The electric blue light flickers, again. The old man is humming a tune, probably one he learned back up from the business class lounge in the south side of Hell, where he goes to decompress. Everything is wrong here, and no one says a thing. Consign, by reason, and all consuming they slide alongside each other threadbare across the lowest level of sky. Packed in tight in their sardine canister lives.
People, like these, at the end of the day, don’t want to be free.
There is person who sits behind my back all day. He is the most desperate person I have ever come in contact with in all my life. A friend of mine said that. I agree. His face is not handsome, not by a long shot. He is, politely what one might term a dweeb back in the day, but he’s not smart enough, doesn’t read enough and doesn’t seek enough knowledge to fall into that category. No, he is a normal, and more than one. He is a barnacle on a sinking ship. Every day of his life here in this place, the last one like this I’ve ever know, is filled up fully and continually with fear. You can read it behind his eyes, around the low hanging corners of his dull, oversized mouth. His face looks like a ventriloquist’s dummy, and there is always a hand or two shoved up his backside which he needs in order to speak. He’ll say anything to keep his place here, as its unimportance diminishes into true uselessness before his shaking, cowering eyes. At any point in the day, if you turn round to look at him, whether on the telephone, sitting and staring into his computer screen, reading or looking at a piece of paper, he looks like he is crying. And he is.
And you know what? I don’t care. I don’t care that he chose this two bit, dinner theatre matinee showing of awful drama, comprised of endless free rides on the sycophant street car stacked up many tall buildings high. I don’t care that he has to feed and clothe his children. Learning to live without all comforts and possessions isn’t so bad as knowing your father is a dead creature, lacking of the light and substance of a man. Some people are made this way, but this dressed down dummy was born into it. He is quick with what energy he has, and he needs. He wants attention, and any single moment, memory or fact that goes above his head (which granted, isn’t hard at all to do) upsets his quaky balance. He would try and talk his way out of the guillotine, if his time came, and would bad mouth anyone to save his precious little place off and to the side of the greatest ship there ever was. He is mommy’s little wimp, who still wears tightly bound suspenders and a leash which keeps him well under control (not that he would ever note its presence, or have want to remove it….after all, he put it there himself and replaces it fresh and anew every single quarter). He has no sexuality (thank god), he has no intellectual self, and those two ideas wouldn’t ever come together in any knowable form that he’d recognize, that’s for sure.
He had a counterpart too. The Italian who worked across the hall from him. This guy gave the impression of being male, but was more officially low class and without scope or dynamic. He pretended he was a great caregiver to all who needed him, but of course only the very weak and wounded needed him. Women, real women, scare him to pieces. He liked to talk about tits, but he wouldn’t have a clue what to do with a pair of them if they came with a request for pleasure. He cannot connect, and lives happily in the ignorance of his familial bonds. They make a dynamic duo that surely beats any other round here. The Italian looks at me like I’m dangerous. I like that. I want him to know, I am very dangerous because I am made up of truth, I eat purity even when it destroys my joys and my illusions of greatness, I am fully realized in my implicity towards what he might consider illicit, and I want without need. Stupid to state these things. They don’t actually go Over the heads of these two or the rest of them. They seep down to the ground, where average joes like them walk (not even with the fervor of a stomp) over my ideals, my better natures, and the rest, mucking them up into dust which has no sounds that they can hear from their tiny, fenced in ears.
He’s on the phone again. He’s making the face. I have a feeling it’s been stuck that way for some time, and the banal, average angels who clamor around his buck toothed head, they’re not leaving him alone any time soon. He has to call his wife again now, to make sure she tells him everything he has to pick up from the store, cause what woman wouldn’t want a houseboy to run errands for you, and come home to you with his empty head of old parlour tricks and jingles, ready to occupy your bed every night with the voracity of an 80 year old man suffering from a bad back and incontinence? He’s picking up the thing at the sporting good store, yes….yes, he is. He will!
You know, they say that the best people talk about ideas, the average person talks about things, and the worst people talk about other people…….well, I guess I’m just not that advanced yet.
M Lucia
Wednesday, September 28, 2011
Monday, September 26, 2011
Case Studies
Case:
26
crying
talked down
doesn't express
pale face
tongue; thick
weak
lacks.
Stay With
Loss.
M. Lucia
26
crying
talked down
doesn't express
pale face
tongue; thick
weak
lacks.
Stay With
Loss.
M. Lucia
Thursday, September 15, 2011
How Graveyards Come To Life
So, about 7 years ago, I landed this job at this rich old lady’s house, estate I guess you’d call it. She had lived some life, she had, suffered and triumphed over numerous husbands, some dying under more than mysterious circumstances (I never trusted the last one – he had millions of dollars (and she had amassed quite a bit after her first two unsuccessful marriages) and yet she demanded he take her to Washington, DC on their honeymoon. I mean, her father was a known Communist, and no matter what, who goes to Washington, DC in the middle of March? She liked the look of the place, she said, constructed supposedly in some ancient, plotted out craftwork done way back when by the Free Masons (she had secretly wished her father was a Mason, rather than a Communist…..secrecy and pomp, robes beguiling men in the dark), but, still, him falling from that building seems a very rare case of circumstance to me). That fall, as well organized as the Masons’ triangular crossfire of structures, made her a true millionaire, so far off into the waves from the big boat of dependence that she was free to travel the world on her own, to each and every place her soul desired.
It was then, seven years ago, that I found myself in her employ – I was much younger, and still beating along from two year job stint to 2 year job stint, hoping for one of my many eggs to hatch. But they seemed to flourish loudly for a moment or two, offer me much in the way of hope, and then tremble from some unforeseen aftershock in my destiny, troubled and random as it was, and quietly fall over, the guilty foundation of some stack of cards not yet realized. This was another way to keep at it, on the sidelines, the back burner, whenever the free time would let me and spaces permit. She was smart, but kooky, this old woman and- in addition to the exotic objects acquired along her fields of travel since her need of a husband ceased, she had acquired mass possessions simply from the reams of said husband’s estates morphing into her one, very wealthy, eccentric and independent collection of life around her, in that big English Tudor home in the woods, just up an almost breath-shortening hill off of the main drag. My job? I was like a butterfly collector, organizing and logging in and separating out and piecing together all her life’s things. It was quiet – there were the other people in the house to talk to…nothing spectacular or earth shattering, I mean- the gardener, the lawyer who visited more often than I thought was possible, the accountant who practically set up rooms there, the cook, the maids, it wasn’t too many to keep track of, but enough that you grew to like some more than others, but deep down, you knew you’d be there only long enough for one of the constant few playing cards you had neatly tucked away in your stockings to erect itself and come to life, finally.
There was a period when the old woman got ill (brain tumor), and she had to let me go (funny thing is, in all that time she had about ten estate sales planned but didn’t sell one damn thing. She was just like me – except I thought I was trying to gather, while she (though she’d deny it) most definitively stepped back when it came time to release her little darlings for someone else to procure). I thought it would be a grand time to try my hand at long talked about escape from that old town, and a new way of life for me – in all ways. It began to burgeon, and then it didn’t. Stagnation and yet, a happy quiet time for me. Then, I had to work again, because – you guessed it! The house of cards was still a garden wall, half built (a whole other set of bricks, but the little piggies lied. They got blown down one by one, all the same). It was more of the same, with a couple years on me (and to add insult to injury, I never left the area surrounding the main drag near the big hill which led to the old lady’s place) and then one particular day, she bumps into me on the street. She was taking walks up and down her big hill per doctor’s orders. She had survived a brain tumor! Who does that, nowadays or ever! I knew she had a tenacity which was beyond most people’s and I always respected that. Whatever she had been given in life was done so, because of absolute action on her part.
Long story short, she wanted me back. Same job, same house, same possessions (again, not one had been sold off even since I had left), same people. I knew what I was doing wasn’t all that high profile or life long (who works for one person their whole life anymore? All day, not in charge, forced into relationships and perimeters that anyone with any sense of spirit would use as a stepping stone and not as a final destination. Might as well lie back into your grave and warm it up). So, more than a few years later, things became less ‘ok’ for me. Coming back I had made my peace with, and I –as always- could sleepwalk blindly through these over categorizations of her library of many, many things (she had ordered in even more people to dust and clean them, more inept and dullard like than the original set which were all still there, of course, mildly bleeding the old lady dry just enough to fit with their quiet desperation, their overly ordered lives which lacked any shred of inspiration. I came to find out from some of them (because even though I had, from the start of this and the last employ, always tried to divorce myself from them emotionally and keep my dignity intact, my dreams afloat and my world, more precious and satisfying than the dead air in that place, alive and breathing, they still somehow were like snotty little kids, grabbing at fireflies because of their light. I knew, deep down, that we All have this light, all Gods, Heavens and Hells within us, adventures and paths alongside us the whole time, but them – they didn’t see it, and I wasn’t letting go of my light to help them to see it. Each person must do this for themselves), small details of their lives, and my wings grew weary of their buzzing…..busy little bees around the few remaining divots of honey that the old woman had left to herself. She had lived out her dreams, one way or another, but what had They done with their lungs, full up with oxygen like anyone’s, their health and youth, but drain the old woman of her only children, just so they didn’t have to feel the nervous worry (fireflies call this excitement) of how to get out there and Do from the purest place in their foolish little hearts?
I had grown older, made bitter and made intensely aware of losing the experience, presence and delight of forces and people loved and cherished, and I came to re-appreciate my original mantra of not suffering fools. Sorry, fools. Even jesters learn to be tricksters sometime. My heart demands it of me, and I’ve learned not to cross her. Suddenly, the sight of them all, their ever growing and diminishing hoards made me physically sick inside. Joking about the old lady’s tumor, about the oddness of some of her treasures, which sounded to me as disturbing as a din of slaughter just a few feet downwards, over the slope of the hill. The reverb of bullet holes tearing flesh and sucking vitality from its most tender places. Nothing left but a hissing afterward; a mourning for the wrong things said yes and no to. Engaged, and ignored. There was one of the old woman’s army of accountants there, who I could tell felt the same things I did about the richness within, and what each moment Can bring, but he was so mired in so many things that there wasn’t much room left permitted for a conversation, much less anything else of worth. As usual, I had to go it alone and did so, hating them behind their backs. It’s funny – it all too rarely hits people that they do not have to experience the world in the way that they have been taught to, or expected to, but somehow this is fleeting for most and just sears itself off like clockwork screws misshapen and tossed right out the windows, shooed away by the rest of those surrounding them, those who would rather live in an open faced graveyard.
Speaking of…The old lady, God bless her, died finally at the ripe old age of 93. It’s a very special number to sail off upon, and sail off she did. Into the seas of her own making, to meet her bevy of husbands who would still, even considering, probably like to show her around and make time with her. It was Her energy that drew in all of them, and not the other way around. Her equally snot nosed son, not a man but more of a collection of spindly fears and malnourished black holes, took over for her estate and for awhile, all the members of the household bled as much of her money out as they still could. No shame. He tried to play daddy but it didn’t work, since there was no respect on either side. Her sold off every last piece of her stuff, every last one, and abandoned the house, and the property, firing them all. Not a surprise really – when no blood or life force can get to a wound, it pales and dies. Babies and rocket scientists know that. Oddly, turns out the place was sitting all that time over government land, which – if you go way back to the original deeds, revealed a shady clause to its original acquiring. When things are built on a lie, they never survive, and it’s always found out one way or another. Why live duplicitously again and again, when you can live as you want to in truth – just one, easy time. I never ever understood that. Guess I never will. The house was torn down, and a graveyard was set to be built over it. Those who are Actually Dead often get passed over, in lieu of those looking to cram themselves in with the early bird special. We don’t have to lie back down in the familial DNA of our generational coffins. By coming to life as ourselves we honor our bloodline and its many triumphs and devastations, limitations and specks of profound joy.
I walked by the place the other day…by the graveyard I mean. Thought out of the first few rows of the newly dead, I might find the old eccentric, or see her speckled ghost walking in late afternoon between the tall grasses and willows, looking for her long lost treasures (since her son never came. Afraid of the dead, it seems). I should have known when I asked the groundskeeper – the low back buckled, sun burned old man who used to tend her garden. He shuffled a bit, from all the lifting at his age. A smile crossed the far corner of his mouth, the one that lets in impetus, the sort that takes you west to the places without noise. He told me what I halfway knew to be so in the malar flush of my battered, regenerating heart. It happened far from this place, he said. How perfect, I thought, right smack in the most central point of the liquid world where all the routes meet to run astray in the chaos of all directions. I walked off, and realized how immense a late afternoon in the soft tide of early autumn it was. How it had been so full and beautiful every single day I had come to work there. How it robbed me of that same beauty, day after day. How I let it. I walked then, in the right steps, down the amber of the hill with the ease of a firefly who had managed to weave above and beyond the sticky, chubby hands of the clobbering kids who chased it, they not realizing that they had it the wrong way around. The tickle of the barley grass snuck up my skirt a few times, the stubborn dew that hide itself had up and kissed my bare ankles, and the sun baking at the hearth blanketed my back with its palm, motherly and forgiving. The old lady’s ashes had been scattered out at sea.
M. Lucia
It was then, seven years ago, that I found myself in her employ – I was much younger, and still beating along from two year job stint to 2 year job stint, hoping for one of my many eggs to hatch. But they seemed to flourish loudly for a moment or two, offer me much in the way of hope, and then tremble from some unforeseen aftershock in my destiny, troubled and random as it was, and quietly fall over, the guilty foundation of some stack of cards not yet realized. This was another way to keep at it, on the sidelines, the back burner, whenever the free time would let me and spaces permit. She was smart, but kooky, this old woman and- in addition to the exotic objects acquired along her fields of travel since her need of a husband ceased, she had acquired mass possessions simply from the reams of said husband’s estates morphing into her one, very wealthy, eccentric and independent collection of life around her, in that big English Tudor home in the woods, just up an almost breath-shortening hill off of the main drag. My job? I was like a butterfly collector, organizing and logging in and separating out and piecing together all her life’s things. It was quiet – there were the other people in the house to talk to…nothing spectacular or earth shattering, I mean- the gardener, the lawyer who visited more often than I thought was possible, the accountant who practically set up rooms there, the cook, the maids, it wasn’t too many to keep track of, but enough that you grew to like some more than others, but deep down, you knew you’d be there only long enough for one of the constant few playing cards you had neatly tucked away in your stockings to erect itself and come to life, finally.
There was a period when the old woman got ill (brain tumor), and she had to let me go (funny thing is, in all that time she had about ten estate sales planned but didn’t sell one damn thing. She was just like me – except I thought I was trying to gather, while she (though she’d deny it) most definitively stepped back when it came time to release her little darlings for someone else to procure). I thought it would be a grand time to try my hand at long talked about escape from that old town, and a new way of life for me – in all ways. It began to burgeon, and then it didn’t. Stagnation and yet, a happy quiet time for me. Then, I had to work again, because – you guessed it! The house of cards was still a garden wall, half built (a whole other set of bricks, but the little piggies lied. They got blown down one by one, all the same). It was more of the same, with a couple years on me (and to add insult to injury, I never left the area surrounding the main drag near the big hill which led to the old lady’s place) and then one particular day, she bumps into me on the street. She was taking walks up and down her big hill per doctor’s orders. She had survived a brain tumor! Who does that, nowadays or ever! I knew she had a tenacity which was beyond most people’s and I always respected that. Whatever she had been given in life was done so, because of absolute action on her part.
Long story short, she wanted me back. Same job, same house, same possessions (again, not one had been sold off even since I had left), same people. I knew what I was doing wasn’t all that high profile or life long (who works for one person their whole life anymore? All day, not in charge, forced into relationships and perimeters that anyone with any sense of spirit would use as a stepping stone and not as a final destination. Might as well lie back into your grave and warm it up). So, more than a few years later, things became less ‘ok’ for me. Coming back I had made my peace with, and I –as always- could sleepwalk blindly through these over categorizations of her library of many, many things (she had ordered in even more people to dust and clean them, more inept and dullard like than the original set which were all still there, of course, mildly bleeding the old lady dry just enough to fit with their quiet desperation, their overly ordered lives which lacked any shred of inspiration. I came to find out from some of them (because even though I had, from the start of this and the last employ, always tried to divorce myself from them emotionally and keep my dignity intact, my dreams afloat and my world, more precious and satisfying than the dead air in that place, alive and breathing, they still somehow were like snotty little kids, grabbing at fireflies because of their light. I knew, deep down, that we All have this light, all Gods, Heavens and Hells within us, adventures and paths alongside us the whole time, but them – they didn’t see it, and I wasn’t letting go of my light to help them to see it. Each person must do this for themselves), small details of their lives, and my wings grew weary of their buzzing…..busy little bees around the few remaining divots of honey that the old woman had left to herself. She had lived out her dreams, one way or another, but what had They done with their lungs, full up with oxygen like anyone’s, their health and youth, but drain the old woman of her only children, just so they didn’t have to feel the nervous worry (fireflies call this excitement) of how to get out there and Do from the purest place in their foolish little hearts?
I had grown older, made bitter and made intensely aware of losing the experience, presence and delight of forces and people loved and cherished, and I came to re-appreciate my original mantra of not suffering fools. Sorry, fools. Even jesters learn to be tricksters sometime. My heart demands it of me, and I’ve learned not to cross her. Suddenly, the sight of them all, their ever growing and diminishing hoards made me physically sick inside. Joking about the old lady’s tumor, about the oddness of some of her treasures, which sounded to me as disturbing as a din of slaughter just a few feet downwards, over the slope of the hill. The reverb of bullet holes tearing flesh and sucking vitality from its most tender places. Nothing left but a hissing afterward; a mourning for the wrong things said yes and no to. Engaged, and ignored. There was one of the old woman’s army of accountants there, who I could tell felt the same things I did about the richness within, and what each moment Can bring, but he was so mired in so many things that there wasn’t much room left permitted for a conversation, much less anything else of worth. As usual, I had to go it alone and did so, hating them behind their backs. It’s funny – it all too rarely hits people that they do not have to experience the world in the way that they have been taught to, or expected to, but somehow this is fleeting for most and just sears itself off like clockwork screws misshapen and tossed right out the windows, shooed away by the rest of those surrounding them, those who would rather live in an open faced graveyard.
Speaking of…The old lady, God bless her, died finally at the ripe old age of 93. It’s a very special number to sail off upon, and sail off she did. Into the seas of her own making, to meet her bevy of husbands who would still, even considering, probably like to show her around and make time with her. It was Her energy that drew in all of them, and not the other way around. Her equally snot nosed son, not a man but more of a collection of spindly fears and malnourished black holes, took over for her estate and for awhile, all the members of the household bled as much of her money out as they still could. No shame. He tried to play daddy but it didn’t work, since there was no respect on either side. Her sold off every last piece of her stuff, every last one, and abandoned the house, and the property, firing them all. Not a surprise really – when no blood or life force can get to a wound, it pales and dies. Babies and rocket scientists know that. Oddly, turns out the place was sitting all that time over government land, which – if you go way back to the original deeds, revealed a shady clause to its original acquiring. When things are built on a lie, they never survive, and it’s always found out one way or another. Why live duplicitously again and again, when you can live as you want to in truth – just one, easy time. I never ever understood that. Guess I never will. The house was torn down, and a graveyard was set to be built over it. Those who are Actually Dead often get passed over, in lieu of those looking to cram themselves in with the early bird special. We don’t have to lie back down in the familial DNA of our generational coffins. By coming to life as ourselves we honor our bloodline and its many triumphs and devastations, limitations and specks of profound joy.
I walked by the place the other day…by the graveyard I mean. Thought out of the first few rows of the newly dead, I might find the old eccentric, or see her speckled ghost walking in late afternoon between the tall grasses and willows, looking for her long lost treasures (since her son never came. Afraid of the dead, it seems). I should have known when I asked the groundskeeper – the low back buckled, sun burned old man who used to tend her garden. He shuffled a bit, from all the lifting at his age. A smile crossed the far corner of his mouth, the one that lets in impetus, the sort that takes you west to the places without noise. He told me what I halfway knew to be so in the malar flush of my battered, regenerating heart. It happened far from this place, he said. How perfect, I thought, right smack in the most central point of the liquid world where all the routes meet to run astray in the chaos of all directions. I walked off, and realized how immense a late afternoon in the soft tide of early autumn it was. How it had been so full and beautiful every single day I had come to work there. How it robbed me of that same beauty, day after day. How I let it. I walked then, in the right steps, down the amber of the hill with the ease of a firefly who had managed to weave above and beyond the sticky, chubby hands of the clobbering kids who chased it, they not realizing that they had it the wrong way around. The tickle of the barley grass snuck up my skirt a few times, the stubborn dew that hide itself had up and kissed my bare ankles, and the sun baking at the hearth blanketed my back with its palm, motherly and forgiving. The old lady’s ashes had been scattered out at sea.
M. Lucia
Monday, September 12, 2011
I'm Finished!
Anyway, so That’s over. Again. Not sure what comes over me, but I can only explain it as a rush…..a whirling dervish skirt being blown up by an industrial strength hurricane past the levys, the floodgates, the moats and filters, past and into a place where the light is so, not bright, but comely, so in a way that any little shred of average or below, any noise that is anything less than the perfect breath to that light, disappoints, scatters the shining parts, ruins and disrespects it to the point where I cannot be around any of it. My insides turn into a horror show- cut up, bloody and pus stained limbs, organs oozing and life force still whirling into muddy corners and choking on its own backwash. There is no other way to describe it and I am thankful it comes now and again and goes. And there will come a time, when all doors will be open and the keys thrown into the rushing tide, locking out all the stopgaps and excuses, the dead pan overcast air stuck in the middle of my brain.
When it was all over, and I wasn’t sleepwalking anymore, I saw the beautiful wild flowers I had picked at the farm nearby, where I hugged my friend the farmer, and kids danced to Motown he had blaring through the speakers, exciting the tomato vines and grasshoppers on late vacation. I felt every inch of the place I call home, cleaning away the dust and mite and fragments of the last months, and how I barely remembered them. I tasted the very virginal salty tears of little Lola, as I kissed her cheeks in the dark as she cried, watching her fall back to sleep as I sang her momma’s special song to her and backed away slowly, as the fireworks toasted the dying clouds in the sky, just off the water. I was in pre-dreamland, and no matter the realities of my life, my brain, my darkness and spaces unfulfilled, there was again imagination and feeling in my body, there was hope, there was living in the middle of many contradictions, there was Patience. That last feeling, that monster, that is the one that people like him felt in their heads for a few moments too long to turn back from offing themselves.
I can understand with absolute empathy and experience that same feeling. It’s as if the house’s been shut up for a hurricane that you and only you can see. The rush is moving and gathering all the same, with no place to dump out the rotten particulars, the patience cannot be felt, and you are trapped, you literally almost cannot breathe clear or at all. In my case, it is passive and you can let yourself go into lethargy and daydreaming (more like emptying your mind of all the missives) but to the literal point of suicide being a viable option, it’s just too much action for you to think about right now. The point is, people like him, they get to this place and it is, sadly, only their courage which pushes them forward into this void, but in their minds, the void is behind them any anything- Anything new and uninformed is for them, a new breath. I’m very glad I just visit this place now and again, out of sheer audacity, sensitivity mirrored by rage and reduction, and I don’t live there. I never will, but well, they only get caught in the reflections coming out from themselves and cannot see beyond the next bend, above their huddled heads, the darkness flying around their solid brainwaves, and convincing them that their place in the stars and safe in between the reeds has been taken. That they do not belong anymore and feel like a mass of thought is pushing them out, and moving on in.
Sometimes they see a crack in the slats, and that gorgeous light coming off the water, moving because They will it to, but sometimes they think it’s an illusion and they take that last courageous action and exit the frame. There is no way out, except to know that there is. Parts of my heart that I don’t even use daily wails for them in those moments, because moments for which I can muddle through and make it out, those moments become timeless, and a darkly etched world that instructs them as their master.
Eternity isn’t a long time; eternity isn’t About time. I hope they find solace in each other in the dreams of the living – they can build a boat mighty and strong and sail on out.
We need them more than they think.
(For DFW)
M. Lucia
When it was all over, and I wasn’t sleepwalking anymore, I saw the beautiful wild flowers I had picked at the farm nearby, where I hugged my friend the farmer, and kids danced to Motown he had blaring through the speakers, exciting the tomato vines and grasshoppers on late vacation. I felt every inch of the place I call home, cleaning away the dust and mite and fragments of the last months, and how I barely remembered them. I tasted the very virginal salty tears of little Lola, as I kissed her cheeks in the dark as she cried, watching her fall back to sleep as I sang her momma’s special song to her and backed away slowly, as the fireworks toasted the dying clouds in the sky, just off the water. I was in pre-dreamland, and no matter the realities of my life, my brain, my darkness and spaces unfulfilled, there was again imagination and feeling in my body, there was hope, there was living in the middle of many contradictions, there was Patience. That last feeling, that monster, that is the one that people like him felt in their heads for a few moments too long to turn back from offing themselves.
I can understand with absolute empathy and experience that same feeling. It’s as if the house’s been shut up for a hurricane that you and only you can see. The rush is moving and gathering all the same, with no place to dump out the rotten particulars, the patience cannot be felt, and you are trapped, you literally almost cannot breathe clear or at all. In my case, it is passive and you can let yourself go into lethargy and daydreaming (more like emptying your mind of all the missives) but to the literal point of suicide being a viable option, it’s just too much action for you to think about right now. The point is, people like him, they get to this place and it is, sadly, only their courage which pushes them forward into this void, but in their minds, the void is behind them any anything- Anything new and uninformed is for them, a new breath. I’m very glad I just visit this place now and again, out of sheer audacity, sensitivity mirrored by rage and reduction, and I don’t live there. I never will, but well, they only get caught in the reflections coming out from themselves and cannot see beyond the next bend, above their huddled heads, the darkness flying around their solid brainwaves, and convincing them that their place in the stars and safe in between the reeds has been taken. That they do not belong anymore and feel like a mass of thought is pushing them out, and moving on in.
Sometimes they see a crack in the slats, and that gorgeous light coming off the water, moving because They will it to, but sometimes they think it’s an illusion and they take that last courageous action and exit the frame. There is no way out, except to know that there is. Parts of my heart that I don’t even use daily wails for them in those moments, because moments for which I can muddle through and make it out, those moments become timeless, and a darkly etched world that instructs them as their master.
Eternity isn’t a long time; eternity isn’t About time. I hope they find solace in each other in the dreams of the living – they can build a boat mighty and strong and sail on out.
We need them more than they think.
(For DFW)
M. Lucia
Monday, September 5, 2011
Behind Closed Doors, or 36 Again
Something is wrong with me.
Every morning no matter who I’m with, alone, troubled, sick, drunk or blissful, I wake myself up from wet dreams and free drives by clutching myself from the inside and moaning, low with a greet of the day that only 1000 fucks from other lifetimes could bring, jettisoned into the high pitched innocent voice of a bright and cheery, turned on femme fatale, my own self contained grin that can't stop her smiling about it all. Thrusting, leg out, to get some fresh morning air, and some fantasies bred of simple trust in her gut, her cunt and her brainwaves. The heart bleeds, but it is less easy to decipher. And that's ok. Just fine, cause my heart always beats my head at night, and tells me to wake up when I need to. She'd never leave me without tears, at the muddy, polluted banks of a forlorn river, without a hand to hold, or a dream to unfold, anything that rhymes like violin, double down oxygen in her soul, it's mine and it's alive and it knows you. Still, the waves ripple like that.
One of my favourite books is The Collector, so much so I want to resurrect myself as a filmmaker and make it one day, mainly because the scenes where they fight in the rain turn me on. Henry Miller made me realize I am a male chauvinist pig in womanly form. Used to read Sexus in my old apt in Queens, not wearing underwear, crouched up on the easy chair, only to discover many of the long, drawn out passages of filthy French sex made me really, really excited and I had to then spend my time cleaning up the slight stains I’d made….even friends had said to me, it’s the sort of book after having read certain very lengthy passages of, that you need to excuse yourself and come back shortly thereafter, massivemasturbation (it should be one word, just like that) interceptions in between pages which were meant to stick together just so, so the words you had to work for were worth it, no matter if the first time or the 100th time reading them.
I am sometimes insatiable, a man’s woman thinking all the time, filtering all the time and fantasizing all the time. I am at home, at ease and with myself in all manner of what is today considered sexual attire – yesterday, considered attire. My pulse races when there are stockings, garters (w/ tucked in flask for safe keeping), my favourite place on my whole body other than my ass, and hips, is that area above my breasts which I feel I need to expose, frame and present to the world else I feel like there is a sack over my head.
Back when I was 13 I learned on my own accord, about all this. Not even sure about what men and women did, I learned quite liberally and physically of my Own accord. Hold it in when you need to pee, and god do the angels sing sweet dirty songs between your legs, but that's the thing. Before I ever knew the right ways to touch myself and touch the men who I caught looking my way when they thought they were alone, I could make this alchemy happen, in the liquid systems of my body, growing with weight and hips, but not sorted yet, and the height not making her way to the top of the class, a final finish like no other, no surprise, just a quiet signal that I was not meant to be a woman before I was fully ready to be. And I was worth this strange and longtime wait. Cause I could make a visit to the toilet (still do) like a Greek chorus of ecstasy and it wasn't so local as it is with the touch-- it's different than all that...it starts somewhere in the front of the hips, grows like the vines of Jesus (when he wasn't trying to impress his boss) seducing Magda in the garden, growing up and around them like joys which we all forget entirely too easily, moving easily through itself into my belly, above and beyond that child bearing place, but with an ocean view all the same, and into (somehow) my upper chest, my heart and my physical fingertips, my hands having an orgasm like ripples of a tide not come in yet....thirteen to thirty and beyond, this is always possible....so, with decades of this know how and humility at its roots at my (actual) fingertips, how couldn't all the rest finally fall into place for me? I keep thinking there is some guilt behind the next corner, alone in my bed, the memory of the blood on his wall, the mix in match of insecurities and emotions that one may call a woman, before she figures out that she can use this to her advantage (I will never use this to my advantage, since the killing of that sort of liberation and purity is a crime which I dare not commit) has informed the woman who can still make her muscles ache to the desperate tune of the world, and its men...
Something is right with me.
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