjudged the sliding door, slamming into clear glass.

The Nature of Sacrifice

It was a moving train, stilled at its home station. Old, Bettina green and black like the piers, but filled with thick woods of ceremony, blood and dirt, bark reaching up high past the open ceiling, where the others invisible in trees found themselves watching us. No windows, but pale, far off sunshine. It didn’t matter, I wasn’t Here anymore.

The experience was a ritual simple and pure as the snow that fell. It fell from a higher sky, like golden stars shimmering in neutrality, floating down and changing from gold to white, a rushing stream. All over us. You were there, and you were as Christ. I was too, though I couldn’t see to tell. The snow came down harder in its stars, caking on your hands, which were mine. Hurting, from the intense cold of it. Stinging our faces. I told you without speaking that we had to bear the pain, and you did.

Then, you were in a hot fiery furnace, aching your eyes and tumbling limbs at me as to why. I placed you there, but I was in the fire with you. You rolled around as a pig without a spit in that rusty orange barrel and came back again; you were re-forged, made into yourself once more. The cold was gone. We joined up as humans and tried to make the train connections to the show. Timetables, conductors and our starry snowfall; Christ burning alive without a cross - we came back from the abyss like gods, though still ourselves the whole while, and not on time.

But we had each other for the long train ride out east, smelling like ocean.
It was a good show.

~ M. Lucia

Valentino Pier

    ~ M. Lucia

The gunslinger hung his gun where he always did, as he always did, at his hip available for ready access to at least draw, feint, front, threaten, pose, posture, bait, bluff, deceive, distract, and on that rare occasion send the bullet flying as fast and accurate as possible so as to maim or murder those who would do him harm.

He stood with his back to a corner, in as much shadow as he could find, folding himself into the darkness knowing he was more invisible to the town square than he probably seemed to himself.  That the naked eye happening upon the warm nighttime scene--a romantic vision cast upon the hub of this growing western metropolis--general store, saloon's yellow light aspill, tinkling piano music, Red River Valley, laughter from the whorehouse, put-on but so deftly so, his cock stirred slightly in the crotch of his jodhpurs, gas lamps red flicker--the naked eye would never notice the spider in the corner.  Tending his web, keeping to himself not asking for more than the occasional meaty fly to satisfy the hunger.  Nothing more.

From here he might watch as they fired past, for they could never really hit one another.  "They's like two sides of one soul so's there's no way for one to really damage t'other," or so he'd said, the old man.  He wasn't sure if he'd wait around for it.  Probably would though.  Couple o' strong ones they are.  No one asks his opinion.  Neither invites him in.  They speak, in tongues, artifice signifying nothing--nothing at least intended for him for he was always aware of some other audience that maybe the words were intended for.  Like he had a part in some larger play but was depended on only for his dull remonstrations, like a young lover pleading for the hand of a more sophisticated object; pleading his case weakly to a Peter at the gate, given his one last due if only for the amusement of the undamned, poking their heads at the bars of heaven, longing again for the taste of lovely dull desire, the tender beauty of contrast with eternal perfection.  

He understood why the best of his kind longed for the anonymity of the grave.  Some thought it to be a question of fatigue but he knew better.  It had nothing to do with being tired of running, of not wanting to look over your shoulder any longer.  None of that really mattered.  His body and mind were trained to react.  He played no conscious part in the mechanism.  And it moved his emotions not one bit.  The bullet through the eye of the minster in Georgia meant nothing.  He had drawn, inexplicably really, the minister did, shouting something about the righteous hand of Jesus and from 10 paces he could see the finger searching for the trigger and then in a moment he could see his own gun in his vision as if it appeared from nowhere and it had already been fired and the minster's finger already draped in his own blood spurting from his eye no where near his own trigger, dead before he'd had any real chance .  And he had walked away.  Unmoved.  Even not caring whether anyone would follow and dispute the validity of the fight and its outcome.  They didn't but it did not matter.  

It was more a question of destiny.  His life really amounted to that.  A search for and a discovery of destiny. His was that corner, first, as an approximation of the ultimate corner into which we were all backed into before long.  It was the quiet, the cease of motion, the constraint, the abnegation of the mechanism, the surrender of self; to disappear into nothingness.  To watch and participate in the dissolution of essence and of ego.

In this way he was witness to the culmination of the improbable argument.  To the ways in which they sought to torture and abuse, the subtle, cancers in still-life and the motivated musings of the innocent by-standers.  They did not see him there.  They did not notice that he had already gone.

Bonaventure

His heavy grip fisted a double whiskey into his gut until his head told him it was not far from bursting. He went home and lay on the couch, staring at the cracks in the ceiling and in his brain. His brain then pushed itself into the microcosm of the parallel life. The one he could have lived if he had ventured free from this day to day, or the one which could have led him astray in its call to survival, or the other one he dreamed of as a child, where all the parts of the dream were clean and unfettered by experience and circumstance, and where fate ruled the day.

But none of those parallel lives happened to him. He lay still and pretended the cracks in the ceiling (and in his brain) were the branches of a tree, the tree that held all he had been and all he couldn’t live up to, so full and tight that it was about to buckle like his headache, down into the floor and through the street, into the nightly sludge of other people drunk-dreaming the same thing. The sludge was the color of lost money, of booze and rot, of old feelings that never leave you, slowly gang greening its porridge brew into a pot somewhere on the outer shore, where the witches stood near the railway.

He had to make a list. A list of things that would save him, a list of prices he could live with paying. He got up and tossed a shoe that didn’t belong to him (it was hers, the only one, how does a person leave one shoe behind) down to the sound of a yapping dog somewhere to in the alleyway, but the shoe hit nowhere near the dog and its furtively confident belchy bark. Bastard reminder of another time and place. Funny how the sound of a dog barking in the country is soothing from afar; could be wild, running in the distance, reminding of the freedom still pacing in each of us. But the measly city dog just happy to shit where it eats and wanting to let the world know it’s fine to do so - well, that just didn’t cut it. But city people, they weren’t much different, were they.

The best part of this late night roll call of tremulous voices, illegible lists and calvinist shakes is that he Wanted to be alone. Escaping all the possibilities that could hurt him. All those people - ego lit their way like a cheap secondhand lamp, the kind that gets marked up for well-dressed, clean couples at the antique shop never having style, nor a place, nor anything that wanted its light. That was most people if you shined the light far enough into them. He felt no empathy for these clean people with filthy, dim souls, shopping for happiness and self worth at the matchmakers. Cluttered full of expectations of what and who their hearts should breathe in. They need and want for a companion, desiring like the worst case of a beholder without a muse. The opposite of a companion was usually delivered and its purpose served quite unextraordinarily so. People often lived together as two burnt out lamps (like a light bulb making a rattling noise, you know you just have to throw it away, its no good...) un-learning the beautiful tides that were offered them before they fucked it up on their own and were forced to stumble blindly into the flickering acquiescence of another fool. The other fool would tell them that this loss of spark and purity was perfectly ok (since they themselves couldn’t even remember what theirs looked like)…it would all be ok…for awhile. Marriage and its backseat companion love (more the scheme of love) shapeshifted into a shady loan offered by the meanest of men in stiff suits. Self created co-signers to bullshit, bigger and more faceless than a man and a wife, or even a woman and hen pecked husband could be - they now only found themselves dirty on the outside, hissing throughout, unaware of each other while standing at the side of the road, with a “Will Work For < hissing >” sign. Bankrupt for someone new to share their same old cracks, self contained skin, unchanging colours, or their original room with.

There was no one in his room. Hadn’t been for a very long time. Saying something to scare them off was usually the best way to achieve this perfect loneliness. But would he ever give in to that other way – tick tocking, rock rocking - you wanting to smash their head in if they said another word about their day, who they think they are, what they want, what they think they need, all while reading the city paper in front of you. How did they lose the sense of the Urgency. Whole food chains eating themselves, universe in constant birth and bloody peril, the mental cases killing their slaves --- can’t two people together know enough to put the paper down, toss it into the fire and devour each other from skin inwards, not just on the first day, but every single day forth? It was too much for most people’s minds as they licked past and flipped pages, people’s ideals were whipped from them hourly without the sexy veil of a lady in leather boots. It usually happened much more quietly than that. The sadder silent whip removed all the warmth, aliveness and heart from people, leaving them to die a little down there every day.

But didn’t he die a little in here alone every night. Or not. It pained him to know they were so asleep in their freedom, and it pained him to know he was too, but for these thoughts which accompanied him on his nightly journey up the bare wall to the ceiling. The branches cracked, reaching out to him - Jesus on his tree calling out as a warning. Better up on the tree in the end, than in the mire everyday, choking up the sickly muck of everyone’s sludge being shoved into his mouth.

How could he share this with anyone? Maybe their cracks were in the bottom of the bathroom trash, or hiding with the feelings he himself tossed into the bottom of the ocean just for the thrill of someone finding them. Still, it’s hard to see deep down to the ocean floor. There would be other nights, other rapturous dreams, other angry slipstreams on which to surf over all our failures both alone and together; there was tomorrow and the night after. The cracks weren’t going anywhere, but would he ever climb on in, or up or over, and see who lay beyond them and if they really saw. Could anyone every shine their light into his eyes again and with it, his heart find rapture, and accord. He passed out before this made any sense. The yapping dog was let back in about 5 minutes later. The last whiskey he barely touched was still at his side.

~ M. Lucia

Appearing the Fool

Loretta walked every night, rain or shine; no matter how cold or wet it was outside. There was never a set destination in mind, instead she allowed herself to be navigated by split decision and chance. The only two constants in her nighttime perambulations were the pace and the time. Loretta walked fast and she wanted to walk fast for as long as she could—quitting only when her cheeks would start to sting and burn from the wind, or when her fingers would become numb from exposure. She had cut the fingers off of her gloves in order to make lighting her smokes easier but in exchange she paid for it with frozen digits. She deemed this a fair exchange. She walked directly in a straight line, hands shoved deep into the pockets of her grey flannel coat. If there was anyone to pass she would pass them swiftly and without comment; she had long ago ditched any attempt at eye contact or greetings after the courtesy had not been reciprocated. Fuckers. Mostly the only other people out at that hour were solitary dog walkers and smokers. The dog walkers were fat-looking frazzled people, mostly men, who wanted their tiny shivering dogs to get on with their business so they could get back inside where it was safe and warm. Its amusing, she thought, to see these big men with their petite dogs—both mincing from one leg to the other in the snow. The smokers were individuals who sought solitude and comfort from a dirty habit, alone in the dark, usually lurking under a tree limb laden with snow, away from the porch lights. She passed them in stealth, respecting their wishes. The endgame was to walk and smoke until she felt sane again, until the fists tightly clenched and bunched up inside of her would relax and loosen up, allowing her to think lucidly about herself and not feel so trapped and anxious.

The walking came about through sheer desperation. Not long after they had moved in Loretta was rendered mute and frustrated, feeling kinetic pricks from the pins and needles setting into her limbs from inactivity. That February had been endless—despite the brevity of calendar days—and every other day she would wake up to see another few feet of snow blanketing the ground, requiring still more shoveling and muffling out any and all sound. She found herself starving for a car alarm, some form of auditory anarchy, a drunken street brawl—anything! Loretta couldn’t bring herself to read yet another line, pretend to watch the television or fake an interest in conversation without screaming and falling to the floor in a fit of rage. Stifled, she felt as though she was trapped inside of a snow globe, soundlessly floating around—and just when she would settle to the bottom someone would come and shake it all up again. She just needed some time alone, that’s all, just a little time outside of the globe, away from all of the other flakes. She had bundled herself up and despite protests from Stefan about the cold and ‘appearing the fool’ she had gone out and sat on the steps, peering spitefully up and down the vacant street. Withered barren lawns surrounding mundane houses with blank expressions stared back at her, silently condemning her as an outcast. Yes, she agreed, yes I am. I do not belong here with you and your cloistered occupants with your pathological desire for the politics of football and your entitled children, getting shuttled to the mall in the backs of minivans while watching television like all-consuming drones. Get me OUT of here. The resentment sidled up to her ever-increasing sense of self-loathing and became a match made in heaven. After all, it was she who had wanted to move. She had grown up in the city and had never bothered to learn how to drive so she couldn’t even rate with the mindless drones in the back of the minivan that she wasn’t skilled enough to drive! She had wanted the Hallmark card life, right? That is when Loretta suddenly stood up, walked down the three brick steps, down her walkway and out on to the sidewalk. She stopped to turn and look at her little house. It was a nice little house. Fuck you nice little house. She turned her back on it and walked down the street and didn’t come back until she felt good about things again.

When she did return to her nice little house—cold, worn out and smelling like an ashtray—Loretta was greeted at the door by Stefan, who was genuinely relieved that she had decided to return and gave her a big hug before helping her off with her damp coat. He planted a warm kiss on her ruddy cheek and bit his tongue about her odor. Touched by the gesture she felt herself defrost a little and together they walked into the kitchen to prepare dinner and open up a bottle of wine. Walking is good, she thought.

That night, instead of making love, Stefan decided to fuck Loretta. As she finished reading the Science section he leaned across the couch and slid two fingers underneath her panties and Loretta lost her place. He nudged her panties to the side with the tip of his middle finger, searching her face for resistance and finding none. Stefan then revealed hidden math skills when he subtracted one from sixty-nine and as Loretta came for a third time she had a vision of a lotus flower unfurling at a fork in the road and concluded that she would continue to walk from this day forward. This is how Loretta survived her first winter in the suburbs: ennui, madness, walking, and fucking. She liked to joke every so often that it was the worst of times; it was the best of times.

Ten years later and Loretta’s legs look great. She has walked perhaps every street in the village where she and Stefan lived together. Her definition of happiness and Hallmark has changed. She is the proud owner of a driver’s license and is only slightly embarrassed to drive around in her Toyota Highlander. She is not so much embarrassed by the SUV itself, instead she feels guilty that she is a solitary woman encased in a giant vehicle without the prerequisite mindless drones arguing about which channel to watch in the backseat. Loretta no longer smokes and has befriended many of the fat and frazzled dog walkers and smokers living around her. Stefan left about three years ago, right after he met Laura, a rather thick-legged bar wench who was vociferously enthusiastic about his math skills and in return taught him many of her own, often while Loretta was out walking. Stefan and Loretta are still good friends and from time to time they meet for dinner—along with Laura—and afterwards they have a few drinks. They are forever trying to coax her home with them, to their home. Later Loretta drives home in her large car, feeling slightly buzzed and soiled for having been such a forgiving sport that she floors it through the STOP THREE WAY sign at the crest of the hill and laughs bitterly to herself, alone in her car.

Loretta still walks every night, rain or shine. She walks fast and in a direct line, always forward. She still does not belong and she is very happy about that. She no longer carries fists around inside of her. The cold air is clean, bracing—she holds it deeply within her lungs, her hands are warm inside of her pockets.

TAKE THAT FUCKERS

Sitting is a moment of peace in the stall in the office building in the confessional quiet of the work bathroom.  This is where we all come to prostrate ourselves to our sins, bloated executive class with too much ready access to fine food and drink at a minimum.  And here all pretense is set aside, the professional carriage jettisoned in a cloud of flatulent smell and sound, grunting and sneezing, the angry spray of piss at the urinal, the crude joke, the wasteful dispenser-spinning and balling of tissue for ass-smear.

Sitting he wonders how it was when the plane passed through the building.  Was anyone sitting then?  Was there a moment before the fire ball when a passenger got to look out the double-paned plane window and see him in his stall staring back, pants around ankles, both kissing metaphorical asses bye-bye?  He wonders, too, why they make liquid soap the color of cum, standing in the shower every morning with shampoo-cum in his hands ready to smear it in his hair; he wonders how he'll ever not think this thought now that he's thought it.  He thinks about the indignity of it.  In the shampoo / liquid-soap factory do the juvenile, Budweiser-swilling, wife-beating workers stare down at the giant vat of simmering shampoo / liquid-soap / jism and think about how long it would take to fill up this vat with the fruits of their own labors?  Masturbating, later, timing themselves to exactly hit the video's money-shot, to cum along with muscled and shaved cock-owner into the blond hair.  And then soon after deflated and self-loathing, staring at the dime-sized issue, thinking of the giant cum-vat at work.

Work is a giant cum-vat isn't it?

Drying his hands on four-obsessive-compulsive paper towels he shoots and misses at the bathroom's metal trash can and leaves the trash on the floor--a moment of rebellion, of non-conformity.  "Take that, fuckers."

Morning Perambulations

Myrna sprawled on the living room floor staring at the ceiling. What a waste she thought.  The morning sun dappled the faux lace curtains, it stretched to reach her.  Her body was beautiful.  Curvaceous and lithe.    
The regurgitated cardboard conglomerated squares sucked the artistry clear from the room.  Already here when they moved in, covering up some beautiful mistake, pressing down on her, on this rug.  She twisted her waist, extended her arms, pointed her toes always aware of the lines she was making.  She touched her cheek, the contour of her arm, with a tenderness she had forgotten.  So quiet this morning, only the cicadas incessant buzz playing in and out of perception.  The orange slides of light passing through the sheer slip of the earth's morning breath across the street in Mary's yard.

DPR

Why Holiday Thoughts are Simple

My mother told me rather non-chalantly that when they were younger,(*), the plan was for my father to die around 88 or 89; she would be around 80 and this would be just fine.
Also slightly in jest (but you never know) she suggested he stab her and then shoot himself (a loud, rambunctious, slavic romeo and juliet but funnier).
That she didn't want to be part of the f*cking widows club.

(*) represents the even more simply uttered aside of "because you know, Mary, he was my whole world".

I dreamed of him in their bedroom from my childhood home, with our german shepherds, his roosters and chickens from his childhood and some fresh running water, waiting for her, and for us. Mismatched shapes like the shadow seahorse I saw the other night in silhouette, and groggy disciplines. I was saying to someone who'd never met him that "he could find the best and most pure qualities in you, he'd just find them right away and connect to you on your best level." Then eyes opened, tears, too many blankets, cat drinking the water at the side of my bed. Bristle ring, wet snow. It didn't stick. 

~ M. Lucia

As a bug in a rug

Nancy was so smug

must have felt good to know it

just like a poet

Just Say No

Some long gone literary figure, or some hollywood actress, once said something like "you define yourself in life by the things you say no to, more than the things you say yes to".  Well, that happens to be true. But not exactly.

I just say no about a hundred times a day.
I see people waiting for the bus, and choosing to read some trashy, utterly forgettable book - not trashy in the way of a romance novel full of tawdry, selfish lust and of course, brilliantly coloured pirate costumes, but some towering self help skyscraper of stacked up, meaningless words constructed to create a happiness that they can never find, not without buying more of these books, and listening for the God-guru which exists outside of themselves (or so they think).
I just say no.
Fake TV news and vapid escapist television in general - don't they see how it's the stockholm syndrome in the white lies of light pounding their skulls so hard, their eyes glaze over and they are literally soul-stolen during, after and before the next merry go round ride into intellectual oblivion? Governments wouldn't be around if they couldn't train us so easily, to see nothing but the orgiastic barrage of dead images sucking our spirit from our eye lights, and causing us to refuse to hear the bird outside the window, or smell the sea we've turned our backs on.
I do not choose that.
Some people find comfort in living off cell phone conversations, like amoeba to parasite, one immobilized organism lacking connection connecting uselessly with another, divvying up brain cells like dead sailors, piled up at the dock neatly by the ocean's waves which we cannot see.  All the candles blown out at once.
I say nay repeatedly.
The same people giving into themselves, and that massive, giant Fear which forces them to fill in silences with talk- rumoured, petty talk about other people vs. the next level of knowing, about things, and then about ideas, which can only represent through words those languages with which we cannot name anything worth uttering - that mystery which is so far from us as it is, is not delighted in, but strapped to the ground and buried in tainted words, which simply inflate the ropes and knots, so that they feel they can get a handle on this reality....pushing the beauty of that other farther and farther away...
I want no part of that.
I see further crimes on the subway, the streets, on walking feet and public and private transportation....gazing into ads, in magazines, on the radio, on the walls of the train, nestled casually into giant billboards of peeling paint, paint peeling around our tired eyes and swollen brains, they make love to these ads, thinking of someone else and crying "no, baby, I love you as you are.  Maybe you could lose a few pounds, though...I'm just saying..." and let the thick images cut down their creative sense of self. Self without needing more, wanting more, buying and consuming more.
I shout NO to wanting more.
To that namely American idea that you are more important than the others, the ones you deem less, and deserve out of purely undeserved entitlement (and to those same who tell their children that they are little geniuses who will also wear that musty crown stinking of entitlement as they body grows into the most rotten, weak trees which cast off other trees in their so called achievement of awakening).
I say Fuck No.
To those who fall aside, spineless and enslaved, to the ego, and allow the same Ego to find reasons to be fearful about the future, about what went wrong in past, watching like spectators while these gangs of insecurity and control thoughts fight it out-
I banish them to the back room where they can drown each other in their collective brain inducing vomit.  In other words, No.
While they're at this game, they should be sure to take every sexual impulse felt and categorize where it must land, where it needs to hide, when it needs to diversify itself so that it is not allowed to be a part of themselves, god forbid a complete human being.  They would rather live parallel lives, call these sexual children deviants and encourage each of the hypocrisies they push out from the insides of their brain to be loud, false and make its own point, and hopefully shame themselves and others along the way.
My body and its mental double say No to this foolhardy idea.  Haven't they seen what it's done to the world?
While they are at these activities, their best ghosts force down every gut instinct into something more civilized partly in order to fulfill the above mentioned entitlement idea.  They could never love anything completely, lest it/he/she takes your vulnerability.  Diving off the deep end is the only way to see the depths and rise above the whirlpools found in certain empty constellations which were, unfortunately, born into us.
I say to those shallow footsteps retreating from the cliff- No, thank you.
The idea that a supposed job or career, as most have it nowadays, defines you and moulds you and offers you protection and result, is a mirror most of the world should smash up and dance around the severed shards of, if they ever want to escape the bars of poverty, of their minds not allowed to grow behind the black brick wall built into their loneliest perimeters, the mirror sunglasses and cocked guns of their own prison guards keeping them there, in jobs and the idea of the need.
No, but of course, no.
The workday ends, the evening closes and no one senses the wind changing direction, or the flock of angry birds flying away from us, complaining the entire way and shitting on our compartmentalized heads.  The heads of those for whom it is not enough to be quiet, or loud with a true voice unabashed, in the golden glory of breathing completely, of allowing silence in the world to envelop you, as you are, the best you will ever and always be, turning over your God from its sleep into the soft, pliable human strands, you listening to the minor keys of the world's music, allow yourself to wish, and weep and desire your past, your future, dancing all in one bittersweet field above your eyes, behind them lies this world which is not a world, is not captured, is not owned, as you are only a guardian of your shiny particle. One in a million trillion spinning atoms coming into life in the light of the fireflies of your youth, your ever loving family, your eternal father, your lives and worlds and loves not known yet, the universes you control with only a piece of the eternal awe, managed through a wink and a revelry.
To the ones who wish to strangle those uncontrollable impulses, those wayward dreams, and that even vulnerability, so they may choose their life, as their mind demands it to be, to choose the things that will overpower this painting still just in newly creation, and give into the machine once and for all-
Again, and always, I just say No.

I say Yes to everything else.

~ M. Lucia

Haiku for Hipsters

sock puppets start cold
felt fucking arse to cheek lights
role play goes too far.

~ M. Lucia

Night, night

She was half asleep, when the nighttime ghost would come.  She had read in books, and in words and in the voices of people talking about energy vampires, that there were succubi, but couldn't remember which was male and which wanted women.  Since she was a late teenager it had taken place.  Deep in the night of her bed, when all the boys had said goodnight, he would come.  There were so many faceless shadows which held her down in near dream time, when she couldn't move or yell.  She felt the heavy weight of the bodily pressure on her, but there was no body at all.  Just like the wet leaves, all in the heaviest blanket, suffocating her, and then having its way.  She never felt violated by any of these creatures, since she always knew in dreaming she was insatiable and wanted any and all of it.  Like grey murky beings fucking her into another world.  It wasn't exactly pleasurable, there were no details, no specific sensations to draw from, it wasn't like life at all, but it held a purpose, an energy that took from her. And they liked to take small pieces from her, in her teenage bed in the night.  It made no matter to her, since it was shapeless and without form.  It drew from her, without actually being inside her pelvis or her heart, but just inside the cloud in which she lived, in her dreaming head. 

It wasn't like life at all.  The one where her heart and her desires got her into trouble.  The endless conversations and this idea that there had to be a plan.  Decades later, she wondered how most people even managed to speak to each other with a true face.  How they had to remove themselves from form, and become those same shadows when enacting every one of their desires for someone.  What problems came from spreading your legs and opening up your mind, nothing that can't be undone in dreaming time.  Push yourself, give more, want more, and climb on into that world where you fuck yourself into a frenzy, burst your heart from its seams and set fire to the person you pretend to be when you let the air glide past you in daytime, caressing the fool in you and laughing at your ideas of strength, power and being a God.  We are all part of that equation, but no one wants to take the reigns.  They have to overpower the sacred and the truest aspects of love into some struggle for normality, to paste false powder made of glue and impotence onto their bodies, raise themselves below the thing that they could achieve and spend each night dour and lonely in someone's arms.  While the shadow vampires fuck you into their dark, bottomless grey world, night after night.

This didn't last forever in hers, either.  One night, there was a face.  A face which presented itself to her in a dreaming fashion.  There was mud on his shoes, and she was pregnant, in this dream.  There was information which she couldn't understand.  In that far-off place of green she loved so - but she was English in this dream life - transplanted, and someone taken care of by this boy's father.  This boy who haunted her, from outside her bedroom window years before she came to be an adult.  It was in early adulthood when he would seduce her every single night, sometimes before she could even fall asleep. Her body would writhe, and want, and try so hard to fulfill itself, only to the chagrin of the empty, quiet room.  That was when the dreams would come, the colours would come alive, his taste in her mouth, his hands fashioning a golden cage all over her body and the softness inside herself would harden and rise up, become a queen among nations of all who would allow themselves to see, that we all held the same truth, in our same liquid selves, voices as each piece of mosaic that could not remember its own, real name.  His name was Michael, Patrick, or the other way around.  She had dark hair still, as did he and his father.  There was an invading horde, and much fiery dirt and straw.  The wind whipped terribly about them, and their lives, taking from their simplicity what it wanted, through empire and expectation.  There was a baby inside her, a son she was supposed to have.  But then she'd wake up, back in this life, back in this house, back into this impotent lifestyle.  But that was many years ago.

Since then she'd obsessed, loved, felt torn apart by and let down by a handful of precious boys.  She played every game there could be, wore every mask she could muster, and became that insatiable presence, in the mounds of their hair, their egos, in the lightning strikes that their combined thrusts would produce, sweating and apologetic always in mid march, debasing herself happily as the women who once said that the most profane of acts made her feel the most innocence.  Shame is supposedly a turn on, they say.  Not when you've been taken by ghosts since you were a girl, since the boy from your dreams made incarnate and present an entire life you and he once knew, in the western moors and the setting sun that saw it play out, again and again.  Not when you can coarse your bullying mind to empty itself, of every inclination to learning, or giving up, when your ass follows wildly and takes you both to dream time, fucking and spitting and kissing yourself into re-creation, into godhood.  Into the kind that knows not where dreams end and life begins...the slow, constant curve of her cunt baptising you into a new world, a new existence which comes brightly as the new day's dew, dripping sunshine on the side of her neck just beneath the wanting of the dawn.

~ M. Lucia

MTMCRHYCCCR

I woke up, still chained around the neck in the parking lot.

Sun starting to rise and the meager dew on the pavement already evaporating leaving a film of filth traced with yellow pollen, collecting in the corners mixed with brown leaves and burned black grass: condoms and dog shit, plastic wrappers stinking of moldy condiments, onion and vinegar,  handfuls of toilet paper, pop and beer bottles, traces of liquid with floating insects, spilled metal containers with strewn plastic lids, orange rice laced with wrinkled peas, befatted and puckered pork and wilted greenery indistinguishable from the nighttime regurgitations of rangers from the saloons and sexeteria, carnal leavings from rebelling bodies, bloodied, genital.

I rake my hair with one hand tracing the contours of my scalp scratching to distinguish between flea-bite scabs and dirt, stuck grit or sand.  Five days since the hose's hot then cold water, when I lay most of the time collecting in the pool, exfoliating layers of scum to be relocated to other tumored sections making way for incoming melanges of putridity, fairly carbonating and tumescent.  I twist up on all fours and retch dryly, violently with a sustained and corrupted belch of carrion feculence and spit a long slender agglomeration, sappy and spoiled, to the drab asphalt.

Seated, I pull at the chain's substance; it drags aridly across the muck, desquamating rusty clods which roll and deposit in the harbor of fecal crud.  It has been re-anchored under the rubberized toe of a hulking industrial behemoth's front-right tire.  The truck looks like some modified paving apparatus with an awkward posterior bucket smudged black, lifted towering over the rest of the vehicle and with two great tar-stained spreader rafts seated low to the ground on each of its sides with ratcheted cables and gears to enable extension and retraction.  It stands tall and fortified, like an alloyed acropolis of cataclysm with a inverted and nippled plow like a cow-catcher painted day-glo green with a grin of white razor teeth in a glare of caution and menace.

I send an abrupt stroke along the length of the chain to the tire and it dislodges throbbing dully against the bottom of the plow.  Down the alley, across the urban fallow and quiescence of brick and weed, through the chain-link fence I can see the progress of runners along the adjacent avenue in marathon competition; lines of men and women, straining in the heat, pinched and confined to their self-inflicted excruciation and blinded to my captivity either by a latent senselessness or by haughty design.  A scrape in the sand on the opposite side of the vehicle broadcasts warning and overstep, signals well-worn lanes of self-loathing against ego and presumption, expected beating for insolence.  I cower instinctively, eyes averted, I trust only in sound and smell to overcompensate every intuition,  debasing myself among the refuse, inviting the sedimentary dung smear of garbage to sanction and endow the evolutionary degradation of my vulgar ignobility in the company of every other living creature on earth, man and beast.

The chain is yanked up and the pull sustained choking me upright onto my feet, hunched and squatting, hands still in the dirt at my side.  I squint into the sun and in a moment a shadowy figure expels a full snotty abundance of foamy phlegm in my peering eye.  I flinch while the greedy bark of dirt along the rim of my upper cheekbone begins to dissolve and smear in the damp mix of saliva and snot.  I clear my eyes and focus only on the bright shine in my field of vision of knee-high black leather boots with elaborate silver metal buckles and catches, steel-cable laces weaving along baroque stitching and embossed symbols and patterns, seeming verdicts of calamity and misfortune.  The boots shift in the sand along with the angle of the chain's draw on my neck.  I welcome the absent-minded press of one heel on the tip of my right index finger, for the gall of my upward glance from before, my wince goes thankfully unnoticed.

I try to keep up with the pull on the chain as we move around the front of the vehicle to a hatch on its left side.  While I am concentrating on looking only at the ground,  I catch glimpses of a tall shadow on the jointed metal surface of the truck, there are weird angles to the shape that leap like nightmare flashes of talon claws wielded threateningly, and the head appears grossly oversized, adipose and swollen with a portent of pus-butter and bloody rupture.  The hatch is twisted open and I am thrust up and into the cab.  A length of chain is tossed in after me.  The end of the chain had been cut off crudely from the wall where I had been anchored days earlier.

The shadow climbs in after me and slams the door.  The cab is shockingly cool and my body shudders involuntarily.  There is an exquisite pungency to the air, an abstergent purity despite the seeming mechanical grime, made more acute by the closeness of the walls, all a stark contrast to the sickly sweet open air of my recent confinement.  A link of my chain is hooked over a handle in the wall and I am forced to stand upright for the first time in more than a week.  My body unfurls unwillingly.  I squint my eyes to avoid seeing what I am not supposed to see.  If I turn my head I can see the runners out on the street through an opening in the wall near the ceiling of the cab.

A button is pressed and the engine outside hums awake with a reverberative squeal of metal and belt and the entirety of the vehicle shudders, enlivened by a short burst on some unseen pedal, but soon collects itself into a single enterprise of vibration as the unadorned steel floor of the cab begins to warm against the abscessed sores and vesications on the undersides of my feet.  Hands encircle my neck from behind, fingers probing the skin underneath the circle of the collar.  The pain is dizzying but I cannot react.  However, before long the fingers are administering a slather of unguent which immediately dulls the burning sting of the touch.  My head lolls dreamily and I moan involuntarily.  My eyes open to the sound of boots on the floor before me.

Despite the healing gesture of the balm at my neck I maintain a subservient obsequiousness and keep my eyes averted even when my face is clasped by the large calloused hand, the fingers crushing the thin skin at my cheekbones and directing my gaze at a covered table directly in front of me attached to the same wall from which my chain was hung.  The cover is removed revealing a body, shockingly white, clean and smooth and bent at the waist to lie face-down on the table, without clothing, its arms spread and hands loosely bound to the wall.  There's a new sweetness in the air.  The smell of lilac and milk.  The flesh stirs and trembles when the cloth is removed and arches its back angling its backside expectantly.  The boots step forward and the large, tanned hands begin to smooth the flesh with a rough tenderness.  The body presses backward to the touch and there is a cooing echoing from the floor.

The fingers have never left my neck and they now begin to enclose themselves in a slow, ever-tightening massage sliding along the balm across the curdling scabs and sores.  Before me the boots are now encircled by black jeans hastily lowered in an urgent, lecherous desire.  The hands press my head against the coolness of the cab wall and the now strangulation at my neck pulses in rhythmic concert with the vision before me.

If I crane my eyes in their sockets I can still stragglers at the end of the race, some jogging, some now giving up and just walking languidly and somewhat uncomposed, bemottled with a soak of perspiration.  One has stepped hastily off the avenue, walking on tip-toe, into the vacant lot and has lowered his running shorts to evacuate his bowels liquidly among the weeds.  A wail like the sunset cry of a loon begins to rise from somewhere.

Springtime

Slipsliding down the neon dream of days
into a falling tree’s bum knee, to ship
hideaway.

Messing tidbits ironed doors---my city’s nightshade;
sunny into bed
under covers of light to rushes for tomorrow:
hatching plans of near laughing cord----
umbilical God.

~ M. Lucia

BIRD MAN OF SING SING

The turtle says I'm all talk.

"Float around in this brackish tank for an hour or two motherfucker--walk a mile in my shoes for once."

"You don't wear shoes.  The claws alone would present problems...insurmountable..."

"Just give me the goddamn shrimp and go eat your faggy strawberry yogurt twinkle-toes.  Everyone's a critic.  Maybe if you get a free moment in your busy schedule you can get me some fresh water?  Whattya say Oprah?"

With that she banged her shell against one glass wall of the tank and swam off.  So I turned out her UV light.  Let HER wallow around in the darkness for awhile, little reptilian pain in my ass.

"Bitch," she muttered.

The hippie mailman took the front steps two at a time leaving a packet of bills and solicitations and a suspiciously dog-eared issue of Rolling Stone, with a vintage image of Jerry Garcia on the cover, commemorating the 15th anniversary of his death, so what does one expect?  I flip through the pages and a subscription card falls out.  It has my name and address already paper-mate'd in in red ink.  Instinctively I get a creeping feeling in my lower bowels and testicles like when my imagination gets away from me and fires his little projector up and blazes unwanted visions of catastrophe onto my skull wall (oh look, there's your daughter running into the path of an on-coming tractor trailer.)  I turn the card over:

Leaps of faithlessness
Are all that's required when
hopes float like lilies

Same red ink, different handwriting.  Is that haiku?  What the fuck?  The turtle flips the filter over in the tank and it (the filter) begins to make a weird sucking noise from no longer being submerged and now only taking in air.  The turtle is strangely cowering in the corner, raking at the rocks at the bottom of the tank seemingly trying to dig a hole to escape.

I see the shadow in my peripheral vision for just a millisecond before I get smashed in the side of the head and I taste the blood in my mouth.  The lights go out.  I had always imagined that a crime-novel blow to the head was something that put you completely out but my experience of it was more of a vague semi-consciousness in which I was completely aware of what was happening to me, but couldn't see nor move.  So I knew that I was carried and roughly thrown into the trunk of a car.  I was able to smell and breathe in the exhaust during the thankfully short drive to the warehouse where, tied to a chair, a bucket of dirty water was thrown in my face.

I came to--like in an Elmore Leonard novel--alone, and as stated tied to a chair in a warehouse.  I was facing a door about 100 feet away across the stone floor with little metal islands of what looked like rusty auto parts and various defunct machinery all lit florescently.  The door opens and a man strides through.  He's 50-ish, clean-shaven but with a shock of wavy white hair.  His glasses are still transitioning from the shift from sunlight.  He's wearing a suit and tie underneath a three-quarter length North Face rain jacket and unlaced mid-calf LL Bean duck boots that flop with each step.  Under one arm he's carrying a long blue-metal tube.  In his opposite hand he's carrying a white coffee cup.  The sides are stained with remnants of messy sips he's already taken.

"Johnny-boy!" he calls from halfway across the room, "what is UP?"

"Have we met?"

"Ah!  You may not remember.  That's OK.  Just give me a second."

He stops and looks around him before putting the coffee cup down on the floor muttering some dissatisfaction with not having a better place for it.  He then starts setting up the portable movie screen he carried in under his arm.  He works quickly taking obvious pleasure in showing that he knows what he's doing, knows the right way to hold the latches so the legs could slide easily open, so the spine could quickly rise over his head and the screen itself glide down where he fastens it into place.

"I got this at Target.  Not like the old Britelite Truvision my parents had.  'Course all the movies back then were all silent Super-8's.  Before your time probably."

I strained slightly against the ropes.

"Sorry about that.  Can't be helped.  You want some coffee."

He picks up the cup and crosses to me.

"You mind it black?  It's better that way."

He puts it to my mouth and pours without waiting for me to respond or assent to sipping.  The coffee cup's rim is wet and soft where he's been drinking.  The coffee itself is strong but bitter.

"They call that one Sly Jimmy Griff Grind.  It's made from 2/3 Kenyan AA and 1/3 Tanzania Peaberry.  My friend roasts it early so you gotta know to get there early.  Before 7 is best."

I cough.  The casual way he's addressing me seemingly oblivious to the fact that I'm tied to a chair throws me. But I can't help but go with it if only out of fear that if I get at all confrontational he might not want to just chat with me so pleasantly anymore.  He clearly has the upper hand.  That much is certain.

"Um, Have we met?"

"In a manner of speaking.  But c'mon, you can tell right off the bat that we're birds of a feather, right?"

"I..."

"You like baseball?  You're probably a Yankee fan, right?"

He was standing over me now.  I could see that coffee had spilled on his shirt.  He had missed a belt loop on his pants.  I had no idea what to say.  I was so confused.  What should I say?  What would get me into the least amount of trouble?

"I'm more of a basketball..."

He sings.  "Black crows in the meadow across a broad highway, though it's funny honey I don't feel much like a scarecrow today."

"What?"

"Bob Dylan could write a song, right?  (laughs)  You like birds though right.  I mean who doesn't.  The cats are the problem."

"Cats."

"The biggest threat to birds are house cats that are allowed outside.  S'why people should keep their cats indoors.  Or not have them all, right?  What was that a turtle in that tank?"

"Yeah."

"What's his name?"

"Paco."

He stepped away again, took a pull off his coffee and rooted around in his left-hand pants pocket.

"Where the fuck is that thing?"

"The turtle's name is Paco."

"Where'd you get that name from?"

"My daughter wanted to get a bunch of birds, can't remem..."

He finds a small grey rectangle--a remote control--in the third pocket he checks and presses one of its buttons.  An image leaps onto the screen.  He turns to look at it.  It's of a tall, full-breasted white bird with a long neck, bright red face and a long, pointed black beak.  The bird's eye is round and yellow with a small black dot at its center.  The eye is conspicuously unlidded giving the eye the quality of shock and surprise.  And a certain menace.

"Patricia, can you focus that a little."

The image pulls into sharper clarity as I strain to swivel my neck to see who's behind me.  It's no good.

"That's it--perfect.  This is a Siberian White Crane.  Also known as a Snow Crane.  It's a long distance migrating bird.  It breeds in Siberia but spends its winters in China and India.  This bird is dangerously close to  extinction.  It's a shame.  It's a beautiful bird.  Some of the larger males can have a seven foot wingspan."

There's a certain sadness to his voice; tinged with frustration.  He's clearly distracted by the beauty of the bird on the screen but annoyed by the possibility that it could ever die out.  I try to be sympathetic.

"What's threatening the bird?"

"Can you imagine seeing a bird flying with wings seven feet across?  I once had a Chinese girlfriend who grew up in India.  We spent a week hitchhiking across Texas together.  Good barbecue in Texas although not as good as in Tennessee.  Problem is..."

He had lost his focus and wasn't paying attention.  His thumb was leaning on the remote button and pictures of birds--one after another--were flashing across the screen.  Seagulls, orioles, bluejays, pigeons, bird after bird, some on nests, some flying through the air, some feeding their young, open-mouthed, straining for food.

"...you can't get good beer in Tennessee.  You want good beer the only place to go is Big Blue Beer Distributors in Brooklyn.  I mean if you want to just buy beer.  But you have to go on Fridays after 4 because that's when..."

Cardinal, chickadee, turkey vulture, titmouse.  I was becoming genuinely frightened now.  Not sure where this was going.

"...they get rid of the loose bottles from the cases because some people go there to buy bottles one at time that's how good it is.  I mean the selection, that is.  Think I'll come back here again, every now and then from time to time, how lovely you are my dear the ball game has gone much to far my dear...."

He was full-out singing now and the light from the flashes on the screen seemed to obscure all other light in the room as if the overhead florescents were drained of the power it took sustain them so that the images of birds flying by now, faster and faster, could begin to leap off the screen wafted and gusted into reality by his voice and his words and his love for them.

"...sing to me, do your thing to me, I'll meet you some mornin', meet you some mornin', in the sweet by and by, by and by, by and by..."

My chair flew back and I landed hard banging my head.  In the moment before I blacked out--fully unconscious this time--I thought I saw...I don't know how to describe it.  It was a beautiful snow white bird--angelic and benevolent.  I saw it upside down so I couldn't tell but I think it wore large round glasses and smiled at me.

I woke up on the floor of the living room below the turtle tank.  I could still hear him singing.  My head ached as I sat up.  In my lap was a copy of Audubon Magazine.  The cover photo was of a large colorful bird in profile: "Costa Rica's Loony Toucan."  A page of the magazine was marked with another subscription card, also filled out in my name.  On the back it read:

Read this for free in
perpetuity.  Sadly
birds aren't so lucky.

I could feel the turtle reading over my shoulder.

"Bad haiku.  Did you know birds descended from dinosaurs?  Just goes to show you..."

Toscana 2008

Buddhists shake the trees down to their meaning
while consolidations of men drown in the pitfalls
of circumstance.
I draw the line in the centre world
so that I may observe every second hand
explode at once;
and in the silence of that holocaust
reams of pleasures come clean,
allowing me an understanding
of everything I lose each time that I rewind.
The lessons are forthcoming;
The Heart beats faster in wine.

~ M. Lucia

IT HAD TO COME OUT

"Fucking bullshit."

(on phone) "Yes, this is 1325.  I need...five bottles of water.  Some of that extra-strength Excedrin.  The migraine kind if you have it.  And can you send us some toast?  Several orders.  At least ten slices if that's OK.  With butter right on there.  Yes.  Thanks very much." (hangs up)

"Cocksucking shit."

"Now Bill, take it easy."

"Look at me."

"Yes?"

"You ever think it would come to this?"

"What Bill?"

"Jesus!"

"What?  Fucking WHAT Bill?  What the fuck are you talking about?"

"I was the fucking President of the United States."

"Yes, I remember something like that."

"Sarcastic cunt."

"Listen Bill if you're going to be crass you can fuck yourself, this is Chelsea's day."

"I was fucking President - you're the goddamn Secretary of State!"

"Don't remind me."

"And not I gotta go out there..."

"Now Bill..."

"...I gotta go out there and walk my baby down the aisle..."

"...don't..."

"...so she can go and marry some kike from Jew Town?"

"Which Jew Town are you referring to Bill, the one that gave you 15 million in '96?"

"Fucking Jew York City.  I was the fucking hayseed no one said could win and I showed them cocksuckers.  And for what?  To go out and eat a gigantic shit sandwich."

"At least it's kosher shit."

"Oh Lord..."

"Oh honey, we knew this day would come.  And she's just a wonderful woman.  She outdid us.  We have every reason to be proud..."

"Who does this fucking kid think he is anyway?  Think he can just waltz into our little family.  Into the circle?  Ah mean, we been through the shit together."

"And we showed 'em didn't we?"

"Goddammit darlin' we sure did show 'em."

"And we aren't done yet, are we?"

"No sir we sure aren't.  Get you back to the White House and this time we'll fuck 'em all."

"Well Bill, let's make sure we don't fuck them ALL this time.  What do you say?"

"I say you're a cunt and you always will be."

"You better fucking believe it."

57 Virginia Lane

Sunday middle of morning is the happiest time there is in existence.
Some manner of onion and green peppers smelling up
the stairs all the way to my room.
In the house I always dream within;
without chance there is every tidal wave of catastrophe,
soaring tsunamis on the same front hill which was miles deep
when I lived there.
Not like the return visit at the age of 21;
it had been manicured to fit a red sports car in the driveway.
Not the wild hill wherein my brother and cousin would build
superior icy upward slopes
the sort that today’s child would be greatly warned against doing.
The same hill in my dreams
the waves seemed about 100 feet high,
but I was riding them,
sinking with them,
breathing in all the water I could
to make me strong-
I did not drown, I just continued on the ride.
The power of the pull dragged me down,
and I screamed with delight
like my childhood home was tossing me into the sky,
my own private roller coaster of ocean,
not as when I was once scared
when my father would toss me into the same air and
back into the pool.
Took me years to figure out I just had to let go,
and scream that delighted scream.
On the Sunday afternoons, in fall
sun shining, cool breeze
and the greatest sounds of drying leaves-
called me back home to the dining room,
where we had our European midday meal.
Meats, and wine and endless chatter.
We all spoke over each other but no one ever really cared.
We fought all the time, but there were no American
silences, no time outs, no repressed meanings.
I only know how to say and be what I am,
what I feel,
what is, as far as I am living it.
No ulterior motives at home,
left me green to the ways of the world’s energetic vampires.
The ones who suckled life energy from a room.
This was news to me.
Then, years later, I realize
they do not have this actual and mythical castle made of
scabs, and Sunday dinners, and fall sunshine.
No verbal prizefights, tears shed, laughter
uncontrollable, stories which were always on repeat
but never old, or worn.
To those who could never dream in drowning and coming alive
again on the front hill,
or the back woods wherein I got lost and liked it.
I am sorry to them that never had the protection of Sunday,
and a midday meal.

~ M. Lucia

AM

Ace of Clubs (Saugherties, NY)

Crinkled memory
bustles on a dim, dirty
wedding day;
plastic jewelry cradling
stretchmarks
of a mother's love,
completely.

Shaking off your
poverty
the sparkling big dipper
taste of poison
cigarette stick, teaching
you to come
into circumstance.

Firmly, like a damp
fine-toothed comb.
Selling their hair,
wares
to the drugstore population
too trembling as they
sweat
their nerves, and families
away.

Heavenly hosts in clear
plastic heels;
deciphering holy scripture,
crumbling limestone and ink
through the insides of
her thighs.

Won't be around tomorrow
when she's lying to the football
coach about her
streetfights,
nights out
and overnight flights--
to the grime marble floors,
tongue-licked clean
in a see through nightie from
another lip-stained,
sunny day.

~ M. Lucia

Pasture

lightly fingertips

trace the sunshine licked from lips,

complete immersion 

sick sunday haiku

birds shrilling mad lies
waterfront sunday spins me
like sure hips rising

~ M. Lucia

bedtime story

All I remember is a story about a church in Mexico, told in between gins and one of the last nights we spent around each other.  So the story goes, in his voice soft and with the edge of a tired lawman from another time - There was a grand Catholic church, he said, somewhere inland from the Baja coast, where exactly I couldn't say.  He said he didn't believe in God, but he believed in churches.  He then grew more morose with each passing word, as he told me in world weary tones about the simpler, less garish and more humble church just off and down from the main road and from the large church.  Then about the Indian burial ground just aways from that smaller church.  Then about the little old man and the little old woman who were making clay pots even further down that road, where there was no road at all.  I had thought the end of the story came down to them, but while that big church, and that little church, and even that Indian sacred burial ground meant shit compared to them, the little old man and the little old woman - well, they weren't the end of the story either.  Inside the clay beds of earth were spiders, the special disastrously unique kind that only thrived in the deep of Mexico, and those spiders weaved more intricately than any man or church or road.  That what they created out of shit and spit and dirt and clay would outlast all the rest, and do so modestly and unheard, in the quiet beneath the world.  I can't remember if it was spiders, or insects, or a different hard shelled creature.  That's where I lose the memory.  And that's where his story ended.

~ M. Lucia