ROCK

He raked his hair the way those who knew him would say was familiar, though no one had seen him around here in ages.  He left all of a sudden way back when but now he was back though not for good, meaning both "not for good" as in "not permanently" and  "not for good" as in "not for any good reason or for anything that would ultimately come to anything good for anyone."

Know what I mean?

If they were looking for him the walk alone would have been a dead giveaway.  As it was some people he passed felt like a ripple in the air--like their mind registered him passing but it wasn't able to compute the math of it; not even to get up to a point where they would say "who was that guy" or "he looks familiar."  They would only just find themselves looking out down the street, away from the stack of newspapers with the pile of coins, up from the sidewalk where the hose pooled leaves and dirt, dropping their wrist's watch to their side without actually getting the time.  Later maybe they would remember a story about him and tell it, laughing and seemingly out of the blue, without making the connection to that morning and that he had walked by.

It's not that he's some kind of legend or anything.  He was just here for a long time and then he wasn't and it was sudden, his leaving.  And even the suddenness of it all was lost in the years, that line was blurred too, though it was the thing that made him most memorable had anyone bothered to really remember--that he left in the night, as they say.  Now people just remembered that he was gone, and probably resented that he had gone because they probably wanted to go too.  And even more resented him because they interpreted (wrongly) his leaving as actually having somewhere else to go and they believed in their hearts that they would leave too if they too had somewhere else to go.  They were wrong about that also--it takes more than that to leave.

So he raked his hair and walked with that hitch like a little jump in his stride and he shrugged one shoulder every now and then adjusting his shirt on his frame.  He talked briefly to someone who had never met him and so didn't know him and he asked about some man with a Chevy who lived on Cahill Street who was probably Mr. Sullivan but she never knew him with any car but it sounded like him because that was the only really old guy who'd ever lived up Cahill and but he's dead now anyways and his daughter, looked like, took his stuff that day away in the minivan you know those green ones, are they Chevy's maybe but yeah?

So she saw him and talked to him but she didn't know who he was so she didn't know to tell anyone and she didn't care anyway about the old stories.  He walked up the block and he used his handkerchief, white as always, to dab his forehead and he stopped to watch a playground one-on-one for a second.  Then he walked out behind the school a little more to where the dumpsters were and he stood there looking at them.  More raking of the hair and this time with both hands his handkerchief shoved down into one of the back pockets of his denim shorts.  He held his hands in his hair remembering.  He felt self-conscious in this position since he was wearing a white tank-top t-shirt and with his arms up his was exposing his armpits which was a thing he had which was just...a thing.  He stood, alone, remembering, allowing himself that, the memory and this time.

He stepped into the space where the dumpster fit into the wall, between it and the wall, and reached up stretching his body.  Above the wall in a space he knew was there he found the rock he had come for.  He pulled it out and down and looked at it for a moment.  Then he stepped out and disappeared again.

 

Eight a.m. Downpour

Skin crawls :clammy:
shore wind blows your marbles apart
one moves like a shot to the waterfront
burning off the battleaxes that
reflect you to the asphalt

Some others play bouncy with
your lower half
colourful inscriptions brand
sun and moon
your arse
and take this trajectory,
won't you
and roundabout street to
the meanings of things
mere; far below
in the bellyful of true intention
that awoke the shattered sleep
you had
sticky skin; still
winds sails stealthy your marbles, good as new.

One fact,
fantasy - hardshell,
memory and dreaming hour at a time.
candy glass knocking breezes
out of soon-to-be
sunny skies,
through your window
vista
ships that take you
without your asking-

Uplifting and knocking your
head into place-
fantasies gain ground,
slipstreams down the
vertical adhesion of your
summer skin;
they always come back to you.
No such luck at claims of insanity now.

M. Lucia

THIS

This is a poem.
It's about transformation and how it is possible.
It's about the influence of chemicals on the body.
It (the poem) uses these short bursts of "thought" so that you (the reader) won't get overwhelmed,
or bored because it's important that your focus doesn't wane.
It's important that we, you and me, maintain eye contact.
It's about (the poem) how you can say things without really saying them,
or even wanting to.
It's about how you can dream things that you don't even understand.
It's about how your mother, in the dream, is holding a candle,
and closing a door and how, in the dream, that makes you sad even though
there's nothing sad about it,
and how the sadness carries over to when you're awake,
and how you're saying a word, awake, crossly, and how before you know it there's a fight.
All from a dream,
that you don't even understand.
It's about how a chemical that's supposed to make you healthy
can sometimes make you unhappy.
And how a chemical that makes you happy
can sometimes make you sad;
later.
Words can transform, if they're spoken the right way.
Because it's all in the delivery.
Apparently.
Or so they sometimes say.
This is a poem.
It's about something.

Suicide is Painless

So, you're free
you Know that, right?
just making sure.
It's too easy to pass by
let the functions of that slave you call your control
your master
rule you and those you've chosen to enslave
we are all free
we are not separate
we are all this one energy
it's sucks, don't it
means we are responsible for each other.

There is no other; our essence is one
no name, no face no being a good person,
as long as you are you.
Why is it so difficult to understand---
all is an illusion
this organism at war with itself
telling you what you cannot be.
I am sorry for you, woman and man,
who think you are hurting because of Some
Thing.

We are all free, our bodies and minds are our own.
nothing more strange than that.
never be afraid of truth.
If it knocks on your door, be thankful
and greet him as a god.
a God. but not one bigger than anything real you feel.
your life is your choice.
And nothing else.
Real love holds no fear,
real fear holds no love.
And the sun rises every day
to try and let  us know that
this is the case. Always.

M. Lucia

Dead Eye Dave

He's out of his box.
He stares at the back of my head, dead,
his eyes a pistol, nozzle press a circle
below the line of hair, neck bones,
lower skull, cords, jugular, nape.

Ode to Mope

Giant mope, what is it with you.
Your dead eye lights wash up against the side of your leg
pissing on your surroundings, in which you take no pride.
You need to climb upwards towards the roof; towards the light
have a think about your skyline, and your tenements inside
no running water, granules of fears percolating
in the change you are utterly defeated because of.
Stop being a giant mope, and jump
Just give us advanced notice of your trip on down,
and tell us how the view is from down there.

M. Lucia

A Red Hook Wedding

Sunday soft light
healing the sun as it hides from us;
waterfront sky cradles our liberation
drunken trellis of characters ambling
the same in bright suits, jackets, dress and colours
around garden plots, lattices and eyes occasional
peering, our pre nuptial drinking dangerously
near the pissing corner, in the weeds
laughter, red wine blesses her dress corset
his sad eyes I see, I look through him
he looks through me
except when I slip loud fantastical fare
outside the bar, on the grey street
he looks from within darkness at me
I don't think he recognizes me anymore.
I drink the irishman's whiskey
on purpose
unapologetic and smiling
we traipse our procession
down to the back garden, lit with dumplings
and an even brighter side of drunk
Did he, the gay brother with the cowboy hat oversized-
did he expose me to crowd when we danced? she asks...
I was too busy wrapping my legs around poles
Statue of David saw the same come and go
and we jutted out at sunnys
the watering hole of the original people we were
when we moved here.  We look around
even in our frustrations, goals, failures and
the unfolding of time
we smile at our neighboring enemies
old friends, lovers and the butts of jokes
we're the luckiest lot in the known universe
to be sailing round this misfit ship
safely with our feet on the ground, and belonging
in the roots of each other's better natures.
Everyone's a romeo, the breeze off the shore
tugboat blows
us down the dark familiar zones to home,
drunk in bed with a bellyful still feasting
swarming in our bellies, we dance to our own
solid tune.

M. Lucia

Smokin' in the Ladies Room

Ah, sure, we had some times now, didn't we.  I will miss you, #3, set just in far enough from the ladies room, those brilliant stalls just like them in Ireland which go right down to the floor.  The hangovers and post-all-nighters were saved for the last, larger, and more equipped "handicapped" stall (I was perfectly within my bounds to occupy it as I did, in the states I was - half sick, half leftover drunk, post "going for a drink with an insomniac" or just mixing those elixirs of life which tested my once great digestive mettle and now just left me raped and beaten in the stomach and spleen at the side of the road).  I've even used the railing at times, to lift me up from my slumber.  On those days, I would curl up fetal-like in front of the toilet on the floor, and have been known to get a good 15-30 minutes of actual twilight sleep.  Somehow the automatic flush on the handicapped toilet was more sensitive than the other 3 (I guess if the handicapped can't reach as well as they should) and the toilet would flush more than occasionally, so the others who happened to be in there knew that Someone was in there, and that Something was going on.  Sometimes the flushing would be every two minutes or so - it was gentle though, and soothing in a way, as I drooled onto my curled up hand and hair, almost like putting your ear to the conch shell and listening to the ocean.  I certainly had no grand speeches to make with the so-called conch in my hand -- just my ear down on the cold tile, nestled into my hair and I slept soundly, whenever I could.

The only other times I've had of note in the 21st floor ladies lavatory were much more illicit.  Looking back, to the old and new company names and the old and new years I've spent in this place, I must have gone to heaven so to speak over 100 times.  When my good friend was here, and I was in the middle of causing her life to take an illicit turn, she and I joked about those doors that went "all the way down" and the fun times we had in there.  I used to pretend I wasn't even in there, hoping no one would jiggle the handle and listen in (truthfully it was and is hard for me to keep quiet on such occasions but this is not the sort of thing one likes to share with women who they don't respect, like or with who to engage a five minute conversation much less invite them in on their late morning or early afternoon orgasms), but then after some time, even though the quiet stealthy climbs weren't as satisfying as they could be, I didn't even care if two women were having a conversation at the sinks about the weather or the weekend -- I didn't let the pallor of their voices invade my space any, and the reaches between my legs and ears were safe from their chatter, clatter, redundancy and glee.  I was in candyland, bellyfulls of play dates, arse ready and legs up and over it all, walking the plank, though my hands and on out of there.

There was nothing so satisfying (in a place wholly and utterly Un-satisfying) as coming brilliantly of myself, silently grinning at their flushy, pissy, wipey and dull body movements, sliding their soft and muttering selves, touching my face all warm and rosy, zipping up my jeans (if applicable) and exiting the stall.  I hated to wash my hands after, but the feeling remained, if nothing else.  That grand walk down the taupe hallways, happy and for the moment beatific in the knowledge that I had come of my own accord just minutes earlier.  Passing by people and enjoying it all at least until the next roadblock hit me hard in my malar flushed face.

And now, to the last day.  You served me well, #3, as stated earlier.  It wasn't our grandest yet, but it'll do, for today.  I planned it out from the moment I woke up and knew if nothing else went my way today, this would.  Best part is, it's free and anyone can do it.  Again, information which it seems doens't trickle down like I had assumed it would, like I mostly did when I had finished, and the only evidence that someone was in there, living it up again and again.  I walked out of there today, threw myself back in my chair and exhaled just right. I'm told the next place won't have these stalls that go down all the way....perhaps I'll have to figure some new stance to hide my beautiful shame from the others......my malady of wanting as much as I can experience....then again, I may just leave the door open at the next place.  A good Samaritan knows no bounds.........

M. Lucia

Gin and July

It was one of the hottest nights in July.  She and Leigh had seen the music together in downtown, overpriced gins, besting arrogant city crowds, but still enjoying the tapestry of hidden mythologies, the happy blistering sound barrier of music that overtook them.  He had been there too, making his usual appearance and then claiming he wanted to listen from up in the balcony.  She saw him up there, lowering and rocking back his hair in slow succession to the pounding of the bass, under the blinding grey-blue light. 

She and Leigh had gotten a cab, as they tired of walking and decided why not just head to the watering hole, with what few dollars they had between them.  They knew everyone there and someone would take care of them, the bartendress at least.  They exited the cab, just as she told Leigh all about how she and he had reached something, yet again, that summer, which started in tragedy and humid weather and continued, unyielding.  Leigh was slightly disturbed, but knew that it was inevitable.  Of course, the moment the two girls (she fancied herself a women, but felt a bit more like a girl when around Leigh, who seemed forever the teenager in her naivete and schoolgirl giggles) exited the cab, about 50 feet down from the bar, there he was, walking as he usually did, out of nowhere.  Out of darkness, his army jacket, his hair tucked behind his ears, and his unusually long legs in stride, moving...he could have walked from the show to here in 10 minutes, manhattan to brooklyn, if he really wanted to. 

She could only blurt out a sarcastic half insult, per her usual defense mechanism when her heart sensed trouble.  "God dammit, can't I get away from you".  He wasn't moved and didn't flinch at this; he invited them both up to have some food.  He had plenty and would make it.  Pork chops, and tomato & mozzarella salad.  And gin, more gin of course.  With this beautiful bitter lemon type stuff which she adored.  He knew her love of gin ran deep, and the hotter the weather for it the better.  No bread or grain to be had - she found his lack of grain in meals and in his daily eating habits, which bear enough for twenty other tall tale, endearing and a little funny, since he just didn't think of it, ever.  Explains how he could drink buds all day and all night, and not have a stomach in sight.  His energies just ran that way -- to the wild, outlying edges of manic thought and movement. 

They ate, Leigh left halfway through the bad and entertaining film that he and she watched together.  Again.  He was conducting one of his self deprecating tests.  Not that he called them such, or called them anything at all.  He was trying to make it through summer without an air conditioner.  On this incredibly scorching night, there was no relief in sight.  No wind, no breeze, no anything but still, dank and wet air like walls around them.  They hadn't, he and she, been in each other's private company for some time.  There was always a reason it didn't continue, and they had just been speaking and thinking and connecting yet again after her closest friends lost their first baby, a son.  He was there for her, and she forgot how good he was at doing so.  She wasn't sure what else was happening here, just now, but there she was.  Fate had placed him in her path on her way home to the local streets within their private universe.

Somehow the drinking continued; gin was the only thing to help the heat stay at bay, just slightly.  They went to bed and it was so hot she could barely breath.  They ended up embracing, kissing, but something different in the way of their kiss.  As if the darkness and empty spaces which followed him as he had walked towards her that evening emptied itself from him, and it was as if he wanted to fill himself with all the forces coming up through her lips to his and back again.  Sweat was pouring off him, as it usually did, but she managed to stay mildly dewy and just this side of clammy.  Soon, their exhaustion at the night, at the heat, the hours standing up with throngs of people, the summer, the aloneness and the time apart leading itself into this newly awkward situation which bred a new one to occur.  He gathered up his limbs and wrapped himself around her, literally.  On top of her, his wet hair blanketing her chin, and she not caring, as he went from resting the side of his face on her breasts, as she could hear his heart beating so loudly with her own; his panic and dynamism and energy which never failed was able to calm and still itself, and she cradled his big Scottish head and dark, soaked up hair in her arms, smoothing his hair in between her fingers, and running her very same fingers, necessary and bare and without presence of any contrived kind, down his neck and back again, kissing the top of his head as he calmed further, and started to fall asleep, his legs and arms tightening around her, for dear life, as she comforted his huge fucking brain to her chest and gave it repose.  They fell asleep that way, in the midst of the black night, wherein the slightest breeze made its way through themselves to the room itself.  She had brought the quiet to his mind, and the slightest coolness from the night windows of heaven on down.  ch

When she awoke again, in the early pre dawn, he was still on and around her, but somehow in the night, without her noticing, his head had made its way down to between her legs, and his face slept story like and with new tales to dream of, there between her womb and her inner thigh, wrapped tight and fashioning up new worlds that he could finally see, with the presence that eluded him, and eludes him still.  Her holding of him would not cease, and they stayed that way, until the drier warmth of the summer sun made the day come round them, without them noticing that the night was gone. 

M. Lucia

Italics Thoughts vs. "Real Life"

So, let me guess, are you going to do the voice again? said under her breath, as she listened intently, because it's always good to line up one's enemies in a row, and know just what it is which makes them Wrong, so that you yourself don't ever slip into that comfortable feeling of them who want to sit on their laurels, make no change, piss in the stalls with their legs up while the house burns down around them, no one noticing, yet Again.  Yep, there he goes....he's mimicking the same television show from the 60's again, not only mimicking the same exact subject, but in the same tone of voice, the same lack of personality, the same inane snap of his fingers, which every time she heard this previous she wanted the old testament God to reach down his massive, hairy hand and snap this drone in half.  It was as if some dwarf with a 50 IQ was sitting up behind his goopy, soft face and driving him forward, along the same patterns of speech, the same stories, the same bullshit brisk walk as if he was heading somewhere Really important.  Probably to speak to his elderly mother again, like a good nebbish Jewish boy without a spine, raise his voice when she couldnt' hear him, make himself feel so important about his "busy schedule" - day in and day out.  She secretly hoped that one day, long after all of this nonsense would pass, that he would be in his somewhat hellish afterlife trying to include himself with his butt-inski ways, singing a jingle while the demons who looked just like his good ol' mom fucked him and prodded and de-rooted him from him Self, the one he never actually had it in him to look for. 

She stood there, already hating each and every one of them, and for plenty of good reason.  They were a corn field of woe and ignorance that simply loved it when the big, bad rains flattened it out.  Laying down was easier, and maybe, just maybe they could have an extra day doing it!  Here comes the fat one, still fat in every mental way eating and obsessing and compulse-pulse-pulsing his way through another random non alcoholic beverage, opening his big guilty mouth wide in the best way he knew how.  And there go the twins again - the yin and yang of midgets who found so much damn pleasure in the bullshit conversation about the weekend, and cleaning out this or that portion of their homes, or the new product of snack food that they loved to cling onto in order that the day might pass even more to their cowering likings.  Not a brain between them, and truthfully in her most creative heart every time she saw them walking her way as they did, practically arm in arm, every single morning, she wanted to say 1) when did the circus get to town or 2) (and more frequently an urge) if you're looking for the King of the Lollipop people, he went that-a-way. 

She then thought to herself, was this pleasure to her? To beat them down, whip them into submission, not allow them any humanity?  Well, she thought, I guess I'm just not that advanced yet.  They didn't even use more than 4% at best of their brains, their god given right to be people, actual fucking People, to not lay down and let the storms keep them flat as a board, on which to tack up their uninspired lives.  As the jingle man's song continued and she thought to herself, as she often did, god that's the most obviously small cock syndrome I've ever seen in action....followed by a shudder, the others filled in the space soon as she had it back to herself.  Another shot.....another....please, give me more, I need for your faces to bend and weep and bleed, so I will have some element of sameness with you.  Contort for me, fat man, tear your saggy, dull skins off for my amusement, midget twins, don't let this end like it will.....with a trail of your groany, complacent voices growing fainter while the stink of you fills my head on the way out.  I don't want to be rushing home in the dark, leaning back with the necessary drunken rush and see or hear you in my mind's eye.

THIS, precisely, is why I hate them.  Whatever reason fate has dropped me here amongst them, Again, is not good enough.  I die more and more every single day, every comment or remark that means absolutely nothing, every year that sods itself into the earth away from me forever, where I don't share with any of you, where I watch your quicksand lives pass like devils before me, trying to tear pieces of me off as you go, and each and every time you go.

She lifted her glass, overfilled and under-satisfied and yelped her most authentic (and therefore completely sardonic) Cheers to you all!  All the best for the future..........they trailed away again.....pencil neck geeks and false primadonnas....seeing the blank cardboard stare she offered, because they did not deserve even a Drop more life than they had and did not see.  I can only hope that your afterlives mirror this wonderful set of circumstances that you all are so lucky to have this one....tits up!  OK, fine.  That last bit she said in her head again.  There was no getting out, for some words, desires, ideas......but her jailhouse was one of freedom, vitality and feasting.  Saddest part is, nothing was keeping them from the same.  She glugged as enthusiastically as she could, and asked politely for another in her best secretary's voice.

M. Lucia

Revelin’ In’t

How easily time slows down
when you’re having fun.

It’s not like they said at all.

I can see the skylights bend and shape
willowy;
they slam in slow forward motion
as if I’m on drugs again

But I’m not.

I’d just willed it, by surrendering
my limbs, my ego my stride
all in- eyes look straight on.

Do their damnedest not to grin, or capitulate
or think – or make;
the colours brighter, even the whites
in the flower petals rise
seduce me in their street lights
bring on another accident, spark a fight.

Everything at once can be serene
in reams of storied paper
cutting across galaxies,
and then the moment breaks its tune-
you are back to this, and that
and the others, dead eyed brims
befitting the very same trees
-that just a hair of a century’s breath
previously
shouted the praises of the atoms
that held their skies to themselves.

M. Lucia

FITNESS TEST(s)

A good day at the gym. Everybody loves Thursdays. You can look down to the street, see the rats and ankles below, and forget that they see you in the very same way.

It was a rainy, and slightly chilly spring day at Beefeater's Sports, Fitness Center (& Spa) (but no one ever used the spa, as most of these men were the sort, shall we say, who winced if hugged too hard, who clenched their eye sockets tighter if they could feel an emotion coming on, and prayed to the god that made them comfortable/rich or whatever level in between they were hard at, to make it subside – cease & desist, who tensed up their paranoid necks at you if you attempted to actually, Jesus H. Christ and his armies of marketing fiends, Touch them. They preferred the fitness part of the place. Where they could be alone with their thoughts. Like being on the toilet or at the urinal, but with their fellow employees around them, watching them huff and puff on that laced up machine of some kind, bringing them down to size one 20 minute increment at a time. Sweat collecting on their cell phones, which they keep close at hand, bleeding middle age into the complimentary towels which are always available for the taking. Truth be told, some of them took theirs already soiled back to the office, and kept it somewhere near and dear to them. Possibly to remind them of the way they smelled when they Actually let out some form of their bodily fluids during their normally cold and routine workday, and possibly to be intermingled with another of their bodily fluids, which they might find themselves releasing upon that late morning stretch. Some might see it as disgusting, but unless the cleaning lady found it in herself to want to explore places in which she would probably never ever think to desire to, their soiled selves would be safe in their office furniture, the ark which holds the tiniest and dirtiest and mostly unused pieces of them.

Here, at Beefeater's at high noon, it was hopping. The muscular guidos were out (their ethnicity didn’t matter much; they were neck less Johnny Gumbas of the New York variety, with eyes that gazed and surmised men and women in the same anteater fashion, sucking up the details as if their competitive life depended on it – they weren’t gay, mind you, all guys did that in college, and showers are a strange place….how can some dynamite not go off in the artillery store?), along with the skinny, ineffectual business dandys – all coiffed and color coordinated – and they never sweat! Why and how was it that they could run ten, fifteen miles on those hamster wheel devices and not sweat a single droplet! Tom thought this to himself, as he ran and sweat and wished he was running somewhere else. Not into the blank and slightly off white wall in front of him, windowless and covered only in the usual corporate gym framed photograph of the skinny girl on the beach doing yoga. He didn’t see any of those girls around Beefeater's – probably because they got tired of the desperate glances of men like him all gathered up on stationary bikes and Stairmasters (think of the word – the Word, after all, is the thing….there is no such thing as being a master of the stairs and if there was, would they really want to take up that challenge?) ogling the women in their downward facing dogs, causing more dog like mental activity to grow and germinate in the minds of those bored men on their rotating Catherine wheels of fitness and health. That, and the inner thigh machine that truly took the cake so far as all the Gumbas, the skinny odorless boys, the distraught businessmen unable to turn away from woman after woman spreading eagle repeatedly by their own choice but a stone’s throw away from the men and their trusty towels, neither improving their station very much from the place where they found themselves.

Hill and Angelo, worlds away from each other lifestyle wise, always had to conduct some sort of competitive match via the stationary bikes, which opposed each other directionally with nothing but mirrors all around. It was a slap-happy, all you can eat circle jerk off of physical fitness and tests of mettle and manhood, since they found it nowhere else in their lives – no woman had respected them for decades now, and all they had left was each other – Angelo was newly giddy, having lost over 60 pounds on his own (he practically sweated pink ponies he was that jazzed), but though they both considered the fight fair (Hill was almost 20 years older than Angelo and therefore never went beyond level 3 of 10 on his own stationary bike vehicle machine), it seemed odd visually, since Angelo was conducting the race from the seated and almost lounging position of one of those special stationary bikes – the ones wherein you sat back, far from the work your legs were doing, as if you were canoeing on a lazy boy, and that’s just what it looked like if you watched Angelo while he biked. The motion caused him to become a mouth breather, and his sweat was still that of a fat man’s – thick, heavy and sloppy, as it did nothing other than smear down the side of his face, back of his neck and presumably his still somewhat wide ass crack. They watched each other with all the glory their sodden work days could muster. They respected each other, even if their alienated wives did not.

Someone would always win, as far as miles biked, and all that, but usually, they wouldn’t seal the bet with any sort of prize to the winner – if a pretty girl walked by in the interim of biking to the showers (where Hill and Angelo always did their cleanup duties on opposing ends of the communal male shower – there was no need for small talk in some situations, after all) to the walk, slow and victorious, back to the office (wherein one or both of them would usually still be sweating – usually Angelo) , the winner of the contest would get to fuck her…..if one of them did, of course. The nameless, voiceless girl would march on, oblivious, but little did she know she was in for a sweaty, triumphant corporate fitness sponsored fuck, courtesy of Beefeater's and the rampant and momentarily vivid imaginations of those men who found some sense of victory in their silly, silly days. No matter if she didn’t look their way, or smiled. They knew the score. Their smiles said it all. They would huff and puff back upstairs, and know, in their heart of hearts, now pumping with good all-American fear and climax, that their special stolen towels would be there waiting for them, and would allow them every indiscretion until the close of work at 5pm.

M. Lucia

WORK IN PROGRESS

I was sitting on the picnic table Rob had built out of logs from the woods, waiting.  No telling when he'd get home.  I had a job to do though, and for now the job was waiting.

Rob's house was one of those in the deep woods of this Tennessee county.  You would never know it was there unless you just happened to drive for miles down the wrong road and kept to it, against y our better judgment, even as the pavement turned to gravel and then straight-up to dirt; turn a corner and there it was, a two-story shit-box really.  Must be four, five generations of no-account hillbilly mother-fuckers exercising drunken whims with no concern for bearing walls or even the slightest bit of architectural aesthetics built into its rambling footprint.  The ancestral manor stood, tall and ugly mossy-roof'd and under a brown layer of decrepit shingle, in a circle of dust carved out of the pines around it, strewn with car parts and kids toys.  It was a cliche, that was the only way to describe it.  There were buckets and baseball bats, lawn mowers and plastic furniture, toy cars and toilet seats; and of course a blustery and bloated hound dog, with a low-hanging ball sack that rocked and floated a bare inch above the dirt, and with a bark more like a coughing exhale who lumbered at me but gave in in an instant to a friendly tousle of his jowly head.

Rob's shit brown Chevy clouded up the driveway and he stopped just short of a defunct sculptured angel fountain and strode in one motion out of the car on a vector perpendicular to my perch on the table toward a garden hose spiderly hung on the side of the house.  The car door bounced on its hinge and made a perfectly timed arc ending with just enough force to extinguish the cars interior light, the door closing with a satisfying thrump.  Rob was dressed in a cheap and tightly fitting blue "suit" with wide pant cuffs that slid easily off around his boots as he dropped pants and drawers in a one practiced motion, pulling his shirt off over his head and tossing the clothes aside and standing, waist-down naked now, wearing only the wife-beater.  , He yanked the hose's faucet two-turns counter-clockwise, the hose sputtered and gasped enough to make the dog open its eyes and list its head slightly, his ears twitching, but soon drooping back down into the dust.

Rob gave the impression of being entirely aware of my presence, where I sat off to one side of his yard, as he grabbed the hose and began filling with water a wide-mouthed black bucket he had yanked out from under a bush.  He didn't acknowledge me but he knew I was here.  I was added close to the top of his mental to-do list, you could see it flickering there under his eyebrows, perhaps it was something about having his junk hanging out though to whatever slight breeze might've been stirring the trees on this July afternoon that made him a little shy.  Who knows?  He filled the bucket to the rim and tossed the hose aside.  The water continued to flow and river through the dust with the slant of the yard toward the dog.  Rob straddled the bucket and then dropped his ass into it the bucket water sloshing over the rim as he displaced it, and sat, his long hairless legs angling up out of the bucket and then down to his mid-calf Tony Lama's in the dirt on either side of the bucket's base.

"Got a cigarette?  No?  Be a pal and grab mine.  Should be on the front seat."

He knew I quit.  I stood, gave him a disbelieving stare and crossed to the car.  I grabbed the Pall Malls through the open passenger side window and turned back to Rob.  I flipped one out and stuck it into his mouth.  I pulled out my own lighter (I quit smoking but I'll never give up my lighter) and snapped a flame for him.

"Mercy buckets."

"De nada."  I held out my hands indicating his position, my face, I believe quizzical.

"Swamp butt.  Hot as a mother-fucker in town.  Courthouse AC's for shit."

My body is fighting me off, a champ encased in a skinny tomboy, hiding in her coat a fat housewife, wanting bon bons and a steakhouse friday night "out" meal (never mind the catholic thing; this isn't the type I'm talking about).  They're all there - arguing and pounding at my head, my hips aching as I twisted and turned on the couch, mumbling on the inside of my head about deeds my ass had committed shameless lifetimes and months before.  Caught somewhere in between cold and sweat, illness and health, my body didn't know what to make of all this - but even as the migraine pelted behind my eyes, and the TV glared with some replaceable old film, I was intrigued already by the mass of information I had stockpiled in my head, wanting to work at it and practice, and the aches and soreness in my lower limbs, and back from the Asian exercise regimen that I now have dedicated myself to for more than a little while. 

Dreams would come, somewhere in between couch folds and bed being mussed, like a surreal catalogue of men and boys in my life, once, now and in the darker zones behind their actual acts and plots - different versions of me in new and unusual places, which somehow I knew, working and walking and doing without pain, exhaustion or migraine.  Waters overtaking me as I squatted in a toilet in the basement, old walkways, and visits, and beaches and homes, and friends and arguments and sex and more of it in different situations - by that point, my libido ran with it and squeezed every last drop of doing from each of those indiscretions, since they ended without my approval, in torrents of vacationary waves, floods and flash forwards, but always something sweeping me to the next thing.  On my own, or not.

In between this massive intent of troubled, achy sleep, I awoke halfway, hearing the drunk men laughing and talking loudly in the silence of the black street below, outside the bar and through my open windows:

"So I found him" (laughter, manly; drunken and expectant laughter) "I found him, at the side of the L.I.E...."(growing echoes of laughter) "turning tricks in front of Yankee Stadium".  My night was kicked to the bottom of the barrel after hearing and remembering that statement of life.

M. Lucia

The Root of Force

I am a fucking virus.

It has always been this way. In a tailor’s shop, aged five, and the man – I remember him. Balding, wearing such a casual, yet delicate suit that it seemed as if it came from the last century (then, 19th) to me. Thin as a rail, long fingertips, pale. He remarked to my mother that I had such big, dark eyes. That I didn’t speak a lot. That it was ok, though. “Still waters run deep”, he said. He seems fascinated. She enjoyed that I had the eyes of the man she loved, the one who saved her from her antiquated, motherless house in queens, where her father ruled over mightily, and she slept in the same bed as her sister, at aged 22, until she was wedded a year later to the rouge from the Adriatic coast, who gave me his eyes.

Parking lot outside a drug store in the smooth and lazy backwater in the sunshine state. I was depressed, dyed the dark brown hair black, probably looked a little mischievous, I’ll admit. But sitting in the car, an older woman (the state’s full of them) comes out and peers at me, through the glass of the front windshield. Walking slowly, and gazing from a turned head as she went. I was just sitting back, leg up, listening from inside the closed glass to something of the disgruntled rock n’ roll variety. Absolute terror in her face – like a tornado was blowing steadily towards the center of it – like she had seen the devil, or god, or something beyond her comprehending, which she couldn’t work out as it moved her way. My mother blamed the black hair for it. But, it felt palatable to me. The cause was myself, and also something that was not me, as I knew it to be.

It depends on the person, it seems. I just don’t have any backwater in me, no gentle sloshing at your ankles, while you recreate and waste away the day. You either can’t keep your mind, your dreams, your energies and receptacles off of me, drawn in like lightning on a magnetic string with no cause or referendum, or you shirk, you run, you show “the face” and make for the hills, so you can sit in your little cave, and not have to think about the force. I remember his face, listening to his friend’s woes, gazing over at me, like he wanted me to sail him up to the heavens in a start, with belief that I could. The same person, feeling I had abandoned him, backs away when I enter, and storms out, slamming the door behind him. The earth and the sky all at once. The women nearby, had it in their eyes like I was reading their minds, naked and humiliated before me, when all I had done was look to them. They gaggle and stay far away, when they feel it- the anima, the vital, the beast – she is a king, and a saint, a whore, and a field to grow precious things, a newborn and a sage on his deathbed. All these things incorporate inside me.

It’s not all in the heaviness of the brain, or behind the eyes either. I can feel centuries of sexual manipulations in my lips, in their corners…both the playboy and the victim, exist there. The battle lines drawn around my neck and in my fists, pounding down armies of the poor, and trying with the same breath that emanates from within to lift them up again, in my hips cackle the whores of Babylon, and Jerusalem, the ones who enjoyed what they do, and keep the universe tightly woven in between their supple thighs. The bottoms of my feet hit earth, and cannot stay there, and then sinks down, too much, past the roots and planted telephone poles, the graves of those forgotten and in the corners of homes which become nothing more than a building in which people reside. A miniature tower, for the meek and the lonely. Little children play in the musculature of my hair, swinging to and fro, like the tire swing and the cliff I had once, always and usually out too far.

There is home here, nothing like it. But there is everyone and everything else too. And they don’t always get along. Punches can be thrown, kisses can be nestled in to daily life, and small moments had. They exist, but are somehow never small. There is fanfare, and loss, and a constant grieving which comes out in bursts, like excited laughter, there is a settling calm and a never-ending energy that I cannot account for. It minds me, though, most of the time it does. I have learned to trust it, and listen to its rules, which it changes second to second, but the tenets, no matter their musical chairs, always seem ancient and grounded. Harness is the next rule – harness in order to be free, and vice versa. I never said the rules were hard and fast. In and through the dark bronze waters of my two good eyes seers up a fire which I know doesn’t quite belong to me…it locks onto you, reverses, fights you off, seduces you and offers you its heart – the heart, which beats in liquid beneath and deeper within, the one which was born a dragon, made into a fawn and slowly learned to become a dragon again…or a maiden’s heart, in a dragon’s dress. She changes all the time, and it used to scare me some, but now...I just hold my gaze and release my hips in all direction, curl up and spring forward, ardor panting at my side. Down, boy, down. My gaze is set. The rest is up to you.

M. Lucia

No Satisfaction

As he speaks, I can see some glimmer of intelligence, but he is a slave to his facade.  There are at least 12-15 instances of self defence, of egoist fueled, angry rebuttals disguised as self deprecations- one unloading after the next, mediocrity swirling around the room, while the world surrounds, encircling this little enclave.  One engorged with banality, by its own serious choice.  

What am I doing here? My blood is boiling, my hands are hot and want to touch something, someone, feel anything.  The out of body is after me all the while.  He knows it's time to go.  My skin is hot still, all around, and I can't feel my feet or turn my head from my well made, ineffectual meal back around to these words about something -- works of no art to me, words of no meaning or time.  Humility backs its frail little spine into mine, into the room, and whispers to me to leave them be - they are happy here, after all.  Me - I tell humility that he has his worth, but not here and now.  This is the aftermath of a battlefield without honor, with no grit, no guts and no mettle.  These are mettleless people who, as this world ransacks its seething teeth into their backsides, leave the wolves at the door, and carry on - sleeping during mild fucks under dark blankets, orchestrating every meaningless detail of all the seconds in their wretched little forced lives that they think they can control, and me - I'm not different.  I just see.  I just see that they sleep, but I don't want to sleep.  I want to be alive, awake, under the sweetest lights, fully come to for the sweetest fuck; torrents of lifelines, family trees and internal battles between all our heavens and hells beneath and within holding my hand, all the while.  

I need to get out of here.  The air is stale, and I look around and can read the abstract horror which only lets itself out of their insides in short, disturbing bursts of mild expression across their faces....even the ones who normally laugh and are jolly are serious, and I can see the fear in their eyes--- the fear of not having this job.  How strange the whole thing is - the recirculation of fear based love spreading like a plague across the place, table to table, buttering your bread with dull knives driven sheepishly out of dull hearts.  Do you not know that the minutes are ticking by?  Look up, for god's sake, you people, why am I the one to tell you this? You can see plain as day most of you, and but a handful of you are in the right place. And you, displaced King, I will myself not to turn around this pale, sunken room, because I do not want to see you sitting here, with them.  I prefer to think of you as invisible.

Maybe it's me.  Maybe I just don't belong here and they all do.  I hold no fear across my face.  They know this.  They don't speak to me with trust.  They see in the way I walk and the leaves of secret scrolls I unravel from myself daily that I am not one of them.  They know there is to be no microchip implanted beneath my hairline.  My hair, beneath the darkest and longest wave, holds in its stead a small, well constructed door.....not for them, though I feel them stumbling around it sometimes, trying to figure out the mainstay of it, the why, the places it goes. I don't think so, my sad and sorrowful dinner guests.  You can smell the wine in my airs, but not my church and steeple.  I see you.  I see all of you and want to tell you to run.  I don't like what your daily verbal errands bring me, or how I reflect back to you, if at all.  Outside, of the talking, the defense mechanisms, the jokes, the fear clutching at you, I'm.......in my own shoes.  My feet touch the ground, and I am in the place in which I move through, past, from.  There is no time, only your fear makes it so.  One meal to the next, one weekend never long enough, one same old same old.  Same old same old is a combined stench now, rising of people without dreams, or dreams that mattered so little to them that they volunteered to have themselves locked up in this prison.  And don't fool yourselves with your gold watches, your health care, your paid vacations and easy going dress code.  This is a prison.  

Meanwhile, my thighs are screaming, they are trying to get up and walk out...looking up here and there, to see some semblance of sky, to taste the rain that hasn't even thought about falling yet, to see the place up through the glass where one of you finally had enough and lept down, smashing his brains and organs onto your rooftops....yet you never heard a sound.  Do you hear it coming? Because I do.  I do, ever so much, hear the ants in cavalcade in the grasses from far away, past your suburbs, past your vacation homes and golf courses, the grasses which grow too wild for you to consume the way you are used to.  I hear the marching bands playing at your funerals, and each baby born just a little bit dumber, a little bit weaker, a little bit less alive because of your lack of the same force.  This force shoots straight up from my head into the branches of every courageous act I am set to follow, but tends towards the moment I can set my lips around some air again.  Not in here - in here, quite plainly, amidst the burning of Rome, I see each and every one of you and every tool and thing on fire and no one knows it...  

Dinner's over and your chattering has ceased.  I look around at strangers who I have spent more of the hours of my life with than any man I every loved, family I ever had or friend I ever cherished.  Please, one of you, cast the first stone.  I am committing a grave sin by sitting here in silence, the rage and lust and fanaticism pouring out of my glands - from my fingertips I shoot you all down day in and day out, but like fuzzy TV you all still remain, in your natural state of half life.  Must be wonderful to be buried to your waist, some of you nearly to your eyes, underground, resting already and yet stealing air and light from the rest of us.  I want to take this steak knife and stab one of them.  Fuck another, or fuck with some others to be sure.  I don't know what I want, but I need the presence of you -legion- not one but many dead zombie souls, but not even with the hankering for human flesh that would make you more interesting to me.  Your collective gumption is without presence, but I need you, legion, to be gone from me.  Or me from you.  

I want to stop declaring myself and let actions speak louder than words.  Read my eyes like braille- you, the afflicted.  These words, this table, these glass windows onto the meaningless world ignites me, and I don't want any of you following me out of here.  Back to your tight lipped families, back to your pension plans and awkward souls.  I want to vomit out all but the air inside my system and shoot like a rocket ship into the stars, the ones shining just beyond the chemical dirt and pale yellow of the daylight city skies - the stars which exist to love each and every one of you, like I should, but are the stars which you can't see, because fear stands guard at your shadow boxes.  

After it was all over, I was still there, in the world with them, physically speaking.  I wanted to pass out, and felt the immense desire to dream, because it felt more real to me.  At least I got a free meal.

M. Lucia

Starboard

Use your words,
set them to syphon out the grease
the meat
that lay unspoken in the lamp light
of home, or however it is
that you may perceive it.

Cut the ends out, the veins
the tools, and plenty which stops
your irregular mind from
surpassing its limitations,
I mean
they're there for a reason, right?

Down on my knees
with my hips baking,
pies making tribes in the trees
I see
all of you, in your worst dressed wears...

Forgive my arrogance, and my most
assured misgivings, but
I can see the globe entire
of the worlds you can't see but a street's length past,
if only I wasn't the only one out here
to explain to you just what is that light.

That star, that alien ship, that white in the sky
gliding past us, while we see only the cracks in
the pavement, and how evenly beautiful
they can be and that space with which we lose
by them, love despite them
they cannot sink our spirits
in, like words can.

M. Lucia

Lifetime Achievement Award

Why are we on this train?

Why is it ok and lauded that we are awake un-naturally
in the morning, before our bodies, minds are ready
and half asleep standing up in droves on a train...

her golden flat shoes are all I can gaze upon.

Why is there this set time for work.
Why must it be from this hour to this hour.
Who's deemed this, who's made this our life?

"Because work needs to get done, miss", I hear
emanate from one of you suits.  Well, listen-

Why the long standing set hours of work,
moving faster than the speed of light
causing our brains to flap in the wind, loose tarps
flesh enfolding
getting whipped by the breeze as the cargo trucks
zip to and fro, carrying nothing of worth,
particularly? To what end?

"We work more, and work faster so we can make more money".
I didn't ask, but thanks for the clarification.

Still, why ruin our bodies, our hearts growing rotten
stinking of boredom and stasis, to make More Money...
Why not work less and require less and exist more fully.

(...)

Hello?

(...)

No?

(...)

No one gets the completely simple logic of that?

OK, then.
Actually No.  This is Not O.K.

Who told you it should be this way?
Just where is that holy book, or voice from the mountain
or hidden scroll which states that this is correct?
Who's made this our life?

We have.


M. Lucia

A Tale of Two Wallaces

How can he keep living that way?

How can someone consider himself dead inside, void, a mathematical equation that was never meant to be. 

Yes, it's as grand as all that.  Hello, goodbye cruel world, blood stains on the inside scribbling notes of some unforeseen equation.  Mathematics proves time and time again, he says- he used to say, that none of this is good, or right or positive.  He was only ever happy when he disengaged from himself, from that mountain of a mind, which was really just a photographic storage bin for all the knowledge he used to take in.  Yet, he never appreciated intellect, not really, and certainly not the truest kind, where humility and emotion take all those thoughts by their heart strings and haul 'em to town with you.  He couldn't do that.  His wheel was misshapen, the axle busted.  He did not have the tools to feel, and simply recorded, noted, did not react and remained passive to other people's strands his whole life.  The Jesuits did it, his mother did it, the blackened shadow of his dead father, looming over him at age 13, his father's dark hair and clunky professor's glasses, the former of which he inherited (he would always take his contacts out at night, and never put on his glasses.  Meanwhile, mine were seared into my brain all those nights I did not come prepared). 

His passivity was so deep down into a hole of despair that he simply could not move.  He should have found ways to escape his brain - the beast, but he could not.  He concentrated too much from within his own Lack- to just exist the world as he was.  It was never good enough; it was never right.   He had this strange good Samaritan thing he took to a faulty extreme - doing good deeds for those not closest to him, so he could be thought of as well in their eyes, since it was their eyes which reflected his worth.  He took the idea of doing kind things and wrangled it up to him, his own personal smack habit of good deeds.  He gave away and lent books, endless books, always but in droves and in particular times he must have felt so heavy.  Then, at the end, at least at the end of my seeing him anymore.  The final push, the bargain basement giveaway.  Leaving the few of us, namely me, who has a whole new library now, to wonder -- offered up that sticky, dark feeling when you see that it's books he's already lent you, books you read, returned and spoke of at length with him about.  And he knew that.  First editions, including the one about the mad scientist who wanted to conjure up the moon child --the summer on the boat, when I had folded the ear of the page down, and he gently asked that I did not, since it was such a special edition -- it was there, along with the other, less impressive biography that I also read and returned.  His Best books were there.  It made you feel terrible, and truthfully, I don't like looking over at my bookshelf much these days.....I prefer to spread them out, rather than see entire acres of his mind piled up like trash at the side of the road...I should stop talking about him like he's not alive. He is- I think.

I know he still goes to work and shows up.  He doesn't know I know that.  But I wanted some third party proof.  I hope he still takes good care of that white abomination of a pit bull who I miss so very much.  I hope he is not in that place of immovable naught, just shy of the executioner's dirt pit, and the line to the beautiful death that he just cannot make happen for himself.  How must it feel there, in the shadow of the day, hearing the world chime and bellow just around you, with all of us in your midst, with my words like a broken record threatening to cut you if you didn't just "be a man" and "get happy" and "try to see the beauty in it all"...the weapon of choice in your hand (if applicable), and that giant and unforgiving brain beating, and beating, and cornering you into this.  But the courage doesn't come.  I hope you sit up and see the day forming, outside your one, particular spot.  What's worse, that moment if you did finally cross that finish line, and regret it the 3rd, 4th or 5th second afterwards.  Maybe your math talk was right.  Perhaps both sides of the coin do bring on nothing but big fat zeros.

M. Lucia

Prone vs. Supine

That was entirely far too long to be face down.

I mean, I Get it – my arse is a favourite. I know the score, and the animalistic connections- the cheeks, the tits, the baby pink, the milk, the urge to survive, the mother and the prime mover who made us, poking at my hips, slapping my arse while I grin wildly – ok, I’ll admit, I have always loved that. And I know you know that, so while I appreciate the much wanted effort, I’m not quite ready to throw it all in your lap idea wise, so to speak, since I told you beforehand, about the arse spanking. For god’s sake, Mr. Magoo and his trusty dog McBarker could have wandered into me and realized I loved waking up with the slightest rosy tint of a handprint on my arse cheeks.

I’m no Freak, mind you, I’m not one of those whippy people, who gets their jollies out of dressing like 1990’s Goths in pleather and beating the shit out of each other. If I ever had a black eye, it would mark the ending of one hell of a fight, which I still would admit (even if not true) that I let you win. I don’t have any deep seated mental requirements to be hung up by my tits, nor do I think it would do me any good or emphasize my womanhood any to nail anything sharp to anyone’s cock. I don’t judge; I just don’t require those things. This is different, and comes from a wholly more lighthearted place. Do you think those people tell jokes when doing those pleathery things to each other like I’m accustomed to? My arse being the drum, in the band, and the rehearsals, and the really big show…..and all that? How do they break the ice with that sort of thing? Even if they know each other’s a pleather lover, how do they just………go from normal- I’m sorry, there I am judging again, from average daily activities to pulling out the iron maiden and having a night in?  I'll admit, the moment when the whacking begins….well, there is a moment with my arse too, I suppose. Just before. The silence and the slight wince, the tear (purely from being physically bent over, not from the sadness or beauty of it all, but I guess I can’t prove that) rummaging in a half drip just to the middle of my outward turned cheek, as I turn back to smile, just like always (it always holts right there mid-cheek…whatever its reason, it’s not enough tear to make it dramatically to my lips or chin).

It’s seamless to me, but I can imagine the booze helps. I think, as long as the Idea of booze inside you remains, even if during the next morning or afternoon (depending on the length of play and the activities slotted or not slotted for the following day) you are technically sober, it allows the liberation of this process, ongoing. After all, smack (no pun intended, but even the sound of that word spins my top up a flight of stairs to a different sort of heaven), smack in the middle of drunk isn’t always the best place to mingle with each other’s bodies (a friend told me once, it was like “trying to shove a clam into a parking meter”).

Still, in the midst of all this, after the spanking, while the sometimes redness gathers in blooming folds, ridging the once smooth skin of my arse, the fucking occurs and all the bells and whistles that come with it (not literally, as these fall under the auspicious office of those pleather types again...or maybe not, maybe more your fantasy monger…I mean, fine, every woman likes to pretend she’s getting raped sometimes, right? (...) Oh. Well, I read it in a book once – it was based on the culture I call my own, and those types, well I guess those are technically My type, but those types just need a little excitement sometimes. It’s not for Every Day, for God’s sake. The rape and the porn, the ruler and the schoolgirl, that’s basic stuff. I’m taking those folk who graduate from all that into something else. Took drama one too many times at school or something, or were still into costumes as much as they were when little kids…the ones who need grips, tracking shots and Victorian wear just to get off with each other. Well, I think I’m much simpler than that).

To reiterate, I don’t mind the why of the arse, nor the so called abuse of it, nor the being taken like dogs do- it’s fitting and if you don’t deal in your own personal beasts, then they lose the warmth of their fur and nails and skin, and their eyes fall back into their head; they hollow, and form into metal, the metal of the machine that owns You, and not the other way around. You can tame them, same as I allow you to tame me (see the middle ground? No? Good. I have a team of ladies in waiting there, and it’s best you don’t come in after they call lights out – there are elevations to a woman that most don’t want to step up to, or see. I like it that way and step up with bells on (again, not literally speaking, though that may be fun)).

When you Are in there, or somehow in conversation with the favourite – my arse, just remember that none of those ladies get that level of understanding, down to the far reaches of our first selves, our hunched shoulders and meaningful grunts, the scream that signals to the night that we are so very alive.

Just.......remember to flip me back over sometimes, ‘cause I been told I have nice eyes too.

M. Lucia

MISSY

Bob walks Missy, his dead wife's poodle mix.

At this particular lawn here a man comes out.  Bob worries and Missy can tell.  Bob wonders "is this another one come to tell me too clean up after my dog?"

He is tall and athletic Bob notices perhaps only because Bob is not.  Not anymore.  Bob and Jackie lived a long life together, grew old and fat together, maybe in the end their "together" was more silence than anything else but there was comfort and safety and belonging to spare.  Bob misses his wife.

The man smiles and speaks first to Missy.  Missy still wary even as the man crouches and offers the back of his hand for her to smell.  She barely sniffs.  "You can poop on my lawn anytime," he coos.  She demurs.

"She does, all the time!" Bob offers, displaying the baggies he carries in his pocket to retrieve Missy's turds, hoping to reassure that he's not the type to not pick up after her.  The man smiles.  "Lovely day!" he says from his crouch looking up at Bob, squinting in the sunlight which lights his face, and Bob agrees.  There is a sense Bob's not completely connected to consciously that his kneeling down to Bob is somehow the same as offering Missy the back of his hand; he's conveying welcome.  "She's sweet," he says, "nice to see you," and jogs back inside.  Bob feels it was nice to have someone to talk to even for a moment.

Bob and Missy watch Wheel of Fortune as the light fades outside the window to night.  They doze, first chair then bed.  Things go unwashed for a time.  Bob eats a lot of one kind of food before moving on to something else.  This week it's Chef Boyardee.  Jackie always had coupons but it's not that expensive, anyway.  Bob prepares Missy's dinner since she's on a special diet--chicken and veggies most of the time.

Another day Bob and Missy are maybe a little further along the street as the man drives by.  He hangs an elbow out the window of his truck and then waves at Missy and Bob and they wave back.  Later that same night since Bob can't sleep he and Missy walk past the house in the dark.  There is music.  Bob pauses and knows after a moment that someone's playing a piano.  The tune's familiar, Jackie would know.

Missy's leash extends and she sniffs around the tree.  Bob dreams along with the music.  He dances with Jackie again like when they were young and not so tired.    His eyes are closed but he smiles.  Then in his head he's dancing instead now with the man.  And it's a feeling now of a lightness, like of floating.  The man is smiling down at him and the light coronas his head and Bob feels a safety again wash over him.  Soon the man is kissing him but Missy pulls at the cord.

Bob walks Missy home to bed.

Lady Jail '11

The first installment of Lady Jail occurs.
This spring - you are taller, and heavier, and your hair
smells like boy's hair that's been washed by the wind and the dirt.
I zip up my jacket around both you and I, because you ask me to.
Now you are closed within lady jail.
The breezes blow; the men are hungover
with trucker voices from the carping and yelling
of the bachelor's party from the night before.
The gardens are planted, and you lean
your bushy, dirty
blond head back into my neck.
And we keep each other warm, as you ask
me to tell you a story, which I attempt at-
but fail, since it's about a beautiful and isolated
island in the Adriatic sea, where there sits
a castle, looking like a painting;
set against blue and white immovable waves
winding flat from the cliff above it all.
I knock your legs and feet with mine, and
make you dance like a puppet -
and this you enjoy, and laugh a jester's chuckle at.
Your hands find the secret pockets at the inside
of my jacket pockets, and grip hard,
holding us all together like veins raining anarchy
down a viney garden piano wire.
Electrical more like it.  The brash willow tree is covering
its shame, its not dressed just yet and the tall red bricks
of the wall behind it reflects our hardness back,
and our fortitude, for better or worse.
We sit, my story petered out; I wonder
how long we can play like this, before you are too big--
trying to put your hands between my thighs to stay warm,
but told you shouldn't because, well, just don't.
Still, I know you're stay warm with a girl down the street
and you'll be free from all that locks you in, but
for now, while you need to be enveloped in grace
and protection which I cannot always afford myself,
you will always have my arms to hold you in,
and your puppet feet will find their steps
to form the grandest of jail breaks.  You will climb the
willow and shoot into the stars, comanches at your side
and bugs in your hair.  And, I'm glad
that you know,
you can always be a fool with me.    

M. Lucia

OUTHOUSE

"This is my outhouse," she used to say, my mother used to.  


She was talking about the "cabin," more a shed really, built out behind the house.  Our ratty little piece of backyard lawn, overhung with pines, mossy from lack of sun and seeming to suffer, almost psychologically, from proximity to the woods bordering the property, was overwhelmed by the raw presence, thickness and press of the acres of forest and hills beyond my Mom's little white shingled haven.  


She had been a huge fan of Roald Dahl's since her formative years in Vermont and had read somewhere that he had had a shed on his property that he would write in.  Mom found the idea of a private sanctuary for an artist a compelling one and told my father so at the dinner table back in 1973.  


I was eating cereal for dinner since my mother had only had the energy to make my Dad's favorite, French Onion Soup, but not from a can, so which it was then, you see, an involved process for her since (a) she wasn't much of a cook and also (b) since she knew he (my Dad) would take it as a special treat (and thus be more likely to react favorably to her statement about Roald Dahl's writing shed and presumably more open to creating one for her) getting it right was that much more important.  In other words, she was plotting and I was eating Cherrios.  


Mom wasn't a writer though, I should say.  Her passion was painting.  Or, I guess, more "the visual arts" because she painted and sculpted, and took photographs and also enjoyed the so-called capital-F Folk arts, knitting, sewing, beading, tapestry, ever since her ashram days, if you know what I mean.  


"I read today that Roald Dahl had a writing room on his property," she sort of blurted between Dad and I while we, both of us, handled our spoons.  She nibbled on a sliced piece of bread with butter and made little distracted, but very typical, sweeps of her hair with her left hand.  Dad was figuring how to pierce the thick melt of provolone or mozzarella my mother had browned perfectly with the oven's broiler, which had sealed the bowl's super-heated contents like a nuclear reactor (my mother had had to deliver the soup in what passed for a crock to Dad's plate with the cow-themed mitts she had gotten from the thrift store.)  


"Hmmmm?"  Dad poked at the cheese.  It wasn't clear if the noise was in answer to my mother's out-of context statement about Roald Dahl or in study of the cheese vis-a-vis puzzling out an approach to eating the soup.  I had a bit of a cold at the time and had to eat my cereal breathing only through my mouth; that is, through the cereal as I chewed it open-mouthed.  The Cheerios' characteristic "oaty" smell and flavor clouded around my head although I couldn't smell it nor taste the cereal itself.  With the benefit of infrared lighting or maybe a spectral analysis of the "crock," one might've noticed tiny cracks spider-webbing through the thin coating of grease around the crock's outer surface.  


"I need a place," Mom continued, "to work.  I need...space!!"  She threw up her arms and splayed her hands suggesting a cloud around her head which she shook (her head), bulging and rattling her eyes.  Dad and I were practiced in decoding these kinds of gestures and masters also at navigating the subtle shifts in her mood, although not, first and foremost as they say, really out of any concern for her well-being or any need to understand her feelings for their own sake, but really, to be honest, as the means for keeping her happy enough to keep feeding us, washing our clothes and cleaning up our messes--perhaps this sounds a bit callous now but it was typical of your average 1970's Edith-Bunker-era American household re: issues of so-called Women's Lib., the ERA and the general lack of a mature and/or enlightened regard for a woman's role in society, a regard which would, in the years to come, of course under-go a significant period of re-thinking.  Mom's "head cloud," we knew, was what we thought of as the general wildness of her thoughts, and the influence of her artistic muse, such as it was, and even the very thing perhaps that informed her occasional whimsy.  For example, it was she who typically composed (composition here meaning the framing and balance of the shots as they were being arranged) the family photos, arranging my Dad, my sister and me according to some inner influence, a voice only she heard and listened to, as she stood there looking at us biting her lip and narrowing her eyes.  For long periods of reflection we said nothing and then dutifully moved finally as directed.  


We both stared at her now, unsure of what would happen next.  I think my Dad was actually at a loss for what was being asked of him.  My mothers sudden outburst, or so it seemed to his largely sedate sensibility, baffled him in its source and motivation.  There was also a high-pitched whine coming from what seemed like a great distance.  My father's head twitched slightly wanting both to ID the source of the sound but also to not break eye-contact with my mother since this was the only thing he was currently hanging his hat on in terms of wanting to satisfy whatever desire she was expressing, however vaguely.  He thought that at a minimum he owed her his attention until what she wanted became more clear.  


"Willy Wonka?" I asked.


I would sometimes confuse Roald Dahl with the characters he created, he was that kind of writer--the way he wrote, the subject matter, the unconventional twists, and the general feeling of menace hanging over the stories themselves made me feel like there was something unhinged about him, Dahl himself.  But so, this sudden break in the silence which had been crowding out the air in the room caused both my parents to jerk their heads in my direction right at the same time as the interior temperature of the bowl's cheese-insulated onion soup and relatively low quality of the soup bowl itself, purchased as part of some supermarket register-tape related give-away, combined to reach critical mass regarding the general integrity of the meal's ultimately flawed assembly and to seek some entropic release bursting the crock of soup right on the table in front of my father.  


"BORIS," my father yelling now, although really only startled by the exploding bowl and hot soup in his lap and his own ambient confusion over my mother's feelings and arm-waves, but making nonetheless the classic parental knee-jerk leap of logic, placing blame first on the kid, assuming anything that went wrong must be due to a child's lack of focus, as if the words "Willy Wonka" had been some kind of magical incanation.  Unfortunately, my reaction to surprise was ordinarily, and certainly in this case, to giggle, usually beginning with a kind of donkey-like hee-haw'ing sound in my stomach, only much faster.  My mouth though was still sort of filled with cereal and milk and my nose clogged with mucous.  


As I laughed and choked my mother rushed to grab a dishtowel from the handle of the refrigerator door and my father quietly fumed (alternating between "goddamit," "would you look at this" and "Jesus Ker-rist.")  There was a moment when both my father and I locked eyes in a instant of intense Oedipal rivalry as it was not immediately apparent who the towel was for, although neither of us were wholly conscious of the true nature of the eye-lock and wouldn't really be able to fully suss out the implications without intense psychoanalysis and perhaps even a few sessions of hypnosis.    My mother worked at the table around my father clearing the mess the crock (and presumably I) had made.  I continued chuckling and Dad muttering.  My mother eyes welled a bit and she made a few sounds which we knew, the two of us, approximated the words "I try so hard" which had the immediate effect of silencing my giggles and softening my Dad.  


"What was this about, a shed was it?"my father had come around to it in a kind of back-to-the-wall moment of truth, and though very little of the conversation after that is a recallable memory for me, the shed is there now, out behind the house.


Over the years my mother spent practically every waking hour in her "sanctuary," painting mostly, the products of her work stacked neatly in the basement of the house upon completion (some passed out occasionally as gifts, though, I know now, none of the really good ones) and catalogued in a richly annotated folder in a file cabinet behind her work table.  I was instructed to not "fiddle" with the paintings and I never did though I must admit it was never out of any maternal loyalty but more lack of interest.  Whenever my mother would refer to her "outhouse" I would cringe or wince depending on the company, disliking her folksy camp, her hippie-era braids and floppy bralessness, her embarrasing blasting of Bob Dylan into the night and her altogether lack of dignity, or so I thought.  


Last night I dreamed of her in her "outhouse."  I was outside watching her from the woods, from behind the trees.  The only light was coming from the windows and it was multicolored, projecting out in rays which seemed to shift as if the source inside was moving, creating...Bob Dylan played but it was as if under water.  I became aware of the animals only at the end right before I woke up.  They were coming out of the forest drawn by her.  I turned my head to look and woke up.  


I miss her terribly.

Vice Versa

So, the story year in and year out, as it went, blurted out crying like a baby, stampeding drunk out of bars, communicating quietly from beds at night, the walk under the stars when remarking on the physical quality of it all, followed by the kiss on his neck that surprised him and made him look back to me as he walked off, it all ended, but it can clearly be sum up by a night smack in the middle of it – during the evening of a scorching summer’s day – we’d gone to the pool, she and I, and instead of swimming laps, we stood around, floating and standing, in the middle of the general pool area, slowly being deserted by any other participants in summertime frolicking, due to the oncoming light summer rain and occasional clap of thunder – wishing we had some nice flotation devices to stretch our long legs onto, and an ashtray (I didn’t smoke but wanted to in this case) and strong cocktails to sip while gossiping over the neighborhood and its contents. Instead, we floated and swam for seconds at a time, as the rain fell around us, and no one was left – the sky opened and the thunder roared. We eventually got out, and it was pouring as I drove her the few blocks to her place and arranged to meet up at the bar for the show and evening’s festivities come evening time.

I know exactly why I did what I did, dress wise. It was hot. Really hot. Sticky, city hot and the humidity that had clouded our senses before the rain had let up only a little bit for the barely cooled down evening. I had on That dress, which wasn’t like a dress at all. Black, and strapless and short and form fitting. It was the bare minimal of clothing, but it did look damn good. Since there was going to be loud music, I thought it was time to reach back into the time machine and bring out the metal and hemp choker I had, which completed the outfit just fine, along with the boots I knew were his favourite – the brown, old leather ones, which I put on with fishnet stockings. There was no going back now. Heat did strange things to you. So did he. Feels like a different person I am talking about now, the spikes, and folds and depth and darkness and shards of outward bending light he had, they all seemed gone, just like he is. The extra bits were added – the makeup, the earrings, and the thing behind the dress that made it mine.

After most of them I knew best poured in, the place got crowded. He showed up just as the music was starting. Off putting as usual, and a gentle mixture of politeness and disgust, per his usual Saturday night. I bought him a beer, and he seemed to think I didn’t have to. Two dollars wasn’t worth much to even me, so I shrugged it off and turned around. I could feel him standing close behind me, his feet staking claim around one of mine, and every so often, and increasing with each interval of time that passed, he would lean into me, and say something to me, loudly because of the noise, but muffled as he shoved his entire mouth into the outer folds of my ear, speaking to me in desperate kisses, the words I practically heard from the inside centre of my cranium. This went on for a little while, and then I might have said something a bit snarly, as I do, and eventually he disappeared.

Later I was told that it was assumed by many that I was his (again) and he owned me, nothing less (still). That he was on me in every single way, as I stood there, not turning around, that he was fucking me, but in my mind and clearly did stake a claim and then leave it behind. That was his game. When I got home that night, after taking a far too mild amount of hallucinogenic drugs (which wasn’t my regular, but I needed to float up a bit on that night, noise spinning in my ears, his voice in my skull and hands and breath on my neck…..they failed me (the drugs) but after long walks around the hot night of the neighborhood streets I was home. I received a message from him that read ‘your dress is very attractive’. I sighed, put my head in my hand, and said to him ‘why not do something about it’. He did, months later, and again, months behind, and that night of missed opportunities sums he and I up. I could think about the last times, which were more dulled, smooth and drunken, holed up on winter nights and in warm misunderstandings again and again, but I prefer to think of the epicenter of our passions, when my flame was flying clear as day, and his was receiving three seconds too late. And vice versa, back again. The summers we ran races against each other under the thundering hot skies which deemed us their playthings for as long as their havoc could hold out.

M. Lucia