Sunny's Winter Solstice

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

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

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

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

M. Lucia

Office Party

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

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

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

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

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

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

M. Lucia

My Kind of Woman

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

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

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

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

fighting for the tallest peak, reaching and falling 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

strong because it is broken,

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

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

M. Lucia

Dead Horse

M. Lucia

Third Barstool From The Door.

The bar is the same, half shaded parlour trick it always is when the light still creeps past the slats on a sunday.  Down in the middle sits Frank, lumpy in that way that men who have lost their teenage obesity far too fast and shrouded are lumpy, as they bramble towards the middle age.  He sips his drink - a vodka and cranberry, because he's never liked the taste of alcohol, cannot let himself be seduced by the bar at hand, and has the tolerance of a twelve year old girl.  Who hasn't discovered the joys of premenstrual Midol yet.  You know, when the world closes in around you, your body gets fat for no apparent reason, you want to fight, fuck and eat everything and there is so much wind in you, you can't hardly stay held within your skin.  Frank's skin is folded, empty and lacks any of the graces of supposed manhood he was born into along the sidelines of his family tree.  He's stuck in the mud again, his brand new shoes clicking on the barstool, onto the hard, wet floor beneath him. 

Trouble with Frank is, he doesn't know women.  And he is a woman among men, begging and cajoling and clinging onto any shred of manhood he can summon up from those around him.  Even the red mouthed, tough talking whore seated next to Frankie couldn't bare to look at him, soft face, fat kid stance, sipping his red lady drink like a divorcee at a strip mall disco.  People like him who couldn't even see the strands of their own minds bothered her deeply; so much so that she had this immense urge to bully the former pudge and insult the size of his cock (which wasn't out of the blue - Frankie, speaking straight ahead in some non-committed direction somewhere between the bartender who kept himself busy enough to ignore him and the few, dozing former men around him at the sparsely populated bar on this sunday afternoon, was attempting in his best mildly drunk manner to boast about women with nice tits, and asses, and it was getting under this whore's skin like something noxious).  Point is, she was allergic to this brand of bullshit and was on the verge of yelling at Frank, about his surely undermined cock and how he's probably had as many proper drunk escapades in his adult life as women he made come - meaning very little to none.  She bit her lip so hard, it split in one mound to two, and she burned it clear and straight with one shot of her whiskey, sealing the injury and getting the hell out of there before he voice returned from the fire breath of her swallow.  And she was really good at swallowing. 

Her glass hit the bar hard, her ass out the door quick as you please, and Frankie was left there, alone with a bartender who wished also for his departure (one drink in 90 minutes, and a watered down one at that, what kind of money could he make off of a guy like this?) and the dozers, the men who at least were men once, and were tired out from years of boozing, fucking, lying and regretting.  Frank didn't know what any of these vices felt like.  He just sat there - inert - thinking about his friend who had betrayed him (you know, in that way only Italians can get betrayed).  Truth its, Frank wasn't as needful of any woman in his whole soppy life than this man who he had used as his sounding board, his cop to talk him down from the ledge.  When the needy are hung out to dry, they don't ever fall down dead.  They just swing there in the breeze, the noose they created for their own burdens and denials about who they are gently choking them, but never ending it all....not even a good choke like the whore liked sometimes was this sort of emasculation vehicle.  Sipping cranberry in the wind, and the dull sun fighting with the shade, in the land of drunks, untouched by their pain and drowning in his own.  He left no tip.

M. Lucia

Wet November

>Wet rain trapping lights, dim and out of focus
cradle leaves die and burning from behind,
lead, then suit
your walkway…

great loss of time,
corn fields dying against the highway-
in between the holy leaves,
catch the summer girls>

M. Lucia

Authority

Ugly does live.
It's average, it makes itself readily available
and it is everywhere, it is.

I am stuck in an elevator down to the street.
With a simpleton, who I cannot bear to make eye contact with anymore,
and a girl who now claims herself a married woman.
I want to tell her, that everything she has celebrated is shit.
Only because of the way she celebrates it.

She knows nothing of the tales of our people,
with her bullshit disco lights, ample parents
happy that she settled for someone who allowed her true self out--

dull, misplaced, useless.
She did not heed the spark of love, of being whores for each other,
cause that's the only way, Uncle Henry says, don't you know...
spent her soft earned money on a dinner party
that she can never take back.

She is empty now, when she walks. She knows not
of real love.  Of selling the deed to your body to someone else's
being.  The thing is:

I have tried
tired
so hard, to experience empathy with them all
and feel the connection, the place and the moment
wherein they and I lose contact. About all this.

I try to allow for the fact that they just aren't as hard as me,
deviant a body as mine,
meticulously latticed a mind
bent for thought, pleasure and innocence at the same time.

Fine, but-

When they simply are silent, when they just
don't
get it.
I cannot for the life of all the people living inside me
See
What they witness instead.

It seems and feels like nothing at all.
Dead, dirty leaves that you forgot to water,
crawling up a gas lamp cylinder.
Tending to a house, which is not a home anymore
but just an empty building.

Don't tell them that they are ghosts.
They will just laugh at you, you know.

No matter.
The river knows our name, and runs clear for us
just the same as it did
before their being born made it unclear.
Unsaved.

I will save all those who ask for my help.

As for all them rest, well...

Good luck with the receptions, the home owners insurance
the new bedroom sets.

Who's really in charge here, after all, ourselves or the blood of those we take with us,
without them coming along for the ride.
And it Is just a ride, now.

Remember your sick bags.

M. Lucia

Henry Miller, My Roommate

Spit stains drape the old, lumpy pillows I'd fall asleep on, wine stains graced the rug, where he would occasionally sign off after many hours in the cement mixer, known as his mind, and pass out.  Spitless.  His insides were all wet, and my neck was wet, so we went together like that.  Perfect roommates.  Henry Miller and I.  Just for a short time, in the waterfront brooklyn neighborhood..."not like that shithole on Driggs Avenue" he'd grumble to me, in his gravel laden minimalist language, when I'd go into the kitchen to search out some of that French aspirin headache powder he'd always bring back...I sucked down the water, also minimalist and tasteless (God bless the French for their ingenuity, unabashed and humble) as he complained to me.  I didn't have the heart to tell him that his crude, middled street was now full of anorexic rich kids with straight legs and trust funds...no heart at all.  Sometimes the truth is better left unsaid.

The point is, with Henry Miller as my current yet temporary sublet roommate (we were both heading onto "other things" don't you know), I was always the one passing out, earrings on, bad story in my pants and lost machinery, drooling all over the place before or after or during the sickness, and him...HIM...never sick, never headache, a lightweight if you think about it (I didn't say that).  All I am saying is that he was always up, his faculties all about him, in the dim light (one of four we would have to replace over the great meeting ground of the dining room table....how does that happen? Three lights, of equal wattage, all linked to one similar switch, out while the fourth stays lit...just enough to frame his grand buddhist head like a shroud of merlot, and calm), wanting to talk about it.  Always talk.  But never sick himself, or messy, or embarrassed.  The wine stains, yes, because he would often just gently fall asleep there for a moment, knocking his wine into the carpet, the tablecloth, the wall, anything that would have it.  I'd imagine a great way for a wino from the streets to get some free red was to crouch nearby, when he'd overstepped his bounds and just wait for the remainder of his glass's contents to wash the insides of their gum diseased, wanting mouths like a dream.  A good source of "income" if that income was vino.  So, I was the one with the industrious mother who taught me how to remove all the stains, no matter where their distress spot, while he watched, in awe - in interest and delicacy.  Listening, cause he was good at that too. 

That time, on New Years Day, after I walked home in the black, abrupt night, drunk on tears and heaving with the weight of him in my skin.  Henry told me.  He Told me about what I was about to learn, and wasn't it all about learning...he knew I couldn't see that yet, but he knew to tell me to take note, remember the way the moon looked, the things he (the one that caused my tears, or so I had thought at the time) and I had talked about, painfully and like a body being torn about at the seams, on the way to said Brooklyn bar, to compare it with the salty, teary night, the first in a year which I had mapped out so perfectly and utterly fucked up, from behind my own eyes and with my old, golden touch.  I told Henry, I said, the boy's ugliness as he saw it, was not worthy of my love, due to beauty which he could not possess.  Henry laughed (as if he hadn't just drunk 2 Whole bottles of wine! With a few crusts of bread, even though he knew I always made a sunday stew with meat and noodles and left it in the ice box, for him to enjoy), and looked off to the window, to whatever vista he would find, and twirled his near empty wine glass, forcing a dark purple ring on my grandmother's birch wood table, and said to me, eyes all slinky, mouth twisting a smile at one end, "but my girl, he has to love himself enough to know the beauty of the gods by which you possess easily, without care...." à bouche ouverte", said with the grandeur and sharpness of his Brooklyn tongue.  I told him I had learned Spanish, though I didn't remember any of it, because I really didn't enjoy them as a people....short, stocky, overwrought with corn oil and bass judgements.  

But I understood all the same, through my well full of tears on that New Years, and on all the drunken nights since, when I came home and found him there, in that incandescent, inescapable light which never died along with the others.  I knew I was beautiful every time, even when my makeup had worn off, and my stockings had ripped.  Henry never ceased in telling me all the truth that he could find, before he gratefully sipped or spilled the last of those various red wines I had always in store for him.  He tried to seduce me one, but I told him I simply couldn't make love to a grandfatherly type....I just loved my own father, who was 44 when I was born, too much to subvert the idea of a man like that.  He was well past 44, he said, but he liked me all the same, he said, as he angled his long, and graceful finger in the air around me, as he spoke.  We wrote on the same page, and I always knew my tears, whether new years or old hat, were safe with him.  Being drunk on wine made him simply more himself.  And the reflection was a kind one, in those murky, perfect moments before I would pass out, or drool my way to a somber, hungover morning of aspirin powder and looking for my purse.

M. Lucia

Orion's Garden

RIP King Street Garden, 1998-2011

Until that day...

She had left the summer house tucked in the drunken, gaping woods, the one that laughed too hard and thought too much, and didn’t know how the outer begot the inner and reverse and so thusly it was, and walked her way out of the place. Not for good. Probably not at all on the inside, but it’s good to let the house be…see how it rises again in the next sunlight, notice whether any fires start again burning from the stone chimney, and listen from afar, so much until you can really hear the roots of the echoes, the timbre of each word and how it comes to you, and you can see that blessed, orchestrated forest from the relative safety of the outer reaches of the river bank, and wildwood. Leavin’ alone, is not leaving, that’s for true.

Just as the fire blood of the setting sun shed its last hum of quarter beneath the skirt of heaven, she felt something tug on her boot, crunching with the leaves in a way that she knew was not naturally so. There was a tiny folded up piece of paper (not ripped, or crumpled, mind you – folded), stuck to the inside heel. She removed it and kept it as she did most things she found or was meant to find- she tucked it neatly into the left side of her bosom. Safe next to the heart place, which lived out here, well fortified. The sun skipped itself away from the places within and without, the loss of light made her feel full, and she was hoping beyond hope that the little summer house was learning to fill itself up again too, fires, whiskeys, the like…the little bent up paper made her smile, and she decided These words written upon it would be the last words until that time came, the next one you can’t see until you’re flowing in its waves, back and forth and the light returns. A haiku no less. Only these, not hers, could be the last words indeed…for now.

No sober sobber
am I. 'Round gypsy camp fires
I dance drunken tears

M. Lucia

Wave Goodbye, Now...

So, then.  Words.  The Skies circumscribed their letters in order, dark velvet crevices punching hard with every last impulse they could summon up.  I describe it this way, because I often have a very delectable, and detailed (and heightened) electric view of the sky from down here, where I've been cast several times.  The fallen woman, who is raised first so high she cannot but knock her head in those sharp corners round the clouds, teetering on the step stool which has been built and fashioned out of an unmarked love of some sort, which the master builder does not yet understand.  This world moves too slow and thick for my taste.  But I am repeatedly cast down here all the same.  I scratch my cheek against the harsh blade the wind provides, and remember myself as I'm knocked down, into the ground and the lower quarters of the grass, suddenly and clumsily so, just so they can still look up my skirt as I go, jack off to it later and pretend it ain't me they're after.  Anyway, I slayed that dragon a long time ago. 

There are bigger vistas which don't tell you their whole story which I have to be on about, in this breath, with my best will rising, my most complete portions of energies working, and my skin still sliding up against itself, and against yours.  I arrive, 2 minutes early to where I am asked to be, and I am 3 towns to one side of things, gone as fresh as the black night more than a few moments before I am wished away to the back of the mind.  Something clicks, and shifts, and moves about my feet as I learn my lesson, for once and for all time.  I channel God and light and darkness, and do not run from anything which births itself from me.  Absolutely nothing is beyond my scope.  I do not have the need to construct a life around and about me, as it is alive no matter what I do, rising in the heat between my legs, in my ears, in your eyes looking at it unfold. 

The train's a whistling.  I gather together the many books full up with secrets I never asked to hear, and will take care of them, or maybe just scatter their swollen ashes into the nearest sea I can find.  I hope the words follow me close behind, but the living that makes them alive is the most important thing.  The words will work it out for themselves.  And They know where to find me.  As for the rest of you, it's been fun.  If you ever find yourself down here with scarlet, intelligent, literate and liberated women like me, who know ourselves to be children, gods, molecules rising from failure and the best of ourselves, make sure to look up at those grandly fashioned stars, swirling a story in front of your eyes, down in heat from the sky, asking thee to know thyself, and smile as the black night falls in on you, and say "yes".....

M. Lucia

Grains of Paradise

“I told you, Bushmills is a proddy whiskey and Jameson is a Catholic one”.

“Whiskeys aren’t religious like people”….why do we believe the information we receive?

He told me that, way back when, the brain (not the mind) that knew everything, but broke down far too easily in the silence of its closed in waters. Now, I look like the asshole saying this, just drunk enough to try and remember if there was any backup information to go along with it. People really do say the damnedest things.

I once told a hairy Irishman that, who walked me home only to push me up against the side of the wall at the roundabout of the BQE (the most romantic spot there is, to some) to keep kissing me, his Rottweiler at his side; lumbering, silent and perplexed. The street was lit golden with dim, late night light, and moist air from the water breezing in.

He took himself out of me just in time, and I asked why he’d stopped. He said he wanted to take a precaution, since the obvious precaution wasn’t being taken (and which I hated taking; it’s like playing tennis in oven mitts…no good), and I kept repeating “we don’t have to worry about that with you…” He inquired, and got it again, quiet and oddly superstitious: “we don’t have to worry about that with you”.  Later on, he’d come to find out that I didn’t want to be a mother, then and there, nor achieve any other level of dastardly reproductive women doing/chance taking. Bushmills had made me say it. It had made me repeat it, and the back story of the facts in my head which did not mean the phrase spoken or the intent seemingly coming out of that (coming on the sheets below) didn’t make it out of my mouth before something else then made it in. That didn’t seem to bother him at all. 

Later on, I laughed and then I ruined it all, again. The dark place, the one coming all over me in dreams chuckled a bit, in a whispered tone to itself, when I thought I was beyond it all. I’m glad to say I nearly am. But, dear Reader, make sure you resurrect any parts of your life wherein you were not living out as yourself – they will form a legion of outbursts and wrongdoing, and find you, in the most inconvenient times, at the most inopportune moments…and they will gently remind you that they are not through with you just yet. Exorcisms aren’t pretty, but our eyes shine clear as Heaven when we make it though to the other side and the darkness falls away, for good and all.

I shouldn’t have trusted a Proddy whiskey from the North.

M. Lucia

Tweedle Dee, Esq.

The electric blue light flickers, again. The old man is humming a tune, probably one he learned back up from the business class lounge in the south side of Hell, where he goes to decompress. Everything is wrong here, and no one says a thing. Consign, by reason, and all consuming they slide alongside each other threadbare across the lowest level of sky. Packed in tight in their sardine canister lives.

People, like these, at the end of the day, don’t want to be free.

There is person who sits behind my back all day. He is the most desperate person I have ever come in contact with in all my life. A friend of mine said that. I agree. His face is not handsome, not by a long shot. He is, politely what one might term a dweeb back in the day, but he’s not smart enough, doesn’t read enough and doesn’t seek enough knowledge to fall into that category. No, he is a normal, and more than one. He is a barnacle on a sinking ship. Every day of his life here in this place, the last one like this I’ve ever know, is filled up fully and continually with fear. You can read it behind his eyes, around the low hanging corners of his dull, oversized mouth. His face looks like a ventriloquist’s dummy, and there is always a hand or two shoved up his backside which he needs in order to speak. He’ll say anything to keep his place here, as its unimportance diminishes into true uselessness before his shaking, cowering eyes. At any point in the day, if you turn round to look at him, whether on the telephone, sitting and staring into his computer screen, reading or looking at a piece of paper, he looks like he is crying. And he is.

And you know what? I don’t care. I don’t care that he chose this two bit, dinner theatre matinee showing of awful drama, comprised of endless free rides on the sycophant street car stacked up many tall buildings high. I don’t care that he has to feed and clothe his children. Learning to live without all comforts and possessions isn’t so bad as knowing your father is a dead creature, lacking of the light and substance of a man. Some people are made this way, but this dressed down dummy was born into it. He is quick with what energy he has, and he needs. He wants attention, and any single moment, memory or fact that goes above his head (which granted, isn’t hard at all to do) upsets his quaky balance. He would try and talk his way out of the guillotine, if his time came, and would bad mouth anyone to save his precious little place off and to the side of the greatest ship there ever was. He is mommy’s little wimp, who still wears tightly bound suspenders and a leash which keeps him well under control (not that he would ever note its presence, or have want to remove it….after all, he put it there himself and replaces it fresh and anew every single quarter). He has no sexuality (thank god), he has no intellectual self, and those two ideas wouldn’t ever come together in any knowable form that he’d recognize, that’s for sure.

He had a counterpart too. The Italian who worked across the hall from him. This guy gave the impression of being male, but was more officially low class and without scope or dynamic. He pretended he was a great caregiver to all who needed him, but of course only the very weak and wounded needed him. Women, real women, scare him to pieces. He liked to talk about tits, but he wouldn’t have a clue what to do with a pair of them if they came with a request for pleasure. He cannot connect, and lives happily in the ignorance of his familial bonds. They make a dynamic duo that surely beats any other round here.  The Italian looks at me like I’m dangerous. I like that. I want him to know, I am very dangerous because I am made up of truth, I eat purity even when it destroys my joys and my illusions of greatness, I am fully realized in my implicity towards what he might consider illicit, and I want without need. Stupid to state these things. They don’t actually go Over the heads of these two or the rest of them. They seep down to the ground, where average joes like them walk (not even with the fervor of a stomp) over my ideals, my better natures, and the rest, mucking them up into dust which has no sounds that they can hear from their tiny, fenced in ears.

He’s on the phone again. He’s making the face. I have a feeling it’s been stuck that way for some time, and the banal, average angels who clamor around his buck toothed head, they’re not leaving him alone any time soon. He has to call his wife again now, to make sure she tells him everything he has to pick up from the store, cause what woman wouldn’t want a houseboy to run errands for you, and come home to you with his empty head of old parlour tricks and jingles, ready to occupy your bed every night with the voracity of an 80 year old man suffering from a bad back and incontinence?  He’s picking up the thing at the sporting good store, yes….yes, he is. He will!

You know, they say that the best people talk about ideas, the average person talks about things, and the worst people talk about other people…….well, I guess I’m just not that advanced yet.

M Lucia

Case Studies

Case:
26
crying
talked down
doesn't express
pale face
tongue; thick
weak
lacks.
Stay With
Loss.

M. Lucia

How Graveyards Come To Life

So, about 7 years ago, I landed this job at this rich old lady’s house, estate I guess you’d call it. She had lived some life, she had, suffered and triumphed over numerous husbands, some dying under more than mysterious circumstances (I never trusted the last one – he had millions of dollars (and she had amassed quite a bit after her first two unsuccessful marriages) and yet she demanded he take her to Washington, DC on their honeymoon. I mean, her father was a known Communist, and no matter what, who goes to Washington, DC in the middle of March? She liked the look of the place, she said, constructed supposedly in some ancient, plotted out craftwork done way back when by the Free Masons (she had secretly wished her father was a Mason, rather than a Communist…..secrecy and pomp, robes beguiling men in the dark), but, still, him falling from that building seems a very rare case of circumstance to me). That fall, as well organized as the Masons’ triangular crossfire of structures, made her a true millionaire, so far off into the waves from the big boat of dependence that she was free to travel the world on her own, to each and every place her soul desired.

It was then, seven years ago, that I found myself in her employ – I was much younger, and still beating along from two year job stint to 2 year job stint, hoping for one of my many eggs to hatch. But they seemed to flourish loudly for a moment or two, offer me much in the way of hope, and then tremble from some unforeseen aftershock in my destiny, troubled and random as it was, and quietly fall over, the guilty foundation of some stack of cards not yet realized. This was another way to keep at it, on the sidelines, the back burner, whenever the free time would let me and spaces permit. She was smart, but kooky, this old woman and- in addition to the exotic objects acquired along her fields of travel since her need of a husband ceased, she had acquired mass possessions simply from the reams of said husband’s estates morphing into her one, very wealthy, eccentric and independent collection of life around her, in that big English Tudor home in the woods, just up an almost breath-shortening hill off of the main drag. My job? I was like a butterfly collector, organizing and logging in and separating out and piecing together all her life’s things. It was quiet – there were the other people in the house to talk to…nothing spectacular or earth shattering, I mean- the gardener, the lawyer who visited more often than I thought was possible, the accountant who practically set up rooms there, the cook, the maids, it wasn’t too many to keep track of, but enough that you grew to like some more than others, but deep down, you knew you’d be there only long enough for one of the constant few playing cards you had neatly tucked away in your stockings to erect itself and come to life, finally.

There was a period when the old woman got ill (brain tumor), and she had to let me go (funny thing is, in all that time she had about ten estate sales planned but didn’t sell one damn thing. She was just like me – except I thought I was trying to gather, while she (though she’d deny it) most definitively stepped back when it came time to release her little darlings for someone else to procure). I thought it would be a grand time to try my hand at long talked about escape from that old town, and a new way of life for me – in all ways. It began to burgeon, and then it didn’t. Stagnation and yet, a happy quiet time for me. Then, I had to work again, because – you guessed it! The house of cards was still a garden wall, half built (a whole other set of bricks, but the little piggies lied. They got blown down one by one, all the same). It was more of the same, with a couple years on me (and to add insult to injury, I never left the area surrounding the main drag near the big hill which led to the old lady’s place) and then one particular day, she bumps into me on the street. She was taking walks up and down her big hill per doctor’s orders. She had survived a brain tumor! Who does that, nowadays or ever! I knew she had a tenacity which was beyond most people’s and I always respected that. Whatever she had been given in life was done so, because of absolute action on her part.

Long story short, she wanted me back. Same job, same house, same possessions (again, not one had been sold off even since I had left), same people. I knew what I was doing wasn’t all that high profile or life long (who works for one person their whole life anymore? All day, not in charge, forced into relationships and perimeters that anyone with any sense of spirit would use as a stepping stone and not as a final destination. Might as well lie back into your grave and warm it up). So, more than a few years later, things became less ‘ok’ for me. Coming back I had made my peace with, and I –as always- could sleepwalk blindly through these over categorizations of her library of many, many things (she had ordered in even more people to dust and clean them, more inept and dullard like than the original set which were all still there, of course, mildly bleeding the old lady dry just enough to fit with their quiet desperation, their overly ordered lives which lacked any shred of inspiration. I came to find out from some of them (because even though I had, from the start of this and the last employ, always tried to divorce myself from them emotionally and keep my dignity intact, my dreams afloat and my world, more precious and satisfying than the dead air in that place, alive and breathing, they still somehow were like snotty little kids, grabbing at fireflies because of their light. I knew, deep down, that we All have this light, all Gods, Heavens and Hells within us, adventures and paths alongside us the whole time, but them – they didn’t see it, and I wasn’t letting go of my light to help them to see it. Each person must do this for themselves), small details of their lives, and my wings grew weary of their buzzing…..busy little bees around the few remaining divots of honey that the old woman had left to herself. She had lived out her dreams, one way or another, but what had They done with their lungs, full up with oxygen like anyone’s, their health and youth, but drain the old woman of her only children, just so they didn’t have to feel the nervous worry (fireflies call this excitement) of how to get out there and Do from the purest place in their foolish little hearts?

I had grown older, made bitter and made intensely aware of losing the experience, presence and delight of forces and people loved and cherished, and I came to re-appreciate my original mantra of not suffering fools. Sorry, fools. Even jesters learn to be tricksters sometime. My heart demands it of me, and I’ve learned not to cross her. Suddenly, the sight of them all, their ever growing and diminishing hoards made me physically sick inside. Joking about the old lady’s tumor, about the oddness of some of her treasures, which sounded to me as disturbing as a din of slaughter just a few feet downwards, over the slope of the hill. The reverb of bullet holes tearing flesh and sucking vitality from its most tender places. Nothing left but a hissing afterward; a mourning for the wrong things said yes and no to. Engaged, and ignored. There was one of the old woman’s army of accountants there, who I could tell felt the same things I did about the richness within, and what each moment Can bring, but he was so mired in so many things that there wasn’t much room left permitted for a conversation, much less anything else of worth. As usual, I had to go it alone and did so, hating them behind their backs. It’s funny – it all too rarely hits people that they do not have to experience the world in the way that they have been taught to, or expected to, but somehow this is fleeting for most and just sears itself off like clockwork screws misshapen and tossed right out the windows, shooed away by the rest of those surrounding them, those who would rather live in an open faced graveyard.

Speaking of…The old lady, God bless her, died finally at the ripe old age of 93. It’s a very special number to sail off upon, and sail off she did. Into the seas of her own making, to meet her bevy of husbands who would still, even considering, probably like to show her around and make time with her. It was Her energy that drew in all of them, and not the other way around. Her equally snot nosed son, not a man but more of a collection of spindly fears and malnourished black holes, took over for her estate and for awhile, all the members of the household bled as much of her money out as they still could. No shame. He tried to play daddy but it didn’t work, since there was no respect on either side. Her sold off every last piece of her stuff, every last one, and abandoned the house, and the property, firing them all. Not a surprise really – when no blood or life force can get to a wound, it pales and dies. Babies and rocket scientists know that. Oddly, turns out the place was sitting all that time over government land, which – if you go way back to the original deeds, revealed a shady clause to its original acquiring. When things are built on a lie, they never survive, and it’s always found out one way or another. Why live duplicitously again and again, when you can live as you want to in truth – just one, easy time. I never ever understood that. Guess I never will. The house was torn down, and a graveyard was set to be built over it. Those who are Actually Dead often get passed over, in lieu of those looking to cram themselves in with the early bird special. We don’t have to lie back down in the familial DNA of our generational coffins. By coming to life as ourselves we honor our bloodline and its many triumphs and devastations, limitations and specks of profound joy.

I walked by the place the other day…by the graveyard I mean. Thought out of the first few rows of the newly dead, I might find the old eccentric, or see her speckled ghost walking in late afternoon between the tall grasses and willows, looking for her long lost treasures (since her son never came. Afraid of the dead, it seems). I should have known when I asked the groundskeeper – the low back buckled, sun burned old man who used to tend her garden. He shuffled a bit, from all the lifting at his age. A smile crossed the far corner of his mouth, the one that lets in impetus, the sort that takes you west to the places without noise. He told me what I halfway knew to be so in the malar flush of my battered, regenerating heart. It happened far from this place, he said. How perfect, I thought, right smack in the most central point of the liquid world where all the routes meet to run astray in the chaos of all directions. I walked off, and realized how immense a late afternoon in the soft tide of early autumn it was. How it had been so full and beautiful every single day I had come to work there. How it robbed me of that same beauty, day after day. How I let it. I walked then, in the right steps, down the amber of the hill with the ease of a firefly who had managed to weave above and beyond the sticky, chubby hands of the clobbering kids who chased it, they not realizing that they had it the wrong way around. The tickle of the barley grass snuck up my skirt a few times, the stubborn dew that hide itself had up and kissed my bare ankles, and the sun baking at the hearth blanketed my back with its palm, motherly and forgiving. The old lady’s ashes had been scattered out at sea.

M. Lucia

I'm Finished!

Anyway, so That’s over. Again. Not sure what comes over me, but I can only explain it as a rush…..a whirling dervish skirt being blown up by an industrial strength hurricane past the levys, the floodgates, the moats and filters, past and into a place where the light is so, not bright, but comely, so in a way that any little shred of average or below, any noise that is anything less than the perfect breath to that light, disappoints, scatters the shining parts, ruins and disrespects it to the point where I cannot be around any of it. My insides turn into a horror show- cut up, bloody and pus stained limbs, organs oozing and life force still whirling into muddy corners and choking on its own backwash. There is no other way to describe it and I am thankful it comes now and again and goes. And there will come a time, when all doors will be open and the keys thrown into the rushing tide, locking out all the stopgaps and excuses, the dead pan overcast air stuck in the middle of my brain.

When it was all over, and I wasn’t sleepwalking anymore, I saw the beautiful wild flowers I had picked at the farm nearby, where I hugged my friend the farmer, and kids danced to Motown he had blaring through the speakers, exciting the tomato vines and grasshoppers on late vacation. I felt every inch of the place I call home, cleaning away the dust and mite and fragments of the last months, and how I barely remembered them. I tasted the very virginal salty tears of little Lola, as I kissed her cheeks in the dark as she cried, watching her fall back to sleep as I sang her momma’s special song to her and backed away slowly, as the fireworks toasted the dying clouds in the sky, just off the water. I was in pre-dreamland, and no matter the realities of my life, my brain, my darkness and spaces unfulfilled, there was again imagination and feeling in my body, there was hope, there was living in the middle of many contradictions, there was Patience. That last feeling, that monster, that is the one that people like him felt in their heads for a few moments too long to turn back from offing themselves.

I can understand with absolute empathy and experience that same feeling. It’s as if the house’s been shut up for a hurricane that you and only you can see. The rush is moving and gathering all the same, with no place to dump out the rotten particulars, the patience cannot be felt, and you are trapped, you literally almost cannot breathe clear or at all. In my case, it is passive and you can let yourself go into lethargy and daydreaming (more like emptying your mind of all the missives) but to the literal point of suicide being a viable option, it’s just too much action for you to think about right now. The point is, people like him, they get to this place and it is, sadly, only their courage which pushes them forward into this void, but in their minds, the void is behind them any anything- Anything new and uninformed is for them, a new breath. I’m very glad I just visit this place now and again, out of sheer audacity, sensitivity mirrored by rage and reduction, and I don’t live there. I never will, but well, they only get caught in the reflections coming out from themselves and cannot see beyond the next bend, above their huddled heads, the darkness flying around their solid brainwaves, and convincing them that their place in the stars and safe in between the reeds has been taken. That they do not belong anymore and feel like a mass of thought is pushing them out, and moving on in.

Sometimes they see a crack in the slats, and that gorgeous light coming off the water, moving because They will it to, but sometimes they think it’s an illusion and they take that last courageous action and exit the frame. There is no way out, except to know that there is. Parts of my heart that I don’t even use daily wails for them in those moments, because moments for which I can muddle through and make it out, those moments become timeless, and a darkly etched world that instructs them as their master.

Eternity isn’t a long time; eternity isn’t About time. I hope they find solace in each other in the dreams of the living – they can build a boat mighty and strong and sail on out.

We need them more than they think.

(For DFW)
M. Lucia

Behind Closed Doors, or 36 Again

Something is wrong with me.

Every morning no matter who I’m with, alone, troubled, sick, drunk or blissful, I wake myself up from wet dreams and free drives by clutching myself from the inside and moaning, low with a greet of the day that only 1000 fucks from other lifetimes could bring, jettisoned into the high pitched innocent voice of a bright and cheery, turned on femme fatale, my own self contained grin that can't stop her smiling about it all. Thrusting, leg out, to get some fresh morning air, and some fantasies bred of simple trust in her gut, her cunt and her brainwaves.  The heart bleeds, but it is less easy to decipher.  And that's ok. Just fine, cause my heart always beats my head at night, and tells me to wake up when I need to.  She'd never leave me without tears, at the muddy, polluted banks of a forlorn river, without a hand to hold, or a dream to unfold, anything that rhymes like violin, double down oxygen in her soul, it's mine and it's alive and it knows you.  Still, the waves ripple like that.

One of my favourite books is The Collector, so much so I want to resurrect myself as a filmmaker and make it one day, mainly because the scenes where they fight in the rain turn me on.  Henry Miller made me realize I am a male chauvinist pig in womanly form.  Used to read Sexus in my old apt in Queens, not wearing underwear, crouched up on the easy chair, only to discover many of the long, drawn out passages of filthy French sex made me really, really excited and I had to then spend my time cleaning up the slight stains I’d made….even friends had said to me, it’s the sort of book after having read certain very lengthy passages of, that you need to excuse yourself and come back shortly thereafter, massivemasturbation (it should  be one word, just like that) interceptions in between pages which were meant to stick together just so, so the words you had to work for were worth it, no matter if the first time or the 100th time reading them.

I am sometimes insatiable, a man’s woman thinking all the time, filtering all the time and fantasizing all the time.   I am at home, at ease and with myself in all manner of what is today considered sexual attire – yesterday, considered attire.  My pulse races when there are stockings, garters (w/ tucked in flask for safe keeping), my favourite place on my whole body other than my ass, and hips, is that area above my breasts which I feel I need to expose, frame and present to the world else I feel like there is a sack over my head.  

And now to the clothing....yes I know....but, when I see a corset, a harness (Victorian not goth freak from the streets of nyc post modern, I dabble but not really…I never tried to shock my family), a suit, a spanking, a well written fantasmical (I create words with my muscles) dream set of good times, my belly goes south and I am not in control anymore, which for my brain is a fucking god sent relief......the colours paint themselves, and I am launched into the space of the dirty, comely stars.  Happy to be there, on cobblestones and rough patch voices, leading me and taking me where I need to go.  It does get dizzy out here sometimes, but there were always roots.  It's just a different sort of dizziness is all....the kind that emanates from heavy, soiled, wet and earthy roots flying through space, orgasming into and around black holes, parallel universes coming again and again, tossing wayward but sound dirt on its inhabitants, and the angels sing for me all the same, and for all of us, who have figured it out.  I diverted from the clothing - just that the thought occurs to me, in my large and well diversified mind, at least once every few days, that I need to get a job: burlesque is the goal, stripper is the decent wage version.  It seems like the best and purest way to go.  But did all those dancing girls with their curvy fishnet legs in the air have thoughts of physics and Heaven's location? Maybe they did, and I'm just getting the chemical combination right to make it the norm of the kicking legged pin up girls, who get a real rise out of it all from taking their clothes off, for an audience, perfectly in tempo with the music and with the clouds passing shadows over them.

 

Back when I was 13 I learned on my own accord, about all this.  Not even sure about what men and women did, I learned quite liberally and physically of my Own accord.  Hold it in when you need to pee, and god do the angels sing sweet dirty songs between your legs, but that's the thing.  Before I ever knew the right ways to touch myself and touch the men who I caught looking my way when they thought they were alone, I could make this alchemy happen, in the liquid systems of my body, growing with weight and hips, but not sorted yet, and the height not making her way to the top of the class, a final finish like no other, no surprise, just a quiet signal that I was not meant to be a woman before I was fully ready to be.  And I was worth this strange and longtime wait.  Cause I could make a visit to the toilet (still do) like a Greek chorus of ecstasy and it wasn't so local as it is with the touch-- it's different than all that...it starts somewhere in the front of the hips, grows like the vines of Jesus (when he wasn't trying to impress his boss) seducing Magda in the garden, growing up and around them like joys which we all forget entirely too easily, moving easily through itself into my belly, above and beyond that child bearing place, but with an ocean view all the same, and into (somehow) my upper chest, my heart and my physical fingertips, my hands having an orgasm like ripples of a tide not come in yet....thirteen to thirty and beyond, this is always possible....so, with decades of this know how and humility at its roots at my (actual) fingertips, how couldn't all the rest finally fall into place for me? I keep thinking there is some guilt behind the next corner, alone in my bed, the memory of the blood on his wall, the mix in match of insecurities and emotions that one may call a woman, before she figures out that she can use this to her advantage (I will never use this to my advantage, since the killing of that sort of liberation and purity is a crime which I dare not commit) has informed the woman who can still make her muscles ache to the desperate tune of the world, and its men...

Something is right with me.

M. Lucia

Labour Days Haiku

Defy me, death knell!
covered in placental arms;
cobblestone stumble.

M. Lucia

Here Comes The Sun

 ...you know that certain light - it's not always visible, and it doesn't denote, connote, point to or relate to anything.  Not at first, second or fiftieth glance anyway.  You can't just look at it like that easy truck stop slut the sunrise, all sideways smiles and bright fuchsia nails...or that wistful, weepy woman- the sunset- crying at you and demanding your attention as she sits tear stained on the stairs, making you compliment her new, most comfortable shoes.  No, not the happy go lucky sunny day, so clear and simple to understand - the bleached, yellow sky speaking small talk to you, even the horrors of the rains, the most dramatic thunder and lightning, taking out your diversions, the artificial lights you come to depend on, sadly....can't find your papers, to remember and tell you what you believe in, tripping over your belongings, your senses of yourself, taking down the night and the dreams that form murky rainstorm pictures in front of your grey night's pupils...chopped and layered waves smacking up against your shattered mind, making sharp and altering dance moves for you to gaze upon, when the blankets of the rain soak you into itself, down the sea wall, chipping off the moss at your sides, your barnacles making their way into the hard, lopsided stone...well, if you make it through the storm, the hype, the rising tide and the panicked masses of faces blanking you and feeling threatened by your initiative and by your thought to ask the audacious question "why should I listen to you".  If you can wait out the fearful ones, the yelping dogs, the paper money throwing itself around, hitting the damp spaces around the foot of the stairs where the sunset sits, drunk on watered down gin, hand holding head and unable to stop her blubbering, because she can, not realizing that there is always a brightly coloured sunrise smoking outside the 24 hour diner round the corner....when the rest of them are stuck in their mired sleep, fashioning ways for their own to be led around by the nose, because it's much easier than opening the door after the storm and greeting it with the properly measured time, clicking your steps behind you as your shadow moves along.  That ever so fleeting sense of light that doesn't tell you all its secrets, doesn't mind all of its leaks and tears, it will come out of the sky slowly, after the so called destruction process.  Self-made, of course.  It's all in how you took it.  How you looked it in the eye as it came for you.  How did you greet it as it moved slowly across your inspiration airs.  How is it now, in the quiet of the outside time, the boats rocking without shame in the constant movement of the waters, white crested waves making not a peep.  Some stories don't need to show you their plot lines, present to you their endings...they simply are, and simply are alive only when you allow yourself to be told their tales.  Sitting motionless in the clean, supple puddles in the late afternoon light - the pale colours not defined, not sent to a cloud or an obvious sense of sun or rain.  You are taking part in the destruction, in the resurrection, in the dreaming and the conjuring of alchemy, all the elements forming with every second....it does not unfold without your acquiescence.  Your beholding is as crucial as the over-bloated sun fancies taking bows in your light every morning.  Climb on in; take your place in the creation and movement of light without an absolute starting point, light coming alive when it does not offer up the sweetness of itself, all that easily...it still invites with each passing breath of breeze and droplet of rain slipping down the length of its neck, turning to meet your gaze in a world not yet expired in its definitions of story yet untold...

M. Lucia

< The Rains Came >

Step back, heels in a mud puddle.
Better on your ass, than your knees…

A crow clears his throat,
shits on your head-
Remember:
The trees grow long,
branches to roots
  surmising
            your
                       
                        fingers;

throwing anchor smack in the center,
the palms of your hands.
Their direction is Up,
and yours follows strands to whichever
directional Heaven you crave knowing the most.

M. Lucia

The Coming of Autumn

The downward slope of the street suited the arch of her steps, the spine of her walk. Autumn was nowhere near them; it was summer yet, but there was something rustling in the distance. So far away, that you couldn’t see it from the upward slope, but in your nerves you could feel its tingle.

A man smoking at the side of the road reminded of carnivals in the rural towns you once knew, before they disposed of you. The angling creak of the high swings that allowed your feet to fly above earth, the carny smoking his pall malls with one hand, the other steady on the rust of the lever that ran this whole damn thing. There’s a concept of God for you. A carny, possible ex-con, inability to shave without piercing his cheek at least once, haggard in clothes that smelled of other people, standing in overgrown tall grass, with one hand smoking his cigarette and the other held onto the lever of your carnival ride. Not held tightly, mind you. Loose, like your dad driving long highways --- one hand on his lap, just a bare cradle beneath the wheel. Like he was captaining a vessel on the sea.

This guy, the carny, he didn’t watch the kids up there, he wasn’t the sort to look up little and not so little girls’ skirts, their legs filling out into their hips with each year of good nutrition and mostly conditional love…no, he was just offering us and the rest who watched, a good, long stare just beyond the mountain valley, just shy and to the left of the treetops as they fiddled the sky into late summer night a few moments earlier each time. The blues shade a slope downward with each passing turn, as each of those girls realizes that her screams can’t hurt her, and they’re a great way to tell the stars sleeping in the evening sky to stand up straight and wake up! Skirts in the air, hot muffler special air drifting southbound in the weeds not far from the blatant and suddenly set up carnival ground.

As the girls grew and screamed with more pinpointed diligence and vigil, the late summer would go and be replaced with the might chill of early fall. The smell of fresh air always got her body excited in a way that sweating and heat did not. It was a strange state of affairs, wasn’t it. That smell of faraway fires, faraway borders, snow which hadn’t even thought about hatching yet, wind just waking up from its cozy sleep, as long as it was faraway it was meaningful to her. The thought of other lives, other days, places to move towards, to keep moving, was the internal beat that she kept time alongside. And that made her wilder, the brief sun and chillier breezes marking her beneath her skin, making the warmth of human touch even more delectable and more satiating.

She was still on those swings, bellowing to anyone who would hear her and singing backup to the whistling winds that would come as fall approached. Not yet, though. The heat was still about; all stifling and stasis and immovable. But down the slope of the street, past the arches of her and her hips, was the end of summer, like the coming of a new year, a new epoch. No one in the world owes you anything and you are responsible for the sum of your life. She knew that. Always did, somehow and no one, not the God of the carnival or the lessons she found in the mountain valley taught her that. It was bred inside of her, like soft earth pouring levels of time in through her ears. Autumn was coming, and she’d ride it out until it did. You can feel yourself coming a long while before you moan, and gush and shudder with the heavens and a lover. You can feel it in the works between your legs – small hunched shoulders in quiet conversation planning a revolt against tyranny, that aching, wanting feeling in the pit of your stomach when you kiss someone just right and they pour down your throat and make their way all the way in, the mind melting in slow backwards volcanic ash, slipping away from you as you feel the crux of it coming inside, then out, with him, and then outside of him. And then it belongs to someplace else.

It is the act of letting go of summer, it is the realization that we are dying, and only we can keep the life thrashing and waltzing inside ourselves. We are the gods in charge of our seasons, and how we weave the leaves of early autumn around and through us – breathing heavy, smell of newly struck fires alighting our grounds…the only ones we strive to reach, with each passing touch, and sense of flight.

M. Lucia

PLUTO HAS A NEW MOON aka Penis von Lesbian

Two fifteen.  That's what time it is.  I read the clock but the numbers don't make any sense.  I say them, "two fifteen"...I might as well be saying bacon sans hockey puck.  Those words sound more or less the same for all it means to me.  


"Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams and he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect-like creature."


I get that.  Kafka wrote, of course, in German which might as well be Greek to me.  If someone said that the Metamorphosis begins with this sentence: "Ich bin ein Berlinner das der Fledermaus eins strasse nein brauhaus," I might protest that it sounds a little implausible but really I would have no standing to say it wasn't truly how Kafka began the story in German with any real certainty, not speaking German or ever really having had any prolongued exposure to the language itself, spoken or otherwise.  Well, I guess I would know enough to say that it sounded LIKE German, knowing enough about the sound of the language to ID as such but not really enough to know what any of the words meant, or if the order of the words made any sense grammatically.  But now, even the English translation sounds wrong to me.  I awoke this morning feeling finally like some transformation had finally been completed.  


I have the first sentence memorized of course.  It's Kafka for God's sake.  It's all up here in my brain.  The words in my head sound like they make sense.  As I sit here thinking about the first sentence I know that it's about a guy who wakes up as something very different from the thing he went to bed as.  Human into insect.  I also can grasp the metaphor, the irony, the plot device so cleverly at work in the story.  Is he actually an insect or does he just FEEL like an insect?  What does it mean to be an insect to Gregor Samsa?  What has he lost?  What has he gained?  I can sit here and speculate all these things inside my own head.  The thoughts are something somehow disconnected, I see now, from language itself.  But when I try to say the first sentence out loud: "Bedbug Lagerfeld don frank bend poolside, chick spleen blond glandular hours condition isthmus cloister." 


I listen to myself.  It is my voice.  And I can sense that the words are English.  It is the language I know I used to speak.  I even can think about what some of the words mean, if I focus on them as separate from the rest of the sentence, such as it is.  "Chick" is a baby bird, or a derogatory word for a woman.  "chick spleen blond glandular..." means nothing to me.  


And I get too the inconsistency that you may be thinking about now as I write this--he's writing in English, he's communicating...I understand what he's saying so what's the difference?  The thing is...I only understand this as I write it.  As I am typing the words, because I'm such a capable typist, I can set down the thoughts in my head as they occur to me.  There is little or no interference between my thoughts as I have them and the words as they are typed virtually by my fingers because there is no thought required by me, consciously, to shape the words using the letters of the english language.  I think them and they come out here.  If I go back and read them, as I did just now?  Gibberish.  Plank ink spot driveway clock by mechanism.  That's what I read when I read what I typed.  What the fuck?  


Perhaps those of you more enlightened than I could explain this...maybe it's a psychological problem, yes?  Something perhaps well cured by the administering of a mild anti-depressant?  Something to ease the complications, narrow the pathways, tamp down the high-grown weeds and suppress the unhappy memories that cloud the otherwise well-adjusted marginalia.  Maybe its glandular.  Maybe it's a tumor.  Who's to say?  Not me of course.  I don't speak English anymore, right?  


I heard about a woman who lost the ability to smell; the "sense" of smell, that was what was lost.  She retained the memory of smell, like she felt that she knew what beef stew would smell like, say, if she could "sense" it in the air...but she also knew at the same time that if she were to stand over a stewing pot of meat and vegetables that there would be...nothing.  What kind of way is that to live you might think?  I don't have the answer to that.  


I can't get this tune out of my head...Gene Kelly singing...singing..."Singing in the Rain."  You know it right?  Images are conjured up just by me saying it, referencing it...you can see in your mind's eye, can't you?  Gene Kelly's face upturned, enraptured by the pure joy of water on his face.  Water from the heavens.  Bestowed one might say.  And as I wade into the psychological implications of this memory springing forth for me at this particular juncture in my life, the water is warm, as it were, it seems inviting...I think I get the point(s).  


It is a profound little bit of musical theatre (cinema, more accurately,) because the underpinnings of the song, psychologically speaking, are so fraught with meaning, subtle and otherwise, as to make ones head spin.  First, the simple statement of fact: "I'm singing in the rain."  Seems simple on its surface right?  It is what it is.  He's just saying what it is that he is doing.  Something about the statement seems to preclude interrogation too.  It's a bold statement.  It's more like "I'm singing in the rain and fuck all if you think you're gonna do anything about it."  And then the re-statement of fact, reinforcing the first statement of fact: "Just singing in the rain."  And then the real gist of it all: "what a glorious feeling, I'm happy again."  You see the point?  No?  It is a profound metaphysical state that Gene Kelly's character has reached.  One beyond ordinary language and expressions, whether through words or music, sights, smells or the most tender touch.  Physical fact equals metaphysical state.  I am singing in the rain and I am happy again.  Words fail me.  Well, clearly.  


All mine schadenfreude island ich nick spray nickle nipple chip.   


What would I say if given a lifetime to say it?  Who would listen?