Dead Horse

M. Lucia

Third Barstool From The Door.

The bar is the same, half shaded parlour trick it always is when the light still creeps past the slats on a sunday.  Down in the middle sits Frank, lumpy in that way that men who have lost their teenage obesity far too fast and shrouded are lumpy, as they bramble towards the middle age.  He sips his drink - a vodka and cranberry, because he's never liked the taste of alcohol, cannot let himself be seduced by the bar at hand, and has the tolerance of a twelve year old girl.  Who hasn't discovered the joys of premenstrual Midol yet.  You know, when the world closes in around you, your body gets fat for no apparent reason, you want to fight, fuck and eat everything and there is so much wind in you, you can't hardly stay held within your skin.  Frank's skin is folded, empty and lacks any of the graces of supposed manhood he was born into along the sidelines of his family tree.  He's stuck in the mud again, his brand new shoes clicking on the barstool, onto the hard, wet floor beneath him. 

Trouble with Frank is, he doesn't know women.  And he is a woman among men, begging and cajoling and clinging onto any shred of manhood he can summon up from those around him.  Even the red mouthed, tough talking whore seated next to Frankie couldn't bare to look at him, soft face, fat kid stance, sipping his red lady drink like a divorcee at a strip mall disco.  People like him who couldn't even see the strands of their own minds bothered her deeply; so much so that she had this immense urge to bully the former pudge and insult the size of his cock (which wasn't out of the blue - Frankie, speaking straight ahead in some non-committed direction somewhere between the bartender who kept himself busy enough to ignore him and the few, dozing former men around him at the sparsely populated bar on this sunday afternoon, was attempting in his best mildly drunk manner to boast about women with nice tits, and asses, and it was getting under this whore's skin like something noxious).  Point is, she was allergic to this brand of bullshit and was on the verge of yelling at Frank, about his surely undermined cock and how he's probably had as many proper drunk escapades in his adult life as women he made come - meaning very little to none.  She bit her lip so hard, it split in one mound to two, and she burned it clear and straight with one shot of her whiskey, sealing the injury and getting the hell out of there before he voice returned from the fire breath of her swallow.  And she was really good at swallowing. 

Her glass hit the bar hard, her ass out the door quick as you please, and Frankie was left there, alone with a bartender who wished also for his departure (one drink in 90 minutes, and a watered down one at that, what kind of money could he make off of a guy like this?) and the dozers, the men who at least were men once, and were tired out from years of boozing, fucking, lying and regretting.  Frank didn't know what any of these vices felt like.  He just sat there - inert - thinking about his friend who had betrayed him (you know, in that way only Italians can get betrayed).  Truth its, Frank wasn't as needful of any woman in his whole soppy life than this man who he had used as his sounding board, his cop to talk him down from the ledge.  When the needy are hung out to dry, they don't ever fall down dead.  They just swing there in the breeze, the noose they created for their own burdens and denials about who they are gently choking them, but never ending it all....not even a good choke like the whore liked sometimes was this sort of emasculation vehicle.  Sipping cranberry in the wind, and the dull sun fighting with the shade, in the land of drunks, untouched by their pain and drowning in his own.  He left no tip.

M. Lucia

Wet November

>Wet rain trapping lights, dim and out of focus
cradle leaves die and burning from behind,
lead, then suit
your walkway…

great loss of time,
corn fields dying against the highway-
in between the holy leaves,
catch the summer girls>

M. Lucia

Authority

Ugly does live.
It's average, it makes itself readily available
and it is everywhere, it is.

I am stuck in an elevator down to the street.
With a simpleton, who I cannot bear to make eye contact with anymore,
and a girl who now claims herself a married woman.
I want to tell her, that everything she has celebrated is shit.
Only because of the way she celebrates it.

She knows nothing of the tales of our people,
with her bullshit disco lights, ample parents
happy that she settled for someone who allowed her true self out--

dull, misplaced, useless.
She did not heed the spark of love, of being whores for each other,
cause that's the only way, Uncle Henry says, don't you know...
spent her soft earned money on a dinner party
that she can never take back.

She is empty now, when she walks. She knows not
of real love.  Of selling the deed to your body to someone else's
being.  The thing is:

I have tried
tired
so hard, to experience empathy with them all
and feel the connection, the place and the moment
wherein they and I lose contact. About all this.

I try to allow for the fact that they just aren't as hard as me,
deviant a body as mine,
meticulously latticed a mind
bent for thought, pleasure and innocence at the same time.

Fine, but-

When they simply are silent, when they just
don't
get it.
I cannot for the life of all the people living inside me
See
What they witness instead.

It seems and feels like nothing at all.
Dead, dirty leaves that you forgot to water,
crawling up a gas lamp cylinder.
Tending to a house, which is not a home anymore
but just an empty building.

Don't tell them that they are ghosts.
They will just laugh at you, you know.

No matter.
The river knows our name, and runs clear for us
just the same as it did
before their being born made it unclear.
Unsaved.

I will save all those who ask for my help.

As for all them rest, well...

Good luck with the receptions, the home owners insurance
the new bedroom sets.

Who's really in charge here, after all, ourselves or the blood of those we take with us,
without them coming along for the ride.
And it Is just a ride, now.

Remember your sick bags.

M. Lucia

Henry Miller, My Roommate

Spit stains drape the old, lumpy pillows I'd fall asleep on, wine stains graced the rug, where he would occasionally sign off after many hours in the cement mixer, known as his mind, and pass out.  Spitless.  His insides were all wet, and my neck was wet, so we went together like that.  Perfect roommates.  Henry Miller and I.  Just for a short time, in the waterfront brooklyn neighborhood..."not like that shithole on Driggs Avenue" he'd grumble to me, in his gravel laden minimalist language, when I'd go into the kitchen to search out some of that French aspirin headache powder he'd always bring back...I sucked down the water, also minimalist and tasteless (God bless the French for their ingenuity, unabashed and humble) as he complained to me.  I didn't have the heart to tell him that his crude, middled street was now full of anorexic rich kids with straight legs and trust funds...no heart at all.  Sometimes the truth is better left unsaid.

The point is, with Henry Miller as my current yet temporary sublet roommate (we were both heading onto "other things" don't you know), I was always the one passing out, earrings on, bad story in my pants and lost machinery, drooling all over the place before or after or during the sickness, and him...HIM...never sick, never headache, a lightweight if you think about it (I didn't say that).  All I am saying is that he was always up, his faculties all about him, in the dim light (one of four we would have to replace over the great meeting ground of the dining room table....how does that happen? Three lights, of equal wattage, all linked to one similar switch, out while the fourth stays lit...just enough to frame his grand buddhist head like a shroud of merlot, and calm), wanting to talk about it.  Always talk.  But never sick himself, or messy, or embarrassed.  The wine stains, yes, because he would often just gently fall asleep there for a moment, knocking his wine into the carpet, the tablecloth, the wall, anything that would have it.  I'd imagine a great way for a wino from the streets to get some free red was to crouch nearby, when he'd overstepped his bounds and just wait for the remainder of his glass's contents to wash the insides of their gum diseased, wanting mouths like a dream.  A good source of "income" if that income was vino.  So, I was the one with the industrious mother who taught me how to remove all the stains, no matter where their distress spot, while he watched, in awe - in interest and delicacy.  Listening, cause he was good at that too. 

That time, on New Years Day, after I walked home in the black, abrupt night, drunk on tears and heaving with the weight of him in my skin.  Henry told me.  He Told me about what I was about to learn, and wasn't it all about learning...he knew I couldn't see that yet, but he knew to tell me to take note, remember the way the moon looked, the things he (the one that caused my tears, or so I had thought at the time) and I had talked about, painfully and like a body being torn about at the seams, on the way to said Brooklyn bar, to compare it with the salty, teary night, the first in a year which I had mapped out so perfectly and utterly fucked up, from behind my own eyes and with my old, golden touch.  I told Henry, I said, the boy's ugliness as he saw it, was not worthy of my love, due to beauty which he could not possess.  Henry laughed (as if he hadn't just drunk 2 Whole bottles of wine! With a few crusts of bread, even though he knew I always made a sunday stew with meat and noodles and left it in the ice box, for him to enjoy), and looked off to the window, to whatever vista he would find, and twirled his near empty wine glass, forcing a dark purple ring on my grandmother's birch wood table, and said to me, eyes all slinky, mouth twisting a smile at one end, "but my girl, he has to love himself enough to know the beauty of the gods by which you possess easily, without care...." à bouche ouverte", said with the grandeur and sharpness of his Brooklyn tongue.  I told him I had learned Spanish, though I didn't remember any of it, because I really didn't enjoy them as a people....short, stocky, overwrought with corn oil and bass judgements.  

But I understood all the same, through my well full of tears on that New Years, and on all the drunken nights since, when I came home and found him there, in that incandescent, inescapable light which never died along with the others.  I knew I was beautiful every time, even when my makeup had worn off, and my stockings had ripped.  Henry never ceased in telling me all the truth that he could find, before he gratefully sipped or spilled the last of those various red wines I had always in store for him.  He tried to seduce me one, but I told him I simply couldn't make love to a grandfatherly type....I just loved my own father, who was 44 when I was born, too much to subvert the idea of a man like that.  He was well past 44, he said, but he liked me all the same, he said, as he angled his long, and graceful finger in the air around me, as he spoke.  We wrote on the same page, and I always knew my tears, whether new years or old hat, were safe with him.  Being drunk on wine made him simply more himself.  And the reflection was a kind one, in those murky, perfect moments before I would pass out, or drool my way to a somber, hungover morning of aspirin powder and looking for my purse.

M. Lucia

Orion's Garden

RIP King Street Garden, 1998-2011