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