Little has hurt more than

rape

small bones pried apart

street echoes and fingers silencing

starvation, hallucinations

the absence of Acacia

the evocation of that stained robe

a solitary bloodletting on a curb

comfort without consideration

evacuation

the endless drone of helicopters

failing at what was most important

abstinence

being a blind accomplice to my own freedoms, denied

Nothing is more sublime than

kindness

photosynthesis

actions and words

my mother

feeling the music

shining

lovemaking

a meal shared with you

knowing that I’ve done this one thing right

the small hand curled inside my own

you

me

Afternoon Dew

Diamond strokes of
amber
stained glass windows call-
the church of God is with me again.

The God that lives in the shard behind
my ego;
the one who knows what’s right is smooth
and slow,
and curving;

Like a field of wheat
making tap dances inside my better nature,
the cup has disintegrated,
and so have I.

In the dim dull talk of others
I find the piece of genius, divine.
In the barfly memoirs I have
yet to write,
I know everything which I see
is Mine.

~ M. Lucia

Missing Paradise

I miss the stars the way they used to be. Swirling in the low hanging velvet sky, navy blue and black getting drunk together and shaking so violently in their fervor you’d think a Baptist was barreling her hips down the Milky Way at me. Tempting me to jump. I miss the feeling of home, sleeping in the silence of a house that my father built, whether that sleep came soft and alone, or warm with your arms around me.

Nights I walked on the pitch black gravel road, with dogs yelping their gangland frenzy in the distance. Over the mountains that protected and yielded. Walking naked and drunk to the cold river, under the spotlight moon, creatures to and fro and yesterday’s leaves blowing round the dirty show. Nothing the next day but a red bra left at the dock soggy and busted while I picked wildflowers and felt the soreness that you gave me. Other nights, tired from work and nails and building walls my father could not anymore, I miss sitting on my front porch getting bitten away by tiny teeth, drinking cheap wine and listening to the frogs in the same river, calling us there and wondering why we were too tired to give them a peep show again.

On the days I was alone there and the same nights in winter, the sound of the soft biting wind filled clear my lungs, and the skinny northern trees bare and naked shrilling back and forth, twirling their wares back at me, as the white crunchy snow and old Indian burial grounds stood nearby. I saw a ghost man in a fire once, burning with a flicker just far away enough that I couldn’t tell if he was real or not.

While chanting those necessary words, and dreaming dreams and facing the white eye in the sky one on one, a squirrel mad with syphilis or some rodentia dementia fell right down like a bullet, shot to the wooded floor from at least 20 feet down from heaven. He shook his head and bounced around a bit, then scurried off to get himself nuts, in the hands or stolen from the saner of his neighbours.

Slugs in rain time, falling along, when I used to turn back at the yellow amber warmth of home; our family was always together there even when my brother was trying to live his life on his own. I brought more and more visitors to them, and they complained but always came around. Barbecues and back porches, quiet phone calls and morning coffee on the front porch. Endless fires being built, sometimes to drunken extremes. The best drunk (except one) I ever got was with my family.

The knowledge that it could not last forever, the guilt that it was this structure and the might of what was lost by it that sighed in every ache and pain and quiet, non complaint my father ever made. In my mother’s nervous worry every time she came home from shopping for groceries. But always knowing they sat up having their cheap wine every night, even when I was not there, made a difference to me. The same wine that before and after, I would sneak late at night, with friends, lovers intermingling, sneaking around like I was a teenager. They probably always heard and never said.

On a cold late winter day, about 2 weeks before the first day of spring, I was not there. But my father sat out on that front porch, wanting to work, and doing it less and less. But never ceasing. He took a rest, and sat outside, breathing in the crisp, moist mountain air, the same that reminded him of his Croatian youth, which he could not recapture but in his mind and in his stories. He got up and knocked on the front windows. My mother looked out and to this day remembers the scene. A big white butterfly in the midst of upstate winter had landed on my father’s hand and stood there, waiting with him. He lifted his hand up to my mother and smiled. They both probably realized what the messenger meant. But my father, still, did not seem afraid. He never let any fear stop him in all his life and, as for beauty - whether butterfly or tall tale or hammer in his hand or a heart that sang, his had his evermore.

~ M. Lucia

WILL YOU EVER WIN?

She purchased the cheap paperback at the airport, figuring it would help her to pass the time during the long flight. High as a kite and on her third day without a hairbrush, she rummaged around deep inside her kitbag looking for her smokes and the flask of whiskey. Patchouli wafted out from her bag like a drunken genie. A woman with blue hair standing behind her wrinkled her nose and moved several steps away where her nostrils would not be offended. Ashtray eyes and fingers clad in dragon’s wings, she stood waiting and listening to the primordial drumbeat within her head, imagining herself a whirling dervish in black gypsy fringe—a siren’s song calling her from across time, compelling her to move on, to listen and succumb to the voice that was hers and hers alone. Sing! Soar!

She had had enough of the scene, the streets were played out—the dead end friends and the boyfriend asleep at the wheel—she was finally free, man. Free! All this happened while she waited for a plane to take off and her mind to cease it’s tripping.

She had few expectations of the book but the cover spoke to her. Gave her a vision. A crystal vision. She kept it to herself.  She threw it into her bag, took a swig from the flask and boarded the plane. Sinking into her seat, she prepared herself for destiny. As the plane crossed the North Atlantic, The Triad was completed; much loved—memorized, dog-eared and devoured. Cloaked in its mythology and the wings of flight she became the maker of birds. She had been transformed, she had listened—it was 1974, her boots were platform, her jeans were tight and she had officially arrived. Right on.

What took her ten minutes to write would forever inspire the trite prolific goddess/witch/whore-obsessed singers, poets and art students all over the world. Candles would be lit in dorm rooms, records played while girls dressed like fortune-tellers would twirl in circles with long diaphanous scarves trailing behind them. Lonely women in bars, crying into their whisky would feel a yearning female spirituality—they were too good—too special—to waste their time on [insert name]. The 80’s would inspire them to Stand Back!, rush to parlours to get doves inked to milky shoulders, and punish their hair with really bad perms.

Thanks a lot.

Gypsy Time

Every breath like fire liquored up on dream time bellows from within,
your Dragon - the Chinese dragon, not the medieval kind.
The flame and filth of life wins out over that which guards all that you fight.
Yet still in the mud your western boots sinking
you to the Earth, to the ways of others;
you fight the Wind - carrier of 1000 evils -
stagnations, deficiencies become
your strengths.

You once felt lonely,
you grew to love the golden light shards
of mirrors birthed from every bad time --
pain, rejection, childhood ingrained in blood are some...
some you cannot rise above, so
dance to their beat, when fire of Dragon
screams from your inner molten core;
In the anger is feast, not domination
revolt with your humility, strength in numbers
beats inside the taunt skin of a drum.

Celtic campfires breed from their
original Eastern shore,
the one you are taught to forget.
They teaching you it’s not to be trusted-
inner defenses, those of mind
try to manipulate you out of your right
to be Gypsy.

Too many colours in your passions…
ain’t No such thing
under the million shades of rust
in the setting sun,
telling you it’s time to come home.
Sip the flicker of electric candles:
new fire is old footsteps
warm meat in your belly and the taste
of leaves burning fantasies through the rot,
which the modern life tries
to strip from you.

The more of their wordy-neurotic
hard–biting worms they supplant you with,
the more you pile on noisy bells,
jangling verses in harvest
on your family’s land.

There is no crime.
Each colour bleeds into a brand new vision.
What you lose every day
in vitality, is gained
every night:::they click
their heels into the sky,
stars fuck them silly
the constellations pour wine down their throats
into their minds, sailing on red waters
of blood, fluid and time.

Construct with each layer of colour,
build, re-build every self loathing lie
into Gypsy.
The dirt is clean, my father always said.
Pure – impure
The fact that you are not wrong makes it ok
that nothing has to remain profane
if you revel, stomp, will and transfigure
you own freedom.

The prison bars are made of sugar cane,
slide down and around as you gyrate
governments into disaster,
the peasant kings drown your neuroses
in a self made moat of your own
bureaucratic shit!

Flushed away 'til it returns to you
in thunder – clap
your veins popping from the madness
of all sides Now.
Which happens to be the same as
an empty mind made into a mirrorball,
that the trees rent to you…

In the solitary voice lamenting
over lost love,
they find her, ravage every sadness
and reignite her fire;
One hundred virgins replete
bathed in grain alcohol,
through their eyes, the pores of their skin,
their original plans and their deathbeds-
each string in their battered Gypsy guitar:

-------- circumstance
-------- familial branding smelling of cheap barbecue
-----------------stopping yourself before you see too deep
into their ritual embers,
you cannot write them off

The next string breaks, falling
flailing, uncontrollable
the song keeps going…the tall grasses tie you down,
leather maidens repay the raping scoundrels
of their innocence,
the broken string whips back to your face, across
the malar flush of your cheeks.

They’re just kidding.
They start cackling, some low like smokers
some shriek like banshees falling through trees-
then you realize their wounds are carrying You
and you – Theirs.
There is no machine.
We are playing this song with our frightened,
broken strings, fashioning every obstacle
along the way.
Viscous wine gushes down the streams like velvet
curtains swimming in the excitement at showtime.

Rip some flowers from between the maidens’ legs –
they just keep them there so you’ll remember
to pull them down from the trapeze of heaven.
They see it too clearly. Everything
is a sign – the strings of the instrument disintegrate
as you yourself let them go-
their nonsense story telling you what you believe;
burn down like cathedrals on fire – chariots
of Gypsies drive them homeward
down your spine, in and up inside you and along
every bloody vein named for what you could have been.

The girls shake wildly,
their dresses doused in mud and abandon
fling up – naked asses
smiling in a unison of lockdown,
for all the onlookers to see.
The masses:
insects,
presidents,
housewives &
thieves
to take pleasure from.

This is the Buddha in his natural state.
This is emptiness in every single spine and pallor
undone – you
writhing to be free…
Beat-beat-shake
it goes on, and on,
your best instincts desire to strike
pounding, pulsing
the ground of Earth to her core.
She will show her smiling ass,
shake her skirt in unison with all the planets
we’ve deemed ourselves allowed to see.

Witness hell after closing,
the morning behind memory, as
weddings neverending in the rain clouds.
Gypsy protects,
murders everything in waste and recycles you
in dress, wine and eternity.
You have been re-born, striking waters with
drumsticks in primal time.
This goes on, on, on, on
more is lost
loss; loss; loss
death is your friend, finally.

Raise your glass made from the
sinew and bones of the modern and the weak.
As high as you can fly, soar to every possible
sky you could imagine.
This song has no end………………..
their skirts twist and turn,
the circle churns,
Burns,
and…And…AND!
All at Once.
This is Gypsy.

~ M. Lucia

Summer Vacation Haiku

Depart and return
only to leave once again
Lessons in ego.

WHA? Continued

The voice was perfectly toned, pitched, and modulated--at least in terms of the quality of sound.  "Too loud" was more a question of quantity and the "Wha" noise I had made was understood, fortunately, by my still-skull-bound Slizzed, as a need for some relief from the excessive volume.

"John," it said again, "turn on the TV."

The voice was like that of a long-lost brother, the prodigal sibling returned from a season of raucous debauchery, ready now for a serious devotion to the family work.  There was a desire to reach into one's pocket to pull out the photograph saying "See this?  That's my brother Jack.  He's the black sheep but he's mended his ways."  There was the latent ur and um of my father's considered conversational style, the sturm und drang of Mom's urgent soprano, the full fricative range of my sister Molly and brother Kurt's sibilant 's'-s and the whispering certitude of coming doom ever-present in the vowel inventory of my Swedish grandmother's swallowed vocal cacophony.  Point is, the sounds were utterly familiar and soothing to me on every level.

And it had only so far said to turn on the TV but I was compelled to comply.  How could I not?  Such was the nature of the voice.  It made me do whatever it said.  And, because when it said to do something it sounded so perfectly reasonable, you just WANTED to do it.  I would learn ultimately, too, that it never said to do anything that wasn't, in the end, in my own best interest.  That was Rule Beta, although essentially a restatement of Rule Alpha/Prime: Slizzeds were, for all intents and purposes, part of their human hosts.  They were one and the same, not aliens, just as in the way that your foot was its own thing but still part of the whole.  There was something about that in St. Paul, wasn't there?  It was a holy and sacred alliance.  The character of that relationship had changed slightly with the awakening but it was still the same.

On TV, CNN was in a panic.  The anchors all had lizards in their hair or on their shoulders or standing there before them on the desk up on hind-legs staring into the camera waiting for their cue.  Some lost their cool and excused themselves, the TV personalities I mean, while others, like Anderson Cooper lost only their focus.  He had stood up and walked off to one side where he listened in rapt attention to the Slizzed whispering in his ear.  He was still miked so the first few of his occasional out-of-context outbursts were sent out over the airwaves, interrupting whatever cooler heads were saying.

"Chiaroscuro DOES sound like sausage!" Cooper screamed giggling and John Roberts stopped mid-sentence.  Roberts had been piecing together the scope of the 'crisis' effecting the studio, no city, no nation, wait WORLD! as reports poured in from remote news bureaus and affiliated foreign correspondents.  He would ultimately win a Congressional Medal of Honor for having the foresight to interpret Wolf Blitzer's savage, saliva-tossed squashing of his own white-bearded Slizzed, subsequent toupee-flung screaming-madness and quick impalement off-camera on a huge shard of the smashed glass that had previously separated the studio from the studio-tour, for what it was.  He quickly absorbed Rule Prime emotionally and intellectually and began to spread the word.

"Strange as it may seem, they don't appear to be of any danger to us," he had ultimately and quickly concluded.  His Slizzed gazed up lovingly at him prompting Roberts to lift it up from under its tiny Slizzed forearms/-paws with his thumb and index finger and greet him eye-to-eye.  This screenshot would make it all the way to the cover of Time and Newsweek (magazines like the National Review and the Weekly Standard ultimately folded quickly in the weeks following the awakening as most of its writers, editors and correspondents, being a paranoid and latently violent bunch, had all killed their Slizzeds in knee-jerk fashion causing eventual madness and death, of course.  Willam Kristol lasted longer than most and was able to toss-off a quick editorial comment on his v-log about what he saw as a "Sino-fascist plot" hidden in the "slant-eyed- lizard invading hoard" before he went completely insane and smashed his skull into the wall right below a framed photogragh of Ronald Reagan.  This vlog entry was endlessly parodied for weeks by less high-minded satrical website's and often with human-slizzed comic duos performing said parodies in adorable little 'me and my shadow' routines.)

Roberts cut to video from all over the world of the awakening and its many after-effects, violent, confused, bloody and insane.  But very quickly it all stabilized and the clean-up began.  

WHA? Part One

On January 1, 2035, at 12:00:01 AM, showing what was, in retrospect, a remarkable and ultimately telling observance of human convention and tradition, the Slizzeds, as they came to be known, were compelled by a force not yet wholly understood despite years of research and speculation, scientific and theological alike, to emerge through the left nostril, from where they had been living presumably to that point in time--i.e. inside the skull of every human on Earth, one Slizzed per human.  Every human except me, that is, but I haven't told anyone that yet.

Incidentally, to say "every human on Earth" back there was a bit misleading because Slizzeds also emerged from all the humans in space as well, meaning into the artificial environment of the joint Chinese-US Space Station orbiting the moon.  Curiously, all the space bound-Slizzeds almost instantly dissolved and evaporated right where they were floating in the zero-gravity atmosphere.  This was another, smaller mystery, which was clearly being overshadowed by the grander mystery of why small, newt-like creatures, with long, prehensile antennae and a highly developed grasp of the respective language of their host-human, had appeared jarringly and in every awkward way imaginable from noses hither and yon across the globe.  Test after test had been undertaken to determine what it was about space, or artificial air, or weightlessness etc. etc. that would prove utterly fatal to those Slizzeds which 'belonged to' the astro-humans of the space station, but to no avail.  Of course these tests had to be conducted diplomatically since all emergent Slizzeds stayed, mostly hiding in the hair (took some getting used to, believe me), with their host-humans.  Elaborate stories had to be concocted and improvised, mostly on-the-fly, about said tests needing to "get to the bottom" of the "disturbing" vulnerabilities the Slizzed 'race' had to certain environmental realities.  Really, if the scientists had been able to consult for half a second with each other, out from under the watchful eye of their respective Slizzeds, they surely would have fabricated an elaborate plot, inevitably involving the first-world military-industrial complex, to rid themselves, and indeed the rest of the world, of what they would have ultimately convinced themselves was an invading force, which would have been an absurd notion.  The urgency of the tests had taken on a different character as humans began to develop certain attachments to their own Slizzed and, of course, to those Slizzeds connected to people they truly loved.  This would prove to be a fortunate turn of events for reasons to be explained later (see Rule Prime below).

I alone knew the death of the space station Slizzeds had something to do with the highly-salinated, vitamin enriched, pre-packaged broccoli-paste the commander of the Chinese mission to the station had been eating all that fortnight, indeed eating with such relish that he had gone through the entire ship's complement of the stuff, save for the small bit hanging from its plastic packaging and floating among the assembled astronauts where the commander had lost his grip on it (the package) in a panic over the unnerving feeling of having a lizard crawl out of his nostril, coupled with the equally (and perhaps more) unnerving sight of lizards scampering from the noses of all those around him.  Ultimately this would be the last bit of broccoli paste in existence as the product had been discontinued by the private quasi-military multi-national conglomerate that made it in a single factory in the Xinjiang province and the packages sent to the space station were the last there were.  The small bit left hanging in the artificial air of the space station was itself extinguished in a ball of fire when the now-Slizzedless astronauts succumbed quickly to some unexplainable madness and initiated the self-destruct sequence of the station right before exiting, without spacesuits, through the aft-hatch, in single-file where they ruptured in the vacuum of space.

Again, I alone knew that the madness in the moon's orbit, and indeed ALL madness in the history of mankind, recorded or otherwise, had been caused by the death of the respective human's Slizzed, skull-bound in the case of 99.9% of human madness, and extra-cranial, in the case of the space station's astronauts.  Rule One - more like Rule Alpha - Rule Prime: If your Slizzed died, you died (and vice-versa, that is, if your human died, you'd best be in the market for a Slizzed-sized coffin [ultimately, though, the human skull filled in just fine for Slizzed burial]).  I knew all this because my Slizzed stayed behind--in my head, that is--and had begun to talk out loud to me, as it were, as opposed to the previously 'normal' (can we think anything is normal anymore?) human-to-Slizzed mode of communication, namely telepathy.  It had ultimately explained all these things to me, slowly, over time ('we' [I had begun to regard myself as having what could only be described as a multiple personality] had a lot time on 'our' (metaphorical) hands since 'we' rarely ventured out of doors, not wanting to draw attention to 'our'-selves by being the only living human without a Slizzed scampering on his or her person).

The first thing it said to me was my name.

"John."

I was jolted awake, startled.  Subsequently I would realize that I had gotten off pretty easy in this respect, only having a voice speaking a bit too loud in my head disrupting my sleep.  Billions had been awakened by what had been described variously as "the feeling like my nose turned inside out," or "you know that feeling when you get a really good blow on your nose? only this time it was like part of my brain popped into the tissue by mistake" or, and most colorfully, "it was like real bad diarrhea, except it was coming out of my face."

"Wha-" I said.  Well, I didn't actually say it as much embody the word mentally, spiritually, philosophically, what have you.  "WHA" was the complete feeling of ME, to ME, my entire gestalt, if you will, brought on, or at least so I thought, by a long night's sleep of fitful dreaming which followed a third-week-of-unemployment pot/whiskey/girl-on-girl pay-per-view debauch.  My stomach gurgled uneasily, my heart-raced and there was an unpleasant sphincteral urgency that I won't go into but all these things I came to understand were common side-effects to the so-called 'awakening' of Slizzeds around the world.  The fact that my 'awakening' took on a different character seemed to not make any difference.  Point is, the voice in my head was the least of my worries and I dismissed it as more of a lingering by product of the dream I was having and had been rudely awakened from.  But awakened by what?  Now the synapses were firing.    

QUOTE UNQUOTE

"It's not time to make a change, 
Just relax, take it easy. 
You're still young, that's your fault, 
There's so much you have to know. 
Find a girl, settle down, 
If you want you can marry. 
Look at me, I am old, but I'm happy. 

I was once like you are now, and I know that it's not easy, 
To be calm when you've found something going on. 
But take your time, think a lot, 
Why, think of everything you've got. 
For you will still be here tomorrow, but your dreams may not. 

...

How can I try to explain, when I do he turns away again. 
It's always been the same, same old story. 
From the moment I could talk I was ordered to listen. 
Now there's a way and I know that I have to go away. 
I know I have to go. 

All the times that I cried, keeping all the things I knew inside, 
It's hard, but it's harder to ignore it. 
If they were right, I'd agree, but it's them you know not me. 
Now there's a way and I know that I have to go away. 
I know I have to go."

4:47am

New moon speaks softly outside window pane
in sleep,
there is no forgetting
your psychic mother rides again.

Possesses the overhanging cliff
past the back projection --
fly to shamanic hideaway.

Biting, unseen insects breed
beneath
your thighs,
walking into the tall, wet grasses.

You keep waking yourself
from the fear,
and their hard bodies on you.
But they never hurt you.
You feel no pain.

Stick around and see
what they have
to say, next time.
Moon slips away…

~ M. Lucia

A Night Ends at the Parliament

As the fire pits in your belly take notice by the rest of the aged world, you must never forget those little games you once played, a child in self-taught banishment. You can gaze like a shaman or burn like a bride. You used to wonder aloud to the shearling clouds in your southern axes, to come along and entertain your grander notions of being loved; those awfully contrived schemes of forgetting the whole of the outside world’s heartbeats, hitting like raindrops.

Eternity in your ink dries up and you’ve nowhere bright to go but your own backgarden – clutching onto modern convenience and salty residency in the front room, while accepting yourself to be wise in the face of free drinks left at the back doorway. The underwater railway into your hometown, breathing raucously. Late night noise patrols slamming the silence in your wide-eyed brain, while others scratch their chins in marked stupidity and you turn away from us all to keep your fantasies to yourself without even them whispering, to flicker past your eyes.

Brown, ailing paper bags of poaching, angry stews from Saturdays come around the streets end at you, beating in two your own prizefight – without the cameras, without your gleam. But will you not open up on this terror trail, feel the skins between most stones, sink your heels, caress those souls that slink past in genuine stream.

Keep your palms over your heart’s core, boy. Step forth, strove those gentle hallucinogens in a continuous motion. Sail on with the fearless shake, a whirling dervish in ascent. Sing on, to praise every pious, worthwhile scream in the inner universe – the rest, from land, your pathway swims upon – out into the all, that truth cannot shake, out into your own very greatest beyond.

~ M. Lucia

HAIKU FOR TEMPORARY ESCAPE

Day-to-day today
like sour mash.  Take this hand.
Let's walk on tree-tops.

Negative Space

Sarah was an artist and my roommate.  You wouldn't guess it to look at her - jeans, t-shirt and strictly sneakers, Nike, not Converse or from talking with her - quiet, not shouting passionately about "Her Art".  But, whatever was going on in that mind of hers, I wish I could have had a front row seat, because the glimpses that made it onto a canvas startled me, made me want to gesture and yell "Hey, look at this! " because I knew Sarah never would- Sarah the Obscure.  She was from a family with 13 kids, I thought she was kidding at first.  You would think she would be sceaming for attention, especially with her talent, but there were times when she would throw away things that I would secretly fish out of the garbage and save under my bed.  She confided in me that she despised those other artsy Greenwich Village girls, who wore their art like plummage - funky dress, combat boots, dyed hair, lots of silver jewelry - she laughed and a said she covered her ears as they strutted by.  I knew that walking the walk was 50% of the package for at least 99% of the world, and even though she had the full 50% on the substance side of the equation, that still only made her equal with the style girls even if their substance portion was thin gruel in an orphans bowl.
      But I've gone off point, which was that she used to have this thing with negative space.  She would take a charcoal pencil  and fill in the air space, the parts that were usually left blank, and a person or object would emerge from the white.  She called this figure-ground reversal, and as I'd watch her, these white figures would seemingly climb out of the paper.  Later on, I'd read somewhere, that Michelangelo felt this when he was sculpting - that he was freeing the figure from the block of marble, chipping away the excess, it was all already there, waiting to come out.
     So I chipped away.  I framed and hung her paintings around our apartment, even the hipster coffee shop on Varick jumped at a mutually benificial display of her work.  I posted images and her bio on the internet and a gallery exhibit soon followed.  It wasn't difficult really, self-important and even truly accomplished people peeked inside this dull, white matte egg of a girl and backed-off gaping, like I did.
     I must admit, we lost touch over the years, she met Mark and I've been here on the farm trying to scrape by.  When I saw the paper, I knew it wasn't an accident because I could remember the conversation like it was yesterday.  I don't remember what triggered it, but it was probably some TV drama or news story, "If you were going to kill yourself, how would you do it?"
     "I'm not interested in this conversation, why would I go where I never want to be? It's opening a door, inviting doom."
     "No, it's exploring all the crevices of your mind.  I wouldn't do the cry for help shit like pills or gas or even jumping off a bridge, but I wouldn't do the obvious gun shot to the head either."
    "I don't want to start my day like this, I need eggs and a couple of refrains from Oklahoma."
     "You know how the buses speed right up to the curb when they come to the busstop?   I'd casually glance behind me and then at the last moment just step off, I could even make it look like an accident, just trip in front of the bus."
    "When I take you out in the surrey with the fringe on top..."
     "Yes, definetly an accident, nobody would need to know my business..."
    "Nosy folks would peek through their shutters and their eyes would pop!"
     "Reminds me, gotta catch a bus up to Lee's for supplies, need anything?"
     "I'm at the farmer's market today, we sell the eggs, we don't paint them."
     "Smartass"

    I was spreading yesterday's paper down for the ducks, the ducklings were hatching and I liked to keep a close eye on things.  This is when I got most of my reading done, no rest for the weary, even though it was yesterday's news.

      Woman Hit By Bus In Midtown
       Sarah Siessler, 41, died after being struck by a city bus. The accident occurred while the bus was approaching the busstop at the corner of 57th Street and Seventh Avenue.....  

     I didn't read the rest.  The ducks were clamboring out of their box.  I spread more newspaper.  I gently lifted the eggs out onto a soft swirled blanket.  The thing about ducks is that they have rounded bills, unlike chickens with their pointy beaks, so it is more difficult for the ducklings to break out of their shells.  It takes more time, and some never make it.  But I learned early on at the farm, that you can't help them,  even if you want to.  If they can't make it out on their own, they won't survive on the outside.  So I sit and watch, I talk to them and encourage them and even sometimes sing to them, but most times I just quietly and wait, taking up negative space.

By:  Dottie PR






  
  

  

Needle and Black Thread '07

The spout of a bitch made her way through the soft, fleshy lining of my stomach as I board the train. When you are porous, you feel the chatter, the slimy wake and the meaningless looks of your fellow commuters even more. Not a way to start the day. The train decides to enter the 4th circle. The Avaricious and Prodigals. No relevance found, just the wait. Opposites bumping, the excuse of a winter coat and bulky bag makes angry waves, pushing big rocks at each other's temperament, hoping that the other person takes their dirty glove off and smacks the shit from your eyes. Tripping over babies, yelling and knocking footsteps – the manic depressives, obsessive compulsives and passive aggressives stewed while the leftovers baked in their down coat incubators, safe from each other and themselves.

No sense, and no guardian. No one in this town ever wants to be the hero, or the leader. They all look at each other for orders; they all look at me. I look down at the glow of the ipod and shut my eyes as angrily as possible, remnants of Tourettes climbing up my blood stream, in my muscles. Twitchy shouts mingle with the Nick Cave in my ear of "Whore. Bitch. Fuckface". I think I actually wished for a woman to be savagely raped by a herd of angry cons. There's never any guilt following that. Just a calm, like muscle relaxants hitting the sweet spot. Then the ridiculous hypocrisy that I'm somehow different and that I am "above it all". But being above it all is easier when you're meditating and not as easy when you're trapped in a moving electric box that's hardly moving at all. I think the guy driving is stopping and starting for his own twisted, perverse pleasure. Getting his kicks before he has to see his nagging wife tonight.

Mornings cannot start this way. They certainly cannot continue well. It's not the nature of the subway. I've been here before- after meditation, yes, but all the lights seemed aglow, everyone's face forced my pull to anti-socialism to fail wildly, as I kept the light of an open door in my gaze. Not Sun Myung Moon gaze or anything quite that extreme. But, something even more far-reaching. I couldn't remember that moment on this morning if I pulled it out of an open wound. We were finally one stop away. I was later than usual. I'd be going in the side door. Then, it happened. The servant of God, or so he seemed, arrived.

I had an experience about 4 years ago going home on the subway- delayed, stuck, one of the worst. This man appeared then. I understand there are a lot of Jamaicans in and around here, talking about being born again and the fires of hell, but this was the Same guy. Back then, my walkman had lost battery power in an overly crowded car, forcing me to listen to his sermon. This time, it was morning, and he arrived on my car in a whip of silence. I knew his voice quicker than the voices I loved and knew to their core. In an instant, I knew it.

Obviously, this wasn't an awful experience. I knew it even now. I stare every day at the mismatched, salvation army threads and bad haircuts of the people who rode the train to jobs far worse than mine, of women with cheap dye jobs and silver roots showing through layering tones of denial, drug store style. Those things don't mean much in the end, but most people in the room will never ever know the feeling of wanting something better, and what's worse, they don't expect it nor feel themselves worthy of it. I think they should take a knife, a cheap one if need be, and plunge it headlong into the ravenous cavern of the guy keeping them from their family's health, good night's sleep and dream of tomorrow being better than today. The ace is always hidden, while the sharpened ends of the playing cards cut their throats with invisible flair. And, all of them...I could never truly be angry at them. All of them I loved and hoped for them to get what they couldn't have.

These thoughts were far from my empty, tired head on said morning. I knew he'd be talking for about 2 minutes tops but it was the kind of rageful transport moment where no logic was to be found - every second that the doors didn't close was another second I screamed at them from inside. Fire and Brimstone before 9am (well, 9:30)— this is not a requirement of society nor ever a good idea. I would love to be walking back down my street now, in the dark, going home to my brooklyn bullfighters and looking up at the rabbit in the moon, boxing some chump coming around the corner at him from the stars. Can't dream of the finish line when you haven't even started.

By the time I saw the blackness outside the subway car window reflecting my angry, beating chest morph into the bleak colors of the 7th avenue station, I smiled and yelled to myself  "I would suck the devil's cock just to shut your mouth you Fuck!" And I felt good. Like a lady. I let the tunneling rage flow from me slow as a snail and exited without missing a moment. I blame cardiology for this: the doctors told my mother just before I was born that my heartbeat had the pattern of a male. I'll look at the black shining sky tonight and find that bunny fighting in his silly big gloves. I felt the wind coming down from the street above on my face. I always knew I had a man's heart.

~ M. Lucia

ROSEBUDS

Walking the through the library stacks, John starts to get that sinking feeling of being a fraud again.  The books all staring at him - Dostoevsky?  never read him; Hemingway, Faulkner?  nothing.  Wait, there was that summer he read "Light in August" but he had no recollection of the book and knew that he had probably read it more to cast a certain image for the counter girls at the pizza place who all went to Smith College and always had so many interesting things to say and wonderful observations about art and music.

Art?  He knew nothing about it.  Sure, he knew all the names (Da Vinci, Rembrandt, van Gogh) but only from the game--Masterpiece.  And he could easily connect book titles with their authors from his days lying on the floor of his Dad's office staring at his parent's bookshelves.  Who wrote "Trinity?"  Leon Uris.  "Steppenwolf" was written by Herman Hesse.  All this knowledge was simply stowed up there in his brain.  He knew nothing about these books nor anything about the authors or what made them write, or even why his parents would read them.  "The Jungle" was written by Upton Sinclair, but Sinclair Lewis wrote "Babbitt" and "Rabbit, Run" was written by John Updike.

Upton Sinclair Lewis Babbitt Rabbitt Updike Upton Sinclair Lewis Babbitt Rabbitt.

He ran his hand along the wooden railing up in the third level, east stacks.  From here he could peek down at the co-eds sitting at the long wooden tables below, doing their homework, their petty researches, and look down their tank-tops and blouses, at the smooth curves and that plunge into shadow and lace...at least in the summer.  In the winter it would only be the fashionably-casual college sweatshirts, earnestly sending text messages from behind musty Marx/Engels tomes, stuffing the paragraphs down for Intro. to Poli. Sci. through their cat's-eye frames.

He sat down on the floor down at the end of the third aisle of shelves.  They kept the 17th century Spanish drama anthologies here so he knew he could have at least a few moments alone.  He took a swig from his granddad's whiskey flask and pulled out the copy of Leaves of Grass that he had printed out off the Kinko's computer that morning.  It had come out of the printer on pink paper for some reason.  Someone must have forgotten to take the paper out but after a moment he thought that maybe Uncle Walt wouldn't have minded.

"Are you the person drawn toward me?
To begin with take warning, I am surely far different from what you suppose."

The girl at the circulation desk stared at him when he walked in; her eyes lingered.  He was afraid to even take out a book lest she think he did it only to talk to her.  And even if he got up the nerve he would say nothing.  She would tell him when the book was due back and he would nod silently.  He had thought about her masturbating that morning.

"Do you suppose you will find in me your ideal?
Do you think it so easy to have me become your lover?"

He looked at the titles of the books where his feet propped on the shelves.  "Calderon & Lope de Vega: The Romantic Dramas".  That's an El Greco painting he thought.  More useless knowledge.  What makes El Greco so special?  Maybe he had it wrong.  Was El Greco the artist or the painting?  The girl in 'Great Film Directors' would know.  She always had more to say about the movies than the other kids in the class.  All that shit about the "deconstruction of the renaissance" in The Third Man.  He thought the movie was boring and fell asleep in the darkness of the screening room.

"Do you think the friendship of me would be unalloy'd satisfaction?
Do you think I am trusty and faithful?"

At noon he could go to the campus post-office to see if his girlfriend had sent him anything from her college in Indiana.  They persisted in using snail-mail to communicate; she found it more romantic than their respective Yahoo e-mail accounts.  The effect was that they had this built in remove from each other's lives but maybe that was good thing.  Maybe that kept it safe and in its place.  He would see her periodically, summers, holidays and they would call each other once a week.

In the letters she wrote about her classes and her professors but never really deep things about her personal life, that is, outside of him.  She would say where and when she went places and did things like: "I gave myself a pedicure before I went out with Peggy to the basketball game" but never really a lot about how it all made her feel.  Maybe feelings don't matter.

"Do you see no further than this facade, this smooth and tolerant manner of me?
Do you suppose yourself advancing on real ground toward a real heroic man?"

This library used to be the school chapel.  The stained glass persists still and the late morning sun shines through coloring his skin.  He holds up his hand to see the alien skin there, the shades of reflected saints.  What would it be like to fall from the third tier, falling through these stacks of history and literature?  On the window sill there is an accumulation of wax; maybe a leftover from some decades old mass, lingering from days of Latin eucharists and frustrated Jesuits.  Or maybe just some other boy needing to check for a line from a Spanish play in a blackout; or late at night after the library had closed.  Is there a secret entrance to this place?

Ode to Red Wine

Came to a fork in the road, 

plod along like a thief on fire

in dire need of a saviour to make 

time pretty, less the sunset slides 

down to the lips of my mouth, 

praying in red to the lie of the noon;

footsteps made in stars sink heaven 

at the bottom of my glass.

Staining my legs and making me 

ache and confess.  That I 

want to sail fruitful in the treetops, 

soar to bathing in sweet crimson pools.

It soars down my throat in the gesture of 

a passion play, enough of each 

that my eyelids sour, 

my gaze turns liquid and

my heart thumps like horses drowning and coming 

to life in faeryland, made into feathers that drift 

through the woods in Irish summer, 

just off the sea, 

having their say and getting tangled in my hair, 

whispering that they love me, even though I'm a lush, 

a wino on a good day.  

Heat pulses from my city palms stroking country girl 

breezes on the base rim of my empty glass of red wine, 

in waves of wheatfields come home to me every night.

~ M. Lucia

Barnacle

(for J. Joyce & Nora)

Livia took a seashell to her harder will and squeezed
it with all her might.

Honeymoon up against a stonewall whiskey burning
behind his eye, he let her try
perpetually duped

Pleasure that these brainwaves sought found home at the
inside seam of her fake lace thighs
She directed the synapses
her body to his skull
fucking right all the wrongs, they set the world to their will.

Made all the white spots sparkle with filth - pride
raised up all the dirt that could not bear a bed
and gave it
theirs.

paper to pen
pussy to heart
prayers to breathing
breath to thunder
clap on hands
slap on arse
film all fears
edit the jeers
for papercuts on paper footsteps
soaked in loin and tending all the rivers at once...

God in his drawers
the toilet soars
the beauty of everyday things.
Its sound is true,
the breath hard and tight.

The inability to remember none but naked things.

--- --

In the stone face of a watery death comes something to do on a Tuesday,
when no opera belts out a girl's name over her death bed,
for no other reason that she's bored with you.
Yes, you.

The lips grind with the stained stones that men have planted in their wake
taste the filth of all others in their years of trouble and conquest,
for reasons not to fulfill the things that play hard at them,
of shrill and crippled winos who bake their sundays into jelly
they shove hard and fast between their toes.

Governments never know how sweet you tasted when the dark turned into day.
Colors adrift, too long a battle to sacrifice your wits over, but
trouble yourself,
Do.

They just don't feel the same nerve endings that eat away at our dreams,
the endless gesticulations that no one sees but me.

It's forever in a dime, a dance hall in a day.

~ M. Lucia

Sound

So what is this? he asks, and I just smile because I don’t really have the answer. I had a weakness for him immediately but that is beside the point. He was quick to smile—an easy soul—and he held on to his Tiger beer with a hand that had forged. Hands not just to hold tickets and pass money and grasp steering wheels—but hands that have plunged and burned and smoothed. During our conversation I caught him caressing the bar top, unaware that he was pressing his palms into the grooves of the wood as if anointing it with linseed oil. His hair was shorter than I had remembered. The night should have struggled—I had expected it to—like a solitary swimmer whose arms tire out while only half way across the channel—but instead we sat shoulder to shoulder amidst younger, louder couples and we were alone with ourselves and a plate full of noodles. He wanted to discuss books and I wondered about his name—whether he had been named after a sound his mother had heard as she lay recovering in a bed composed of starched white sheets; the ricochet of an axe, a wheel separating from it’s axle, the sudden flight of a thousand Starlings in tandem? His name must be the synthesis of a sound—hot and gnarled—being plunged like ore into something placid and temperate. We caught noodles with our chopsticks, slick and salty—and I realized that the answer to his question was Now. This is now. As I slurped and swallowed a noodle he wished me a long life—as is the tradition with noodles—and said that he liked Now.

I can’t breathe.  It feels worse today.  I must’ve been asleep for hours.  The sun’s going down over the Fitzpatrick’s roof, it must be past 4.  Where’s Ma?  The kitchen’s so quiet.  She must not be back yet.  Mother in heaven, why won’t this coughing leave me?  I used to crave a little solitude; time away from Ma’s puttering attentions.  Now I just feel so alone.  If I can reach the lamp, maybe the shadows won’t unnerve me so.

Greta my love, why can I no longer see your face when I close my eyes?  Have you left me?

I can remember her walking down the lane, her back to me, in the early morning softness.  Such a lovely straight, tall posture; so like a beautiful flowering tree she is.  Her dark hair curling there at the end like a gentle breeze upon her shoulders as she takes to the fence, her boots steady on its boards, accommodating her and lifting her over chivalrously.  Never one to go the easy way, this I knew from our first days together.  She’s up and over in an instant but I turn away from her searching for a gate to pass through.  But why would I ever take my eyes off her, why ever forego the opportunity to see her, look at her?  When I see her again she’s already meters away, mud collecting on her petticoats as she crosses the field off to who knows where.  I can get her attention though and I start singing her song.  Then I could still raise my voice above a whisper.  A smile must’ve crossed my face as I see her stop mid-stride playing at surprise her hand to her chest as she turns to me.  I see the sweet joy in her expression even before I see her features with waves of sunlight gathering to her beauty.  But then the face is black and the scene is gone from my mind. 

I’ve got to get out of this tiny bed.  There’s barely any room here to stretch out, the way Ma has boxed me in since I fell Michaelmas night.  The light’s almost gone now and it’ll be cold I can tell.  Lord, I’ve been lying here far too long.  Sometimes, I try to see how long I can just lie without moving, what it must be like!  I’m not afraid of dying.  I trust the Lord has a plan for me and may be my time will come early.  I am only afraid of not seeing Greta again.  That she will leave and I will never be able to tell her what she means to me.  Do you think you can feel death when it comes into the room? Ma told me Granny’s death was like that; that a cold came over the fire and the room seemed to darken as if a cloud had past before the sun and suddenly she was gone.  I will not give in should death come for me; I will fight.  I know now that Greta’s in the world and my heart beats with hers.  How could it stop if she lives?    

It is time to get out of this bed.  I am determined that with whatever strength I have I will go and see her.  Wrap this blanket around me and out into the fresh air.  What a thing to walk out in the world again.  

Spookies

Here kitty, kitty
your fur as soft as silk
let's pretend your blood is milk.

~ M. Lucia on behalf of anonymous 5 year old.

I drank from the cup

There is love, without exception

Pleasure without expression

Hope held deeply within your chest

Listening to you exhale I watch the shadows grow long across the floor

Licking chapped lips, kissing pricked fingers

Pry them apart like bones, unmarrowed 

Driving repetition and indifference

I’ve tasted, I’ve known

Like a trigger I’m pulled

and so in rising I cross the floor with dirty soles

Driven away, self exiled automaton with dreams dashed and splattered

Eyes open wide

Flayed, willingly and fully

Drenched and lathered

I spit out the bit and

Submit

Broken and pleasured

Nursing the Wound

Frozen cells of time lapse life
moving backwards
beating a path to regret
you can't quite see.
The silvery smell of a burning
paper cut remains.

Ideas and desire
sip toasts
clinking glasses
shattering stems
rain down to the base of the wound.
Stepping in and from
the mound of tabletop excuses.

Dance like gypsy wedding
in late summer eves;
three day supply of livery, liquor and love
tear like a circumventing itch
you can't cure.

The red streams grown
in tissue and strength-
hands forming, which
threaten to strangle you
for forgetting
that they were there.
That they have always been there
singing tipsy
the nights away while you
waited; deduced
and reinvented
their circumstance.

Hack off the limb,
where the scratching won't subside
and fashion a silver spear
deep enough and strong enough
and clear enough
to slice through reams
of perforated bullshit;
casting off the spell of waiting
room reading---

Book burning,
spear at side
gypsies waltzing the second wind
of their third late afternoon,
calling at you.
To move.
They won't ever run dry,
and your swollen sky
bounding above their heads.

~ M. Lucia

TRICK BAG

It's an archipelago of angst in a sea of selfishness--a constellation of crazy.  That's what it is.

The poetic line would then harken to a ship on the sea or a space vessel floating through the maze, regarding each in turn--the beauty of her verdant shores, or the gentle curves of her horizons, as the sun alternates from wink to nod.

Better a telescope, eyeing from a distance.  Bad enough to have the light streaming into his eye but at least voluntarily; to then have the option of looking away, sitting in the locked observatory, in the cool room with no door, except in the ceiling, which gapes perpetually open, the shaft and lens staring out and up at the emptiness.  Oh, if only it were truly empty.  The lights in the darkness impassively yet demanding still the attentions of the amateur astronomer as he scribbles frantically to figure the math of their motions.  Is it gravity or dark matter?

In a dream, curled on the metal floor, the light from the heavens streams out of the wrong end of the telescope and curls a cat-tail out the ceiling and down the side of the wall.

He climbs out.  In the dream.

Calendar Girls

Jaycee didn’t have a real problem with the job to tell the truth. Since she was little, Jaycee pretended to be a stripper in her upstairs bedroom. All by herself, she’d dress up in her mother’s shawls and wrap herself in scarves like a Pompeii whore and she’d undo it all in perfect sweeping arpeggio time in front of her parents’ mirrored closets. No one ever came to find her, or caught her there in all those years. She’d make it with her stuffed animals without knowing what slots and tabs were involved in all that raucous motion or the particulars; it just felt comforting, good, less lonely. Or she’d do up the whole soap opera of the date, the affair with the boss, quite lewd for a girl of five, as her parents stood outside, in the backyard below, unaware, making hamburgers. She had asked for cheese on hers and could smell the bland, processed American square melting onto the burger, steaming, as she victimized her teddy bear, black and white dog, took them all to heaven with her. Within five minutes of meeting anyone, Jaycee would animate these childhood tales to them, and top them off with the idea that she blamed television, the nighttime soap operas, but that she enjoyed the experiences, even then.

Jaycee had worked at the local strip club since she was nineteen. All these places were like libraries,she had convinced herself, as she chattered at three hundred miles a minute. Yes, they were small town libraries, and these men that came were all scientists of a certain sort who paid their tuition to come into darkness and research. They could find out all sorts of things from a girl like Jaycee. She was a Virgo (oddly, the Virgin), as so clearly worn when she had on nothing else. Her picaresque sign of the Virgin holding a sheath of wheat was planted in the beaded sweat droplets that nestled her neck when she did the deeds. They could see she was of German stock, her build, her bosom, the dangerous clarity between her wide-set blue eyes. It was Americana at work, Dresden style. A disarray of voices from the pills the other girls would give her sometimes made her dissociate like she were in front of a painting, but in the space that it occupied, the murky sorts of fields and thick figures blending more and more the closer you stepped towards it. The female form was like a painting, she said, becoming another girl every new day, and there were no paintings to look at in her small town. So, these men came to Jaycee like a Greek Goddess of old, to study her form, to be true to the darkness clouding up in rotten smoke and to stay with her while she danced right past them in that darkness, following the paint as it spilled to the floor and tripped this goddess for good, twisting her ankle on the way down like always happens when little girls try to dance in their momma’s over sized shoes.

After more than an hour of this bullshit verbiage on the train, Jaycee spoke of the first time she went to a strip bar, just before her older brother’s friend was getting married (She didn’t want to be home all alone, even though she was a mature fifteen). She had used the bathroom there almost immediately, though would have preferred to hold it in, probably. Jaycee found her way and all the girls were most obliging, since she was girly enough in her big funny, fake fur coat, like a twenties do-gooder slumming it for a change in the night. She crouched above the dirty toilet to pee and heard two strippers, one asking the other if she wanted one of those pills. The only other thing that Jaycee remembered in that bathroom was the mound of colourful, cheap, used underwear that was piled outside the stalls like the stinking defeated dead from a roman battle of some kind, as the girls adjourned in the backstage/changing area. It might have been three feet high; all meshed together, worn like gypsies gone to hell, or some dark basement in Florida, whichever fell closer on that day.

From that day on, Jaycee grew up through teenage weeds like a rotten rose pushing and showing itself to any available light, seeing again and again those infantile, rough boys after they gave up and became repetitive, lewd old men; or, what’s worse, those silent, morose types somewhere in between in age, who were trying to calculate their love of losing inside the blankness of their mind’s page, while watching Jaycee strip down to her childhood limbs, swinging the umbilical shoelaces of her gaudy costume at their deadened, dim eye-lights. Fumbling for change, they would only see the girls’ supposed power over them in terms of vulnerability calculated through lack of age that would play out in years to come, when the obviousness of the change bouncing off the liquor-stained floor would grow complacent, silent in the taciturn dollar bills that work provided to them as they grew older. Their dollars silencing their minds, their tongues yelling audacities at any young thing to shake her ass in their faces. Their mouths would be silent no more. Jaycee just sat there facing the night air of the train, turning occasionally back in her mind to those first, innocent boys, the ones who never came into the strip club. The power that their once innocence had to blot out the rest of what went wrong afterwards. Thoughts of the initial will still spun verses through fingers softening, lips abiding; and any right-minded girl will tell you, there’s nothing more soothing than a young man’s vibrancy – dark fists of hair and the furtive conquer of their beating hearts galloping towards the maze of oncoming towns.

~ M. Lucia