Jigsaw strains my mind awake. The witching hour sends hard shards down the outside of my thigh, particularly in a nestled coupling of insect bites, as if they knew the crux of my sweetness. They're flying circles low, somewhere above the bar, drunk on me as is everyone who manages to swim the moat of foul words, crass promises and detached obsession. That's the sound my leg is making, quietly pulsing each dream-wake thought running the river round itself, made drier each hour by the white of the moon, which laughs every time I think I'm healing within circumstance.
Face down, into the thick wheat coloured rug, pillows form my princess bed, no pea any prince could feel for, when there's lots more interesting maneuvers above the lone green proof of my forgotten royalty. Quiet hum of a/c, cats raping and running as my stillness refuses to shut itself up, and return to the business of dreaming...The witching hour provides none of the gusto it once held above me; no ghosts, no fear- of anything outside of myself. I feel as if the world has died into its night, and I am the only one left. I try to get away from the leg, from its connections to my ankle, my calf, the back of my knee, the rupture of my ass, with its crucifixion process laying the latest jesus in my mind down onto me, blanketing me with every sounding note. A man sits at the piano- I hear its wood gently pushed up and in. A few chords, but mostly lone notes soothe me, as my ear listens to the carpet earth, thick and muffled and 3 floors up.
Soon I'm back in bed, dreaming thirty or forty explicit and well lit adventure stories - pulp, plot, fears and noises coming back to me, and no matter which way I turn, it's not what I thought it was. Too many pictures to focus in on one serious thing. Before you know it, the pain dulls, my mind keeps its working into itself, even without me at the helm, light searing in from far off sky, over the small, abandoned factory that hasn't let a soul in for some length of time. It holds within it all the dreams I'm not finished with yet. My claw marks are from climbing In, and not holding on- the ship sails because of their force, and is not held in stasis anymore.
The pain has been my close friend, and comfort and reminder of all that is not finished with me. I've got time, and I've felt that feeling too, the one of understanding what it feels like to know the pain is outside of me and not coming back, even when it does. Once I figured that out, the feeling of being healed with invisible elixir, whatever face it may take (it's always my face so I better get used to it) I know there's an open road. It knows I can live without it. Not even a good fuck can keep pain under my spell. So I put my heart wild and bloody into it with each deadpan sensation of sickness which remains. And I wrap myself around him and take him in every night. One day the final dream will have me waking up in utter peace and good health. He'll have to thumb a lift on down the road to the next sucker. We all take our turn after all.
M. Lucia
Sunday, July 31, 2011
Friday, July 29, 2011
AFTER THE FALL-THREE
I never get used to the way they come out blue. {STOP}
And bloated. {STOP}
When you look up close. {STOP}
You can see sand like black pepper in every corner and crevice. {STOP}
Why do they always swim at night? {STOP}
Panies, condom, car keys, tissue. {STOP}
Find the girl but I know the story. {STOP}
There used to be a factory along here. {STOP}
Made bricks out of the stone from this hole that they dug.{STOP}
They say the shovel is still down there deep under the water. {STOP}
Dug down so deep there was no getting that machine out again.{STOP}
The spring water did the rest. {STOP}
Boys will be boys. {STOP}
And bloated. {STOP}
When you look up close. {STOP}
You can see sand like black pepper in every corner and crevice. {STOP}
Why do they always swim at night? {STOP}
Panies, condom, car keys, tissue. {STOP}
Find the girl but I know the story. {STOP}
There used to be a factory along here. {STOP}
Made bricks out of the stone from this hole that they dug.{STOP}
They say the shovel is still down there deep under the water. {STOP}
Dug down so deep there was no getting that machine out again.{STOP}
The spring water did the rest. {STOP}
Boys will be boys. {STOP}
AFTER THE FALL-TWO
In the dark I can see the black line of trees, a slightly less inky midnight sky, and a small moon of reflection wallowing on wind-wave pond-ripples.
It's like a movie.
I drop in a dive from the overhanging embankment, my feet finally freed from dirt and from weed, leaving behind everything that just now happened back there behind me in the woods. Until that moment, now aloft, she hung on me too but then with the plunge into the water all her traces were gone and she became again only a thing in my head; a thought, an idea, a memory.
Baptized (again) by the water's chill, below the surface it is all solitude, complete. The fish, you know, have nothing to say and only the bottom calls out its black purpose: "stay here." There are always spirits at the bottom of a pond in the woods; they are taunted by the wood-witches gliding above the surface and by all manner of gnomes, goblins and billy-goats-gruff with mossy beards and hiding corners down at tree root, ferned-in by the cloud of magic surrounding the dew-dappled deerdoes.
She sleeps there among them, her spell cast off and then turned on herself.
Submerged I take rest.
It's like a movie.
I drop in a dive from the overhanging embankment, my feet finally freed from dirt and from weed, leaving behind everything that just now happened back there behind me in the woods. Until that moment, now aloft, she hung on me too but then with the plunge into the water all her traces were gone and she became again only a thing in my head; a thought, an idea, a memory.
Baptized (again) by the water's chill, below the surface it is all solitude, complete. The fish, you know, have nothing to say and only the bottom calls out its black purpose: "stay here." There are always spirits at the bottom of a pond in the woods; they are taunted by the wood-witches gliding above the surface and by all manner of gnomes, goblins and billy-goats-gruff with mossy beards and hiding corners down at tree root, ferned-in by the cloud of magic surrounding the dew-dappled deerdoes.
She sleeps there among them, her spell cast off and then turned on herself.
Submerged I take rest.
AFTER THE FALL-ONE
Plunge; from hunger
It's been a long time since I swam the ocean.
The move through the liquid,
nothing like a fish--not at all like that,
but still under the water.
Eyes shut, tight and thus blind.
The water here around my skin warms
slightly in the moment I pause before pulling
with arms and pushing legs
forward to the next space
which is cold at first but then warmed
in its turn.
How long can I stay down here?
Air doesn't feel like a problem at the moment.
I'm used to holding my breath.
It's been a long time since I swam the ocean.
The move through the liquid,
nothing like a fish--not at all like that,
but still under the water.
Eyes shut, tight and thus blind.
The water here around my skin warms
slightly in the moment I pause before pulling
with arms and pushing legs
forward to the next space
which is cold at first but then warmed
in its turn.
How long can I stay down here?
Air doesn't feel like a problem at the moment.
I'm used to holding my breath.
Thursday, July 28, 2011
[May Be Habit Forming]
The codeine bottle sat righteously, two-thirds empty, in the top left corner of the medicine cabinet right between the Vaseline (Lucy could never remember buying Vaseline, but somehow it was always present) and the natural Irish hangover remedy which hadn’t been used in some time, actually. She wondered if it was still fresh. Like all good dizzying medications, the codeine cough syrup, prescribed for that terrible of terrible flu that Lucy had contracted about 2 weeks after her father passed away, was one of the tiny, thankful distractions she had at that time. Also there was Jack in her bed throughout it all, there was the new job she was starting at the end of the month (or rather the old job that had laid her off years back, during the time when she had planned to run away to the shores of Los Angeles, making it out by the time she hit 30…well, almost. She didn’t go), there were the meals Lucy got from her mother, made with even more care and more leftovers than she knew what to do with, there was whiskey – beautiful, sap stained Irish whiskey, there was the upcoming move into the waterfront section of Brooklyn, into which she slid like the others who lived there – running away from something, being through with something, starting over, being yourself and not pretending anymore. There was all that, which she was about to face, conquer and swim laps around like a harpy with no shoes on, dirt happily itching at her feet. There would be love, and loss of it, more than once, but all that hadn’t happened yet.
Lucy had been prescribed the codeine by the doctor, and she took it. Thick purple stuff it was. It made her remember how she hated taking cough syrup or any sort of medicine when she was little. There would be hours-long negotiations with her mother about it. She hated the taste of it so much and built it up so much in her head that sure enough, when the spoon would go into her mouth (her mother thought by shoveling it in quickly, her daughter would taste it less), Lucy’d gag and spit most, if not all of it, up. It was just no good. Once, out of frustration, her mother dragged her down a very short stack of thickly carpeted stairs (by the hair, Lucy was told, by her brother who enjoyed making their mother feel guilty about every little thing “wrong” she did…..truly, her mother did very few things wrong) instructing her brother: “hold her down, John!” when Lucy had an ear infection and needed desperately to take the medication. When Lucy’s father got home from working that night (he set his own hours and performed his own magic feats with electricity every chance he could with his own electrical business – they were magic feats because he saw them as such, loved what he did and did not answer to anybody), he told her mother (in somewhat constant but well spoken broken English) “you never do that to her again”. That night, Lucy was taking her ear infection medication smothered in chocolate ice cream.
And it went like that. But after Lucy’s father was (just) gone, she happily took this purple codeine magical elixir (it was so, because she saw it as such, much like her father) and it indeed quelled her terrible hacking cough and thereby soothed her raw throat, which she had been coating with soup and hot whiskey. During the course of the codeine weekend, she remembered Jack taking her mother’s stew and adding, as he usually did, a blanket of cheese on top, throwing in a few of her spices and serving it to Lucy by her sofa side. Of course, they had been fucking regardless of her being sick throughout, and only in the last day, when the constant cough and the raw throat made her moan from its pain, she just hadn’t the energy. He still would sit there with her, her head in his lap, dress with no underwear, while he ran circles around the top of her ass, and they watched something sweet like “The Shining”. Lucy’s breathing would increase slowly and she could feel him there, and slowly her hands would move up or down and in a start they’d be kissing and it would all just start over again. Hard to stop at that, really, when your body wants what it wants. He somehow never got sick from her either.
On that particular night, Lucy was asleep -napping- while Jack spoke on the phone and watched Dario Argento films which made her drug induced sleep full of accented and dubbed screams, breathy Italian voices and eerie background music. In addition, she started to hallucinate a bit, part way into her nap- turning back and forth, seeing the half eaten stew sitting there, not remembering having eaten it, and then thinking someone else she knew had shown up- but it was all in the twilight, not in the actual environment, so-called. Codeine came from opiates, so it indeed had a lot to offer, if you weren’t interested in straight lines anymore, and wanted to let some other part of you (i.e. the universal mind) run the show for awhile while your body slept, your thighs still sore from that afternoon.
All of this ran through Lucy’s mind in the seconds during which she opened the medicine cabinet in her waterfront apartment two years later. The bottle of codeine cough syrup had just about expired, but she couldn’t bring herself to get rid of it. Purple streaks decked the sides of it, along with a faint but substantially hardened ring around its bottom, which Lucy felt give her a bit of a fight (she liked a bit of a fight) when she tried to remove it from the shelf in order to spy more closely its one-third remaining contents. A woman named Amanda had come over that evening to see Liz, the woman who shared Lucy’s kitchen within the two apartments which made up the third floor. Liz would be leaving the States for good soon – moving to Portugal where she had been traveling to regularly for the last 2 years oddly (Lucy found the number odd anyway) and where she’d be opening her own shop and art gallery. Liz had family money, which always left a chip taken from Lucy’s shoulder and placed delicately inside her mouth, when it came to people with family money. Amanda had befriended Liz in the months she lived there, and had befriended Lucy as well. People like Amanda were always drawn to people like Lucy; fractured, openly wounded and flailing people, who sought her rootedness and tenderness and strength sometimes with a force she could not say no to.
This night was not a happy visit though. While Lucy and Liz shared a meal, and some wine, Amanda blew in (expectantly) crying her eyes out, as her twin brother- the one she felt beyond the usually spoken about tenets, irreparably joined with since, well, always- he had finally done it. He had been waking up in a haze most nights, taking massive amounts of pain pills for no such physical ailment. He was a depressive, like his sister, and an addict generally speaking, as she was. Drink, pills, most anything. He had a young wife, and two little kids, one just a baby. Amanda had come over many times before- worried about him, terribly worried so that her stomach would be aching, and she’d get drunk fast as she could- to stop the worrying, to help her sleep, which she could not. Amanda would say that she could Feel that her twin would kill himself in this way soon. And he did. He did so at the age of 32, same age as her, a few moments younger and gone in a flash into his addict’s heaven. Or so she hoped. Amanda was hysterical on this night, and was in some kind of kaleidoscope of grief, shock and pain. She felt like she was dying, physically and more. Like her life’s vitality was cut from her. But she could not bleed, or see it so. Amanda soon calmed down, ate some food, drank all of Liz’s wine, and they talked about it, and then did not, as Amanda’s inner addict took hold for survival’s sake and found out that Lucy had in her medicine cabinet the aforementioned one-third of the thickened bottle of codeine cough syrup. Half drunk herself, Lucy had gone to retrieve it for Amanda, when all the memories of its origin, of the origin of Lucy’s relationship with medications, with her own brother, and father and family took place.
Quick as all that, Lucy was back in the other apartment with the bottle, which Amanda sipped big gulps from, growing more manic with each one, each chaser of white wine, and each overstepping fashion of words which slipped right out of her mouth as if in a stream. Like she orgasmed every few sentences at once, multiplying while her body similarly moved and shook slightly. This got them talking about orgasms (segues never really are such…they are just empty excuses for talking about what you want to talk about). The passage of words which led to this doesn’t matter; that we are here now is all you need see. It got to the specific point that neither of these very adventurous women (so named by their own opinions) had ever ejaculated when having an orgasm, whether by someone else or by their own very capable hand. Lucy sipped her wine, keeping it closer to her face, and sighed. The wine glass, now empty, made a very thoughtful 'cklllink' as she replaced it on the grey stone counter top. Lucy made the face of a child, sly right sided smile and silently lifted up her fingers as if she was asking for permission to go to the little girls’ room in elementary school. Amanda and Liz both started reacting in many forms at once – wide eyes, laughter, bright exclamations, almost as if this was being communicated to a very titillated man, getting up from the couch and/or making their way over to Lucy to question or clarify this fact she had expressed without words. They asked her if she had, indeed, “had them”. And Lucy told them that she has Only had them that way for a very long time. That the men she’d been with hadn’t always made her come, but when she did, and always when she did by Her own very capable hands, she came completely. That’s right. She had an active, liquid cunt. They asked her, how much? Lucy told them that, when properly, it was gushing. It was messy, indeed. Whether alone or not, she always tended to have to have a towel over sheets, or some such barrier to catch the wave as it were.
They leaned in and listened further, Amanda now completely distracted from her twin brother’s death as she put down the last remaining drops of the codeine elixir to listen even more fascinated than before. Lucy started to feel self conscious, but they both assured her – it was an amazing feat, and she was special. Drunken, and codeine intoxicated Amanda even remarked that Lucy was like a unicorn! Lucy further explained that it wasn’t always this way. She couldn’t remember the first time it happened (alone probably) many years ago….how for awhile she wasn’t sure if it was what it was, but she read up on it and kept a close eye out, and knew it came from a different spring than the other place. She had not wet the bed, in the traditional sense. Nowadays, she said, when occasionally it didn’t happen like that, if she was too drunk, or tired or not bringing her full heart to it, she felt like it wasn’t real, like it didn’t reach her, like it didn’t count. There Was something to it; she didn’t just have this extra feature. When it came like that, most often, she could feel it building and always knew when it would show itself, but couldn’t usually feel from whence it came. Maybe it Was like a unicorn, mysterious and free and from the mystical waters where light is dark and dream is drug induced reality…..a friend of hers (a bonafide red headed slut who was now mother to a beautiful red headed baby daughter) had engaged Lucy about it, and told her that it was the only way to be, and that you could control its trajectory, force and mark if you worked at it. Usually though, in the seconds at which it would happen, Lucy was so immensely uncontrolled in her body and her self that it was more like a virgin oil well coming for the very first time, covering the earth and letting you know just how utterly alive it was in that moment- creating and in creation, and fostering a warning to anything that surrounded her that when she was made to bring it on all the way, carrying the gods and the pains and the liberated stars with her, you just couldn’t be afraid of getting a little wet when calling up the depths of the ocean like that.
Liz indeed went off to Portugal, with Amanda leaving New York soon after her twin brother’s funeral, travelling to Costa Rica, then back to Alabama where she was from, marrying her brother’s best friend, getting pregnant (or probably the other way around), getting divorced (or probably annulled) and travelling again to Costa Rica to lose herself any way she could. Amanda’s back in Alabama now, making floral bouquets with her very own business. Lucy is still in the waterfront, having had no need for codeine for some time, so the bottle was not replaced in the medicine cabinet. She still talks to Amanda sometimes, checking in on her when anniversaries of grief come and go, chiming in with her own thoughts about her father, and about how many Eastern cultures take part in ancestral worship – wherein families look to their non-living relatives who have gone before as gods to be sat at the base of, and talked to and asked for advice. That the ancestors spoke through us all the time. After these searing, comforting thoughts would pass between their occasional communications, Amanda would always offer Lucy a coy and hearty closing salutation, referring to her with a wink as “my lovely unicorn”.
M. Lucia
Lucy had been prescribed the codeine by the doctor, and she took it. Thick purple stuff it was. It made her remember how she hated taking cough syrup or any sort of medicine when she was little. There would be hours-long negotiations with her mother about it. She hated the taste of it so much and built it up so much in her head that sure enough, when the spoon would go into her mouth (her mother thought by shoveling it in quickly, her daughter would taste it less), Lucy’d gag and spit most, if not all of it, up. It was just no good. Once, out of frustration, her mother dragged her down a very short stack of thickly carpeted stairs (by the hair, Lucy was told, by her brother who enjoyed making their mother feel guilty about every little thing “wrong” she did…..truly, her mother did very few things wrong) instructing her brother: “hold her down, John!” when Lucy had an ear infection and needed desperately to take the medication. When Lucy’s father got home from working that night (he set his own hours and performed his own magic feats with electricity every chance he could with his own electrical business – they were magic feats because he saw them as such, loved what he did and did not answer to anybody), he told her mother (in somewhat constant but well spoken broken English) “you never do that to her again”. That night, Lucy was taking her ear infection medication smothered in chocolate ice cream.
And it went like that. But after Lucy’s father was (just) gone, she happily took this purple codeine magical elixir (it was so, because she saw it as such, much like her father) and it indeed quelled her terrible hacking cough and thereby soothed her raw throat, which she had been coating with soup and hot whiskey. During the course of the codeine weekend, she remembered Jack taking her mother’s stew and adding, as he usually did, a blanket of cheese on top, throwing in a few of her spices and serving it to Lucy by her sofa side. Of course, they had been fucking regardless of her being sick throughout, and only in the last day, when the constant cough and the raw throat made her moan from its pain, she just hadn’t the energy. He still would sit there with her, her head in his lap, dress with no underwear, while he ran circles around the top of her ass, and they watched something sweet like “The Shining”. Lucy’s breathing would increase slowly and she could feel him there, and slowly her hands would move up or down and in a start they’d be kissing and it would all just start over again. Hard to stop at that, really, when your body wants what it wants. He somehow never got sick from her either.
On that particular night, Lucy was asleep -napping- while Jack spoke on the phone and watched Dario Argento films which made her drug induced sleep full of accented and dubbed screams, breathy Italian voices and eerie background music. In addition, she started to hallucinate a bit, part way into her nap- turning back and forth, seeing the half eaten stew sitting there, not remembering having eaten it, and then thinking someone else she knew had shown up- but it was all in the twilight, not in the actual environment, so-called. Codeine came from opiates, so it indeed had a lot to offer, if you weren’t interested in straight lines anymore, and wanted to let some other part of you (i.e. the universal mind) run the show for awhile while your body slept, your thighs still sore from that afternoon.
All of this ran through Lucy’s mind in the seconds during which she opened the medicine cabinet in her waterfront apartment two years later. The bottle of codeine cough syrup had just about expired, but she couldn’t bring herself to get rid of it. Purple streaks decked the sides of it, along with a faint but substantially hardened ring around its bottom, which Lucy felt give her a bit of a fight (she liked a bit of a fight) when she tried to remove it from the shelf in order to spy more closely its one-third remaining contents. A woman named Amanda had come over that evening to see Liz, the woman who shared Lucy’s kitchen within the two apartments which made up the third floor. Liz would be leaving the States for good soon – moving to Portugal where she had been traveling to regularly for the last 2 years oddly (Lucy found the number odd anyway) and where she’d be opening her own shop and art gallery. Liz had family money, which always left a chip taken from Lucy’s shoulder and placed delicately inside her mouth, when it came to people with family money. Amanda had befriended Liz in the months she lived there, and had befriended Lucy as well. People like Amanda were always drawn to people like Lucy; fractured, openly wounded and flailing people, who sought her rootedness and tenderness and strength sometimes with a force she could not say no to.
This night was not a happy visit though. While Lucy and Liz shared a meal, and some wine, Amanda blew in (expectantly) crying her eyes out, as her twin brother- the one she felt beyond the usually spoken about tenets, irreparably joined with since, well, always- he had finally done it. He had been waking up in a haze most nights, taking massive amounts of pain pills for no such physical ailment. He was a depressive, like his sister, and an addict generally speaking, as she was. Drink, pills, most anything. He had a young wife, and two little kids, one just a baby. Amanda had come over many times before- worried about him, terribly worried so that her stomach would be aching, and she’d get drunk fast as she could- to stop the worrying, to help her sleep, which she could not. Amanda would say that she could Feel that her twin would kill himself in this way soon. And he did. He did so at the age of 32, same age as her, a few moments younger and gone in a flash into his addict’s heaven. Or so she hoped. Amanda was hysterical on this night, and was in some kind of kaleidoscope of grief, shock and pain. She felt like she was dying, physically and more. Like her life’s vitality was cut from her. But she could not bleed, or see it so. Amanda soon calmed down, ate some food, drank all of Liz’s wine, and they talked about it, and then did not, as Amanda’s inner addict took hold for survival’s sake and found out that Lucy had in her medicine cabinet the aforementioned one-third of the thickened bottle of codeine cough syrup. Half drunk herself, Lucy had gone to retrieve it for Amanda, when all the memories of its origin, of the origin of Lucy’s relationship with medications, with her own brother, and father and family took place.
Quick as all that, Lucy was back in the other apartment with the bottle, which Amanda sipped big gulps from, growing more manic with each one, each chaser of white wine, and each overstepping fashion of words which slipped right out of her mouth as if in a stream. Like she orgasmed every few sentences at once, multiplying while her body similarly moved and shook slightly. This got them talking about orgasms (segues never really are such…they are just empty excuses for talking about what you want to talk about). The passage of words which led to this doesn’t matter; that we are here now is all you need see. It got to the specific point that neither of these very adventurous women (so named by their own opinions) had ever ejaculated when having an orgasm, whether by someone else or by their own very capable hand. Lucy sipped her wine, keeping it closer to her face, and sighed. The wine glass, now empty, made a very thoughtful 'cklllink' as she replaced it on the grey stone counter top. Lucy made the face of a child, sly right sided smile and silently lifted up her fingers as if she was asking for permission to go to the little girls’ room in elementary school. Amanda and Liz both started reacting in many forms at once – wide eyes, laughter, bright exclamations, almost as if this was being communicated to a very titillated man, getting up from the couch and/or making their way over to Lucy to question or clarify this fact she had expressed without words. They asked her if she had, indeed, “had them”. And Lucy told them that she has Only had them that way for a very long time. That the men she’d been with hadn’t always made her come, but when she did, and always when she did by Her own very capable hands, she came completely. That’s right. She had an active, liquid cunt. They asked her, how much? Lucy told them that, when properly, it was gushing. It was messy, indeed. Whether alone or not, she always tended to have to have a towel over sheets, or some such barrier to catch the wave as it were.
They leaned in and listened further, Amanda now completely distracted from her twin brother’s death as she put down the last remaining drops of the codeine elixir to listen even more fascinated than before. Lucy started to feel self conscious, but they both assured her – it was an amazing feat, and she was special. Drunken, and codeine intoxicated Amanda even remarked that Lucy was like a unicorn! Lucy further explained that it wasn’t always this way. She couldn’t remember the first time it happened (alone probably) many years ago….how for awhile she wasn’t sure if it was what it was, but she read up on it and kept a close eye out, and knew it came from a different spring than the other place. She had not wet the bed, in the traditional sense. Nowadays, she said, when occasionally it didn’t happen like that, if she was too drunk, or tired or not bringing her full heart to it, she felt like it wasn’t real, like it didn’t reach her, like it didn’t count. There Was something to it; she didn’t just have this extra feature. When it came like that, most often, she could feel it building and always knew when it would show itself, but couldn’t usually feel from whence it came. Maybe it Was like a unicorn, mysterious and free and from the mystical waters where light is dark and dream is drug induced reality…..a friend of hers (a bonafide red headed slut who was now mother to a beautiful red headed baby daughter) had engaged Lucy about it, and told her that it was the only way to be, and that you could control its trajectory, force and mark if you worked at it. Usually though, in the seconds at which it would happen, Lucy was so immensely uncontrolled in her body and her self that it was more like a virgin oil well coming for the very first time, covering the earth and letting you know just how utterly alive it was in that moment- creating and in creation, and fostering a warning to anything that surrounded her that when she was made to bring it on all the way, carrying the gods and the pains and the liberated stars with her, you just couldn’t be afraid of getting a little wet when calling up the depths of the ocean like that.
Liz indeed went off to Portugal, with Amanda leaving New York soon after her twin brother’s funeral, travelling to Costa Rica, then back to Alabama where she was from, marrying her brother’s best friend, getting pregnant (or probably the other way around), getting divorced (or probably annulled) and travelling again to Costa Rica to lose herself any way she could. Amanda’s back in Alabama now, making floral bouquets with her very own business. Lucy is still in the waterfront, having had no need for codeine for some time, so the bottle was not replaced in the medicine cabinet. She still talks to Amanda sometimes, checking in on her when anniversaries of grief come and go, chiming in with her own thoughts about her father, and about how many Eastern cultures take part in ancestral worship – wherein families look to their non-living relatives who have gone before as gods to be sat at the base of, and talked to and asked for advice. That the ancestors spoke through us all the time. After these searing, comforting thoughts would pass between their occasional communications, Amanda would always offer Lucy a coy and hearty closing salutation, referring to her with a wink as “my lovely unicorn”.
M. Lucia
Monday, July 18, 2011
For Sean (...)
The alchemist, she knew that each of us had a thousand and some adventures at our fingertips, moving through earth and cities between our toes, the coming of stories that we raise up toward, growing in strands with each armory wall of our big, beating hearts that we hold scapegoat against. She knew everyone possessed this vitality, but the story was true, in fact, that some enjoyed a direct line to that life spark more than others. She herself was always at its epicenter - sometimes it seethed inside her, and she felt her blood boiling over its own borders. She wanted to scream at those moments, when the rest of them sat, weary eyed and dullard-like. She grew sick of sitting among the dead, so she set out, like she always did, whether down her street to the water’s edge, over the mountains to the place where the sky leered down at lovers in the river, across the oceans to the other, more rounded civilizations and their inhabitants, the same and also different. With each climb, lick of morning dew and erstwhile angular maneuvering -- without work, without accomplishment, without routine -- she strode. You can’t mix the same old chemicals together and create something new; it just doesn’t work that way, physically or otherwise, as the alchemist will tell you. She wanted to record these journeys and speak them as a story – but, it never came out like that. Only in poem form, or in some kind of memoir or jumble of imagery - never as she walked, or made her way could she tell someone else’s story, at least how it was told to her, in the present moment. The sun glistened hopelessly in a platter of offerings in reverse, threading its way into and behind her, as the world laughed, and couldn’t tell you why. She found solace there, beneath a shallow bend of sky, and on soft, drunken grass. She would finally try to tell a story.
Once upon a time, there was a man. He was always a boy, but also ever a man. There was a sense of protection about him, as he tried his best in public life to remind everyone around how much he cared, how much he wanted to listen, and he played his part very well. It wasn’t a part to him, but it was. He spent his days crunching numbers, but had a poet’s heart. Sometimes he did not himself know or believe in this. His sense of protection didn’t make you feel protected, at least not when you were around him in the outlying provinces of work. His eye was always turned elsewhere, just behind him or to the side, and you got the feeling he was planning twenty different modes of distraction while he sat there, talking to you, while he slept, while he drank himself towards that sleep. You did feel utterly protected, though, when his words came through, with the unfettered voice, and when his actuality was misshapen, bent, twisted; you know, like Himself without the veils he normally kept as gunman just beneath his eyes- he was then natural, and wonderfully awkward. Large brained, magnificent ploughman’s hands, crystal clear and Awkward. He craved this awkwardness, and then pretended it didn’t exist. He did this with a lot of things. He had rules and regulations about his person, from his choice of drunkenness to the rituals with which he would offer his attentions, to the manner of clothing he would wear, and he was all about secrets, but may not have seen them as so. Secret lives, secret imaginations, secret roles he played out or thought he could, should, might and didn’t, shuffling around so much of himself in shards that like an overused slot machine, when his number came up, to the one worth the jackpot, he couldn’t draw upon it anymore. He had suppressed it so far down and away, in the backs of abandoned lots, and tucked into notated pages, in the corners of his mind where he flirted with all sorts of things, and then didn’t. He couldn’t come up for air, because his limbs were held down by the might of his own personal army. It seemed like it had been that way for a very long time. There were other times for him. Perhaps other places, people. He looked *happy* once, but even he couldn’t say when that was, or how. He let the one in charge choose his skill set (the one interested in survival always does) and set out the rules to that game too. However, he had often let himself be laid out bare, at one time. He liked to use the word “unmanned”, but really he was most a man in those very same moments. Eyes gone liquid and azure, the courage to ask for help, the knowledge to step back and breathe in, admitting to the one in charge that he wasn’t cut out for this.
At other times, it was like a government compound, or that of a cult’s, where you couldn’t see the guru in charge, the one calling the shots. When he would erase the awkward half (the same one who wrote poems and twisted dreams and righteous indignations, dirty stories which were born of every part of who he was, which would allow him to just jettison himself out of his seat and into the sky, then find he couldn’t stay there) he was then locked inside of himself, invisible to the crowd. He would then sometimes walk back and forth in a criss-cross fashion along the dirt road just at the foot of the great mountain, pretending like he was going some place, but just walking back and forth, occasionally looking up at the moon, and wondering from what elements she was fashioned. His heart spoke lucidly with the care of someone believing in what they created, building piece by piece and with the great willingness to let the whole thing unravel at his feet. He craved the chaos, and often would interject into the crowd’s hushed achy noise with a hard, and pointed jab at their thick airs, then retreating back again. He craved it, but like those long moonlit walks, he would stumble, often on purpose, often after too many drinks, just so he could think about what was up there, from the safety of where he was; with the so-called reality in front of him, protecting him against the freedom to be all things at once. It was like a light switch. He required perfect, or rather perfectly imperfect conditions, to work, to create, to want, to engage, to love, and to dream.
When he did allow himself to be in the right place, as he would term it, the dreams would follow stunningly. Foul toothed, loose lipped, angry and boisterous, individualistic and carefree, a punk song strummed on the lightest feather of an angel’s harp (missing a string or two). He could write about anything – ANYTHING. He would often not finish; that was his poet’s quicksand and the man, the hero, that was his flaw. But it wasn’t a flaw, as flaws go, really. It was simply a lack of courage. It wasn’t that actually, either. It was hard to pinpoint. The courage was there. He could conquer new frontiers and take a nap in the grasses that he helped to colour in, with the ease of a newborn who had just crossed over as a wise old sage from the last life. A shot, feeling like soft eternity. But he did not trust in it. He could not let himself be guided by it, not for very long anyway. He fought certain battles within, costumed and charactered epics and sometimes simple downtrodden tales that zipped across the black night, looking for that huge hissing in us all, that black hole which most were afraid to encounter. He wanted to stay up with it ‘til dawn, talk it out, get it drunk and take it to bed. Problem was, sometimes he couldn’t remember why he had set out, come the morning after. The remnants of mud on the bottoms of his boots and dead fireflies who took sleep in his hair would bother him all day long, as he tried to remember, but by high noon the stains gone, the fire of the flies buried again in his heart chambers with care. The bibles telling of his journeys would blanket him in sleep, but he wouldn’t have the time or the belief to always be their scribe.
Time is beating by him, and he is still a hero, but does not admit to seeing his own face yet, though it is there all the same. Between the mirror and our perception of it, there are always secrets within secrets. One day, perhaps soon, his absolute want of freedom and the knowing of what it truly means, and how everything we lose by it is also that which makes us great, these things will form like a brand new earth in him, yet still marked with the inescapable memories of all that has gone before. The fall, the walk, the words and the numbers, and he will make use of every inch of what he has been and perhaps, if the constellations align in just the right manner, if the light from each eclipse hits him just so, and he realizes that the place he is in is not born of chaos but of a life lived on purpose and to whose end he can conquer, wrapped in a white flag- he can then sacrifice, or be born again, from a drunkard shadow double burning drum beats in his ear…perhaps then, not the real, but the ultimate hero – in the form of a man living out his days as himself, no matter where he happens to be, will flick the switch in the back of his head, wired within the name of his star in a straight electrical route up and over to his heaven, and experience in every moment, both utterly aware and absent of mind, the great privilege of his lifetime, in being who he is.
M. Lucia
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