There are little children, designer gear in rags and mismatched smiles across their faces, eyelids pounding open and shut as the drums beat from behind the walls, their own -ruined before they start- heartbeats, you know those that have been decided for them, playing along to the finish-your-own-story game on the dated players, tiny machines that rape and plunder all the way to the point when their premature batteries lose their charge....their blinking shoes laughing at them and their skins peeling from their auras, all the colours slammed down into grey, which is the only freedom they'll ever know. Brats making single cell demands from places which they shouldn't even know how to inhabit yet. At least work your way into your daily greed and sustenance; don't just drink it up in your mother's selfish, inhibited tit as it's shoved into your halfway house mouth, drinking up all the greed you can as early on as you can. "He beat the shit out of me, I know he did......but you know what? I deserved it every time".
It's high time I climbed in and slammed the door of my winged caged bird and took a little trip to every home in sight - next time you scream and demand and insult people, making fun of them and you not even big enough to wear big kid pants yet - I will slap you hard, across the side of your head. Let me guess - you won't be doing that again, now will you. I would like to gather all the spoiled children of this far fetched universe and give them all a good beating....if we beat the greed from their souls early, took away all their toys, gadgets and extras that they do Not need, and made a big happy bonfire of it all............start ‘em young is all I have to say. Make them join the circus, slaughter the herd, feed the others, and clean up the sick, and waste and garbage of those who bore them, and let them see what we've done to each other, all in their sweet and twisted name. The little children shall also inherit the Earth, and a bitter day will come to even them when they realize we all get what we deserve, and nothing more.
Now, that was a midnight rant, but now sitting slightly ill, vulnerable to the point of taking a step back, one can think of it more rationally. Put the spoiled child down somewhat gently, letting go of his hair, and lower the ax, tuck it back behind the fireplace and let’s talk about this. It’s really his parents you need to talk to. People are so concerned with what they Didn’t have as a child, that they want to shower and spoil their children with as much as they can. Well, that’s all well and good, but giving into a whim and a tantrum is not the same thing as instilling into them the idea that they deserve and require and need things.
I, yes now is the point in the story, where the ubiquitous “I” comes into it – I could spend the morning to dinner time outside, with two dogs, the dirt, the sticks, the flowers, the bugs and insects, the rocks and the clothes line – for some reason, when I think of that one day my mother and I were having a showdown, and I curled up fetal on the deep end’s diving board (I’m still hiding out there now, closer and closer to jumping) since she wouldn’t come get me for dinner – she wanted me to come in from outside of my own accord – she knew I was like him and I would never, and she being like Her stubborn father, also wouldn’t give in. She took down the clothes from the line, and it was growing chilly, and grey and windy and I lay there, covering my back and feeling the cold of the diving board, looking at the hill up to the tennis court he built for me (dirt, but exactly to Wimbledon standards and being the anglophile I was even at age eight, it suited me fine) and the long step pyramid like levels of rose bushes he and she planted there – in extended lines, some faring better than others, from red to yellow and speckled and more….I think of that Kafka story about the executed man and the pit – I think I read it at a very early age for some reason but the connection has no bearing on this scene, it just – for some reason – comes back to me every single time I think of it. I don’t remember who gave in, but we ate dinner and it wasn’t the last of the showdowns between her and me.
He then told me the story of our grandfather living with them, in Queens, before he came to our upstate house to live, after his accident. How he kept the apartment upstairs on the 2nd floor of their house, and his father and maternal grandfather were like fire and fire, stoked by oil and the flame on both sides – they did not get along. He, the boy, a notorious troublemaker who knew the streets from a very early age, would run from his father’s belt up to the grandfather for protection, and then when the grandfather threatened, down to his father for the same. He knew the game and ran it with gusto and aplomb. One day, he came home from school and saw his mother, kitchen knife in hand, saying to him “I could have killed the bastard, I could have knifed him” with a smile and probably more than a handful of gin in her belly. Across the house, it was quiet and his father was fixing some odd household thing, and just muttered “woman is crazy”. That’s all he needed to know.
The point, children, you, the ones who expect the whole world to open up since you’re arrived (and I relate, I was the young one of the four siblings/cousins, they all looked at me, never hit (but she should have been is the consensus on that, and I tend to agree) and all smiles and the center of attention, but that was for those I loved – the rest of them could earn my attention, if they so chose, I didn’t run after Anybody, it wasn’t in my bearings to do), the ones who now as adults and still children, with this sense of entitlement – how putrid that sense comes across to me. How selfish, and sorrowful and like a slap in the face to everything earned and deserved. How they ruined the idea of spoiling your child with love.
So, I don’t have the energy to fly around in my mythological slaphappy machine and beat you all. Life will beat you all in time – when you don’t know how to love someone, because you don’t know the meaning of loving Despite vs. loving what is done for you, walking around with your stuffed animal winter hats and big boots like oversized children – afraid of being complete human beings and afraid of someone, something, Anything taking away your toys and your entitlement and then, you are left sucking your big, no-hard-work-has-seen-it thumbs, wondering why the finish-your-own-story game didn’t work out as they told you, it deserved to---let’s hope a few imperfect, un-healthy slaps to the brain will wake you all up to the fact that the story is you, and everyone else at the same time, and we all get what we deserve, and nothing less.
M. Lucia
Thursday, March 31, 2011
Wednesday, March 30, 2011
Monday, March 28, 2011
Late Spring Evening in Dorset
Would I were nestled inside a punk narrative
streaming Cornish coastal kisses, salty dirt
made in the palms of those who anchor and release
my imagination with their tiny, unheard-of
hands
pouring their love into the Celtic sea where
a sky sits on top of them, its arse like cushions
your grandma's holy thighs, cloudy in a shade of blue
milling the peas of green, tempered English light
which just doesn't hold sway on this side of the
Atlantic.
This story of peat and children smelling of wind
their airs perching them up as they make adventures
with nothing but words and their shoes
in an instrument which speaks a language which we all
can feel, but none can hold to us.
So we push away the elusive notes which boggle us
unlike the sheepfolds of sky and rain on that craggy
cliff coast, where suicides beget love affairs beget
all the things which were not take upon, when they
could have been.
The coast and its blue-green punk rock sky remains
in silent scream at our stupidities
while we yell at the children for their dirty feet,
and eyes too wide upon the oncoming sea breeze,
salt in their lids making up stories as they go;
never letting our own fears get in their way.
Can't stop the sky from forming as it does,
always--
have her way.
M. Lucia
Sunday, March 27, 2011
Bodhisattva wins again.
there is a truer, clearer and most naked version of this self
taking up bulky space in the bed where I sleep away the last of these nights;
prodding, dreaming too loud and gathering its notes
ready to pounce at any moment...my two headed dragon dying
burying, celestial rising into one clear woman
with nothing to hide and not a second of life's waking presence
imagined under cover...
dressing herself in the skin of her dead twin,
forgive this messy, difficult process.
If I was meant to remain a longing angel,
or a being greater than the best woman possible,
then I wouldn't be here still, with you, breathing in
and letting go, and gathering in, here she comes now.....
no way out of it. She's got some hip in her step,
and all the best love in her messy, tender heart
and she's smiling a bit....right there with me,
coming on like no tomorrow.
M. Lucia
taking up bulky space in the bed where I sleep away the last of these nights;
prodding, dreaming too loud and gathering its notes
ready to pounce at any moment...my two headed dragon dying
burying, celestial rising into one clear woman
with nothing to hide and not a second of life's waking presence
imagined under cover...
dressing herself in the skin of her dead twin,
forgive this messy, difficult process.
If I was meant to remain a longing angel,
or a being greater than the best woman possible,
then I wouldn't be here still, with you, breathing in
and letting go, and gathering in, here she comes now.....
no way out of it. She's got some hip in her step,
and all the best love in her messy, tender heart
and she's smiling a bit....right there with me,
coming on like no tomorrow.
M. Lucia
Friday, March 25, 2011
Happy Birthday Manifesto
Today, we have still-life bellies that churn.
Today, they run clear past us into the protection of clouds which we do not trust.
We do not trust that they know us.
They cease their forming.
In our stilted numbers, charts and disease DSMs, we malfunction each and every time we come to the same fork in the road, plundered sand before us that doesn’t
Reach.
Invite.
Commune.
We have lost all connections to the prime mover
By obsessing with success and obsessing equally with failing.
By being equally obsessive failures and successes.
By failing to successfully obsess.
If we could reach into the genuflections of our pocket, and climb aboard the mast of the prime mover that sits in our bellies, prodding itself with its own idle time, then we could jump start the clouds and drag race our oblivions into each other, properly awake and with each and every of our so-called diseases riding shotgun into the light oncoming.
Trail-Blazing
-----
M. Lucia
Today, they run clear past us into the protection of clouds which we do not trust.
We do not trust that they know us.
They cease their forming.
In our stilted numbers, charts and disease DSMs, we malfunction each and every time we come to the same fork in the road, plundered sand before us that doesn’t
Reach.
Invite.
Commune.
We have lost all connections to the prime mover
By obsessing with success and obsessing equally with failing.
By being equally obsessive failures and successes.
By failing to successfully obsess.
If we could reach into the genuflections of our pocket, and climb aboard the mast of the prime mover that sits in our bellies, prodding itself with its own idle time, then we could jump start the clouds and drag race our oblivions into each other, properly awake and with each and every of our so-called diseases riding shotgun into the light oncoming.
Trail-Blazing
-----
M. Lucia
Thursday, March 24, 2011
"Look Into Your Heart!": Life Rights
There is something in our not so polite society which I can’t seem to get around. It’s that feeling I get in the pit of my stomach when I see people on television talking about making a difference, and sponsoring themselves in some grand or typical fashion for a cause. The caring and worldly idealistic part of me thinks everyone should help others, more than damn near any other drive in this life. Something that happens, when someone is looking to you for care, and healing and help. I found out years ago that it’s hard for the helpers to get help themselves, and often when you do give that much of yourself, you can get taken advantage of, bled dry, have your own drive, desires and vitality driven from you all the way to the corner of your big toe, cowering like a little battered puppy, unsure of why you got put out so, and how more was never enough, and how when people feel sorry for themselves, and their problems, generally speaking, they are not honoring their humanistic duties. To not only persevere, but to change what it wrong to the best of your ability and rise above it. Even if you have to go around, or dig a new hole out, or slowly build a ladder to the stars in old, bent nails and crooked floorboards, you DO it. There’s no way out of it. When the selfish ones take you and your good works for a ride, you’re left at the side of the road thinking “was that really all about them”? And you wonder, you wonder what good parts of you they took with them….it would be all well and good if they took these little gems of your wellbeing and utilized them, fashioned them into themselves and achieved something More. Usually, though, they stumble upon some other thing that’s shiny and appealing and makes them feel good for a moment or two, and drop what you “gave” or what they got more often than not, and leave it dusty in a ditch between opposing highways somewhere unspoken of down the line. It’s always the ones who cry and yelp and wallow in loud enough voices that you and all with functioning ear drums can hear them at it, who get all the help they need, and don’t take. It’s the quiet ones like us who have to work it out for ourselves, our humilities the thing that sometimes wrecks us in the end.
Well, other than those types, something Does happen when someone is looking at you for care, healing and help. They release their inhibitions, their fears take a back seat and they trust in You. There is almost nothing like this feeling in life. When during the day to day practices of our matchstick existences do people lower their iron veils and trust that you can make it better for them. Inside/out and in again, whether mental, physical, emotional or the like, it doesn’t matter the science of what you are doing to help. But, there is accord with other human beings, and the ultimate of these accords is love. From the level of a healer to a lover to a parent to a god, you’re all in the mix and the structures of heaven cannot stand without you. We are all differentiated nerve endings that shoot off into nowhere, no end, no insertion point, just blank destinations that need us to name them in order that they can grow into something. Still, there are those now who help and help and try in their way and I cannot tear down anything they do. Back now, to the evening television and the people sponsoring names and charities and words across chests and phone numbers at the bottoms of screens. All I can see now in my streamlined eyesight is wastes….waste of time, waste of people, waste of days and brains and emotional states. Did you ever think to add up all the hours wasted with people I can’t stand and would leave a public place if I saw even a few of them present, clattering about nothing and filling my time out with their bullshit? Because I have. I have added, and multiplied and added again. I was not put on this earth to sit here, like this, my back and ass degenerating into moss at the side of the road. This system is blackmail, and nothing more than that. Answers are not needed if you remove the reasoning behind their questions. Nothing Has to be a certain way, yet we tell ourselves it does every single day. Being present and seeing the sun rise like a poem doesn’t remove the fact that most of us live in a bad soap opera, not even one about passion or adventure, but the kind where everybody’s talking all the time and getting nothing done. Years inside our own minds dealing with lovers, and friends and people in our lives who we put up with and not for love, but for complacency, for situationalism, for the day to day security of thinking someone might need us in this world. With energetic vampires that become a bad smell which haunts our auras and injects poison into our veins….forks bruising our skins and palatable insides with its all you can eat buffet, the fat and retarded Americans eating their egg salad and tuna using your backside as a folding table, like there is no tomorrow. Accepting every thing we see in tiny screens and bigger ones, our eyes milky with residue of the machinery that fucks us further into the ground, hour by hour, which presumably will go by another word and system some day soon. Clocks seen so antiquated in this world of invented time, and our second hands are disintegrating before our very eyes, while we chortle sour infected milk through our noses, throngs of assholes on our backs telling them they love us, when they don’t even know by a tenth of one percent what that word really means.
So, now a third time, back to those charitable ventures. The feeling that causes the stomach churning is painted as thus: I hear that American thing, that modern thing, that Thing I can’t seem to get past or abide by, and it makes me back up into the corner of the party every single time. It’s this small frame view of helping people somehow that comes from this right place, but somehow grows fallow on the road between there and here. My mind sees things like this: World Bank, richest people, corporation/business, fucking everyone who isn’t making them richer, leave the poor to remain themselves, with no books to read or moments of leisure, or blank pages of sky on which They themselves can write, without the multitude of those working for the first set telling them just how much they are allowed to do. Then you have the somewhat well to do types, trying to help the little guy, when the card game for the little guy was fixed eons and eons ago – at the very least, the last half century constricted that collar so tight on this slave that he buys his technological toys, listens and watches shit in every shape and colour and design they have out there (and boy do they have a Lot these days) and doesn’t feel it getting tighter and tighter on his neck every moment. A bead of sweat, a feeling of closing in, one chink less in the chain dangling him above the firepit of ultimate despair (in which he’s probably just fall past flames into a 9-5 and some car payments and guilt shoved down his throat by people who hurt whom he did not hurt who need him to work to save, when they them the first set of revelers would rather stamp out a nation to make their day better than give to them, or to you or me or anyone not tethered closely to their side). Now, this small frame view as said is a drop in the bucket and a drop is better than no drop one would assume, but you then get back to that cycle of waste – time, people vampires, emotional fucknots which we think we need to survive, excuses and roadblocks which keep the winds of change off of us, work to get to the buffet on time, etc…..and how let’s take this one paid ad commercial about sponsoring a charity. They (those who demand the collars on the rest of us) sit back and let this chain be built – organizations, LLCs, business dealings, paperwork, accounting, people employed and taxed and put upon, equipment, cables, making and constructing, metal, wires, buildings, rent, events, media, glass, cameras, t-shirts, phone calls, and what’s more, monies going to other organizations, and eventually people are helped….but all of that in between, how can it be living? When each step gags someone on the chain, and they still sit, unfettered by emotional and trust and love. I sigh, and sit back, on my ass which I hit awake and tell to get the hell into the streams of highway ahead of it, and think it all unfair. And that we, and no one else, keep ourselves in darkness and waste and outward spirals into nothingness, when we could have it all starting NOW.
M. Lucia
Well, other than those types, something Does happen when someone is looking at you for care, healing and help. They release their inhibitions, their fears take a back seat and they trust in You. There is almost nothing like this feeling in life. When during the day to day practices of our matchstick existences do people lower their iron veils and trust that you can make it better for them. Inside/out and in again, whether mental, physical, emotional or the like, it doesn’t matter the science of what you are doing to help. But, there is accord with other human beings, and the ultimate of these accords is love. From the level of a healer to a lover to a parent to a god, you’re all in the mix and the structures of heaven cannot stand without you. We are all differentiated nerve endings that shoot off into nowhere, no end, no insertion point, just blank destinations that need us to name them in order that they can grow into something. Still, there are those now who help and help and try in their way and I cannot tear down anything they do. Back now, to the evening television and the people sponsoring names and charities and words across chests and phone numbers at the bottoms of screens. All I can see now in my streamlined eyesight is wastes….waste of time, waste of people, waste of days and brains and emotional states. Did you ever think to add up all the hours wasted with people I can’t stand and would leave a public place if I saw even a few of them present, clattering about nothing and filling my time out with their bullshit? Because I have. I have added, and multiplied and added again. I was not put on this earth to sit here, like this, my back and ass degenerating into moss at the side of the road. This system is blackmail, and nothing more than that. Answers are not needed if you remove the reasoning behind their questions. Nothing Has to be a certain way, yet we tell ourselves it does every single day. Being present and seeing the sun rise like a poem doesn’t remove the fact that most of us live in a bad soap opera, not even one about passion or adventure, but the kind where everybody’s talking all the time and getting nothing done. Years inside our own minds dealing with lovers, and friends and people in our lives who we put up with and not for love, but for complacency, for situationalism, for the day to day security of thinking someone might need us in this world. With energetic vampires that become a bad smell which haunts our auras and injects poison into our veins….forks bruising our skins and palatable insides with its all you can eat buffet, the fat and retarded Americans eating their egg salad and tuna using your backside as a folding table, like there is no tomorrow. Accepting every thing we see in tiny screens and bigger ones, our eyes milky with residue of the machinery that fucks us further into the ground, hour by hour, which presumably will go by another word and system some day soon. Clocks seen so antiquated in this world of invented time, and our second hands are disintegrating before our very eyes, while we chortle sour infected milk through our noses, throngs of assholes on our backs telling them they love us, when they don’t even know by a tenth of one percent what that word really means.
So, now a third time, back to those charitable ventures. The feeling that causes the stomach churning is painted as thus: I hear that American thing, that modern thing, that Thing I can’t seem to get past or abide by, and it makes me back up into the corner of the party every single time. It’s this small frame view of helping people somehow that comes from this right place, but somehow grows fallow on the road between there and here. My mind sees things like this: World Bank, richest people, corporation/business, fucking everyone who isn’t making them richer, leave the poor to remain themselves, with no books to read or moments of leisure, or blank pages of sky on which They themselves can write, without the multitude of those working for the first set telling them just how much they are allowed to do. Then you have the somewhat well to do types, trying to help the little guy, when the card game for the little guy was fixed eons and eons ago – at the very least, the last half century constricted that collar so tight on this slave that he buys his technological toys, listens and watches shit in every shape and colour and design they have out there (and boy do they have a Lot these days) and doesn’t feel it getting tighter and tighter on his neck every moment. A bead of sweat, a feeling of closing in, one chink less in the chain dangling him above the firepit of ultimate despair (in which he’s probably just fall past flames into a 9-5 and some car payments and guilt shoved down his throat by people who hurt whom he did not hurt who need him to work to save, when they them the first set of revelers would rather stamp out a nation to make their day better than give to them, or to you or me or anyone not tethered closely to their side). Now, this small frame view as said is a drop in the bucket and a drop is better than no drop one would assume, but you then get back to that cycle of waste – time, people vampires, emotional fucknots which we think we need to survive, excuses and roadblocks which keep the winds of change off of us, work to get to the buffet on time, etc…..and how let’s take this one paid ad commercial about sponsoring a charity. They (those who demand the collars on the rest of us) sit back and let this chain be built – organizations, LLCs, business dealings, paperwork, accounting, people employed and taxed and put upon, equipment, cables, making and constructing, metal, wires, buildings, rent, events, media, glass, cameras, t-shirts, phone calls, and what’s more, monies going to other organizations, and eventually people are helped….but all of that in between, how can it be living? When each step gags someone on the chain, and they still sit, unfettered by emotional and trust and love. I sigh, and sit back, on my ass which I hit awake and tell to get the hell into the streams of highway ahead of it, and think it all unfair. And that we, and no one else, keep ourselves in darkness and waste and outward spirals into nothingness, when we could have it all starting NOW.
M. Lucia
Wednesday, March 23, 2011
For the 23rd of March (part 2 of 2)
So, own personal daddy of mine, here we are again. I cannot believe I saw your brown eyes look at me for the very last time a whole four years ago on the next evening I see. My dreams last night were strange, and while in the apartment I once knew, with them and the baby, and other babies, this version had a little Boy with strawberry hair like hers, and a little girl with dark hair like his, but then you were....in some form, like a skinny intruder of some kind, walking through the place, I hated the fact that you rarely if ever speak in my dreams....you are simply there, in the familiar places, but without words and I have to assign them onto you, and I just refuse to. You might know that the world you live in now is not for talking, and that there are better ways......still, rose oil is burning and our mother said you talked people's ears off, and that's the way you liked it. I did too. In this dream past, you walked out of the window and started to balance on the outside fire escape, but then this horrible REAL feeling of you fainting, falling back onto the railing and through it and down down down, and then my mother was there and the dark pitted feeling went away, and we thought (or I said) something about you saying the most marvellous declarations about life and going out there with a bang and it was OK. You had died, and just came to life again like a misshapen zombie, to remind us of what we all were, and still had in some parts of us. But then, we looked out, and you popped up - alive, again, courting the air and with us, but further from the presence you gave us a moment of, and in another screen, channel and plane. You also had a baby in your coat - the realization that he was there all along co-existed with the fact that he should have died too, but didn't. He was alive, and smiling and off you went. Always off - I guess now that your body doesn't ache like it did, you had better places to be than reassuring us of your safety. You always told me to be safe was one of the most important things.
I'm now younger, more cocksure and with less smarts, and as usual, I'm getting out of the train at Poughkeepsie, the end of the line. Up north, where you found mountains that reminded you of the homeland, and where you kept on building despite doctor's orders. There you were, every time, sitting in the white car, as I know it now, my old man's car that I drive around the neighborhood. Big, oversized baseball cap on, one of many, our mom kept some from you which had your smell, of the many we used to buy you for all the times you'd be working - some random corporation names we got for free from our place of employ, some things like CIA or FBI......it seemed funny, yet right for you to wear those....some place of authority you belonged, in the dirt and the nail beds. Big, on your small head, which I inherited - we had little heads, unlike the pumpkin craniums which my mother and brother shared, which we did still love ever as much. I'd climb those station stairs, with my oversized duffle bag for the weekend, cold in winter or rain, a short walk, or the time in late summer I turned 30 and had a boy on each arm, knowing full well which one you'd like the best...the one that told stories like you, even though he was barely out of his teens. I'd see you there, parked perpendicular to the parked cars, always out of the way but where I could see you, and then our carride would commence.
I can't count on my hands, toes or thoughts how many carrides we shared - in station wagons, pathfinders, the Subaru which was a stick shift, which you always said you'd teach me but I never learned. Through the woods, and the lone two lane highway, route 9 or similar, to whatever home we were in at the time, but none so pure as the last one, in Catskill, on Paradise Lake Road. How perfect an ending place for us as this here family, only I wish it was still in my hands, beneath my feet. I wish those porches where I found morning sun with my coffee, those back porches I looked through hanging laundry at green, endless, and rain and where we entertained the ones I called my own for that short breadth of time.
That carride wherein the dead trees of winter on either side of us framed the journey we took together numerous times, or the bright sun of summer in the car where the A/C didn't work very well. I would usually recline, nap if I had been out late the night before, or listen to some quiet tapes I still hoarded in the vehicle, which you didn't mind listening to, if I included some old country, or your favourite song which I play for your every single year - "Highwayman"......something always punches me in the gut when Johnny, who as an older man reminded me of you, except that you never got an old man's girth - your work ethic and European frugal necessity about food (not wine however, which you and I could dispatch together without reason and with no bad feelings whatsoever...it was like a hangover from your shared jug was impossible to achieve) prevented you from too much girth or sinew, when Johnny sang "Or I may simply be a single drop of rain....but I will remain...and I'll be back again and again and again..." Always, and never will you be away from us. You were the friend who knew me best, and I'm afraid it's sometimes terrible to not have you around anymore. We fought as well, occasionally, being so alike.
Still, I talk to you. Even if you prefer silence in my dreams, I'm talking to you. Our carride is happening on many nights, when I am falling asleep, or wake up troubled for a few moments, I'm back there. In that car with you, driving me home from the train station. We talk, you emphasize my mistakes and yours, and yet at the same time how you cannot change what has occurred, you can simply learn from those mistakes and start with the next breath, all of these actions a blueprint in your dreamer architect's head, the lines and swinging doors always possible. How you were the most gregarious and social and talkative chap around (you would never use the word chap), but Americans didn't like that, and sometimes made you retreat, and feel mean, and I now understand, as I did just a little then. The stories you told the boys who should have been men that I brought home in those last years, when I learned to be bold, about spending Christmas Day more than once on the streets in Zagreb, when you left home and your father who didn't appreciate your black sheep's qualities like your beautiful mother did. How you didn't even know it was Christmas, and you didn't tell this story to be boastful of your resolve, but to simply share the idea that hard times make the good times you learn to say yes to better, how each day means something unique and powerful to you, no matter if any old weekday, or Christmas Day itself, whether a million people care for you or just one. How you could count your true friends on the fingers of one hand, and nature taught you everything you trusted and the real you was something to be lived through and not hidden, shamed or shoved to the side. That living your life in honesty and aliveness as yourself didn't have to hurt or demean anyone and that it was not only your right as a human being, and a man in your case, but your duty, how you wanted to help me me build or restore a home when I was convinced I was moving to England or Ireland to live in an old stone house with some fellow I had to run off to, who I didn't know yet. Even then, you said you wanted to help, even if you'd be over 80 - you knew your fire burned twice and more for all of us, and you loved the fire itself. Bringing light to your earth, all aglow.
You wished and earnestly were convinced that you really should be able to live at least to 150, possibly on the way to two lifetimes...you just needed more time, and resources and sunsets to light your plans by. Well, I can tell you I have failed not too often, I have not tried in many things like I should, but every single morning I find a few more inches of gaul, or courage with safety built in, of myself even when I know you probably wouldn't have understood or approved. You knew the important equations between us and in which we both found life and that's all that I keep with me. Soon I'll be standing in the Roman palace again, where you carried me home from the opera in the breezy summer night, me asleep and safe under the stars of your home. Soon, I'll stand in the center of your village, where the famous sculptor whose family you knew resided, and I'll climb that same knotty tree I did as a five year old, reinventing and making alchemy out of your old superstitions, which you didn't put too much stock in. You preferred a destiny with all possibilities.
Our carride takes me down every road and every possibility each time I start again. Being a humanist as you so loved to call your European mind, which knew trees, granite streets and wooden frames of every house that mattered in the solar system of tarot cards we people call our well to do fashioned lives, you and I ride together many a night, you talking and me listening, and vice versa, napping, looking and dreaming at the tops of trees, and the oncoming stars of the night sky in paradise, as we let the world know who we are, and see who comes out to greet us when we turn off the highway and find our way home. Happy anniversary from the start of your trip with no words necessary on the universe divide, my own personal daddy. I'm still me, don't you know, mostly thanks to you.
M. Lucia
I'm now younger, more cocksure and with less smarts, and as usual, I'm getting out of the train at Poughkeepsie, the end of the line. Up north, where you found mountains that reminded you of the homeland, and where you kept on building despite doctor's orders. There you were, every time, sitting in the white car, as I know it now, my old man's car that I drive around the neighborhood. Big, oversized baseball cap on, one of many, our mom kept some from you which had your smell, of the many we used to buy you for all the times you'd be working - some random corporation names we got for free from our place of employ, some things like CIA or FBI......it seemed funny, yet right for you to wear those....some place of authority you belonged, in the dirt and the nail beds. Big, on your small head, which I inherited - we had little heads, unlike the pumpkin craniums which my mother and brother shared, which we did still love ever as much. I'd climb those station stairs, with my oversized duffle bag for the weekend, cold in winter or rain, a short walk, or the time in late summer I turned 30 and had a boy on each arm, knowing full well which one you'd like the best...the one that told stories like you, even though he was barely out of his teens. I'd see you there, parked perpendicular to the parked cars, always out of the way but where I could see you, and then our carride would commence.
I can't count on my hands, toes or thoughts how many carrides we shared - in station wagons, pathfinders, the Subaru which was a stick shift, which you always said you'd teach me but I never learned. Through the woods, and the lone two lane highway, route 9 or similar, to whatever home we were in at the time, but none so pure as the last one, in Catskill, on Paradise Lake Road. How perfect an ending place for us as this here family, only I wish it was still in my hands, beneath my feet. I wish those porches where I found morning sun with my coffee, those back porches I looked through hanging laundry at green, endless, and rain and where we entertained the ones I called my own for that short breadth of time.
That carride wherein the dead trees of winter on either side of us framed the journey we took together numerous times, or the bright sun of summer in the car where the A/C didn't work very well. I would usually recline, nap if I had been out late the night before, or listen to some quiet tapes I still hoarded in the vehicle, which you didn't mind listening to, if I included some old country, or your favourite song which I play for your every single year - "Highwayman"......something always punches me in the gut when Johnny, who as an older man reminded me of you, except that you never got an old man's girth - your work ethic and European frugal necessity about food (not wine however, which you and I could dispatch together without reason and with no bad feelings whatsoever...it was like a hangover from your shared jug was impossible to achieve) prevented you from too much girth or sinew, when Johnny sang "Or I may simply be a single drop of rain....but I will remain...and I'll be back again and again and again..." Always, and never will you be away from us. You were the friend who knew me best, and I'm afraid it's sometimes terrible to not have you around anymore. We fought as well, occasionally, being so alike.
Still, I talk to you. Even if you prefer silence in my dreams, I'm talking to you. Our carride is happening on many nights, when I am falling asleep, or wake up troubled for a few moments, I'm back there. In that car with you, driving me home from the train station. We talk, you emphasize my mistakes and yours, and yet at the same time how you cannot change what has occurred, you can simply learn from those mistakes and start with the next breath, all of these actions a blueprint in your dreamer architect's head, the lines and swinging doors always possible. How you were the most gregarious and social and talkative chap around (you would never use the word chap), but Americans didn't like that, and sometimes made you retreat, and feel mean, and I now understand, as I did just a little then. The stories you told the boys who should have been men that I brought home in those last years, when I learned to be bold, about spending Christmas Day more than once on the streets in Zagreb, when you left home and your father who didn't appreciate your black sheep's qualities like your beautiful mother did. How you didn't even know it was Christmas, and you didn't tell this story to be boastful of your resolve, but to simply share the idea that hard times make the good times you learn to say yes to better, how each day means something unique and powerful to you, no matter if any old weekday, or Christmas Day itself, whether a million people care for you or just one. How you could count your true friends on the fingers of one hand, and nature taught you everything you trusted and the real you was something to be lived through and not hidden, shamed or shoved to the side. That living your life in honesty and aliveness as yourself didn't have to hurt or demean anyone and that it was not only your right as a human being, and a man in your case, but your duty, how you wanted to help me me build or restore a home when I was convinced I was moving to England or Ireland to live in an old stone house with some fellow I had to run off to, who I didn't know yet. Even then, you said you wanted to help, even if you'd be over 80 - you knew your fire burned twice and more for all of us, and you loved the fire itself. Bringing light to your earth, all aglow.
You wished and earnestly were convinced that you really should be able to live at least to 150, possibly on the way to two lifetimes...you just needed more time, and resources and sunsets to light your plans by. Well, I can tell you I have failed not too often, I have not tried in many things like I should, but every single morning I find a few more inches of gaul, or courage with safety built in, of myself even when I know you probably wouldn't have understood or approved. You knew the important equations between us and in which we both found life and that's all that I keep with me. Soon I'll be standing in the Roman palace again, where you carried me home from the opera in the breezy summer night, me asleep and safe under the stars of your home. Soon, I'll stand in the center of your village, where the famous sculptor whose family you knew resided, and I'll climb that same knotty tree I did as a five year old, reinventing and making alchemy out of your old superstitions, which you didn't put too much stock in. You preferred a destiny with all possibilities.
Our carride takes me down every road and every possibility each time I start again. Being a humanist as you so loved to call your European mind, which knew trees, granite streets and wooden frames of every house that mattered in the solar system of tarot cards we people call our well to do fashioned lives, you and I ride together many a night, you talking and me listening, and vice versa, napping, looking and dreaming at the tops of trees, and the oncoming stars of the night sky in paradise, as we let the world know who we are, and see who comes out to greet us when we turn off the highway and find our way home. Happy anniversary from the start of your trip with no words necessary on the universe divide, my own personal daddy. I'm still me, don't you know, mostly thanks to you.
M. Lucia
Monday, March 21, 2011
Vernal Equinox Haiku
Part four: Rite of Spring
back of our throats with meat, moon-
shine. Life...one big toast
M. Lucia
back of our throats with meat, moon-
shine. Life...one big toast
M. Lucia
Saturday, March 19, 2011
The Story of HA
I want to tell you the story. The one I wrote on blue paper, from the office, which I lost somehow. I get angry, even tonight, about the fact that I lost it. I can't understand how I could throw away even accidentally the story of Gabriel, born of the two people I love the most in this life, at least in these years, in these times, through all the men and boys and in the place I call home, like no other. This is a different language, I suppose, the one with which I was meant to speak it. So, here it comes.
Heather and Ariel are my family. There is no other way to say it. She is a voluptuous, red headed fire woman whose anniversary of living in Red Hook is exactly one year before mine. A German Ohio farm girl who converted to Judaism for the love of a beautiful Sephardic Jewish man, from Brooklyn, via Israel, Chicago, and Brooklyn again, his mother born in Casablanca says it all really. They laugh at fart jokes, enact the very same in my presence, are the archetypes for mother and father, opposites who cannot live without the other's presence, always and forever....I had always thought them a beautiful pair, sexual in the most open ways possible...H once gave A a blow job on my couch when I was in the adjoining apartment, many years ago, just a few months after I moved in, and afterwards, when they sat there, her getting up and giggling the timbre of a flock of baby birds who just found out they can fly, I knew that she loved him more than anything she gave her name to in this world, and it was gorgeous, and alive and kicking and breathing and all that I wanted for myself, and nothing less.
I was the right hand woman throughout the pregnancy, and all the women in red hook like me wanted a boy - we were the sort of women who didn't like other girls, and all referred to ourselves as "guy girls" which could be a blessing and a curse. I was already named as the hot neighbour lady who would offer the boy his first boner.....a title which I held to and respected, in case you wondered. Nothing wrong with that. It was magical, and everyone - EVERYONE - knew it was two incredible lovely people who CHOSE to do this, even though it was a technical accident in Costa Rica - that weekend I stayed at DWK's place yet again, and he moaned at me when I walked up his steep stairs, the day after the night he had himself in me, and me reciting the alphabet backwards, pleasuring me with every part I got right, and lack of pleasure punishing me for all that I got wrong (I didn't get much wrong), and then he walked up the stairs behind me, in my tight red summer dress and no underwear, not showering since I'd been with him last, on purpose of course, I loved smelling him and feeling that he was still inside me, his tongue in my mouth, his mind at my feet, all of it was alive and there with me, when A and I dropped off their old and non neutered dog at the Wallace K household, and his dog, the white pit bull who I love and miss so much, tried to mount the Rottweiler and there was spit, and fluids, and we laughed our asses off and drank beer while the dogs settled in together for the length of this Costa Rica trip. So, he moaned behind me, my summer red ass leading the way, the red spanking marks of his hands still on me beneath the fabric, and his sounds fully letting me know that he wanted me again in his bed with no headboard, the sun shining too bright as he pulled me into his knowing of me further than ever.
I had went out, on that night in question, in the inappropriate black dress, sandals and necklace. I went into the bar once I knew she was in labor, and got them hamburgers and delivered cupcakes that I had made just a few days before...the horrid teal icing, which was for my friend who loved the colour more than most things she ever knew. The birth went on, at home, through the night, they had been though all the classes and he had been ready nearly too. She bought him his favourite bourbon since he deserved it, and I sleep with awful, misunderstood and murky dreams that night. Red Hook is quiet - there was no big night down at the Irish bar, and the streets were silent, our windows open, and I heard no sound of babies crying......come 6:19am, I awoke, as their same Rottweiler who would be put to sleep a couple weeks later, banged at the door between my apartment and my neighbour's, and I awoke to silence, and knew it was wrong (baby's birth time was 6:19am). I sat on the opposite side's couch and called her best friend, and then....sirens....awful sounds they are. I went down to go to work, and saw the ambulances cross the wrong way on the street, and I knew what was happening, but I was so incredibly in denial. I texted on the bus, called, nothing. Then, at the job I returned to, for reasons I now know of, being myself like I've been gifted to be again, and all, A called me at 10:30 and explained rather calmly but clearly in shock, that the night was long, the labour intense, and it was a "crazy day"....and when asked about the baby, he just said, without hesitation or sighs of any kind (this was after I learned he stood there, beautiful, sensitive and strong A, in the emergency room, watching them admirably try to do CPR on his son, and failing, but he stayed, and watched and waited) that "he just didn't make it".......I later went with their best friend, now the woman who shares my top floor, and saw them emerge from each other's wounded arms from their bedroom, that he built onto her huge and voluptuous studio loft, in addition to the baby room, in tears and shock and an outpouring that I could never and hope never to understand.
Later that night, we watched stupid films and ate McDonald's, and he and she held hands across my lap and we cried and laughed and talked about porn and he told us that when he went to the roof to smoke, that the name of the boy came to him.....the Hebrew word Neshema, which means soul and also breath, and since their son (he made sure to tell her that she was a mother, and IS a mother and no one could take that from her, even though it all felt like a horrible dream to her) couldn't take his breath, it was the perfect name for him, as the stars shot across the black sky. He came over to her, vulnerable and open and herself, all pistons firing, and kissed her hard on the mouth and said "well, I'm bound to you, and that's it. Forever" the sort of promise most people couldn't keep for a tenth of a lifetime, they had it in their own personal pain which was mine, and the world's and then...............................................................after 6 months of recovery and shame and guilt and inappropriate laughter, and trying and living, she got the Lola bean in her, on her birthday, when he proposed to her, and she, drunk, walked out of the bathroom with her pants around her ankles and crying for some over dramatic reason she was prone to, and he laughed and said "you really want me to do this right now, like this" and she didn't say no, so he got down on bended knee, and though the ceremony still hasn't taken place, they've been married since before they were born. And the double fortune baby, the sister of Gabriel Neshemah, was born perfectly, soundly and safely in that following fall late night, and the name of Lola became a legend - a girl who is ready to stand up, fight and leave us all to better adventures at 4 months old, with her grey blue eyes, laughing smile and perfection which none of us could figure out just yet.....makes the loss of Gabriel a gain, and our lives a sanctified remembrance of circumstance. Our lives are just our own, and god is just our watchmen, don't you know. I love you, and there are few I know who have lived their lives as themselves as fully, honestly, without excuse and with all the passion this world has to offer, and with as many grins, laughs, folds and visceral embarrassments as you two. You are Adam and Eve, in reversed cowgirl, roles unclear, lips kissing til the end of time, through the darkest hours and the lightest of tears, now and forever marked with the loss that makes you gain everything - each second you can, and will and do. Look up to the sky - the shape it is forming, is in honour of you.
M. Lucia
Heather and Ariel are my family. There is no other way to say it. She is a voluptuous, red headed fire woman whose anniversary of living in Red Hook is exactly one year before mine. A German Ohio farm girl who converted to Judaism for the love of a beautiful Sephardic Jewish man, from Brooklyn, via Israel, Chicago, and Brooklyn again, his mother born in Casablanca says it all really. They laugh at fart jokes, enact the very same in my presence, are the archetypes for mother and father, opposites who cannot live without the other's presence, always and forever....I had always thought them a beautiful pair, sexual in the most open ways possible...H once gave A a blow job on my couch when I was in the adjoining apartment, many years ago, just a few months after I moved in, and afterwards, when they sat there, her getting up and giggling the timbre of a flock of baby birds who just found out they can fly, I knew that she loved him more than anything she gave her name to in this world, and it was gorgeous, and alive and kicking and breathing and all that I wanted for myself, and nothing less.
I was the right hand woman throughout the pregnancy, and all the women in red hook like me wanted a boy - we were the sort of women who didn't like other girls, and all referred to ourselves as "guy girls" which could be a blessing and a curse. I was already named as the hot neighbour lady who would offer the boy his first boner.....a title which I held to and respected, in case you wondered. Nothing wrong with that. It was magical, and everyone - EVERYONE - knew it was two incredible lovely people who CHOSE to do this, even though it was a technical accident in Costa Rica - that weekend I stayed at DWK's place yet again, and he moaned at me when I walked up his steep stairs, the day after the night he had himself in me, and me reciting the alphabet backwards, pleasuring me with every part I got right, and lack of pleasure punishing me for all that I got wrong (I didn't get much wrong), and then he walked up the stairs behind me, in my tight red summer dress and no underwear, not showering since I'd been with him last, on purpose of course, I loved smelling him and feeling that he was still inside me, his tongue in my mouth, his mind at my feet, all of it was alive and there with me, when A and I dropped off their old and non neutered dog at the Wallace K household, and his dog, the white pit bull who I love and miss so much, tried to mount the Rottweiler and there was spit, and fluids, and we laughed our asses off and drank beer while the dogs settled in together for the length of this Costa Rica trip. So, he moaned behind me, my summer red ass leading the way, the red spanking marks of his hands still on me beneath the fabric, and his sounds fully letting me know that he wanted me again in his bed with no headboard, the sun shining too bright as he pulled me into his knowing of me further than ever.
I had went out, on that night in question, in the inappropriate black dress, sandals and necklace. I went into the bar once I knew she was in labor, and got them hamburgers and delivered cupcakes that I had made just a few days before...the horrid teal icing, which was for my friend who loved the colour more than most things she ever knew. The birth went on, at home, through the night, they had been though all the classes and he had been ready nearly too. She bought him his favourite bourbon since he deserved it, and I sleep with awful, misunderstood and murky dreams that night. Red Hook is quiet - there was no big night down at the Irish bar, and the streets were silent, our windows open, and I heard no sound of babies crying......come 6:19am, I awoke, as their same Rottweiler who would be put to sleep a couple weeks later, banged at the door between my apartment and my neighbour's, and I awoke to silence, and knew it was wrong (baby's birth time was 6:19am). I sat on the opposite side's couch and called her best friend, and then....sirens....awful sounds they are. I went down to go to work, and saw the ambulances cross the wrong way on the street, and I knew what was happening, but I was so incredibly in denial. I texted on the bus, called, nothing. Then, at the job I returned to, for reasons I now know of, being myself like I've been gifted to be again, and all, A called me at 10:30 and explained rather calmly but clearly in shock, that the night was long, the labour intense, and it was a "crazy day"....and when asked about the baby, he just said, without hesitation or sighs of any kind (this was after I learned he stood there, beautiful, sensitive and strong A, in the emergency room, watching them admirably try to do CPR on his son, and failing, but he stayed, and watched and waited) that "he just didn't make it".......I later went with their best friend, now the woman who shares my top floor, and saw them emerge from each other's wounded arms from their bedroom, that he built onto her huge and voluptuous studio loft, in addition to the baby room, in tears and shock and an outpouring that I could never and hope never to understand.
Later that night, we watched stupid films and ate McDonald's, and he and she held hands across my lap and we cried and laughed and talked about porn and he told us that when he went to the roof to smoke, that the name of the boy came to him.....the Hebrew word Neshema, which means soul and also breath, and since their son (he made sure to tell her that she was a mother, and IS a mother and no one could take that from her, even though it all felt like a horrible dream to her) couldn't take his breath, it was the perfect name for him, as the stars shot across the black sky. He came over to her, vulnerable and open and herself, all pistons firing, and kissed her hard on the mouth and said "well, I'm bound to you, and that's it. Forever" the sort of promise most people couldn't keep for a tenth of a lifetime, they had it in their own personal pain which was mine, and the world's and then...............................................................after 6 months of recovery and shame and guilt and inappropriate laughter, and trying and living, she got the Lola bean in her, on her birthday, when he proposed to her, and she, drunk, walked out of the bathroom with her pants around her ankles and crying for some over dramatic reason she was prone to, and he laughed and said "you really want me to do this right now, like this" and she didn't say no, so he got down on bended knee, and though the ceremony still hasn't taken place, they've been married since before they were born. And the double fortune baby, the sister of Gabriel Neshemah, was born perfectly, soundly and safely in that following fall late night, and the name of Lola became a legend - a girl who is ready to stand up, fight and leave us all to better adventures at 4 months old, with her grey blue eyes, laughing smile and perfection which none of us could figure out just yet.....makes the loss of Gabriel a gain, and our lives a sanctified remembrance of circumstance. Our lives are just our own, and god is just our watchmen, don't you know. I love you, and there are few I know who have lived their lives as themselves as fully, honestly, without excuse and with all the passion this world has to offer, and with as many grins, laughs, folds and visceral embarrassments as you two. You are Adam and Eve, in reversed cowgirl, roles unclear, lips kissing til the end of time, through the darkest hours and the lightest of tears, now and forever marked with the loss that makes you gain everything - each second you can, and will and do. Look up to the sky - the shape it is forming, is in honour of you.
M. Lucia
Thursday, March 17, 2011
The Serpent Tamer
I can feel the snakes rattling from inside their beds in this earth
someone sees their mounded ridges forming a hesitation
a call to arms that only reaches our chest once it's too late for us
our notes plucking themselves to a business that makes us not our own
a sadness too far reaching and tight gripped that we cannot wrestle with it
dance, fall in love or sing to it like we should.
The snakes are mingling now, the din of secret selves
the soundboard of disaster in their tongues,
hissing and begging us to listen and feel them coming for us.
All our lives spent tossing and turning,
away from the feeling of this pain which they carry as a burden to their backs
to be kissed like a shot right through and into us,
and our feet still, planted firmly on this earth, their heaven
while superstitious familial stars break up stagnations in our own
personal skies. We let our hands fall from their defences
our minds smile wide and our lives move onward and so forth...
A trickle down of triumph, momentary lapse of reason
and the snakes keep their moving, their invisible hands never at rest
as they eat through the dirt, rock and sinew
and show us who we really could be, standing there under our shared
idea of Heaven.
M. Lucia
someone sees their mounded ridges forming a hesitation
a call to arms that only reaches our chest once it's too late for us
our notes plucking themselves to a business that makes us not our own
a sadness too far reaching and tight gripped that we cannot wrestle with it
dance, fall in love or sing to it like we should.
The snakes are mingling now, the din of secret selves
the soundboard of disaster in their tongues,
hissing and begging us to listen and feel them coming for us.
All our lives spent tossing and turning,
away from the feeling of this pain which they carry as a burden to their backs
to be kissed like a shot right through and into us,
and our feet still, planted firmly on this earth, their heaven
while superstitious familial stars break up stagnations in our own
personal skies. We let our hands fall from their defences
our minds smile wide and our lives move onward and so forth...
A trickle down of triumph, momentary lapse of reason
and the snakes keep their moving, their invisible hands never at rest
as they eat through the dirt, rock and sinew
and show us who we really could be, standing there under our shared
idea of Heaven.
M. Lucia
Saoirse
Looking back, I guess it was a tad dangerous to travel up to Belfast from Dublin, by bus during that week in February when all the Catholic cab drivers were being shot by RHD, UVF, UDA etc…..leading to back and forth from the IRA, the “real” IRA and all the rest. The bus ride was pleasant enough and started, in the early morning, in the dark, at the Bus Eireann station on O’Connell Street. I had walked in the dark from Raglan Road, past the windswept trees blowing their bits and wares past the US Embassy (which I would be visiting shortly after this trip), and down Pembroke to Northumberland to Lower Mount, Merrion Square and a handful of other streets in getting to Trinity…for this morning, past some gypsy kids from the Liberties, out early, stealing themselves a little morning light as it begged coming onto us, on their horses, dirty and skinny, and over the O’Connell Street bridge to the station.
I met friends of mine who were making the journey with me, myself to see my then Belfast boy, the only redhead I could ever abide by, with an old man’s soul. He was already up there and we were staying nearby his family’s house, as his relatives were also in town. The heavily made up woman with big jowls and wide pants lapels at the shop outside the bus station was singing loud and at the top of her voice, the Celine Dion song from TITANIC, because it was being played everywhere people were known to breathe. Most of the people in the brightly lit shop were quietly enjoying her singing, and while it wasn’t her best, she meant it and that’s all the Irish really care about. Whether You care about Something. Got my tea and my Tayto’s and something like onion and cheese on a bap and we loaded up. The journey went though town after town until we got to Northern Ireland, and the towns, well, they didn’t change much, but for the occasional flag whose colours I didn’t quite recognize. The people of the North I liked – they weren’t so pleased as those down in the South. They had problems – old, massive, hurting and ancient problems and you could read it across their faces. Another friend of mine once made her Irish face look like the people in Donegal, in the North, who always had a face on them that looked like it was fighting the wind blowing at them. It usually did, and Ireland was the place wherein I learned that wind could drive you mad, make you curse, lift your skirt and show your arse to the world and have a personality all its own. These people made those windy faces. Caught up in it, like me.
By the time we got to Belfast, he was waiting for us and we went straight to his house for dinner with his parents, both teachers, both Catholic. He exclaimed once that his parents always went on vacation in August, as it was marching season and they preferred not to be around for all that. I liked them immediately, just as I liked him immediately. Their house was sweet and small, and he then drove me out to where I was staying with my friend’s group, who happened to be Protestant, and happened to be in the Protestant section of town (no more than an eight minute walk, but many universes away within levels of danger, circumstance and feeling). Walking past those murals as we did throughout the weekend, back and forth over the tiny bridge and from catholic to protestant enclave and back again, it is immense what energies you feel. Those murals were like nothing I've ever seen before and still none like them to this day - the colours, the faces, the combinations of righteous, mythological and political symbols as they extended to their catholic or protestant gods.....I'd have to crack their heads open and go at them for a hundred years before I could ever see even more than an inch into those thick, wielding forests of hate, reactionaryisms, pride and mourning.
I was staying in a big, tall white house which housed at least 5-6 Irish girls – the one I liked the most was very tall with black hair and a strong nose (the so called black Irish always appealed to me most, I loved the strain of Irish people who had either the blackest hair or darkest eyes imaginable….some Spaniard or Norman Englishman had laid his claim and much else to that lot centuries ago) who had this wonderful sense of herself that I didn’t quite grasp or have yet in talking about these workers on the streets who, instead of the American cat call, would say something to her like “you’re a big, tall girl, aren’t ye”….she said this the next day, as we girls sat around the big white and round table listening to cd after cd after cd and that was the very first day I drank Irish tea with no sugar or milk (they were out, being students and all) for something like 8 hours. It was a true session, and boys and friends and neighbours floated in and out, while we sat there and talked about our lives, our visit, the current tide of troubles, music, America, anything…..I seem to remember my friend from school’s story of being direct descendants of Bridget, the Irish maid who worked for Lizzie Borden’s family, and who supposedly knew the secrets inside that New England mortician’s house. My blood was hopped up on the tea, and my ears filling with sounds of Sinead O’Connor singing “I love you, my hard Englishman…” and a certain quiet in my bones, especially when it came to evening time and we took our fill of some homemade soup and sat around even more so, doing much of the same until we went out for pints.
The pints from the night before were what had set us back into that day of musical and tea-laden reflection. The boy had driven me to them and then out with him – pubs and parties, this neighborhood and that, with some disquiet and mostly ease…we passed through a checkpoint, he and I, and the English soldier knew he was Catholic by his name which he had to give him (but oddly not show him any ID to back it up – how trusting they are, even with their supposed enemies)…he pointed up at the Europa Hotel, and told me it was the world’s most bombed hotel…….. "before Sarajevo”. I admired him greatly for adding this, and we became close over a sort of war-wounded, ethnic hatred backed up background, him more directly, me more remotely from the war in Sarajevo which killed my great aunt who I never met and destroyed so many of the places I never got to see. When word came in that the church in which my father was born was leveled to the ground with Serbian bombs, my father went into his room and was never quite the same after. The world of his childhood wasn’t as he loved to dream up in his fantastical head that it was. They rebuilt it up, but you know how that goes. The boy and I would talk about factions, and soldiers and sanctions non-politically, since he was the sort who could talk about anything, intellectually speaking but always kept his heart in it. Never cold, or detached. He was the perfect example of something mattering to Him. On that night we went to lounges and pubs wherein I remember staying late and pouring leftover drinks into each other and drinking like nothing had happened. I was a pro back then with a stomach of steel. Some local boys told me I didn’t act or look like an American, and I must have blushed so red I became a tenth more Irish in that moment. They’d said they were going to Wisconsin and had I ever been there….obviously my answer was no, and they actually seemed surprised that, as an American, I hadn’t been to every state. At the local parties later, in mixed company but taking place in the catholic neighborhood, some boys in sweat pants, black hair and baby faces with their lusciously troubled accents which I swooned over, since it had depth, and a certain strength to it, less happy-go-lucky than the typical Irish vocal fare, told us why he had a fresh big black eye on him – it was because the soldiers knew he was “too good looking to be a Protestant”. So proud of himself and his reminders, he was.
Somewhere, on that long and drunken night, I seemed to lose my passport at one of those parties…..the next day no word and the next none either, and by the time I left the Belfast bus station in the nighttime, at the end of the mildly frightening weekend (frightening for others, but not for me), gazing at the burly English soldiers who stood guard with strong jaws and permanent five o’clock shadow, and noticing the differences in the languages which appeared in public places – in the South, it was English and Irish/Gaelic, in the North it was English, but also French, Spanish, German, Italian…like they wanted so badly to be non-Irish and a continental tribe, by the time I was back on Raglan Road, safely secured in its tender leaves and soft palate pavement, and black wrought iron gates and red doors, I was forced to visit the nearby US Embassy and get a replacement passport. I was upset, since my lost version had recorded my trip to Sarajevo through France and Vienna from the previous September…those stamps were gone, and I had to start anew. Weeks later, the boy came to me after a trip up North to see his family and he had my passport in his hand. Turns out one of the local partygoers remembered me and let him know to give it back to me. Could have sold it down the river for more than a few pound, but they returned it quick as they could. So trusting, like little children, and left cowering in the corner, drunk and happy for a time, laughing too loud and telling jokes about their worst nightmares……that is what the Irish are to me, that gleaming black eye caught on a young boy who didn’t hate a thing in the world and the space between him and the rest of it which goes un-filled and un-connected betwixt and between all the years since.
M. Lucia
I met friends of mine who were making the journey with me, myself to see my then Belfast boy, the only redhead I could ever abide by, with an old man’s soul. He was already up there and we were staying nearby his family’s house, as his relatives were also in town. The heavily made up woman with big jowls and wide pants lapels at the shop outside the bus station was singing loud and at the top of her voice, the Celine Dion song from TITANIC, because it was being played everywhere people were known to breathe. Most of the people in the brightly lit shop were quietly enjoying her singing, and while it wasn’t her best, she meant it and that’s all the Irish really care about. Whether You care about Something. Got my tea and my Tayto’s and something like onion and cheese on a bap and we loaded up. The journey went though town after town until we got to Northern Ireland, and the towns, well, they didn’t change much, but for the occasional flag whose colours I didn’t quite recognize. The people of the North I liked – they weren’t so pleased as those down in the South. They had problems – old, massive, hurting and ancient problems and you could read it across their faces. Another friend of mine once made her Irish face look like the people in Donegal, in the North, who always had a face on them that looked like it was fighting the wind blowing at them. It usually did, and Ireland was the place wherein I learned that wind could drive you mad, make you curse, lift your skirt and show your arse to the world and have a personality all its own. These people made those windy faces. Caught up in it, like me.
By the time we got to Belfast, he was waiting for us and we went straight to his house for dinner with his parents, both teachers, both Catholic. He exclaimed once that his parents always went on vacation in August, as it was marching season and they preferred not to be around for all that. I liked them immediately, just as I liked him immediately. Their house was sweet and small, and he then drove me out to where I was staying with my friend’s group, who happened to be Protestant, and happened to be in the Protestant section of town (no more than an eight minute walk, but many universes away within levels of danger, circumstance and feeling). Walking past those murals as we did throughout the weekend, back and forth over the tiny bridge and from catholic to protestant enclave and back again, it is immense what energies you feel. Those murals were like nothing I've ever seen before and still none like them to this day - the colours, the faces, the combinations of righteous, mythological and political symbols as they extended to their catholic or protestant gods.....I'd have to crack their heads open and go at them for a hundred years before I could ever see even more than an inch into those thick, wielding forests of hate, reactionaryisms, pride and mourning.
I was staying in a big, tall white house which housed at least 5-6 Irish girls – the one I liked the most was very tall with black hair and a strong nose (the so called black Irish always appealed to me most, I loved the strain of Irish people who had either the blackest hair or darkest eyes imaginable….some Spaniard or Norman Englishman had laid his claim and much else to that lot centuries ago) who had this wonderful sense of herself that I didn’t quite grasp or have yet in talking about these workers on the streets who, instead of the American cat call, would say something to her like “you’re a big, tall girl, aren’t ye”….she said this the next day, as we girls sat around the big white and round table listening to cd after cd after cd and that was the very first day I drank Irish tea with no sugar or milk (they were out, being students and all) for something like 8 hours. It was a true session, and boys and friends and neighbours floated in and out, while we sat there and talked about our lives, our visit, the current tide of troubles, music, America, anything…..I seem to remember my friend from school’s story of being direct descendants of Bridget, the Irish maid who worked for Lizzie Borden’s family, and who supposedly knew the secrets inside that New England mortician’s house. My blood was hopped up on the tea, and my ears filling with sounds of Sinead O’Connor singing “I love you, my hard Englishman…” and a certain quiet in my bones, especially when it came to evening time and we took our fill of some homemade soup and sat around even more so, doing much of the same until we went out for pints.
The pints from the night before were what had set us back into that day of musical and tea-laden reflection. The boy had driven me to them and then out with him – pubs and parties, this neighborhood and that, with some disquiet and mostly ease…we passed through a checkpoint, he and I, and the English soldier knew he was Catholic by his name which he had to give him (but oddly not show him any ID to back it up – how trusting they are, even with their supposed enemies)…he pointed up at the Europa Hotel, and told me it was the world’s most bombed hotel…….. "before Sarajevo”. I admired him greatly for adding this, and we became close over a sort of war-wounded, ethnic hatred backed up background, him more directly, me more remotely from the war in Sarajevo which killed my great aunt who I never met and destroyed so many of the places I never got to see. When word came in that the church in which my father was born was leveled to the ground with Serbian bombs, my father went into his room and was never quite the same after. The world of his childhood wasn’t as he loved to dream up in his fantastical head that it was. They rebuilt it up, but you know how that goes. The boy and I would talk about factions, and soldiers and sanctions non-politically, since he was the sort who could talk about anything, intellectually speaking but always kept his heart in it. Never cold, or detached. He was the perfect example of something mattering to Him. On that night we went to lounges and pubs wherein I remember staying late and pouring leftover drinks into each other and drinking like nothing had happened. I was a pro back then with a stomach of steel. Some local boys told me I didn’t act or look like an American, and I must have blushed so red I became a tenth more Irish in that moment. They’d said they were going to Wisconsin and had I ever been there….obviously my answer was no, and they actually seemed surprised that, as an American, I hadn’t been to every state. At the local parties later, in mixed company but taking place in the catholic neighborhood, some boys in sweat pants, black hair and baby faces with their lusciously troubled accents which I swooned over, since it had depth, and a certain strength to it, less happy-go-lucky than the typical Irish vocal fare, told us why he had a fresh big black eye on him – it was because the soldiers knew he was “too good looking to be a Protestant”. So proud of himself and his reminders, he was.
Somewhere, on that long and drunken night, I seemed to lose my passport at one of those parties…..the next day no word and the next none either, and by the time I left the Belfast bus station in the nighttime, at the end of the mildly frightening weekend (frightening for others, but not for me), gazing at the burly English soldiers who stood guard with strong jaws and permanent five o’clock shadow, and noticing the differences in the languages which appeared in public places – in the South, it was English and Irish/Gaelic, in the North it was English, but also French, Spanish, German, Italian…like they wanted so badly to be non-Irish and a continental tribe, by the time I was back on Raglan Road, safely secured in its tender leaves and soft palate pavement, and black wrought iron gates and red doors, I was forced to visit the nearby US Embassy and get a replacement passport. I was upset, since my lost version had recorded my trip to Sarajevo through France and Vienna from the previous September…those stamps were gone, and I had to start anew. Weeks later, the boy came to me after a trip up North to see his family and he had my passport in his hand. Turns out one of the local partygoers remembered me and let him know to give it back to me. Could have sold it down the river for more than a few pound, but they returned it quick as they could. So trusting, like little children, and left cowering in the corner, drunk and happy for a time, laughing too loud and telling jokes about their worst nightmares……that is what the Irish are to me, that gleaming black eye caught on a young boy who didn’t hate a thing in the world and the space between him and the rest of it which goes un-filled and un-connected betwixt and between all the years since.
M. Lucia
Wednesday, March 16, 2011
The Irish American Dream
An American will look up at that man,
successful and rich
living up there on the big hill in the mighty sun
and think
"One day...I'm going to be that man".
An Irishman will look up at that very same man,
successful and rich
living up there on the big hill in the mighty sun
and think
"One day...I'm going to get that Bastard".
M. Lucia
successful and rich
living up there on the big hill in the mighty sun
and think
"One day...I'm going to be that man".
An Irishman will look up at that very same man,
successful and rich
living up there on the big hill in the mighty sun
and think
"One day...I'm going to get that Bastard".
M. Lucia
Beginnings With No Middles Or Ends
Plotter is a field smack the central of her head.
From across the way of the low riding waters, our energies lie to themselves, to the kelp, the minnows, the dead men lost at sea.
Penetration in order to feel, breathing in the muddy air-waters, fire seeping from your eyes, as you attempt to swim across, to the harbour lights and self knowledge finding itself in dreams on the other side.
Dive in, don't let the whispers of fat bruised souls who have fallen back frighten you from the doing of your one will.
Waterways eventually push you to sink just when you think you've cleared the halfway mile towards the shore.
End shore-start more reasons to forget why you started seeing pictures at the age of five.
Numbers dance in their own lifelike cast from cotillion to orgy every time.
Your arms stride limp, as kale dying from heaven in the midst of a broadcast.
Too terrible when the ocean catches your tears, so you can't see which way they ran to this time.
If you think you're swimming through, just turn around and spot the salts trailing, its own phalanx commanded, growing up into a twirling sphinx, ready to crush any who follow you to the promised dry land deep within the coming, golden shore.
Get there, find a plan, make a man and bury yourself - the sand will do the same as the ocean.
The tears will dissolve away, the great ancient machine ceases to be.
Each bought formulated in number, fear...and straying arms will sink when the thing you move through doesn't recognize you.
Take notice of your fools and the way they find their circumstance.
Hair in eyes growing form and spinning your footsteps like an oversexed top gone wild.
More than sized in your intentions, but naked in your surest experiments, slowly building stars in their wake.
Disease in its best place stands as a reform.
A substantiation of what memory brought it all on.
So look back (again) the tides astray in song after you.
You know what they're calling for, the active dreaded parts of you, draining down the causeway until you sit up in the sand, hands gripped bloody with your better nature, looking horizon wise to the next local race.
M. Lucia
From across the way of the low riding waters, our energies lie to themselves, to the kelp, the minnows, the dead men lost at sea.
Penetration in order to feel, breathing in the muddy air-waters, fire seeping from your eyes, as you attempt to swim across, to the harbour lights and self knowledge finding itself in dreams on the other side.
Dive in, don't let the whispers of fat bruised souls who have fallen back frighten you from the doing of your one will.
Waterways eventually push you to sink just when you think you've cleared the halfway mile towards the shore.
End shore-start more reasons to forget why you started seeing pictures at the age of five.
Numbers dance in their own lifelike cast from cotillion to orgy every time.
Your arms stride limp, as kale dying from heaven in the midst of a broadcast.
Too terrible when the ocean catches your tears, so you can't see which way they ran to this time.
If you think you're swimming through, just turn around and spot the salts trailing, its own phalanx commanded, growing up into a twirling sphinx, ready to crush any who follow you to the promised dry land deep within the coming, golden shore.
Get there, find a plan, make a man and bury yourself - the sand will do the same as the ocean.
The tears will dissolve away, the great ancient machine ceases to be.
Each bought formulated in number, fear...and straying arms will sink when the thing you move through doesn't recognize you.
Take notice of your fools and the way they find their circumstance.
Hair in eyes growing form and spinning your footsteps like an oversexed top gone wild.
More than sized in your intentions, but naked in your surest experiments, slowly building stars in their wake.
Disease in its best place stands as a reform.
A substantiation of what memory brought it all on.
So look back (again) the tides astray in song after you.
You know what they're calling for, the active dreaded parts of you, draining down the causeway until you sit up in the sand, hands gripped bloody with your better nature, looking horizon wise to the next local race.
M. Lucia
Girl in Hotelroom Chapter
The trucks would be hissing by the Portland hotel room all night. The breaking of the dawn was so muffled by the weight of their beastly arrivals, mingling not for a second until they exited this frame again. She lay on the bed like a slice of cardboard, brand-new from its packing, while her ash drizzled over the candy colored bedspread, like grandmother’s. But someone else’s, since she never knew her grandmother, nor her house, no stolen pennies, nostalgic stones or sweets hidden in baggy pockets. Just a fading photo and no memory of what it meant. Her friends told her it was better that way - you never knew the kindness or warmth, but you missed out on the icy distance, the bitterness that grows from a widow’s windowless garden, the power struggle that exists between old daughters and older mothers until the grandmother relinquishes her throne. Still, she caressed the bedspread as if it told her everything would be ok and that she was a beautiful girl but had her father’s eyes.
The dim amber light was shy to cover the cramped room, anxious to keep its place and reveal only a few distinct and quarantined aspects – the clunky and remote control, the bible creeping out of an unopened brown drawer, the brazenly-coloured brochure about what few channels there were to watch, to remind you that you were still in America, no matter where you ran to.
The blue ashtray. A friend kept close, while she couldn’t sleep. James Dean was an insomniac (true beauty is sometimes only felt when its fighting the shadows amongst your eyes). It’s supposed to rain a lot in Portland, that rain would soften the trucks in her ears, like an angry ocean beating oars to the shore. They were solemn the trucks, approaching and yielding at the same time. She began to try and figure out the very instant that the approaching truck began to depart from her trembling eardrums. It was puzzling and fooling her, becoming a game as she ashed her failing cigarette at what she thought might be that very instant. But she couldn’t win, her fingers couldn’t keep up with her brain waves, which couldn’t chase after those trucks driven by phantoms, and they would never reach their destination, the ticking of the clock would prevent it.
This is the sort of hotel that murders happen to – all quiet behind rows of brown wooden doors (or painted-on wood). Giving into sleep would lead to blue and red lights flashing over the distressed amber, finding it out in its loneliness. Then it better rain, for men in garbage bags with flashlights would arrive in a more direct fashion that those who are dry with comfort.
She couldn’t bear to watch television, not when the forests were so nearby. The idea that they were something to visit outside of our lives began to sicken her. The dampness in the room began to seep into her bedspread (phantom grandma’s) and she preferred to lie over it, and pull the cheap blanket over her, still dressed and barely breathing.
When she was little, her thoughts would keep her from normal sleep sometimes – like there was so much around corners in her mind that her child’s head couldn’t possess it straight away. Her mother used to stay with her in her dark pink room, like a church it seemed now, she the silent gospel act under the canopy. Her mother’s core was distant yet the part of her that nurtured did it well, like one of a queen’s attendants, would take a poisoned cup for her, or at least it felt like she would. First, every time she would begin to fall asleep, a mathematician would grow to magician inside her head. That feeling when you start to drift to sleep, of losing control (sometimes you hit earth once and then ascend again) was when the numbers would come over her. Her mother on her rocking chair, waiting, probably thinking about her mother gone so long (phantom grandmother with no bedspreads to offer) while her daughter’s eyes, how still were they. She would be half sleeping, her mind began racing. Those creeping shadows would act like mischief once the parent has gone away, like a church without God – running from place to place. In her mind, it would manifest itself into numbers – not any particular theories or problems that she could remember, but perhaps because they were too great for her to remember. In the dream, sitting on a bench, no world around, no one sitting there – she still remembered that. The numbers would make no sound, just a hum growing in her thoughts, they would flash in front of her sleeping mind faster and faster, more problematic and so much so that one would be gone before the next progressive one appeared and so forth, ‘til her breathing increased, her body caught up and her tiny soul couldn’t bear its grand seal just yet. Seems as if it were the mathematical problems that equally served as the secrets of every universe. She would wake up in a start, perspiring, nervous, never crying. But her simple mother would be by her side, on the bed, warm washcloth taken in hand for her head after she felt its waning, typical softness mingling with her arm on the mattress next to her. She would get to sleep eventually, but, in these episodes, her mother knew something was occurring. She could never follow through to what exactly, but her daughter might remember someday – might speak of it or write it down, or dream of it again, or think on it, while smoke rose through the air from her silent mouth in a Portland hotel room, as she listened to the trucks, giving up on their moments of arrival and departure. They were much slower than the numbers of the universe, but she still couldn’t manage to crack their code.
She used to be exhilarated when she was a girl, a few years after the numbers episodes, when she couldn’t get to sleep again (mother still by her side, this time with a glass of ginger ale to calm her, castor oil not hidden inside like the duplicitous orange juice she consumed as a younger girl). She would have a kind of breathing fit, though nothing so dramatic, she would explain it to her mother in the only way she knew how – “I just feel like I can’t take a full, deep breath”. In trying to continuously, she’d not be able to breathe properly and that made sleep a hardship. To live, to take that one, deep, full breath became so much the focus of her, at least on the inside.
Her cigarette was gone. The people next door through flypaper walls that’ve gone dark, they put their TV on. She had to give in, she listened, her mind went blank and the valium tones of late night shows drowned out the trucks and clock ticking and the quiet of her sheets and memories of numbers and breathing in . . .
Her body slits its aural wrists and sank beneath the once-blue, stone coloured blanket, the amber light drowned her thoughts and she fell asleep. Even without the sharp breath of waking up, when she and many do, forget to breathe and the body shakes your lungs to momentary reason for a spell. She simply drifted through the forests but come out the other side, where there were no flashlights and their rainy policemen, no mothers waiting on rocking chairs, no games and numbers revealing to her prematurely the hidden gifts of the skies on fire and the stars in their prime, just the muffled, light-less sound of a false family’s voices next door. And the occasional rehearsed applause which wasn’t for her, since it had been only real once, but saved again and again until it was only a shell of someone’s smile that was experienced probably twenty years ago in a real place that, most likely, died by now. So the amber lamp constant, no tingle of stopped breath, no sounds from the forest, but she fell asleep at 2:20am to the sound of a dead man’s laugh.
Mimi L.
The dim amber light was shy to cover the cramped room, anxious to keep its place and reveal only a few distinct and quarantined aspects – the clunky and remote control, the bible creeping out of an unopened brown drawer, the brazenly-coloured brochure about what few channels there were to watch, to remind you that you were still in America, no matter where you ran to.
The blue ashtray. A friend kept close, while she couldn’t sleep. James Dean was an insomniac (true beauty is sometimes only felt when its fighting the shadows amongst your eyes). It’s supposed to rain a lot in Portland, that rain would soften the trucks in her ears, like an angry ocean beating oars to the shore. They were solemn the trucks, approaching and yielding at the same time. She began to try and figure out the very instant that the approaching truck began to depart from her trembling eardrums. It was puzzling and fooling her, becoming a game as she ashed her failing cigarette at what she thought might be that very instant. But she couldn’t win, her fingers couldn’t keep up with her brain waves, which couldn’t chase after those trucks driven by phantoms, and they would never reach their destination, the ticking of the clock would prevent it.
This is the sort of hotel that murders happen to – all quiet behind rows of brown wooden doors (or painted-on wood). Giving into sleep would lead to blue and red lights flashing over the distressed amber, finding it out in its loneliness. Then it better rain, for men in garbage bags with flashlights would arrive in a more direct fashion that those who are dry with comfort.
She couldn’t bear to watch television, not when the forests were so nearby. The idea that they were something to visit outside of our lives began to sicken her. The dampness in the room began to seep into her bedspread (phantom grandma’s) and she preferred to lie over it, and pull the cheap blanket over her, still dressed and barely breathing.
When she was little, her thoughts would keep her from normal sleep sometimes – like there was so much around corners in her mind that her child’s head couldn’t possess it straight away. Her mother used to stay with her in her dark pink room, like a church it seemed now, she the silent gospel act under the canopy. Her mother’s core was distant yet the part of her that nurtured did it well, like one of a queen’s attendants, would take a poisoned cup for her, or at least it felt like she would. First, every time she would begin to fall asleep, a mathematician would grow to magician inside her head. That feeling when you start to drift to sleep, of losing control (sometimes you hit earth once and then ascend again) was when the numbers would come over her. Her mother on her rocking chair, waiting, probably thinking about her mother gone so long (phantom grandmother with no bedspreads to offer) while her daughter’s eyes, how still were they. She would be half sleeping, her mind began racing. Those creeping shadows would act like mischief once the parent has gone away, like a church without God – running from place to place. In her mind, it would manifest itself into numbers – not any particular theories or problems that she could remember, but perhaps because they were too great for her to remember. In the dream, sitting on a bench, no world around, no one sitting there – she still remembered that. The numbers would make no sound, just a hum growing in her thoughts, they would flash in front of her sleeping mind faster and faster, more problematic and so much so that one would be gone before the next progressive one appeared and so forth, ‘til her breathing increased, her body caught up and her tiny soul couldn’t bear its grand seal just yet. Seems as if it were the mathematical problems that equally served as the secrets of every universe. She would wake up in a start, perspiring, nervous, never crying. But her simple mother would be by her side, on the bed, warm washcloth taken in hand for her head after she felt its waning, typical softness mingling with her arm on the mattress next to her. She would get to sleep eventually, but, in these episodes, her mother knew something was occurring. She could never follow through to what exactly, but her daughter might remember someday – might speak of it or write it down, or dream of it again, or think on it, while smoke rose through the air from her silent mouth in a Portland hotel room, as she listened to the trucks, giving up on their moments of arrival and departure. They were much slower than the numbers of the universe, but she still couldn’t manage to crack their code.
She used to be exhilarated when she was a girl, a few years after the numbers episodes, when she couldn’t get to sleep again (mother still by her side, this time with a glass of ginger ale to calm her, castor oil not hidden inside like the duplicitous orange juice she consumed as a younger girl). She would have a kind of breathing fit, though nothing so dramatic, she would explain it to her mother in the only way she knew how – “I just feel like I can’t take a full, deep breath”. In trying to continuously, she’d not be able to breathe properly and that made sleep a hardship. To live, to take that one, deep, full breath became so much the focus of her, at least on the inside.
Her cigarette was gone. The people next door through flypaper walls that’ve gone dark, they put their TV on. She had to give in, she listened, her mind went blank and the valium tones of late night shows drowned out the trucks and clock ticking and the quiet of her sheets and memories of numbers and breathing in . . .
Her body slits its aural wrists and sank beneath the once-blue, stone coloured blanket, the amber light drowned her thoughts and she fell asleep. Even without the sharp breath of waking up, when she and many do, forget to breathe and the body shakes your lungs to momentary reason for a spell. She simply drifted through the forests but come out the other side, where there were no flashlights and their rainy policemen, no mothers waiting on rocking chairs, no games and numbers revealing to her prematurely the hidden gifts of the skies on fire and the stars in their prime, just the muffled, light-less sound of a false family’s voices next door. And the occasional rehearsed applause which wasn’t for her, since it had been only real once, but saved again and again until it was only a shell of someone’s smile that was experienced probably twenty years ago in a real place that, most likely, died by now. So the amber lamp constant, no tingle of stopped breath, no sounds from the forest, but she fell asleep at 2:20am to the sound of a dead man’s laugh.
Mimi L.
WHA? - part one...Goodnight Dave...Goodnight John...
Blagich first noticed the blemish at the base of his thumb on a fishing trip with his two sons Rocco and Anthony and chalked it up to some irritant somewhere on the boat--fish scale, salt water, sun block...
Later that week, it began (the "blemish") to take on a bit of a 'life of its own' as they say but he ignored it because that was his way, generally, and so, even as it swelled and reddened and irritated, he expected and anticipated, did Blagich, its eventual passing and clearing, in due course.
No such luck.
Maybe sometimes people would heed the warning that such an eruption on ones body would offer and conclude maybe "I gotta eat better," or "I gotta make a point of giving my hands a good rinse after getting off the subway," or "I gotta floss more regularly...." Maybe Blagich, if he was that kind of person, would have himself taken some time off, say, from the drinking and the whoring for a couple of weeks maybe - "just until this thing on my hand clears up." But he wasn't (that kind of person) and he didn't (take some time off, etc.).
As he watched the "escort" clear out his wallet from the floor of the hotel room where he had sprawled drunk, and post-coital-epic-fail'd (as usual), he chuckled to himself because he knew they (the escorts) liked (for obvious reasons) to clear out his wallet and, being a sport, he always left them a little something to take, (though also so as to avoid them getting any ideas about maybe asking their pimp to come toss the room while he was "indisposed," and of course knowing too from the git-go that the rest of his roll was safely locked in the in-room hotel safe, [under combination number '2625' as always]) and just before he slipped off into (what he hoped would be) a blissful sleep, only after hearing the sound of the hotel room door slam meaning that the escort had high-tailed it off to her next engagement, he thought he felt an uncomfortable 'shift' (it really was the only word for it) beneath the pussed-over red scale on the back of his hand, and then, in the last moments of consciousness, saw the red skin part and an eyeball (?) peek out knowingly at him.
Waking up on the floor of the hotel room, with its familiar (and, truth be told, comforting) feel and smell of industrial carpeting, he immediately began his now-standard, and routinely implemented, process by which he reconciled the drunken world-view of the previous evening into the cold light of that morning's reality. Typically this involved the realization, for example, that maybe the girls outside the bar on 7th Avenue last night didn't really want to "fuck him" (no matter what his foggy memory seemed to imply) as much as maybe wanted someone to pay for their drinks for an hour or two (note to self: log on to Americanexpress.com and review "Recent Charges.") But also maybe the mini-bar drinking, and the high-cholesterol room service and the escort service phone calls (which he could now do from memory) weren't so much the pathetic cries for help that they might seem to be but more like wonderful examples of "living of life to the fullest" and of "being in the moment"--exercises detailed on the cassette-taped and dusty-book-shelfed copies of self-help programs he had accumulated over the years--over the course of an adult-lifetime of post-masturbatory passivity, late-night channel surfing and 3AM "come-to-Jesus" moments of clarity--breathless dialing of 1-800 numbers and conversations with disembodied and vaguely-accented tele-marketers pushing incentivized special-offers and not-to-be-missed once-in-a-lifetime-opportunities..
But what of the "hand-eye" dream, as he chose to call it in that brave hung-over haze in which he allowed himself to think about it, and reflect on its (the dream's, [it must have been a dream, right?]) possible meaning. It really could only have been a dream, something like that, right? Something weird and other-worldly like that...it really was "Kafka-esque," wasn't it? Using that term he exaggerated the forming of quotation marks in the air with his hands and yet still he imagined himself in those moments of reflection utterly at the mercy of some strange and possibly drunk (himself) writer alone in the middle of the night crafting outlandish (absurd really) and mythologically loaded stories in which he, Blagich, flopped and jabbered like some marionette freshly sprung from a claustrophobic traveling case into the harsh light of a vaudeville era stage--made to deliver inane punch-lines to weak laughter, smelling of garlic and sweat (the laughter), hidden in the darkness of the theatre behind layers of stage- and spotlights.
And yet there it was...somehow the "blemish" on his hand, around the thumb, had been bandaged in the night. He had no recollection of tending to this wound nor even of where the bandages themselves might have come from. It was all a mystery. But the memory of eye - the look of it, and the expression contained in it was burned irretrievably into his brain. There was only one way to get to the bottom of it. He would have to take the bandage off and see what there was to be seen.
Later that week, it began (the "blemish") to take on a bit of a 'life of its own' as they say but he ignored it because that was his way, generally, and so, even as it swelled and reddened and irritated, he expected and anticipated, did Blagich, its eventual passing and clearing, in due course.
No such luck.
Maybe sometimes people would heed the warning that such an eruption on ones body would offer and conclude maybe "I gotta eat better," or "I gotta make a point of giving my hands a good rinse after getting off the subway," or "I gotta floss more regularly...." Maybe Blagich, if he was that kind of person, would have himself taken some time off, say, from the drinking and the whoring for a couple of weeks maybe - "just until this thing on my hand clears up." But he wasn't (that kind of person) and he didn't (take some time off, etc.).
As he watched the "escort" clear out his wallet from the floor of the hotel room where he had sprawled drunk, and post-coital-epic-fail'd (as usual), he chuckled to himself because he knew they (the escorts) liked (for obvious reasons) to clear out his wallet and, being a sport, he always left them a little something to take, (though also so as to avoid them getting any ideas about maybe asking their pimp to come toss the room while he was "indisposed," and of course knowing too from the git-go that the rest of his roll was safely locked in the in-room hotel safe, [under combination number '2625' as always]) and just before he slipped off into (what he hoped would be) a blissful sleep, only after hearing the sound of the hotel room door slam meaning that the escort had high-tailed it off to her next engagement, he thought he felt an uncomfortable 'shift' (it really was the only word for it) beneath the pussed-over red scale on the back of his hand, and then, in the last moments of consciousness, saw the red skin part and an eyeball (?) peek out knowingly at him.
Waking up on the floor of the hotel room, with its familiar (and, truth be told, comforting) feel and smell of industrial carpeting, he immediately began his now-standard, and routinely implemented, process by which he reconciled the drunken world-view of the previous evening into the cold light of that morning's reality. Typically this involved the realization, for example, that maybe the girls outside the bar on 7th Avenue last night didn't really want to "fuck him" (no matter what his foggy memory seemed to imply) as much as maybe wanted someone to pay for their drinks for an hour or two (note to self: log on to Americanexpress.com and review "Recent Charges.") But also maybe the mini-bar drinking, and the high-cholesterol room service and the escort service phone calls (which he could now do from memory) weren't so much the pathetic cries for help that they might seem to be but more like wonderful examples of "living of life to the fullest" and of "being in the moment"--exercises detailed on the cassette-taped and dusty-book-shelfed copies of self-help programs he had accumulated over the years--over the course of an adult-lifetime of post-masturbatory passivity, late-night channel surfing and 3AM "come-to-Jesus" moments of clarity--breathless dialing of 1-800 numbers and conversations with disembodied and vaguely-accented tele-marketers pushing incentivized special-offers and not-to-be-missed once-in-a-lifetime-opportunities..
But what of the "hand-eye" dream, as he chose to call it in that brave hung-over haze in which he allowed himself to think about it, and reflect on its (the dream's, [it must have been a dream, right?]) possible meaning. It really could only have been a dream, something like that, right? Something weird and other-worldly like that...it really was "Kafka-esque," wasn't it? Using that term he exaggerated the forming of quotation marks in the air with his hands and yet still he imagined himself in those moments of reflection utterly at the mercy of some strange and possibly drunk (himself) writer alone in the middle of the night crafting outlandish (absurd really) and mythologically loaded stories in which he, Blagich, flopped and jabbered like some marionette freshly sprung from a claustrophobic traveling case into the harsh light of a vaudeville era stage--made to deliver inane punch-lines to weak laughter, smelling of garlic and sweat (the laughter), hidden in the darkness of the theatre behind layers of stage- and spotlights.
And yet there it was...somehow the "blemish" on his hand, around the thumb, had been bandaged in the night. He had no recollection of tending to this wound nor even of where the bandages themselves might have come from. It was all a mystery. But the memory of eye - the look of it, and the expression contained in it was burned irretrievably into his brain. There was only one way to get to the bottom of it. He would have to take the bandage off and see what there was to be seen.
Tuesday, March 15, 2011
Happy Monday!
There's Chocolate Babka in my cube, the only regular solid with which you can be square. It's melting in its tin brought in by the old woman in a babushka while assholes gather round and push her out of the way, to the ground, stinking carpet. It smells like a hamster cage over there, you know. Rotting flesh baked on purpose with the inside face of this chocolate babka - the old woman crawls away, cackling to herself while you pathetic frumps pull on your business casual and choke yourself with the almighty black crumbs of her chocolate babka. She lived more life in one summer of her youth than you fools see in a decade of yours......the pigeons encircling you waiting for their piece, shit on your head and bless you with their sympathy every single second. She has no sympathy for any of you. Someone clutches their loins and heads for the bathroom yet again, another their head mumbling something about "not agreeing with me" (life doesn't agree with you my dove, take the express train to the basement, and look for your name on the morgue calling cards.......there's always room for one more, honey), others puking up the sharp bits which they just couldn't swallow and take into themselves. But there's no need - She see you're all already here. Early to the party, to pass around the germs in your toilet seat souls...fill your faces, mmmmmm doesn't that sugar make you feel good? All chubby and loved inside, like you wish they loved yo- no, but wait, what is there to do when it runs out again........club each other to death seems the only option, set yourselves on fire before that babka can pass through you as you have passed through your lives- untouched and unleavened. A society of the fallen souffles....how marvelous, she thinks as she re-ties her gypsy bells on her skirt, which she's worn every single day since that summer none of you will ever see, and she walks out quietly, stepping gingerly and with care (for the stride of her footsteps, not for your carved out, bloated bellies face up in the rubble, babka belching at your souls). Cubes all, fitting perfectly into a giant super cube of an absolute fetishism of normality, and how ugly it looks from the outside in. She's gone, with her empty pan in hand. There's always more babkas to make, and always more shaky, slobbering lips in its pursuit. A job vell done, she says out loud, the chocolate bready aftermath decorating the mouths she escapes past, into the light where they don't know how to shine.
M. Lucia
M. Lucia
Monday, March 14, 2011
Use Your Words
you wake up, out of breath
kneeling, ankles in two V's
spread from yourself, wet and dripping
in the gray-black granite street.
night - your exhales grow stronger,
and you take out shapes of glass from your mouth;
piece by piece, no blood comes of it
shard and chunk and lever
each and all, without any fear.
knowing full well what's come from and got into
this mouth,
been demonstrative and concealing,
these lips,
ruled by it and it's very slave.
they all see, but no one cares of this act,
that it is misplaced.
it is only out of place if you say so,
and you just go through the motions
with every intent pounding its way up from your heaving,
natural chest, heart stained in grape
damp and excitable with urgency
there in the middle of the pavement.
the pieces form parts of a wine glass.
must have been a great vintage,
you think, as you smile wide and make your way
through the process, mouth intact and inviting.
M. Lucia
kneeling, ankles in two V's
spread from yourself, wet and dripping
in the gray-black granite street.
night - your exhales grow stronger,
and you take out shapes of glass from your mouth;
piece by piece, no blood comes of it
shard and chunk and lever
each and all, without any fear.
knowing full well what's come from and got into
this mouth,
been demonstrative and concealing,
these lips,
ruled by it and it's very slave.
they all see, but no one cares of this act,
that it is misplaced.
it is only out of place if you say so,
and you just go through the motions
with every intent pounding its way up from your heaving,
natural chest, heart stained in grape
damp and excitable with urgency
there in the middle of the pavement.
the pieces form parts of a wine glass.
must have been a great vintage,
you think, as you smile wide and make your way
through the process, mouth intact and inviting.
M. Lucia
American Dream
The walls dripped with thick, flowing curtains of a mentalist nature.
There, the white tiled floor receives my steps, and the walls seep and ooze into me,
their psychic sponge, they've been waiting for me today.
A thousand cardboard cut outs and an individual corner of sky
takes it all in.
There is a child in a photograph - shoeless, dressed in dark, rough fabrics
posed yet completely natural. Ruled by his poverty, but not ruled as we are
by the misfiring pistons in our brains which developed themselves so unruly
with satisfaction and selfishness and that horrible thing---entitlement.
his face did not know it, and if he ever knew comfort later in his one true life,
dirt on his skin, staring up with unfettered childhood at the ice cream man,
a tough old slav in a butcher's white cap, his metallic grey of warm milk
the only sweet solace in this child's manifest destiny days,
he did not learn this thing called complacency. His hands slowed, and women
wrote letters about him, doted and cared as much as their leisurely lives
would allow, in their husband's shadow...this little boy stepped outside of that.
Existed after the fall, and before the flood.
He beams, not a hope in the world, and yet no tightness bearing down on him,
he and the others all lined up like leaves on a tree which placed them here,
caught in this time - their manner, their faces and features look
adult-like...their lack of dependency ruling over my shattered steps, as I
walk past them, their eyes follow me with more of a rounded soul than any who grab at the air
all around me could ever dream up for themselves.
He looks up at that big, strong and menacing man with the jug of warm milk,
and he is there, in that moment, with beatitude, like nothing else we could ever know
or taste again. It died with them, and their bones take their goodness with them
in the dirt left on our expensive, ridiculous shoes.
M. Lucia
There, the white tiled floor receives my steps, and the walls seep and ooze into me,
their psychic sponge, they've been waiting for me today.
A thousand cardboard cut outs and an individual corner of sky
takes it all in.
There is a child in a photograph - shoeless, dressed in dark, rough fabrics
posed yet completely natural. Ruled by his poverty, but not ruled as we are
by the misfiring pistons in our brains which developed themselves so unruly
with satisfaction and selfishness and that horrible thing---entitlement.
his face did not know it, and if he ever knew comfort later in his one true life,
dirt on his skin, staring up with unfettered childhood at the ice cream man,
a tough old slav in a butcher's white cap, his metallic grey of warm milk
the only sweet solace in this child's manifest destiny days,
he did not learn this thing called complacency. His hands slowed, and women
wrote letters about him, doted and cared as much as their leisurely lives
would allow, in their husband's shadow...this little boy stepped outside of that.
Existed after the fall, and before the flood.
He beams, not a hope in the world, and yet no tightness bearing down on him,
he and the others all lined up like leaves on a tree which placed them here,
caught in this time - their manner, their faces and features look
adult-like...their lack of dependency ruling over my shattered steps, as I
walk past them, their eyes follow me with more of a rounded soul than any who grab at the air
all around me could ever dream up for themselves.
He looks up at that big, strong and menacing man with the jug of warm milk,
and he is there, in that moment, with beatitude, like nothing else we could ever know
or taste again. It died with them, and their bones take their goodness with them
in the dirt left on our expensive, ridiculous shoes.
M. Lucia
LONE
The only thing worth anything
is extending, stretching, offering
and doing so without the protection
that comes pre-installed.
"Do you free yourself from fear by
cowering in your physical body?
Your body is a boat to lay aside
when you reach the far shore.
Or sell it if you can find a fool.
It's full of holes."
Thus the poet with a shotgun under his bed.
And what of the mind and what of the heart and
what of the soul and what of the passion and what
of the what?
The giving is not to be feared--it's when the giving
is unwanted. Or seems to be. That's the thing really to be
afraid of and it's what causes all the drink, suicide, self-destructive pain and yelling,
the hitting and being hit.
It's when you speak the words and all
they do
is come back
to you.
is extending, stretching, offering
and doing so without the protection
that comes pre-installed.
"Do you free yourself from fear by
cowering in your physical body?
Your body is a boat to lay aside
when you reach the far shore.
Or sell it if you can find a fool.
It's full of holes."
Thus the poet with a shotgun under his bed.
And what of the mind and what of the heart and
what of the soul and what of the passion and what
of the what?
The giving is not to be feared--it's when the giving
is unwanted. Or seems to be. That's the thing really to be
afraid of and it's what causes all the drink, suicide, self-destructive pain and yelling,
the hitting and being hit.
It's when you speak the words and all
they do
is come back
to you.
MY BLOODY SEANCE - Part Two
PREVIOUSLY ON "MY BLOODY SEANCE":
21ST CENTURY GYPSY: How did you know?
WHITE MAN IN SUIT: You come to a psychic reading and you ask how did I know?
Yes, I see.
Now please sir, take my hands.
Would you mind very much...
Sir?
I say, I saw you were smoking. Before. Would you mind washing your hands?
AND TONIGHT ON "MY BLOODY SEANCE":
My hands? You want me to wash my hands?
Or if you have some kind...some sort of anti-bact...
My hands are clean.
No one's hands...
I'll tell you what...
No one's...
Here's what we'll do. If you want my hands clean...you want 'em washed? You do it...
Do what?
You wash my hands...you do it for me...come here...
THEY CROSS THE FRAME, THE STAGE, THE IMAGINARY WORLD INSIDE MY HEAD AND THUS YOUR HEAD TO A SINK HIDDEN BEHIND A LAYER OF GAUZY VEILS/SCARVES. IT'S STANDARD EQUIPMENT-SMALL WHITE PORCELAIN SINK--CHUNKY AND FUNCTIONAL YET SMALL, TUCKED IN THE CORNER ALL WITH EXPOSED PIPAGE.
Here...{she says, handing him a white bar of soap. She rolls up the sleeves of her loose fitting sweater. [yes, that's right.] She sweeps her long brown hair behind her shoulders. He's getting a second look at her in this new context. She begins running the water. She holds her hands under it and turns to him.}...so?
{He's standing with the soap in his hands. Staring at her.}
Can't you...can't you just...
Listen, you need my hands clean? - YOU do it.
{She turns her face away from him but he can still see her in profile in the mirror behind the sink. She is clearly defiant. Resigned, he pushes his suit jacket sleeves and unbuttoned shirt cuffs up onto his forearms and joins his hands with hers in the sink, lathering the soap. Up close he admires her prominent nose, the way it gives a theme to her features, the way her eyes lean in towards it, the way her small mouth sought to compensate for its dominance, the way her entire face taken at once was full of sensuality and had a fervent quality of rich ethnic beauty that rang down through the generations of a pride and stubbornness that was unmovable, unconquerable. He took her hands in his and began to wash her fingers. He was instantly aroused by her when she exhaled abruptly and he smelled the cigarettes...and...and...garlic on her breath-it made it all (the arousal) now so much worse. He no longer cared or needed her hands to be 'clean' but he never wanted to let go of them in the soapy warm water. He could see her breasts move down the vee of her sweater as he rocked her body through her hands and arms and he imagined them swaying and pressing against the sweater's fabric and then imagined them in his hands and his mouth...}
Clean enough now? {the accent again...the statement, lacking articles, abrupt, efficient, bare-minimum, second-languaged...he wanted her now more than anything else. Could this be some kind of gypsy spell she cast over him? She looked him straight in the eye. His anticipation was palpable. Any subtle signal and he would rip off her clothes and have her straight away on this filthy floor. She held the moment, fully in command of herself and the situation, and then laughed, quickly and derisively, and all in a second he was wholly unmanned.}
Come. {she mocked him with the word leading him back to the table.}
21ST CENTURY GYPSY: How did you know?
WHITE MAN IN SUIT: You come to a psychic reading and you ask how did I know?
Yes, I see.
Now please sir, take my hands.
Would you mind very much...
Sir?
I say, I saw you were smoking. Before. Would you mind washing your hands?
AND TONIGHT ON "MY BLOODY SEANCE":
My hands? You want me to wash my hands?
Or if you have some kind...some sort of anti-bact...
My hands are clean.
No one's hands...
I'll tell you what...
No one's...
Here's what we'll do. If you want my hands clean...you want 'em washed? You do it...
Do what?
You wash my hands...you do it for me...come here...
THEY CROSS THE FRAME, THE STAGE, THE IMAGINARY WORLD INSIDE MY HEAD AND THUS YOUR HEAD TO A SINK HIDDEN BEHIND A LAYER OF GAUZY VEILS/SCARVES. IT'S STANDARD EQUIPMENT-SMALL WHITE PORCELAIN SINK--CHUNKY AND FUNCTIONAL YET SMALL, TUCKED IN THE CORNER ALL WITH EXPOSED PIPAGE.
Here...{she says, handing him a white bar of soap. She rolls up the sleeves of her loose fitting sweater. [yes, that's right.] She sweeps her long brown hair behind her shoulders. He's getting a second look at her in this new context. She begins running the water. She holds her hands under it and turns to him.}...so?
{He's standing with the soap in his hands. Staring at her.}
Can't you...can't you just...
Listen, you need my hands clean? - YOU do it.
{She turns her face away from him but he can still see her in profile in the mirror behind the sink. She is clearly defiant. Resigned, he pushes his suit jacket sleeves and unbuttoned shirt cuffs up onto his forearms and joins his hands with hers in the sink, lathering the soap. Up close he admires her prominent nose, the way it gives a theme to her features, the way her eyes lean in towards it, the way her small mouth sought to compensate for its dominance, the way her entire face taken at once was full of sensuality and had a fervent quality of rich ethnic beauty that rang down through the generations of a pride and stubbornness that was unmovable, unconquerable. He took her hands in his and began to wash her fingers. He was instantly aroused by her when she exhaled abruptly and he smelled the cigarettes...and...and...garlic on her breath-it made it all (the arousal) now so much worse. He no longer cared or needed her hands to be 'clean' but he never wanted to let go of them in the soapy warm water. He could see her breasts move down the vee of her sweater as he rocked her body through her hands and arms and he imagined them swaying and pressing against the sweater's fabric and then imagined them in his hands and his mouth...}
Clean enough now? {the accent again...the statement, lacking articles, abrupt, efficient, bare-minimum, second-languaged...he wanted her now more than anything else. Could this be some kind of gypsy spell she cast over him? She looked him straight in the eye. His anticipation was palpable. Any subtle signal and he would rip off her clothes and have her straight away on this filthy floor. She held the moment, fully in command of herself and the situation, and then laughed, quickly and derisively, and all in a second he was wholly unmanned.}
Come. {she mocked him with the word leading him back to the table.}
Saturday, March 12, 2011
For the 21st of March (part 1 of 2)
I'm sleeping too soundly these days. Never had a problem with it, dreaming, sleeping, not snoring, not a midnight snacker, or bathroom hound, or night sweats, terrors, too many nightmares, or not enough, well rested is one of the absolute constants of my life. I don't do strung out well, I never have the same resolve after an all night tear, if an all night of everything my body can handle then I simply need to sleep the day away, so I can give it my all as ever. Waking up in the dark always bothered me - age 11, black morning sky when the preparatory school van (white, made you feel like you were on a sports team no one cared about, or a mental ward no one bothered to acknowledge) would wait outside, and your mother'd be up with you, seeing the white blurry lights in the condos across the man-made canal in the florida pre sunrise, in the crisp, under furnished massive house he built for all of you, while you got ready and he slept, because he could. Because he was his own boss, and taught you that doing what you love was half the battle in life. I still hate getting out of bed before I am ready. You were the exact same way, and I got it from you, my own personal daddy*.
I wake up, but I am not awake, and this reality I'm not all that aware of anymore (and I like it that way) slips away through the reeds, the sounds of the daytime far and far from me, will we talk in the night like we used to....it's around that time you start meandering into the living space, sitting there, on the easy chair I call my own now, one of two which I kept - this one was the one in which you died, the first time. I'm groggy, and could use the bathroom (once in the night is alright) and when I come out, I sense your shadow there, in that chair, where you grabbed your head (so I am told), softly fell back from a very heavy and noisy nap, and regrettably your last words "I'm sick" had nothing to do with the sum of the words of your life.
So, what are we going to talk about tonight? I know I've had a streak of unfettered violence in me since the days you went away, and perhaps feel my sense of comfort, and home is gone, and has never been the same. But it's alright. Your departure, in your choice and in all you built up in me before it, made me who I am in all her colours and I've got more sense of self that I know what to do with, and more than this world can probably take. We were so alike, you and I, that I became convinced you were my son in another life, or twin brother. But all that talk never really scratched your surface, as you were more of a roman in your thoughts about spirit. You surely had some things to bring up about me - about what could be planned and thought out, and done successfully and that mistakes are there so you learn about them, and what they were there to teach you.
I know, there is no time in this dark and aromatic room while the moon sails around the window sky, to conceal or come to terms with all of this. One word begets a thousand, one memory a projection of a million strands of possibilities and reasons for us all, and why we are the way we are. Why you could never see yourself getting old, too old to build and blueprint and make, in your mind, and then through your hands. We're going to have to go back in time and have our proper talk, the way we used to, from trains to cars and that.......
I wish you had become a history teacher or historian of any kind, your mind was ripe to succeed in this way. But your heart fire needed actuality, the sweat and the long sun of the day, the beer drank afterwards which you always shared, the dig, the dirt the shovels, me getting carted around in your wheelbarrow.....leaves every fall, a pool filling every spring, was me. Strange I never got to articulate these things until you were gone from this life. I'm glad we're still talkin, and forgive me for being so out of it - I'm tired, I'm in between dreams and realities, and this time walking through my living room, by your chair, is tinged with wishing and conversations that still go on, and I;m glad they do.
So, we're going to catch up, you and I, daddy (you were the Old Man, and not the Daddy, which made a huge difference to my view of you and of the orchestration of your grand and individual lifetime), the train's pulling into the station and I'm about to cart my bag, in various stages, up the stairs, over the tracks, and through the high ceilings and overheated station to you, in the white car which sits outside my window, on my street, you in your oversized baseball cap waiting, and then the engine starts.......I know, I should go to bed. We'll talk before the morning. The mild, and lucid clouds kiss lifetimes across the sky and you're taking stock of it all as you always did. You'll see me again soon, while you're dreaming up ways you could make yourself into a cowboy in between the smiling shards of night....
M. Lucia
*dfw
I wake up, but I am not awake, and this reality I'm not all that aware of anymore (and I like it that way) slips away through the reeds, the sounds of the daytime far and far from me, will we talk in the night like we used to....it's around that time you start meandering into the living space, sitting there, on the easy chair I call my own now, one of two which I kept - this one was the one in which you died, the first time. I'm groggy, and could use the bathroom (once in the night is alright) and when I come out, I sense your shadow there, in that chair, where you grabbed your head (so I am told), softly fell back from a very heavy and noisy nap, and regrettably your last words "I'm sick" had nothing to do with the sum of the words of your life.
So, what are we going to talk about tonight? I know I've had a streak of unfettered violence in me since the days you went away, and perhaps feel my sense of comfort, and home is gone, and has never been the same. But it's alright. Your departure, in your choice and in all you built up in me before it, made me who I am in all her colours and I've got more sense of self that I know what to do with, and more than this world can probably take. We were so alike, you and I, that I became convinced you were my son in another life, or twin brother. But all that talk never really scratched your surface, as you were more of a roman in your thoughts about spirit. You surely had some things to bring up about me - about what could be planned and thought out, and done successfully and that mistakes are there so you learn about them, and what they were there to teach you.
I know, there is no time in this dark and aromatic room while the moon sails around the window sky, to conceal or come to terms with all of this. One word begets a thousand, one memory a projection of a million strands of possibilities and reasons for us all, and why we are the way we are. Why you could never see yourself getting old, too old to build and blueprint and make, in your mind, and then through your hands. We're going to have to go back in time and have our proper talk, the way we used to, from trains to cars and that.......
I wish you had become a history teacher or historian of any kind, your mind was ripe to succeed in this way. But your heart fire needed actuality, the sweat and the long sun of the day, the beer drank afterwards which you always shared, the dig, the dirt the shovels, me getting carted around in your wheelbarrow.....leaves every fall, a pool filling every spring, was me. Strange I never got to articulate these things until you were gone from this life. I'm glad we're still talkin, and forgive me for being so out of it - I'm tired, I'm in between dreams and realities, and this time walking through my living room, by your chair, is tinged with wishing and conversations that still go on, and I;m glad they do.
So, we're going to catch up, you and I, daddy (you were the Old Man, and not the Daddy, which made a huge difference to my view of you and of the orchestration of your grand and individual lifetime), the train's pulling into the station and I'm about to cart my bag, in various stages, up the stairs, over the tracks, and through the high ceilings and overheated station to you, in the white car which sits outside my window, on my street, you in your oversized baseball cap waiting, and then the engine starts.......I know, I should go to bed. We'll talk before the morning. The mild, and lucid clouds kiss lifetimes across the sky and you're taking stock of it all as you always did. You'll see me again soon, while you're dreaming up ways you could make yourself into a cowboy in between the smiling shards of night....
M. Lucia
*dfw
Thursday, March 10, 2011
MY BLOODY SEANCE - PART ONE SINCE IT'S 11:25
!@#)*&^^&^@&%#^%~^@#%~^%@#~!#^&@^$&!@%^%!$(^%(^$%(!&^@%$(&!@^%#
{east european conversation = gibberish to white man in suit and tie who walks up to a store front [THE PSYCHIC READING ROOM - PALMS, TAROT] and to [what he sees as] two 21st century gypsies, both of whom are smoking}
@*$&_(*&)*&^@$)!&%#)^%@!#^!~*@#^%(!@^%&@^!%$&(^!@%$^%@)!*$^%@)!^$%
Excuse me...uh....I.....
#*&^$)&Q^)$&^Q)&^$)&@!^$)&@!^)$(&^@!#$&^@)#&$^@*#&^$&#^)@&$^&#^$#&*
I say {throat clear} I say I was wondering about getting a - uh - a "reading" {makes little quote signs in the air with his fingers}?
Yes sir please...{one of the women drops and steps on her cigarette grinding it into the sidewalk and gestures for him to enter, the other peels away and vanishes. The woman speaks in a heavilly accented English which would present as a put-on by a native speaker of the tongue from whence the "accent" is alleged to have extended into her English but nonetheless completes the perfect picture for the man in the suit and makes him begin to feel a smidge more at ease with the whole thing what with his in-bred attitude [superior] toward "foreigners" and it actually reminds him [the accent plus the whole creepy feel of the quote-unquote gypsy and her cheap but authentic-feeling environs] of The Wolf Man (1941) with Lon Chaney Jr. and Claude Rains, with the wolf-head cane and the dry-ice fog hugging the soundstage landscape.}
I was wond...I wanted to ask..
Please sir, step in.
Oh, well, yes, but I wanted to ask, might I get...might there be...
No happy endings here sir, massage parlor down the street - Koreans. {she laughs...she's joking}
No, hah-hah {blanching and reddening simultaneously but forging ahead, which if you knew him was saying a lot because he was already way off the reservation w/r/t what would be considered typical behavior for him}...no, I wondered, might there be a possibility of a seance? Is that the right word?
Seance? You wish to commune with the dead?
Well, yes. Not all of them. Just one person in particular. One man.
Step in sir, please....I think the reading will be a beginning; a help to you first and then we can discuss other questions you may have...about your father. {they enter and he is quickly led to a table--paint your own picture, you know what it ALL looks like.}
My father?
Yes. Please take my hand.
How did you know it was my father?
Please sir, take my hands.
{He moves his hands from the table to his lap and also makes a series of gestures and head & body movements which scream "DEFENSIVE" to the woman who, while not formally trained in any of the so-called psychoanalytical disciplines, could write a book about body language, and it would be a sure-fire, crackerjack best seller but, as it would be revealing trade secrets, it would likely put her out of the medium business, which really wouldn't matter to HER theoretically since SHE would be sitting, as it were, with a hit book (and presumably a steady stream of fat royalty checks) but it would though, in fact, cut into the business of many, many OTHER people in her profession, her colleagues so to speak--people generally not known for their forgiving or understanding nature(s) when it came to the stanching of the life-blood of their industry [namely the exploitation of the emotional desperation of people, from all walks of life, searching for meaning and connection and some understanding perhaps of who they are/were and where they're going/came from, aka their 'destiny'] which is a polite way to put it}
How did you know?
You come to a psychic reading and you ask how did I know?
Yes, I see.
Now please sir, take my hands.
Would you mind very much...
Sir?
I say, I saw you were smoking. Before. Would you mind washing your hands?
{east european conversation = gibberish to white man in suit and tie who walks up to a store front [THE PSYCHIC READING ROOM - PALMS, TAROT] and to [what he sees as] two 21st century gypsies, both of whom are smoking}
@*$&_(*&)*&^@$)!&%#)^%@!#^!~*@#^%(!@^%&@^!%$&(^!@%$^%@)!*$^%@)!^$%
Excuse me...uh....I.....
#*&^$)&Q^)$&^Q)&^$)&@!^$)&@!^)$(&^@!#$&^@)#&$^@*#&^$&#^)@&$^&#^$#&*
I say {throat clear} I say I was wondering about getting a - uh - a "reading" {makes little quote signs in the air with his fingers}?
Yes sir please...{one of the women drops and steps on her cigarette grinding it into the sidewalk and gestures for him to enter, the other peels away and vanishes. The woman speaks in a heavilly accented English which would present as a put-on by a native speaker of the tongue from whence the "accent" is alleged to have extended into her English but nonetheless completes the perfect picture for the man in the suit and makes him begin to feel a smidge more at ease with the whole thing what with his in-bred attitude [superior] toward "foreigners" and it actually reminds him [the accent plus the whole creepy feel of the quote-unquote gypsy and her cheap but authentic-feeling environs] of The Wolf Man (1941) with Lon Chaney Jr. and Claude Rains, with the wolf-head cane and the dry-ice fog hugging the soundstage landscape.}
I was wond...I wanted to ask..
Please sir, step in.
Oh, well, yes, but I wanted to ask, might I get...might there be...
No happy endings here sir, massage parlor down the street - Koreans. {she laughs...she's joking}
No, hah-hah {blanching and reddening simultaneously but forging ahead, which if you knew him was saying a lot because he was already way off the reservation w/r/t what would be considered typical behavior for him}...no, I wondered, might there be a possibility of a seance? Is that the right word?
Seance? You wish to commune with the dead?
Well, yes. Not all of them. Just one person in particular. One man.
Step in sir, please....I think the reading will be a beginning; a help to you first and then we can discuss other questions you may have...about your father. {they enter and he is quickly led to a table--paint your own picture, you know what it ALL looks like.}
My father?
Yes. Please take my hand.
How did you know it was my father?
Please sir, take my hands.
{He moves his hands from the table to his lap and also makes a series of gestures and head & body movements which scream "DEFENSIVE" to the woman who, while not formally trained in any of the so-called psychoanalytical disciplines, could write a book about body language, and it would be a sure-fire, crackerjack best seller but, as it would be revealing trade secrets, it would likely put her out of the medium business, which really wouldn't matter to HER theoretically since SHE would be sitting, as it were, with a hit book (and presumably a steady stream of fat royalty checks) but it would though, in fact, cut into the business of many, many OTHER people in her profession, her colleagues so to speak--people generally not known for their forgiving or understanding nature(s) when it came to the stanching of the life-blood of their industry [namely the exploitation of the emotional desperation of people, from all walks of life, searching for meaning and connection and some understanding perhaps of who they are/were and where they're going/came from, aka their 'destiny'] which is a polite way to put it}
How did you know?
You come to a psychic reading and you ask how did I know?
Yes, I see.
Now please sir, take my hands.
Would you mind very much...
Sir?
I say, I saw you were smoking. Before. Would you mind washing your hands?
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