HARPY BRITHDAY!

Happy Day oh bloggy wonder!  I know it's a day early - tomorrow was the official day this blog was launched a year ago but yesterday saw the 365th blog post meaning that a pace of one post a day was maintained - which is a really uninteresting and unglamorous way to say that--which only probably means that I should stop using this voice that breaks through this blog's fourth wall and get back to the anonymous rants that have made this blog notorious (to a very very small group of people).  So as I said one year ago:

Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. Gather ye rosebuds while ye may. You can't handle the truth. We're gonna need a bigger boat. I'm gonna make him an offer he can't refuse. You can't fight in here this is the war room. I got no place else to go. Give my daughter the shot. As you wish.

Signed,

Senior Editor

NON GRATA PERSONA GUY (THREE SIXTY FIVE!!!!)

So I'm walking down the platform trying to find the perfect spot at which to board the train.  The train is late...or I'm early again, depending on how you want to look at it..."Perfect" (as in spot--see above) is a variable mainly because the "ridership," as the transit authority likes to call it, is in flux (maybe one might say it's not so much "in" flux as it is actually "a" flux) and a lot can happen, especially if you're one of them...you know, one of those guys, those chaps, who mix and mingle and connect.  Once that road is trod (upon)?, next thing you know  you're stuck with whatever comes down the pike--standing there on the platform, waiting for the train to THE CITY contemplating the "ridership"--watching the people coming off the boat measure the distance between this and that, could they make it they wondered..."if I run, starting...now, would it make that critical difference between making the train and not (making the train)?"  It nagged at them, didn't it?  Even standing there gazing down the barrel of the 7:40 am train, waiting for it to trundle its silvery shaft along the rails into the station, benefiting from the perspective the boaty folks lacked, having the luxury to know better about the arrival, or not, of the train.  I could wait, patient, I could watch them run up the stairs, and at the same time measure "the platform" and admire the mix that accumulated at the mercy of an assortment of facts--who would take the train and who would not, who was taking a day off and who was not, who called in sick, who was laid off, who had had enough!!  No one today, at least no one who might command attention, left to his own plans (best laid), a man of leisure, left to read or nap or scan the news as he would. For now, a public posting (not unlike this one--the posts, public to be sure but who was reading?) about what was called a plan for evacuation on a train platform mounted sign post.
It's really a killzone they're talking about right?  At this distance, given these logistics, what really were the chances after all?  The call them "Native Americans" now but it's starting to feel like they got the last laugh.  We name our town, our mall and our power plants after them and then watch helplessly as our own hubris backs us up against a wall.  Within the "killzone," whether it's by one-time massive dose or slow-acting, horn-sprouting evolution on speed, we are all persona non grata, NONE are welcome, the buffet is closed, the parking lot is full, the theatre is sold-out.  What would become of all of our petty ramblings and earnest worries then?  Close all the bank accounts, college funds and 401K's.  There's no one left at the wheel.
  

The Last Word (not)

Wild fire grows.

Up, she blows tethered on her-

That was the last haiku.  It was not finished....it read with a mediocre smile, thinking itself a righteous genius (and being right, since it takes the most courage to be mediocre, and then leave it on the page and take the righteous into your life with you, and nothing less).

She  had grown tired of these lessons.  Why scream day after day, when the world wasn't listening.....you point out the trees, palm and captured by the dim electric light of sun and the reflection of the ice in her whiskey highball, and they look upon it for a second, and back to their papers, shuffle shuffle the noises so loud you can't hear them shut you off, or the machine, or the roots in the ground that grew them, or anything that made you stop.  Just stop, and admit the colours are right.

No one kidnapped her.  No one came after her, mafioso style, or snuffed her out, or kept her in dark rooms where that story about the the girl taken in by Frederick Clegg, the house, the isolation, the photographs, tying her up, the forgetting that he didn't do, it wasn't like that at all in the real world.  She simply walked to the railing, that one in the faraway place over the cliff.  And she jumped off.  Silence.  No photographs, no last words, no epitaphs, no ashes, bodies, blood and broken bones, that way the face is sunken when in the casket, that way the memories flow from the liquid place that we cannot control, none of that.  No suicide note.  Just that start to the mediocre haiku, but the one she called her own.  And nothing really matters as much as that fact.  You know the streets around you like the veins in your body, the garden that grows, you made it so.  Invisibility in steel towers has nothing on the provincial knowing that we don't simply get anymore.  This is not urgent, it is simply true.  

My body was found at the foot of that giant tree, swaying and cocking its neck, the clavicle and the dips in the stars, right at the ocean front, but I was happy there.  I left the tops of the vantage points behind...the places where the others stayed, it just wasn't for me.  I always have to jump, that's just the way the road reads the words, and the hours in the day, and the simple sigh that greets every morning's moment until I reached that railing, fully myself and wanting.

The birds shit around the perimeter of my resting place.....I'd like to think one of the more adventurous ones will take that half haiku in its mouth crooked and carry it to the other shore, the one where the sinews click, the hips fuck each other into existence and my words find weight with the sun.  No setting or rising required.  Still, I did it with my eyes open and I found life there, in the battleship between the waves, the sonic boom the fanatical dreams that I've only recorded here, on all of you (all of you).  The thoughts scattered, shit and wind to the clouds, to find a warmer climate and a life worth living.  But still, I blame no one for this.  I'm glad to have come, again, and yes, once more, to the same place.  

I know the birds don't give a fuck about my little nasty haiku, my nimminy pimminy little note....but, perhaps someone out walking in the morning, thinking hard about the way the light hits them, the way life hits them, and how they might intend on hitting back, might bend down and pick up that little, bended and pleated piece of paper, that haiku of a pretentious variety (always with the insults), just make sure to keep that little piece of paper, and promise that you will.  I think every good thing I've ever thought, feel, or been is somehow on there, in the corners, in the dust and dirt, in the elephant ears that I granted, of my own volition.  That's all.  Until next time.  I yield the floor, the dirt, the sand, the old garbage thrown from cars, the used condoms (such a waste they are), and the mountains of regret we all keep in our selves beneath this perfect light we call our lives, to you. The one who picks up this piece of paper.......

M. Lucia

BEETHOVEN'S BENCH

I mean to say here only briefly--to discuss, or even just to mention before they come again...before they find me and figure out I've been talking to you and then, well, God knows what will happen--that there's a bench in Vienna--and I'm totally aware how this is going to sound, and I know too that that in itself is a thing that people always say to be dramatic and to suspend the disbelief--saying "I know this sounds crazy but..." like somehow just saying that makes the whole implausible nature of whatever "fantastic" story is being told more plausible, and easier to swallow as it were--the wheels are greased and so the story can go on and anything can happen.  But I'm not saying that here because I don't expect you to believe this, what I'm going to say, and ultimately I guess I don't really care since I fully expect to be dead as a doornail by the time you get around to reading this.  This here...what I'm writing to you dear reader, is really all about me...meaning it's all only for my benefit.  I need to be able to go to my grave knowing at least that someone knows what happened to me or at least know what I think was happening to me (that's something that people also say when writing something like this but I think I've made my point and I'm not going to belabor it anymore.)  I'll leave it to you to wrestle with questions of my sanity...to decode what I write, search for hidden indications of mental illness, compare notes (if there's more than one of you) consult the latest psychiatric journals and narrow the symptoms down.  Either way you'll still be left with the nagging question of my death, although now that I think about it I would imagine THEY (and I really have no idea who "THEY" might be, just so you know, although not that it matters) would either (a) make my death look like a suicide or (b) dispose of my body, both of which unnerve and depress me so I'm going to just press on so I can make sure I wrap this up in the time I have left (aye! the cliches are killing me...I wish I had more time....)   


Anyway, there's a bench in Vienna, as I said, along the park side of the Rue de Merkenstrasse.  I really should say "La" Rue de Merkenstrasse shouldn't I?  Although now that I think about it isn't it sort of redundant to call it the La Rue (i.e. street) de Merken-strasse ("street" in German, right?)?  So basically it's Street of Merken-street.  Or more accurately Merkenstreet Street?  I guess it is redundant but that's what it is, so be it.  Or maybe I'm just not remembering it correctly.  Maybe it's just Merkenstrasse.  Or La Merkenstrasse.  And come to think of it why "La" at all?  Isn't that French?  Or I suppose it could be Spanish too but I thought since I was remembering "Rue" that we were talking French but the point being why French and German in one name.  That should have been the tip-off right there.  I should have guessed once I put La Rue in with a German name that I made a mistake and re-thought the whole thing.  But I digress and like I said, I'm running out of time here.  I mean they're coming.  I can hear them.  There's sirens in the distance and they're getting closer.  And there's that hum that won't go away, and it's getting louder.  And then there's the thing where my iPod keeps shuffling to Beethoven Symphonies when I have at least 6,000 other songs on there for it to shuffle to but it won't it just keeps plowing through the 9 Symphonies (but, and here's the tricky [and I have to say really annoying] part, it's shuffling within the symphonies--you know, first the second movement of the third symphony, second the third movement of the fifth symphony and then the first movement of the eighth, and continuing on like that).  Isn't that weird?  And I don't think that in itself is any indication of the fact that they're coming which they most surely are or that I'm running out of time which I most surely am...it was more the thing with the sirens and the hum.  And that scratching noise.  And I think they've poisoned my wine.  And the guy in the wine store with the thin little mustache and all the grease in his hair and the weird way he wears a doctor's white coat that he never seems to change although it never seems to get dirty and the funny little look he gives me when I ask for Cabernet like maybe I'm mispronouncing it somehow (and I'm not even saying the end like "net" - you know with the "t" actually spoken hard instead of cab-er-nee so I don't know what his problem is other than maybe he's feeling self-conscious about the fact that a bunch of men who look like government operatives [and I'm just making this part up now but for effect, you know?] were just in his tidy little store and were switching out some of his inventory and he can't do anything about it [so there's the whole helpless, being used as a pawn of the man thing] and it just so happens that those [the switched out ones] are the very bottles that I pick off the shelves and so he can't decide if [a] I'm part of the whole conspiracy and his little shop is being used as some sort of clearing house/exchange center for government spooks of which I am one or [b] that maybe they're doing something to me that I'm not aware of, the effects of which may take place in his very store--the store he is so obsessed with keeping clean and tidy so much so that he's imposed the unconventional wardrobe thing with the white doctor's coat on himself).  Or maybe he's part of it too.  I hadn't thought about that until just now...
What was that?  Oh no, I have to hurry.  OK, so there's a bench in Vienna along the park side of Il Place du Strassemerkel...Merken!  Merkenstrasse.  And no one ever ever seems to sit there but me.  And all the pigeons stay away...they never fritter around that bench the way they do other benches.  And I hate birds so I sat there.  And it was empty like I said.  And then walking along the strasse, the rue, the street, right past my bench, I swear was Beethoven himself.  And he regarded me with this queer little expression like I was sitting at HIS bench.  Like I was in his place.  The expression was nothing like that of the little greasy thin mustached man in the wine store with the white coat.  This was a stormy, angry look.  And so I stood up and then he stepped around me and sat himself and started playing at some imaginary piano...and I swear I heard the Moonlight Sonata playing but then he just faded away right where he sat.  He didn't vanish as much as fade away...and the music did too.  And then there were several men all at once you know like triangulated around me the way the government has men on surveillance trying to plan for any eventuality--like they would be ready no matter which way I ran but instead I leaped over the bench and ran into the park and got away.  I've gone back to the bench everyday on the Merkely and every time it's the same, although the piece Beethoven plays is different.  Yesterday he even played a Chopin Polonaise which there is no way he could have known because it was written after he had died...only now I think the men have found me and they know what I'm doing and... 

 Diocletian Palace, the Silver Entrance.

Diocletian Palace, the South Wall.

M. Lucia

URGENT: Please Read

Most of us are just folks, aren't we.  But it's not enough.  The doors of the train were closed, not permitting the stink and unnatural radiation of the station into the small car, safety behind those doors, with some kind of silver protection which seems like enough.

Behind the door was the couple.  Hispanic, as usual, as they seem to encompass the more banal and complacent in all of us these days - too short, too fat, too often the worst set of clothes tapered onto the least proper of bodies, worshipping the idea of the lazy american, their pedestal, as they were in the sight of the eye for just a moment's time.  A moment, in which the car just started to move, and he pushed her away from him - casually, not with love but just with the sense of getting her a bit farther away from him.  At the same moment, her faceless self, back to us, vomited something golden and awful, the sort of puke that one might find themselves encompassed by in the latest hours of night, in the hungover late morning or early dawning, but no - in the later rush hour of 7 o'clock on a subway platform.  Then the car was gone.  She was non chalant, and clearly wasn't bothered by it - or so the closed and sealed doors told us.  But to have that beast exit out of you in mid spring evening - what in the hell brought that on.  That's not love.  That's most people.  Living in the murk below the sunset and not seeing any of its colours. 

I don't like the way our brains work these days.  I don't like that we are thinking of twenty things when talking to each other - our eyes averted, not a gaze amongst them.  Ever want to be the aggressor, or the magnanimous one, or the innocent or the loving one.  It's all in the intention, in what you are.  The thing you cannot get away from not matter how you try.  But then, in that moment, look into their eyes and don't leave, don't look away.  Nothing like it yet in today's technology.  People don't know how to be with one another anymore.  A life without activity and a life without so called ambition work-wise is seen as failure.  If only they knew what failure really is.  It is not living in the presence of those around you, of loving with your whole person, of being in the crux of that cluster of stars that you call your life.  That's all there is, every day.  Nothing else matters. 

I see myself in the wrong place, with the wrong people, having loved the wrong people, and wasted myself on the earth.  I hate myself for each of these moments, but forgive at each and every turn.  Because I know what's what.  If it's broke, you must fix it.  There is no other way out of it.  Wasting our days with fools enacting useless acts, making shams into great truths and lies into something which we cannot transcend from - to that which we deserve at our better and best selves....that is the worst sin which in his time Jesus could not even dream was possible.  Drink from the cup, and let it awake you, every sinew, sensation, dream and brightness.  It is never too late to stop being just folks.  The flame forgets how many times it is put out, and the privilege of being who you really are, forgets its place and your sunset falls away, into the cloudy water of everyday folk.  In our own hand, we have it...for now.

M. Lucia

Ruzic

The rooted idea of Home
has a place
at the end of the tunnel.
In your DNA, in the way you gaze through the day.
Sorry to all the girls whose fathers were fuck ups.
Mine was not.

And it feels damn good.


M. Lucia

Heathen Child

I am the heathen child
the one which conducts playtime in the closets
when you're away
scattered applause makes
lightning white noise in between my legs
my ears lies the brain
reveals all the truth I need
in direct succession,
my research takes its poison
its gun
the bullets and the hands at rest
all the religious articles wet on the rug next to me
I would slice my wrists
but I sit back in the bathtub instead
only to find that the God is not necessary
as the rest of you see him.
Him, dressed in my bathrobe...
I was raised by beasts and killed by vultures
and I am the proof that they all exist.
You think they will protect you.
You are wrong.
Sucking my thumb, nestled
in the light between my eyes
where Heaven grows and Hell subsides;
Nothing scares me, and that is that.
Bring on the thunderstorm so I can ride it into you
and into that God which I am.
Look up, bright now, and remember to not do anything
without your full heart in it.  Otherwise, why bother.
This you tell like a charming serpent, firing the machine guns into the night-
Chop my throat with that ax, and makes all the bullshit fall away down the drain.
The water runs clear out the window, into the sky and street
and all the while I am dancing
the Buddha is for me to meet. The Jesus in me moans,
for the dark Mary he left sitting on the rock;
for the Allah that I walk with, all of them sent up the chute
at my disposal-
Let it run, I say.  But No one will tell me it can't be my way
because mine is theirs is the kingdom and the glory
whores and grace and humility and the stoic quality
that lets me know to feel is not to smear your tragedy all over the rest of us.
To love is not to sacrifice, but to gain up the shadows that your bullet holes make
without regret
and walk forth, knowing who you are and make sure to smile too, but
only
if you want to.


M. Lucia

GORGEOUS MISTAKE

He took the picture and then just happened to glance down at her feet, in the sand, at the base of the tree where he had her pose for the photograph.


There was something wrong there but he couldn't place it--her toes--it was like a voice whispering.  That was how remote the thought and the feeling was.  In the distance the sound of children laughing in the surf.  The sun on the Pacific horizon dropped so dramatically it was as if the very noise of it was mixed in there with the small sugary voices, the kid giggles.


You OK? she asked him.  He looked now in her eyes and then at the scar at the center of her forehead, chicken pox, the same way he had a thousand times before.  In one motion he turned the camera off (the lens retracted reminding him of the turtles they had seen that afternoon lounging on logs in the pond by the hotel) and slid it (the camera) into his pocket.  He placed his hand at the center of her arm and the niggling suspicion in his mind was temporarily warded away to some back bench where it would wait certainly, and for the time being wait silently.


They have been married for 24 years and he had just turned 50 and here they were on Maui to celebrate.  He turned her by the elbow and stepped in behind her.  The sun had warmed the skin of her back and it heated his chest even as the cold wet of her bikini bottem chilled his crotch.  With one hand on her stomach, he slid the other arm across her chest and slid his left hand under her right shoulder strap, resting it broadly at the top of her chest, one or two finger tips feeling the slight stubble of her right arm pit.  She rested her head, nestling into him.


Everything was in its place.  This expensive trip was only a financial blip in their bank account six time zones to the east of this beach.  Fifty and comfortable, almost wealthy, and recently promoted at work--a certain corporate confidence had been placed in him and trust flowed freely back and forth, from his employers and to friends and family.  His parents had begun that decline he knew would, over the years to come, turmoil him but at the same time also ultimately dull the forboding he felt about not achieving the dreams of his "better self," teaching him, at close range, to keep his head down maybe, splitting the difference, and not hope for more than warm sand every now and then, a good novel, and a satisfying 18 holes.


His wife's toes were not unattractive the way some older women's were and he never fancied himself the type even to think about feet.  He never noticed when some women in the office wore heels, say, or why that would matter to anyone especially his male co-workers and subordinates.  The sun was dipped now maybe 20% into the ocean, the air around it shimmered red and orange.  Birds flew by in groups like they were on their commute home for the day.  His son Josh floated face down on his surfboard in the shallow water searching the uncoming set.  Smoke from an outside pit floated by scenting the air in a way that made his stomach growl vaguely.  He never noticed her toes nails before.  They had seemed painted almost luridly, at first glance, in a color like the one surrounding the setting sun only brighter and more intense.


She surprised him with a yell off to the distance.  He had been lost in his thoughts and when she called to their daughter Chloe he had a bit of the feeling that you had when you just missed being in an accident, where your body instinctively anticipates trauma.  He felt an ache in his thighs and he could hear his heart beating--it was all about the blood, he thought.  Chloe had allowed the crack of her ass to show again and her mother, his wife, had been chasing her around all afternoon complaining about that little dimple of flesh flashing out to the world.


She stepped away from him to yell into the wind and he dropped again to the blanket they had pulled off the hotel's king-sized bed to bring down to the beach.  The hotel preferred you use the over-sized towels they provided at the entrance to the steps leading down to the sand but they wanted one large blanket the way they always had over the years and hundreds of trips first to Coney Island and then, after some time, all those years at the Jersey Shore.  He raked his stiff and sea-sticky hair feeling the sand graining his scalp.  Josh was paddling into the waves and they bobbed him and his reckless youth almost cinematically.  The sun was down now maybe 40-45% and the sea had begun to boil around it.  His wife was laughing and Chloe crossed her arms over her chest and stared down at her feet.  She gave Chloe a smack on the ass and turned back to him smiling.  Chloe sneered at her mother's back and stuck out her tongue.  He shut his eyes and concentrated meditatively on the wind blowing on his face, moving the whiskers of his beard and the hair on his chest.


When he opened them he was looking right at her left foot planted in front of him as she scanned the water for Josh.  He looked more closely and it was the nail of the smallest toe that really bugged him.  It was tiny, a sliver really, it was hardly even a nail but more like a deposit of hardened calcium in a stony crevice of the foot's poorer neighborhood.  And yet she painted it, or had it painted.  It was just the thinnest stripe of orange, so narrow in fact that the color didn't seem to match the other toes, as if there wasn't enough of the color in one place to help your eye form an impression of the shade in-full, the same way a swatch at the hardware store never really gave you a sufficient enough sense of the color you finally painted on the living room wall and so after it dried you stood with the swatch holding it a different angles, unshading lamps and squinting one eye and then the other and though the swatch seemed to blend in with the finished surface the swatch by itself still looked different from the wall.


Why paint it?  When had the toenail gotten so small, was it always like that?  He remembered, far away now off in the distant past, a weekend in her dormroom when he had kissed her feet, allowing himself a glance up past her spread thighs as she stared down at him over her breasts, gloriously naked, and uninhibedly so and he had quickly and impulsively popped her pinkie toe into his mouth sucking it and sweeping it with his tongue imagining somehow the roles reversed and it being her mouth instead, and his penis, a suggestion maybe, hopefully, to her as they began to wade into the deeper intimate waters of their physcial relationship.  He hadn't thought then to look at it or remark on anything about it, not the nail or even if it was painted.  He didn't really remember anything about it.  Now he stared at it almost 30 years later and looked up at her again.  


She stared out at the water.  Josh was turned toward the shore now looking back over his shoulder at the waves as they came at him and washed over him, unsure in his inexperience which one would be the best to ride.  He had all the equipment and expensive lessons all week, but he hadn't really gotten the hang of it yet.  The sun was almost fully down, just a thin semi-circle staring back at them.  Meat was almost certainly now on the luau's fire pit and something like tropical Hawaiian music was playing, or at least he thought that was what it might be.  He reached out and covered the foot with his hand.  She looked down at him and smiled, almost suggestively, as if she could read his mind and the fact of his hand on her foot also summoned for her the same momery.  She was so happy here he knew.  


I'm gonna get one more swim in he said and stood and ran toward the water as he always did when he went into the ocean.  Ever since he was a boy he approached the waves that same way--he made the committment to go and then ran deciding that there was no changing your mind, just the inexorable physical motion at the water.  As he ran now he felt the camera bouncing against his thigh but he didn't want to stop and he didn't want to go back.  He had drained himself of thought and he had stopped caring about anything other than just in this moment being under the sea.


The water was shallow for a few yards but then dropped off quickly at this part of the beach,  he knew.  A few strides first and then he lunged, diving at a wave, his body slicing under.  The water was just cool enough to chill him but warm enough still to take him in comfortably and he pulled at the tide trying to swim out as far as he could on the breath he had taken in before going under.  He came up briefly for air with his back to the beach and then resubmerged swimming out even farther before surfacing again and finally floating in water in which it was too deep to stand.  


The light now from the set sun was a generalized reflection on sky and water alike, the half-light of dusk still enough as it eased the whole beach across into night.  The hotel had at some point illuminated the patio torches and from across the water he could see the luau pit cast shadows of flame on a corner of the hotel garden.  


His wife and daughter huddled together on the towel.  Josh lay on his board on the sand in the shallows the waves tiding into him and then draining away.  A pair of girls to his right seemed to be approaching him though he lay there seemingly unaware.  He pulled the camera out of his pocket and out from under the water into the air.  Treading water he held the camera in front of his face and pressed the power button.


For a second the picture of his wife by the tree, the last picture he had taken, flashed across the screen.  It glowed slightly green, seemingly suffering from an infusion of water.  Then the screen went black flashing momentarily a jagged lightning blot signfying a dead battery.  The lens blurted out from the camera's front halfway and stopped dead impotently.  He let his arm drop back under the water and let the camera float away with whatever tide there was, in or out.


Chloe and her mother (his wife) seemed to be sparring at this distance.  He could imagine the discussion.  Easily.  Josh had stood and was carrying his board toward the family blanket.  He turned to look at the horizon and to where the sun had been and had set.  He himself sank under the water and he began to swim toward the other side of the world.

Suitcase Full of Porn

Suitcase full of porn, he ascended the staircase with indolence jumping jacks in his heart, and pockets.  The steps were white, and smooth, yet with a newness not irregular, except for the second to top step, which wasn't completely flat, and rose and fell underneath the length of his foot (usually his right, but he would often plan it in his head and either let the right have its day, or occasionally force the left one to have a go, but that took concentration from at least ten steps beneath, and when the left did fall onto the wavy, roman-like stone step near the top, it never felt natural), and he already heard her stirring from behind the closed door.  The echos of the breeze outside her open window was making its way underneath the door, and into the bottoms of his pant legs...the suitcase was muttering something about the way skin tasted when you went at it like is your God given right.  God given.

He knocked, low and with only two raps.  She yelled, but the distance and thickness of the door made it seem like a voice of a medium level at most.  "You know I never lock the door".  He did know, and the fact that he never put his suitcase down at the door somewhat proved this fact.  He turned the handle, notable not a knob, downwards and heard the click, not easy but controlled force made it work best.  Of this he was also fully aware.  He glimpsed her as the vista changed to the inside of the room, and the bright light pouring from the open window blinded his sight in its majority.  "It's too cold to have the window open".

The suitcase, full up with tarts and cunts, cock and bull, quietly touched the ground, as he felt for his chest, and his heart, beating with said indolence and growing force.  He couldn't see yet past the sunshine and wind oncoming, but felt warmth in the wind as she passed by close in front of him.  "It's not too cold to have the window open.  The air is dead in here without it".  He heard this contradictory statement, and just after the word "dead" came the corresponding and also contradictory thick click of the window being shut, and the curtain drawn nearly all the way to the middle plane.  "I see you've brought your files with you again", she added, as he finally caught her in his sight, now with a shadow overcompensating in his retinas, onto her skin and lips as they spoke.

"You never had a problem with it before", he said as his vision cleared and he saw her, again just in her underwear, with one piece of a dress on, and opened, always in a state of half undress.  He walked up to her, and she smiled at this small, but worthy attempt at contradiction, and her lips grew outward, into the open air around them, and she gently tossed off the one piece of actual clothing she had on, and pulled him to her.  There was no time for any more formalities.

Like the beats of a well structured drama, her eyes ate him up, and her hands with the grace and arc of a well turned heel in dance, reached downwards and out onto his cock, growing in all directions as did her tongue in his mouth, biting and pulling at his bottom lip in soft staccato.  His hands then decided it was enough for him to set aside any passivity, and that he would drive forth at her with all the filth and depravity that he held inside that suitcase, watching eagerly from the floor near the window.  He forced her down onto the bed, and her legs wrapping round him, the great divide stretching out into the pit of his belly, as she sucked his cock like a pro, and he begged her off of him at the last quickening second, since he wanted to come with her writhing underneath him, which is the way she always preferred as well - fighting the good fight, her cunt acquiesing to the rigor of his overtaking her, only because she herself had allowed it.  But once it did, there was no going back.  She was the irregular stone step and he would tread onto and into her empire, conquering and building up new nations, as he tasted her sweet in his mouth, and her moans went wildly alongside the smell of her skin, thick and fragrant with her indolence, which she stole from her with her lips.

Once actual fucking began, it seemed like the room closed in onto them, and they ate up the breeze, and he would rise and fall in breath and climax with each and every thrust, her pulling the walls of her cunt close inwards onto him, only to release him back like a wave killing you and tossing you back, every minute and every time it wanted to show you what life was really all about.  The fact that you were not in charge was the key.  This went on, as he buried his face driven with sweat into the burrow of her neck and she scratched at his back and bit at him with the feebleness of a slow thinking child.

He smelled fresh air mingling into the murk they had created, on her cheeks and on the top of her breasts, and glanced over for a moment, seeing that the window was not all the way closed, but indeed open a crack.  She noticed and smiled wryly, her eyes half closed from the activity and she bit her lip and forced him to go deeper into her.   Her mumbled words like someone on the brink of drunkeness, "see, the wind is more alive, yeah?..." became simply yeahs to moans without any question mark, as he kissed her with his tongue and full intention.  His beasts and deepest sensations rose to the top of him now, and they fucked their way clear through that crack to the outside breeze, coming loudly until and for hours after the wind finally died down out of exhaustion.

M. Lucia

Bok! (Go With God)

The night, the family wine swirling in my pores, my mind is calm
half asleep, I drag my illegal suitcase full of contraband
to the car.
the same song again, playing on repeat on her radio.
I don't think to ask why; she's related to me, so I understand.
We're late, since we were up all night raising up our name to the sky
via vino, food and soul, complete and unapologetic.
They call for me, and I am the last to board,
the ladies ("we are good looking, beautiful family", we are more women than men, we are strong, and stubborn and striking all) say they will drink coffee, at the airport, for me, while I fly off.
The last words I hear in the country of home are from a security airport employee who makes me take out
my hairspray to show him it is what it says it is.  Just like us, who are what we are.....his words are
"you are very beautiful woman"...my reply:
"you should see me when it's not 6 in the morning in an airport"
He smiles and I walk, medium paced to the plane. 
I am still walking at a medium pace.

M. Lucia

Zagorka

The zagorka is wild, but there is a microcosm of earth, which offers it protection above and below.  It is, as we are, nestled in between the looming white and brown mountains and independent blue clouds and sky, and the earth below - and below - and below.  Seeds of ground, of herb and rocks, which built modern life from ancient life, and roads which are born of recent machines are still, stoic with minimal needs.  The rocks are a blanket over dry and then rich soil, reams of creatures which live in and around her surface, smooth and inviting, motherly and wild.  

The men have planted some land mines and have tried to remove the tops of her homes but she stands still, and defiantly turns her head away from the engines that roar for her, when those engines lack fire and only know air and cement.  She prefers to take her levels inward, into the deepest of vistas and out again, laced with her wild ways to the wind and the sea, which surrounds, and is always moving, even in stillness it advertises to the rest.  When you stand above her, you can peer below to the finest constructions of tall paintings made into your world; when you think you can control her, out she runs again, pushing her way back to you and up your backside, making her way into your ways and not apologizing for it.  But, then, you will find her wilds laced with cherry and olive trees, and vineyards which carry you through to the thinking onto your head which you call imagining.  

She is the blanket of moist, warm grasses and the circling dogs roam her like their own, and is the lap for the weary head to regenerate itself -- that inexplicable feeling of waking up from a much needed sleep on her earth, the wind dancing about your feet, the drop just out of frame, down to her other, equally as stubborn, skies which simply exist for you to look upon.  To see yourself in her crystal clear waters.  She is everything about you, secrets all, but not hidden, all that she is she has always been.  I wake up from her moonshine dirt with the scent in my skin, the pallour of fullness making offerings to my mouth and steps.  

The zagorka is the untamable place, winds making gladitorial battles and animalistic lust games and passion plays and childrens tales all at once, beneath an understanding, open and starred sky.  The sun warms my ways and my touch is grand, because she has showed me that I am her wildness equally, and wildness contained in every presence, the moments I eat birth and death like stray flowers worn in my hair, rocks in my bag and a constant barely drunk soul which guides me on with curiosity, and a pounding heart.  The zagorka runs the highways in my veins and the new skin beneath my feet.  Once awakened, she will never sleep again, and there is no need to be afraid of her anymore.  She lives to love what she recognizes as her own, to shield and retreat, to open her eyes bright to me.  

Her mantle is digested, my father is racing the moon above it all, and my heart is made fragrant and expanding, my touch the nexus of the adjoining universes which I can yield to, because I do not have to yield.  I am her contradiction and spin around the rocky, seamless and downward/upward coastal measures without care of how far I go...as I am always looking out from inside the contained wilds of her spellbound eyes.  I am zagorka.  I am home.

M. Lucia

WHAT'S THE STORY WITH RORY?

----- Original Message -----
From: Michaelene Friedersdorf
To: Rory Friedersdorf
Sent: Mon Apr 18 12:24:49 2011
Subject: What happened to you?

Where did you go?  I waited over 2 hours at the hospital the whole time calling Daniel at home to see whether you went there...we're both worried sick and didn't even TELL Dad (or Mom God forbid).  Please don't tell me you're flaking out again!  Really Rory when are you going to wake up?  Our mother's laying in a hospital bed tubes in every direction and all you can think about is...I don't even want to know what!  I'm about ready to give up altogether but Mom still needs you (especially now) so if you're somewhere and need to come back call my cell and I can come get you.  I'll have to use Dad's car since on top of everything else this week something happened to my brakes or something and my car rolled down the hill and crashed into the big oak on Canaan Avenue.

Please call me at least.  If you can find the time...

CARING (INTENSIVELY)

Michaelene is downstairs complaining to our father.  I can hear her and you know what?  I actually think she knows I can hear her.  It's just like her to not give a fuck.  And it's not even out of any plot, you know, like an attempt to manipulate me by making me overhear her bullshit and even making me hear my father agreeing that I'm a fuck up, which is really the only hard part about it.  Like I'm going to somehow "come to grips" with her complaints and with my own "bad behavior" and "change my ways" and suddenly "be there for our mother," by which Michaelene, of course, means "be there for Michaelene."  


I'm sitting at the window on the third floor of M.'s giant house, in her "office," the place she presumably does all her big thinking in.  I rolled the desk chair over to the window and from this angle I can see my father's car parked in front of M.'s.  They're both identical (in all but color) "green" cars, you know, environmentally low-impact cars.  My father purchased his right after hearing M.'s enthusiasm with her own and with her influence presumably.  He always pretty much went along with whatever she said.  My old 15 MPG Wrangler's a horror show presumably, another symbol of my self-indulgence, like the frowned-upon extra glass of wine, and the request for the dessert menu, or the display of ANY emotion at our mother's hospital bed.  


Mom's out of surgery and M.'s plotting hospital shifts--when we'll all take our turn being there (the timing of course being M.'s decision because "someone has to decide"), expected to hold Mom's hand and be "a presence" for the nurses.  M. assumes everyone's a fuck-up, like her sister, and if given the chance to slack-off will take it, so her theory is that if someone's always there then the nurses won't have a choice and Mom'll get better care.  She's got it all figured out is what I mean to say ultimately.  


When I asked Angie, the ICU nurse assigned to Mom last night, where she was from I got the inevitable look of betrayal from M. like I had shown our collective hand or something, shown a weakness.  My father defended me later in the car ride home but only with a tactical argument along the lines of saying that if we make friends with THEM they're more likely to help us out, at which M. snorted and chuckled to herself shaking her head.  She has an amazing ability to register contempt even when viewed in profile from the back seat.  I wondered if she was only showing that expression on the side of the face I could see since it was directed only at me.  Like the dark side of the moon, I imagined the other side of her face being expressionless and impassive.  Or maybe the other side of her face compensated for the ugliness of the side facing me so that her expression over-all would be some kind of zero-sum game.  Once in awhile I still sorta wished that the loving side would face me once in a while, but the moon never did show her dark side, and Michaelene always did.  Anyway, I was really just wondering where Angie came from, that was all.    


I could really hear her going at it now down there.  When you get right down to it I think what I find most amazing is how she could just make her mind up about everything so easily, including me.  She's just locked in as they say.  And I know now that I'm definitely leaving today, no matter what her plan is for bedside vigils.  I can't be here anymore, no matter how sick my mother is. There's always one, isn't there?  The kid who leaves their parent in the hospital and never comes to visit.  I think I get it now.  Sometimes you just can't compete.  And when the game is "who loves Mommy more" who even wants to play? 

THE STREAM

I bought the water because I was eating and I thought "I'm supposed to drink something too, right?"  So I have the water and I'm just carrying it with me.  Carrying it around unopened.

I'm so tired.  I'm bone tired.  I'm dead tired.  I'm even SO tired of being tired, and TALKING about being tired.  I'm tired of the way it shows on my face.  "You look different," yes I know, you know what it is?  I'm older.  I'm very suddenly older.  "Your eyes are so red," yes, I know.  I've stopped trying to figure it out.  I'm greyer, I'm circled and lined.  More now than before.

I'm tired of carrying this bottle around.  This spring water.  This miracle of the world when you think about it and when you look at it from the perspective of the other 90% of the world--I'm one of the ten percent with an unwanted miracle-bottle of unbelievably clean water.  I can't just throw it away just because I'm sick of carrying it.  That would be sin itself, right?

So I return it to the inventory.  I place it in a pile of water bottles of a different brand at a different store miles from where I bought it.

What's going to happen?  Does anyone ever just give back something they don't want anymore?  How often does that happen?  And what are they going to do--at Starbucks--when someone tries to buy the bottle of water that they don't sell?  And if the person who wants to buy it finds out they don't sell it are they going to want it anymore?  Even if it's free?  "Take it" they'll say and the person will frown and say "well can you give me one that I can actually buy?  I don't want this one if it's free."

Maybe it is only good if it costs something.

Bitter and Sweet

These last pains have left,
and also they say they will
have to stay
again, but softly
there in between the rocks of the house
in the knots amidst our internal rivers
running always back to us.

There are vistas which stretch up like wildcats
tearing and eating at our memories
until they are happening now, along with the songs
from the radio, the twisting of the old roads made new
the moon of gold bearing down on us
glittering skies of pride
and stubbornness which has, at its crux
the makings for a history
worth understanding.

M. Lucia

Those Eyes

Those eyes I see them everywhere,
under the sun, through the winds
walking through roman ruins.
Those eyes peer out at me,
trying to communicate, left
mostly to hand gestures which
resemble the form of drinking up...
Those eyes glance by, sometimes in blue
but mostly in the warm brown tones
sipping rakia, vino and mineral water.
Talking, and talking and smiling through wrinkles
which were not there before.
Those eyes are my father s
showing me photographs and talking of the village,
the one I will see on sunday.
How many people get to see the physical spot
wherein their entire genetic universe had its big bang
growing barks of brown wood, smoking lamb and laughter
which causes fear and excitement
to be back in my home - with this history implanted
of our name
in the windy night behind my eyes.
Those eyes which I have beaming still,
how will they look upon you and themselves
when they return, mended and billowing
with calm and might.

M. Lucia

Kavana at Noon

Why is it that we get everything wrong?
Why is it that technology has wrapped its cords round our neck, raped and unmanned us,
and left us in the closet, asphyxiating on our own sex drives and vomit capitulated
in a stream of radiation and bliss which mows us down
pissing on our humanity and we - mute as a clown - watching it get dragged farther
and farther away...
How sad it is for me to sit in a cafe, indescript and typical
watching children, girls not even 21
smoking and drinking coffee and talking
yes Talking-
did I stutter?
TALKING to each other, to me
even though I speak near none of their (my) language.
They send odd texts to get closer together
to meet up
They make phone calls, with their very own Voices
to make plans,
to keep plans
to be alive in each others presence.
Their phones work just as fast and efficiently as ours do.
But they still refuse to live as fast and inefficiently as we do.
They use this extremely modern technology simplistically
and it brings them closer together. Once they have achieved this:
it is back to talk, and food, and drink, and smoke and coffee
and laughter and mimicry and dark humor and ideas.
The technology sits back into its place,
and knows when to shut its trap.
Something is wrong with us.
I sit there, with young girls
who know more about being human beings than I.
But you see, I remember.
Its in my blood and it cannot be cut out,
no matter how hard you try, America.
Still, I sat in a cloud of macchiato and malboro reds
and thought about how I used to do this, more than a decade ago.
How I dont remember the last time I did, or tried, or was -like this.
Normalcy creeps in slowly, and I laugh again at who we think we are,
over there in that free world.  Hanging in the shadows of our closets
the cords of electronica slicing at our necks, as we turn away
from each other, and ourselves.

M. Lucia

Marasovica 29

The thought was disturbing to her.  The thought was extremely disturbing to her.  The thought - it repeatedly disturbed her.

Our lives were bullshit.  There was no other way to get around this very plain fact.  We existed back there, in the so-called land of freedom, of opportunity, of any dream you wanted to dream up.  But that's just the problem with the American Dream - it is for the patterns and happy trails in your head, not for the life you think you lead there, in so-called Americana, land of the free.  You're only free when you're dead, and you there, living in the land of the dead.  

It is as if every anger that plagued at me, every rage and reason that smacked me all about town, if you can call it town, is gone away.  It does not exist in me here.  Because *I* exist here.  Without my defenses up, without my fists curled into angry baby dragons...coiling and strategizing and shaking its fist at the world.  

The world, it goes by here.  There is a vista both in front of me, my past behind me, and all about my mind.  There is the homemade wine I consume, sometimes with water and sometimes not, which exists in me in the very same way, the meat made in the town of my father's birth.  The family talking loudly, smoking outside, there the sea and the ferries, the beer I had on the promenade, my hands caressing the walls of Rome.  I can never leave this place because it has been inside me all of my life.  Now, it is free and does not claw at me as it does in your land of the living, so-called.  All of these things are there, present in that very moment - as the moment I am living in right now.  

Ami the big black poodle barks - the Bura wind is coming in for the night, into my quiet apartment rooms, with the bathroom in which I remember sitting on the toilet at 6 years old and someone opened the door, because I did not lock it.  I am here now.  The woman raised somewhere else, but existing here all the while.

I have tasted the tip of it on my tongue and it glides down my throat - glistening all spit filled, salt water kissing, roman relic on my heels --- this is water, indeed.  And I'm soaking at its shores, far away from the idealistic and self deluded bullshit of the workaday American dream.

Time does not exist here.  Everything will work out.  Every moment is a golden one, indeed.  Henry was right.  This is my Paris, the Roman ruins collapsing my neuroses and telling me to be still.  He would never ever have dreamed of suicide if he had been alive and present in the waters of this city.  Every place we are, every one we can be, is golden and renewed, sprouting up and in all directions, and nobody has to get hurt.    A house with all its right parts, and a family with all its right members.  Each love in its own right place.  That's the lesson.  The wind comes by and will paint me up a sunrise for tomorrow, advancing from all the shores.

M. Lucia

Worldweary

The world and its ways
dont sweep my face as it
used to do.
Force every boredom
clinical relief
battle blister and
sweet comfort......
To the firing line.

The night is turning its wheels
fast into day;
and Ive got to open my eyes in
Every direction
and be up with it.  Here.
goes
nothing!

M. Lucia

Parallel

Here in the shadowbox everything is reflected...but so...I like to keep my back to the ledge because sometimes I get that vertigo thing, you know, really bad.  

Hard part is though just having the mirror to look into.  Only that.

Because it's me in there.  

I mean I can see me but I wonder what's going on beyond the corners, you know behind the other me.  I don't think it's always the same as here, you know, on THIS side of the mirror.  I suspect it isn't.

Sometimes I feel like I catch little wisps of smoke coming from back there.  Or a shadow from around the curve.  Which just then calls into question the "ME" part of the reflection too.  You know, because if anything is different then EVERYTHING must be different.  

Or, how do I know that what I'm seeing right here in front of me is really me and not just some prop, some elaborate deception?  I don't, that's how.  

Maybe there's another me--the one who propped up the fake me on his side of the mirror so he could do something different--and maybe he's having a lot better time of it all.  Maybe that me has the grace unlike THIS me, the real one (at least to me), to not press his face so hard against the mirror and to just go ahead and walk the path along the edge and see what else life has in store--"fuck the vertigo," he might say.

I watch him sometimes and I think--maybe I imagine--I see him peel his face off from the other side of the mirror against mine and then circle around behind me.  I can't move so I have to crane my eyes around in their sockets.  I feel them darting around in there, my eyes I mean and that makes me panic.  I must look panicked with my eyes darting around but then it's also worse because you know your eyes can only really move just a little bit.  

I'm not like a cow who apparently has like 360-degrees of peripheral vision.  Or at least something approaching that.  That according to something I read somewhere in an article about meat.  

It's strange to read something about "meat" and only really retain the one fact about eyes.  And a cow's eyes to boot.  

I still can't move.  Not until he comes back.  It's like we can't BOTH be flouting convention.  One of us has to keep the faith, carry the torch.

Eat shit--at least ONE of us has to.

SO I have to stand here waiting until he comes back from whatever fun he's off having.  HE'S the lucky one--the other me is.  HE gets to have all the fun.  Well I'll be here when he gets back and we're going to have a word or two, let me tell you....

Windowless

We all stood there, at the bus stop – some of you I know very well, and others I see your faces every single day or every third day or once a month, but you are all still a cyclical number of people, in various coats and colours and hair and stances that I see, on the corner of my street.

Today is different. Ever since Monday, we’ve looked up at that house with trepidation.

The lone, beautifully gutted reminder of the old waterfront. The small, economical brick a golden yellow even teetering on a rusty orange. The windows facing front – no panes, all boarded up cleanly. They are so long and seem like they stretch from the ceiling to the floor of that second floor front of the building. Everything about its structure is not of now – there is care, there is a tallness, reaching so straight into the sky. The neighborhood cats have community board meetings in there, and all of you and I stand there, every morning, dreaming and thinking and examining it. It has no purpose in this modern version of our street. But, it is surrounded by mildly industrial field and parking lot. They used to park old props for movies in that field - a cross country bus, a shot out glass police van, a vintage and rounded ice cream truck – anything you desired. On the other side was the phalanx of yellow school buses – our street was where they came to sleep their nights away.

Now, the parking lot is empty – the school buses gone. There is progress in the air – it’s not shocking. The view from that lone three story house must be magnificent. You always envied those cats that could climb up the vines which, in summer, grew from brown root to green varieties up the sides of the house and the boarded windows. It was the back of the house that held the surprise. The View. Those windows, facing the back street and the water, they didn’t have boards or anything holding them back. They were empty holes looking out into the water, the clouds, the tugboats and steamships and cranes. You, and presumably others, stared up into that view and transported yourself into the driver’s seat of anywhere else you wanted to be. It would always be slightly disappointing when the bus rounded the corner, but off you went with that vista still in your eyesight.

Not since Monday, though. A crew of men has arrived – there is a barrier of boards to protect the surrounding areas, when they throw and toss and kick and knock the bricks down – they are stubborn, and just won’t go that easily. But, it’s coming down. It’s clear to see. Even today, the whole top floor is practically gone. You all stand there, and wonder what will happen to your one sided street, where there was nothing before but empty school buses, lots and sky, at the center of which was this dreaming place. This monument to the individual quality of this place which chose you to be its resident. Everyone seems accepting- some take pictures, some just watch intently. It’s as if each of our year in and year out, daily dreams and thoughts and fears and workings are implanted into each brick face which gets knocked to the ground, without care.

It is most possibly alright to accept this and let them go – it is, though (in fact) jarring, and whatever takes its place, there will be an emptiness without a center, without a fixed star from which to view – one which shows us where to focus our sight onto briskly moving morning clouds and sun. The sky has been let loose, and, other than the rumble of the bus coming from around the corner, you can hear footsteps, light and modern, and you sigh a little more as you ascend the bus’s steps and watch the home you all shared get smaller as it rides away from you.

M. Lucia

CHINA'S BIG CHILL

What is this shit?

This I'm thinking to myself, of course.  Just putting it out there in case I wasn't making myself clear that I'm totally just thinking that and not saying anything of the kind straight out in the open in a room with my future wife, my mother-in-law and grandmother-in-law (RIP-since she's in the room but not actually IN the room, if you know what I mean, overlooking, as she is, this sweet little pre-nuptial scene from the cheap seats-i.e. as urn-bound ashes on the mantle next to the brass candlesticks and the framed photo of my future parents-in-law one of whom [the MIL] is actually present in the flesh, as previously indicated and with the FIL not present in the room or even in the state since he's still touring with Glenn Campbell's band, being one of the better steel guitar players in the southwest at a minimum) present.

I'm looking at china patterns, of course.  I don't know why that would be "of course" since you have no way of knowing what I'm looking at and yet somehow I assumed if you thought of a list of things that would get that kind of reaction out of me (i.e. "what is this shit?") right at the top of the list I bet you dollars to doughnuts would be china patterns.  Anyway, I'm looking at a catalog of them as it happens.  These are things, I should say at the outset, with which I am not familiar--china patterns I mean, of course.  Is anyone?  Familiar, I mean?  And when I say 'anyone' here I mean specifically any man?  And now you chime in the way you always do with a few examples right off the top of your head without having to take really any serious type time considering the question (which is an indication of just how stupid my statement is right?...given the examples contradicting my statement that are just cold leaping to the front of your mind and to the tip of your tongue even with just practically zero brain energy put into the question) of men in your experience who know all about china patterns - "take my Uncle Charlie" you might say and then regale me of how good old uncle C. just loves getting himself lost in the Dining & Entertainment department at Macy's blah blah blah...OK I get it...it's just me.

So I ask again.  What is this shit?

Does anyone entertain anymore?  Isn't it just Super Bowls and Final Fours and Oscar parties and BBQ's?  When am I going to need china?  Maybe that one time your Dad comes off the road and after the requisite decompression period, a few long soaks in a hot bath, a brief period detoxifying cold-turkey style off the cigarettes and Jack Daniels and Vaseline Intensive Care applied to his sore calloused fingers...and he sits down at the table, his face just dried out and leathered and hair pompadoured and greasy and your mother walking a little funny from sore privates presumably your Dad being a randy bugger but faithful nonetheless saving six weeks of lust up for your Mom post-tour, and so he sits there and saws away at your dried out Steak Diane - your favorite recipe - see?  I listen...and he drinks the lemonade and au gratin taters slurpin and sawin and sawin and slurpin...I'm not bitter --I love your Dad.  No, I do.  But point is does he need to eat off the china?

Pain is Beauty

As I was suffering steadily on the second evening of a substantial cold, the usual parameters of the spa and the experience of getting what ladies in modern society refer to as the “bikini wax”, something that, due to my ethnicity combining pre-colonially at a crossroads between Slavic, Mediterranean and possible Near Eastern aspects (mostly thanks to the roving and raping Ottoman Empire utilizing the rule that Croatian women under their rule had to sleep with the local Princely ruler first on her wedding night), was an accepted fate of my visage, over and under. It was routine to me now, so much so that I could almost gage to the minute just how long it would take, and usually I would be in and out of there in about 15 minutes or so, when there wasn’t a delay. As usual, on this rainy Wednesday evening, very well put together Manhattan women of mostly under 50’s wandered to and from the place, neat and pressed khaki coloured rain coats and not a cat hair or a wayward fold in their outfits. One was carefully strategizing her next beauty appointments pre-vacation, first asking if the 11th of May would work, since she is going away on the 13th – to that, the older, Slavic woman with short spiky blond hair behind the very demure counter, all plums and products, tried to book her in on that day, “as early as 11” she could take her, to which the woman reconsidered and pushed for something closer to 1pm. I was waiting a slightly longer time, staring up and down the walls of products which I could never afford, thinking about how when you need certain things, and oh so many certain things with lovely, syllabically lyrical names and packaging, wherein you have no idea what it does, but damn, it looks like it does something pretty amazing what with the pin up girl drawn on the front label, in thick black strokes, all Jane Russell and lips puckered, when you need more things like –that-, you would keep needing them, wouldn’t you. And then that might lead to more routine, and ritualistic purchases and scheduled appointments and no wonder life seemed full up with this stuff for these women – they depended on it. I stuck to my bare and main necessities, and blew my nose repeatedly, feeling slightly less attractive while doing so.

The small corner couch that was L shaped wasn’t comfortable for women to be packed in to, so two different women were taking up two separate spots, spreading out their high end beauty and lifestyle magazines around then. There were a selection of short, round cushion chairs with no backs, which I put myself to – along with the rain and the sick making me feel like a washerwoman who had no business in this place of expensive products and finely coiffed society women (even though I had been a regular for almost 7 years now – the root of my ethnic line not bowing out of the game easily), I had sat on the round cushion chair facing the hall, where the women in white, Polish mostly (I wondered repeatedly why that breed of women all in all were the majority of those who liked to rip the hair off of, in and around the privates of various paying customers – and how does one find that profession?) would come out and say the client’s name, slightly muddled in their strong accents but with the alacrity of a doctor about to perform a life saving or life-changing operation. In my sitting, I sat with my legs apart, in the world between straddling and not, and was very comfortable, but the seated style made me feel further like I was less than they were. Like I was the street beggar in some early Victorian novel, squatted with my bustle up in my face, hoping to make a few pound for the family I had procured at a young and decent age. Finally, out came a woman with blond, curly hair, in her mid to late 40’s. She was not my regular – Rena. Rena looked like a teenager, though had two kids and always complained at me about them, her house, cleaning it, going (or not going) on vacation – she was a young woman with an old woman’s life and spirit. Over the years I had gotten used to her conversations and complaints, and how they merged with so much ease, with her style (fast, un-invasive, ending with the legs up in yoga-type mode –when one felt the height of humiliation and/or ridiculousness at this act which one put oneself through, while paying money to do so!) and just the general feeling a woman has with another woman seeing her 95% of the time with no pants on. Comfortable. But, as of late, schedules had forced me into taking whoever was available on Wednesdays and Thursdays when Rena wasn’t in. Once or twice, one of the “other women” (it did feel like I was having an affair – I would have to apologize to Rena, when I saw her again, and accept her further complaints about the job that the “other woman” did – she would ask me, addressing me with an added “anka” at the end of my name, which was such a prevalent and regular part of my day to day life that a few years back, the man I was with at the time started calling me by this name, which now afforded it a sort of bittersweet nostalgia, bitter or sweet depending on the day and memory of course) stuck in my mind, and as this woman came down the hall, I knew she was one of them, my other women. She said with force as if she knew me so well – my name, with the “anka” at the end of it, which surprised me – was this a Polish thing or were she and Rena sitting behind closed doors, sipping coffees on their break and comparing clientele over bar chart analyses and projected hair growth?

She was thrilled to see me – and I knew I was in for it. What the “it” was, was not known just yet. She instructed me specifically to not leave my coat on the floor near the door (the room had thrown me off – in all my years it was not one I had ever been in before), since she would be standing there at some point (she never did). Secondly, she stayed in the room with me, while I stripped down bottoms wise. It wasn’t all that strange – nothing in the doing of it would reveal anything she wouldn’t be seeing as it was, nor hadn’t seen before, but somehow there was something a little unsettling about taking your boots off, and rolling down the tights that you had bought when they read “leggings” but you knew now that they were just tights. There was something freeing about sitting at a job you know you didn’t belong at, with the knowledge that you weren’t Really wearing any pants. Still, you were out of it sick-wise, so all of this might prove to be a dream in betwixt tossing and turning and trying to clear your sinuses up. You set yourself on the table, the paper making the scratchy, elevated noise it always does, remarking on how you’re wearing the perfect shirt dress for “this”. She is all business, but acts like she and I are old friends, and asking about my upcoming trip to Europe, and airfares and such. It hurts more than usual, I feel, and she tersely reminds me of the breathing exercise she taught me, which, as she mentions it, all comes back to me, though I think it couldn’t have been more than once or twice when I had her as my “attendant” – breath in deep with her, and then fast exhale when she did the ripping. My growingly stuffed nose found this level of work slightly taxing, as I tried to breath in and then out with each and every rip – whereas my good friend Rena wasn’t seemingly pleased nor disgusted at the job she did attending to the privates of ladies the city over, this woman seemed to clearly be enjoying herself with each new rip and tear. She peppered this very forward and direct action with somewhat forward and oddly chosen (for the times during with they were spoken read having no pants on under bright lights) compliments – She told me to life up my left leg (which Rena wouldn’t do, as she always had this method of having the one leg supinate in a V shape, which afforded her the right angle to make it happen), adding my “beautiful left leg” which forced me into another self effacing statement, of what exact detail I cannot recall. Then, the breathing started again and I was so good at it apparently, that she began to say “good girl” every time I breathed right, and she ripped – she must have said “good girl” at least twelve times during the 15 minute session. When I was face down, and asked her if I should “hold” the buttock area for her, she remarked with all manner of directness, for which I had recognized in her in this short time – “you know I am assertive and say what I need. If I needed you to do that, you think I wouldn’t tell you?” To which I laughed and she followed with “you think I would just suffer in silence?” We chuckled again, and I said quietly “it’s my job to suffer in silence”. She enjoyed the wittiness of that, and then went to work on that side of things. Something felt strange, however, about lying prone, and having her repeat the “good girl” remark, quieter and more intimately. I felt slightly vulnerable there, but then again who doesn’t feel vulnerable face down with a Polish woman further into your ass cheeks that you ever really want a Polish woman? I somehow got into the “stance” if you will of holding my left leg (the “beautiful one”) against the tile wall, to give her better leeway and this did not add to my sense of dignity nor ladylike qualities in any way.

It ended in the same way it did with Rena – the legs up and over, except she emphasized widening then versus the totally up and over quality that I was used to with Rena. She brought me back down aways, and remarked that she loved watching flexible people – to which I added the last of my self effacing remarks about always have flexibility, even when not exercising. While I said these words, I couldn’t help but be slightly creeped out by her flexible people remark. I was glad this experience was rounding down. It ended with one more direct jab at my vulnerability, when she lotioned up that which she had ripped, sewn and tuckered out – somehow, Rena was able to get said lotion everywhere it needed to go, without any feeling of invasiveness, but not my friend here. She really worked those hands of her farther along and about the things than one would expect from a technician of her variety. I suppose it was her duty to defrock me mentally one last time before the night was out. She told me to enjoy my trip and there was a moment wherein I felt like she was expecting a hug, but lying then, pants still off, skin all lotioned up, I just wanted her to get out so I could get dressed, pay up and get the hell home. I’d admit she does a fine, fine job in her work, but it was all so different than what I was used to. On the way out, in making the next of appointments which would stretch into infinity or death, I was asked if I wanted the appointment with Mariola (her name finally! Oddly familiar but all I could think of in a 12 year old boy’s mind which was mine at that moment was Areola and how it was nearly fitting for her name to at least resemble and rhyme with said nipple vocabulary)…I had to explain that I was used to going to Rena, so I’ll choose Rena next time and go between the two, laughing like I had to juggle these Polish women between my legs and in my wallet for years to come. When all was said and done, I hurried off through the light rain, blowing my nose and feeling that oh-so-awkward feeling of lotion in between ass cheeks, as I descended the subway stairs and got myself home. Sick as a dog, but smooth as a baby’s behind in springtime.

M. Lucia

March of the Cloves

The cloves bitter and resounding
with rooted symphonies of direct
bliss march their way
 up the spine,
nails crackling
earth in the burst-open
brain of Christ – a bloody mess,
as it time travels from one seat to the next,
taking
and eating
and rummaging as they go.
Jaysus was just one of the dominoes,
who
  forget
    his lines
      in the
        show.

M. Lucia

Miracle on 34th Street

The boss, for the very first time, acted not as the elderly, cloaked-in-wealth-and-grace and therefore not as elderly as she was, mother-culturemonger figure who adored me from the moment I walked in the door, then planning to write some films and perhaps sell some (though by that time the phrase "making it" was pared down and recombined into something more life-like, though still words, words, I had hoped you would save me from yet another office), but she was terse with me, telling me that I should concentrate on my work and not on the phone converastion I had been on for an obviously long time.  I felt instantly shamed, like I had disappointed my mommy warbucks, who was always kind and never made me feel like an underling, was interested in my thoughts about art, music, the opera....she was the upper west side writ in delicate jewelry and perfectly held hair.  I felt badly for this, as I was on the phone with someone who embodied weakness, and who taught me that a kind and giving heart sometimes bled too much and all over my shoes, dammit.

He was on the rooftop, My rooftop in Astoria - he was desperate, lost, quasi-suicidal as usual but not really (he lacked the backbone)...smoking and looking out from my home, which he had made his, due to his many life failures (he was the sort of person who practically Begged you to tell him to just be a man).  The sad part was, I was never even attracted to him really - we had become close over a set of fantasies about wanting to live as if it was the 70's - Easy Rider, The Band, the seeming freedom that people didn't exhibit anymore - it was the tiniest slice of myself brought out by someone in a moment when I needed to be taken for a ride.  He was never my type - Greek, for starters.  And claimed he was 5'9" but pretty sure he was not.  He lived in delusions....he was Jim Morrison in his mind, so of course life looked pretty hellish (and Astoria too, for that matter) when he was the son of a father who shot himself, and who fancied himself some dark piano playing poet, but really, he was just a scared kid who had an occasional stutter and a nervous eye twitch (and a cocaine problem).  Either way, he was mooching off of me, everything from my home to my food, to my nights and mornings, to my body, which, looking back and slightly off to the side, was barely affected by anything he asked me to do to him.  He was not an aggressor, nor forceful nor even decisive about anything.  Anyway, I guess we all need one we're regretful about.  I'm thankful it's not more than the one.

On that day, he kept me on the phone, "talking him down" but really he just wanted to hear himself talk.  He had no core; and from what I hear still does not.  I remember staying over at his Astoria basement apartment, early in summer, with his friend who I was much more enamoured with.  The former Mormon boy with blue eyes and lips that made me weave as many scenarios as I could about him.  The cowboy kid from out West.  We all three fell asleep in his bed after another of our all night music / drinking hideaways...I was sleeping next to him, as I did for some reason, and felt something around the back of my knees.  A few times, when I woke up, drunk but not hungover as my tolerance was skyrocketing that summer, I looked down and saw the boy, wrapped up in the fetal position around my knees, his face buried in my belly.  Sleeping soundly.  How is it possible to live a life and then feel years after it all that I wouldn't know what to do around those two people, around myself then if I ran into her drunk outside the Irish bar on Ditmars Boulevard....I would tell them both to stop letting the past define you, and to make those artful fantasies your Own and move through the adventure, and stop wallowing in your own selfish disgust.  I don't think they'd like me very much now.  Well, the rooftop phone caller would not; but the Mormon - now married to the chubby Asian girl who wears no makeup because you can't take the Mormon out of the boy, well, he might actually look back on me as that wild, older woman who presented him with some stories when surely he pops a few dozen kids out as his parents did.  I think he may smile a little sideways smile at me, and think still fond thoughts of those racked up, bramshackled times.  I don't work for someone I respect anymore.  And I don't take too many phone calls at work anymore either. 

M. Lucia

DISCONSOLATE {draft}

Sisters, now as then,
vying, debating, staking
territory and well-aimed barb.
Knowing weakness
exploiting without mercy
pitching complaints toned and zoned
to effect devastation.

Disconsolate and inconsoled.

In time they fall into each other's sleep funk,
breathing both the air of a bed
like the womb they once shared
though years apart.

Their dreams, so different, though in the same language  
not spoken but symbolled and also but signed.
Personae dramatis all the same to you and me
if the you and me be the she, and the she.

Line of light through drawn curtain awakens
again a new day and battle,
rejoining armies and lines thus redrawn.
They notice perhaps not that the night had passed too
over decades of time and yet still they lay,
not still, but rolled in and in roles.
Old ladies now all abicker,
sisters then as now.  

Application for Memory

Not one, but two
fog horns sound for me, and no one else
in the middle of the mustard lit waters out there.
I haven't had the feeling of walking, running, striving or stumbling home
with the thought that I was pulled and taken and belonged
to the place I needed to return to.
I haven't followed anyone down a dark dirt road with no street lights
in some time,
hand in hand in the dark but what's the point in the dark
when you can be in a car, rain beating on your skull from up and around you.
Streaks of dull thunder sounding you and creating a pathway,
not like those times when I followed you into the water.
The water that belonged to us, but all I remember
is the white moon thick and high up,
the cold water which seemed particularly wet to my clothes and feet
you grabbing me up onto the wooden plank, where we walked the pirate ship
the reverse way,
smelling like dirty country water and no one in sight.
That road, the one I haven't been down in some time,
since before I learned I could find my way home without dramatics
or planned out tactics
or houses I needed to rebuild in the king's honor,
one miscalculated plank at a time, from the ground floor up.
Still, I stare out the lighted subway car, into the darkness that is
dirty, rancid and never completely black,
into the lighted telephone of a woman who doesn't feel me standing against her,
gently so, not with malice or weight,
swiping inspirational phrase after inspiration phrase
across her expensive phone.
The origin - philosophy, guru, religion or otherwise
is unbeknownst to me, but
I exhale, and cannot take the length and breadth of her quiet desperation
because it is my own, and I close my eyes
and think how fucking good the soles of my wet feet felt, in the summer night
after we fucked in the lake at the end of the street,
walking back under warm, black starry sky
over charcoal gravel that felt soft and elaborate
level and charming, like him following me with desire in his eyes-
her spring morning is my summer night in a different plane of shadow,
she notices my presence and is threatened as we both exit the train,
and we part like that, in the steps of collective memories.
I smell the water and wind as I climb the subway stairs and
feel his steps still close behind me.

M. Lucia