Christmas cookie...
The first time my fucking brother pounded the cookie dough I had carefully shaped in the half-hour my mother gave me to "be creative" because Dad was working late and wouldn't yell at her to "tell the fucking kids to shaddup and go watch TV" and had only left for a quick pee since I had been holding it in for 29 of those 30 minutes so excited for once to be doing something upstairs rather than down in the basement with the spiders and the kerosene heater and the clicking furnace and the whistling winter wind windows and the musty dog farting but I couldn't hold it in anymore and all I had left to do was put the jellybean buttons on the snowman before Mom popped them in the oven and I came out of the bathroom just in time to see my brother SLAM the dough into the wooden table and then actually spit a long-tailed goober right into it and all I remember is what 'sounds' to me like a silent scream but my mother hearing it and smacking his left ear and he cried like a baby but sat on my head later against the cold stone floor of the cape cod we lived in in Peekskill, NY, circa 1973. That night I drew lines into the condensation of the windows meant to be daggers I wished I could stab into my brothers ears and eyes and hands and feet and even his fucking tiny boy balls.
Then there was the one I had in college right after Jerry--Jerry the Jerk they called him which I knew and understood why but still that night his cock was in my mouth such was my desire to break through with all these people I wanted to be friends with, pathetic as that sounds in a completely movie-of-the-week kind of way but then again they don't make those movies from nothing but at least a GRAIN of truth--came against the back of my throat and it seemed to me to be at least a little inconsiderate not factoring my feelings at all into the equation and just assuming that since his cock was there I was consenting to swallow. I guess it's a fine line, I don't know, you tell me...I guess that's what a girl should expect putting that thing in her mouth and moving her tongue and her lips around at the direction of the grunts and moans from above taking cues and signals from a moron and known 'jerk' or at least that's what the movie of the week would tell you, right - suck a cock and expect to swallow SOMETHING Mackenzie Phillips might say no? But stumbling out in the champagne haze I grabbed one of the Christmas Tree cookies that my roommate Mary Alice Gilloughy had made (just to change the taste in my mouth) because "you need something to eat at a party" she would say such was her theory and it was a safe bet that Mary Alice wasn't putting ANYONE'S cock in her mouth unlike me who went from cock to cookie with the skill and alacrity of a $2 whore except for the eruption of vomit soon after of the three C's as Jerry the Jerk called it as it was happening practically--champagne, cookie and cum all over Mary Alice's grandmother's comforter making her actually get her Irish up (said Jerry, again) and call me a 'cunt' which she pronounced with such relish like it was spelled with a KCH at the beginning that I just shut down in so many ways and gave up on ever stabbing my brother in the balls or anything like that and resigned myself to...well, so many things from that moment I can't adequately say.
So now we find ourselves staring at the plate of snowmen and christmas trees and even fucking stars of David lovingly baked and decorated by yours truly in celebration of yet another holiday season in the company of so many recasted characters from my life - there's my Dad at the copy machine and Jerry down in IT and Mary Alice in accounts payable - that had I not completely shut-down years ago I might've had the strength, physical, mental, emotional, to do something about it - like yell at the top of my lungs FUCK YOU ALL!!!!!!!! but instead I resort to rat poison. In the cookies. And they come at them like rats don't they? Can't resist another Christmas-y confection can you Jerry? God forbid you NOT stuff your face with another cookie Mary Alice...and Dad, yes Dad, I've never seen anyone eat a fucking cookie with such anger. But then again you were always a bit of a yeller weren't you Dad? Well Happy Holidays friends, lovers, family one and all. And just to show you I have a sense of humor, I'll join you. Nothing like a nice cookie to get the party started. 'Tis the season! Mmmmmmmm, it's good.
Friday, December 17, 2010
Broken Tramp Stamp
Remember that small, but powerful cluster of set-in scars-
scratches made by city cement, at the small of my back?
This pain doesn't come close to that one by a long shot.
This one- dull, inactive, tight and twisted like a schoolmarm
caught in the doldrums between empathy and utter hatred
for those fucking kids.
Releasing slowly ---sharply---
down my ass and into my legs.
Your wound went upwards, through my gut, eight-fold
reaming my heart
and my head followed.
Small bits of cement still live in there, to remind me
of what fun that can be had for free.
~ M. Lucia
scratches made by city cement, at the small of my back?
This pain doesn't come close to that one by a long shot.
This one- dull, inactive, tight and twisted like a schoolmarm
caught in the doldrums between empathy and utter hatred
for those fucking kids.
Releasing slowly ---sharply---
down my ass and into my legs.
Your wound went upwards, through my gut, eight-fold
reaming my heart
and my head followed.
Small bits of cement still live in there, to remind me
of what fun that can be had for free.
~ M. Lucia
Wednesday, December 15, 2010
Standing at the Edge of Water
what do I deserve
standing beneath the sun the same as everyone else.
but not the same, or not in the same way.
Sometimes the misanthropes, we
are the very sweetest of all.
We shudder, and shout inside,
we remove ourselves from the great
and expensive
theatre of conflict.
From the prizefights sewn into our bellies,
from the fact that we are afraid of all of you.
We are afraid you will see us there, mask removed,
crying into our wine at beauty which we want to share
into the day, but cannot.
We know most of you will snub us out, every chance you get.
Most of you take the truth of us and wrap it up in the back
of your hand --- laugh, tease, disengage, belittle.
We hate you, because we do not.
We loathe everything all of you do, simply
because we would absorb the pain along with our own.
Our love to give becomes a sort of blood letting---
and we're let go into the abyss,
but once we are alone there, in the dark,
we see it goes only to our knees. The black water-
smiling up at us, our friend.
We then turn back to you folk and your perfectly happy crowd,
laughing like idiots, remarking not of the fact that we All-
were born under this sun,
and we all deserve--- Everything.
~ M. Lucia
standing beneath the sun the same as everyone else.
but not the same, or not in the same way.
Sometimes the misanthropes, we
are the very sweetest of all.
We shudder, and shout inside,
we remove ourselves from the great
and expensive
theatre of conflict.
From the prizefights sewn into our bellies,
from the fact that we are afraid of all of you.
We are afraid you will see us there, mask removed,
crying into our wine at beauty which we want to share
into the day, but cannot.
We know most of you will snub us out, every chance you get.
Most of you take the truth of us and wrap it up in the back
of your hand --- laugh, tease, disengage, belittle.
We hate you, because we do not.
We loathe everything all of you do, simply
because we would absorb the pain along with our own.
Our love to give becomes a sort of blood letting---
and we're let go into the abyss,
but once we are alone there, in the dark,
we see it goes only to our knees. The black water-
smiling up at us, our friend.
We then turn back to you folk and your perfectly happy crowd,
laughing like idiots, remarking not of the fact that we All-
were born under this sun,
and we all deserve--- Everything.
~ M. Lucia
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
Breakfast: A Guide (From the Grave of Henry Valentine Miller)
So you see, eating is an art. Just as fucking, and letting your heart go does, before it kill itself and bleeds onto all the onlookers while they stand at the side of the road, staring down at their shoes and wondering why they feel so damn Good when they first put a pair of new shoes on. Like a duck in the bath, sloshing its ass around happy as the yellow in the sun greets it upon ever single new morning. So mornings and breakfast. One of these things is wonderful, the other not so hot. While a sunrise is something to see, it never fails that your seeing it through hazy, cum soaked eyes of glittering, viscous adventure and filled to the lids in the best array of liquors the world has to offer you for free is the more preferred way to see the sunset. LE SUNSET. It’s not as routine as the overly self-aggrandizing motions of getting yourself out of bed after a full night’s sleep in order to stand with your un-spiked coffee at the window, looking out onto the sun. He’s around the corner, beating your better intentions and pointing out how you are an embarrassment to the natural order of things, the meals, the drink, the fuck, the rage, the fanaticism. Oh yes, all meals should have some level of fanaticism to them…like a good Pentecostal snake charming service, tongues wagging and licking up the Lord as he bears down on you, in full glory through the tiny, dead eyes of the otherwise unappreciated garden snake. So there should be revelry, torn clothing, at each and every meal, even if you dine alone. And always a little something to tickle your insides with liquid-wise. Something delicious and open hearted.
Therefore, leading me to breakfast. It has its place in the day, but I find enjoying it at or just after noon is the best way to truly savour its specialties. Your mouth is awake, hopefully has enjoyed a rollick good go at it in the bed, on the table, in the window (remember, they’re staring at their shoes and they want to be looking at you, so make it good. Give them something to see, before the blood nicks them in the corner of their leering eyes. Under their hats and above their fears of themselves and who they could be, if they didn’t let the world cage them in so. Your mouth is open, you see, alive and tasting all that it can, not like a numb cunt too late at night sloshed on drink or too early in the morning, before she’s had a proper amount of time to wake up – all closeted and bundled up. The lights are on, and it’s time for breakfast. What a wonderful array of food items one can enjoy. If there is any way to avoid the idea of lunch, your world will be such a marvelous place. Lunch is for chumps, you see. Suckers, and life peddlers who mock at the idea of actually Enjoying something, but doing it, going through the motions, because it is time. The act of eating lunch is an act of true depravity. Nothing noble, or giving about it. No heart to be found there at all, in that black pond of filth and muck lying at the side of the highway. You might as well be on a desert moon trapping gazelles for all the life lessons and pleasure you could get from a lunch. You hear people talking about meals they had out – grand, fantastical meals that sound as if they got fucked up the ass by the whole theatrical cannon of the western world. And then got served a dessert on top of that.
And those about breakfast, the Right ones, they lay in bed or put this ransacked, alluring meal together when still drunk, or so sick they can’t see straight – Then they taste the glory in their food. When it serves to lift them out of the pit of despair they have carved out for themselves, thought by thought, regret by soulful regret. Seeing their sunrise in the midday, glaring and warming them from the inside, secretly hiding away from the demons of the daytime with their lover, never to get out of bed, while downing canyons of coffee, cathedrals of sweet bread and syrup. Dousing themselves in bacon grease and sliding their day into oblivion. That’s breakfast, my dear. Be sure not to miss it next time it comes around, even if you’re about, say, 6 or 7 hours too late for it. And the champagne! Oh, the absolute mindfulness of bubbles rising in your glass, your cunt, your stomach. Like a slow orgasm rolling its way up the sides of the flute (even that word speaks to God --- drinking out of a Flute for heaven’s sake!). Of this specific diet is no one thing, but many – preferably a combination of meat – the baser and dirtier the better- just like whores, you want the ones who know that a good debasing is a mass at St. Peter’s undone. Sausage, bacon, I like the back bacon – Irish or Canadian style. Thick and chewy, where you can taste every inch this animal struggled through, and his pain and grief at the death process, he is alive in you and oh does he bring you good tidings. Double smoked, applewood…you can’t fail with a start like this. If you did your head in the night or morning before, then this is the most surefire way to slap yourself in the ass and get going. As your own pace, of course. There should be butter, or jam (both is a wonderful thing to have together, on good crusty loaves of bread. Give your bacon something to bounce up from as it acrobats into the stars found just below your lungs, in the sky of your belly’s celestials. This should be done slowly, chewed, swallowed, engorged inside you. You need to know every moment of your life is coming together in the moments to come.
Eggs are optional – they fit or they don’t. I love a good scrambled egg, cooked in butter with chives, dill, maybe a little tomato or red onion if I’m feeling frisky and progressive. They can be another, more civilized layer to this breakfast of the daytime, creating colours and pastels in your fields at play. Also, a well made sunny side up (or down, as I prefer, I like poking it and seeing where it’ll leak, almost like reading tea leaves in the shady dealings of a gypsy- taking your money and not even giving you a good fuck. What’s the future worth like that? If you are a real zealot, I mean a foot soldier in the legion of Living – someone who knows that the light in someone’s eyes can annihilate you, or muffle your screams in their adeptness, that the mountains are all the walls of your body, the one we are now feeding, at the table, with the fork and spoon…someone who can see themselves, and the world for what it truly is. Devastating, inept and beautiful, and alive. Then, my dearie, will you know what you have gotten yourself into here, the bacon almost gone and the eggs and their maddening colours and textures making you cry. Also, there can be a trade off with the butter and jam, and the runny golden juice of the sunny sided egg. Your choice. I like an ample supply of bread to cover all three, sometimes separately, sometimes all at once. Now, the final gorge. If we were in Rome, it’d be time for the tickle of the feather, probably along with a few good slap and tickles, because when in Rome, do as the Romans do (especially when there is almost nothing that they won’t do)…you know, the good upheaval of the contents in your stomach. Most nowadays don’t go that way, and I only do when I’ve hit midnight too hard with brown liquors and forgotten to eat a meal. Myself, I keep it all in, a packed house for the opera and its ultimate climax. Something sweet and bready, pancakes, French toast (my favourite), waffles, anything that you can drown in terribly sugary chorus girls singing your body all the way home. This is the kind of meal you won’t need to supplement with snacking before you start up again for supper time.
Of course, I don’t even have to mention that the champagne is flowing through you like good biblical verse, Jesus coming into Jerusalem to be crucified, riding on an ass, green palms rattling in his terrified face. Bottles should come neatly, one after the next, with no cause of stopping until it’s a natural act having nothing to do with the supply. White wine, Lambrusco, sparkling rose, anything like this will do. You’ll have your choice of afternoon drinks later, long past the time you sleep all this madness off, and look your cunt in the eyes again, bellybutton first. Lastly, this ritual is only complete with a good, strong coffee or tea – black only, caffeine always, and don’t you know, always tipped with a little extra something. Be careful here. You don’t want to fall overboard from too heavy a pour of whiskey or brandy in your coffee, or in your pot of tea (always a pot, never just a cup. It’s bad luck, or so the gypsy told me before she fucked those sailors for free. Wonder if she saw them coming in her crystal ball). Savour this last piece of the pie, it will stay with you, allying you throughout your day, here on this earth, creating and destroying yourself, your gods, each other and the light inside the darkness hour after hour. There is always time for a surprise crucifixion and you, dear one, are now ready for it all. Old Testament and new, birth and death sacrament, tongues inside you and pricks making their way up your river Nile…the deed is done, the first one and now all the rest can follow.
Most importantly, make this breakfast last as long as you possibly can, preferably do it with people you love in one way or another (but by yourself has its place too, long as there is love, acceptance and a rough and ready desiring). Stand up from the table, and if you’ve the courage, recite some words which construct inside your esophagus, the sweet, the bubbles, the fallen beast, all mingling and creating a poem that God himself could not pen without this call to the sun to move his teetering ass across your sky, since you are already riding him from behind, belly up full of taste and fanaticism. Get up and shit it all out, and then make your way into the world. The sun’s not going anywhere just yet, and we still have supper to consider.
~ M. Lucia
Therefore, leading me to breakfast. It has its place in the day, but I find enjoying it at or just after noon is the best way to truly savour its specialties. Your mouth is awake, hopefully has enjoyed a rollick good go at it in the bed, on the table, in the window (remember, they’re staring at their shoes and they want to be looking at you, so make it good. Give them something to see, before the blood nicks them in the corner of their leering eyes. Under their hats and above their fears of themselves and who they could be, if they didn’t let the world cage them in so. Your mouth is open, you see, alive and tasting all that it can, not like a numb cunt too late at night sloshed on drink or too early in the morning, before she’s had a proper amount of time to wake up – all closeted and bundled up. The lights are on, and it’s time for breakfast. What a wonderful array of food items one can enjoy. If there is any way to avoid the idea of lunch, your world will be such a marvelous place. Lunch is for chumps, you see. Suckers, and life peddlers who mock at the idea of actually Enjoying something, but doing it, going through the motions, because it is time. The act of eating lunch is an act of true depravity. Nothing noble, or giving about it. No heart to be found there at all, in that black pond of filth and muck lying at the side of the highway. You might as well be on a desert moon trapping gazelles for all the life lessons and pleasure you could get from a lunch. You hear people talking about meals they had out – grand, fantastical meals that sound as if they got fucked up the ass by the whole theatrical cannon of the western world. And then got served a dessert on top of that.
And those about breakfast, the Right ones, they lay in bed or put this ransacked, alluring meal together when still drunk, or so sick they can’t see straight – Then they taste the glory in their food. When it serves to lift them out of the pit of despair they have carved out for themselves, thought by thought, regret by soulful regret. Seeing their sunrise in the midday, glaring and warming them from the inside, secretly hiding away from the demons of the daytime with their lover, never to get out of bed, while downing canyons of coffee, cathedrals of sweet bread and syrup. Dousing themselves in bacon grease and sliding their day into oblivion. That’s breakfast, my dear. Be sure not to miss it next time it comes around, even if you’re about, say, 6 or 7 hours too late for it. And the champagne! Oh, the absolute mindfulness of bubbles rising in your glass, your cunt, your stomach. Like a slow orgasm rolling its way up the sides of the flute (even that word speaks to God --- drinking out of a Flute for heaven’s sake!). Of this specific diet is no one thing, but many – preferably a combination of meat – the baser and dirtier the better- just like whores, you want the ones who know that a good debasing is a mass at St. Peter’s undone. Sausage, bacon, I like the back bacon – Irish or Canadian style. Thick and chewy, where you can taste every inch this animal struggled through, and his pain and grief at the death process, he is alive in you and oh does he bring you good tidings. Double smoked, applewood…you can’t fail with a start like this. If you did your head in the night or morning before, then this is the most surefire way to slap yourself in the ass and get going. As your own pace, of course. There should be butter, or jam (both is a wonderful thing to have together, on good crusty loaves of bread. Give your bacon something to bounce up from as it acrobats into the stars found just below your lungs, in the sky of your belly’s celestials. This should be done slowly, chewed, swallowed, engorged inside you. You need to know every moment of your life is coming together in the moments to come.
Eggs are optional – they fit or they don’t. I love a good scrambled egg, cooked in butter with chives, dill, maybe a little tomato or red onion if I’m feeling frisky and progressive. They can be another, more civilized layer to this breakfast of the daytime, creating colours and pastels in your fields at play. Also, a well made sunny side up (or down, as I prefer, I like poking it and seeing where it’ll leak, almost like reading tea leaves in the shady dealings of a gypsy- taking your money and not even giving you a good fuck. What’s the future worth like that? If you are a real zealot, I mean a foot soldier in the legion of Living – someone who knows that the light in someone’s eyes can annihilate you, or muffle your screams in their adeptness, that the mountains are all the walls of your body, the one we are now feeding, at the table, with the fork and spoon…someone who can see themselves, and the world for what it truly is. Devastating, inept and beautiful, and alive. Then, my dearie, will you know what you have gotten yourself into here, the bacon almost gone and the eggs and their maddening colours and textures making you cry. Also, there can be a trade off with the butter and jam, and the runny golden juice of the sunny sided egg. Your choice. I like an ample supply of bread to cover all three, sometimes separately, sometimes all at once. Now, the final gorge. If we were in Rome, it’d be time for the tickle of the feather, probably along with a few good slap and tickles, because when in Rome, do as the Romans do (especially when there is almost nothing that they won’t do)…you know, the good upheaval of the contents in your stomach. Most nowadays don’t go that way, and I only do when I’ve hit midnight too hard with brown liquors and forgotten to eat a meal. Myself, I keep it all in, a packed house for the opera and its ultimate climax. Something sweet and bready, pancakes, French toast (my favourite), waffles, anything that you can drown in terribly sugary chorus girls singing your body all the way home. This is the kind of meal you won’t need to supplement with snacking before you start up again for supper time.
Of course, I don’t even have to mention that the champagne is flowing through you like good biblical verse, Jesus coming into Jerusalem to be crucified, riding on an ass, green palms rattling in his terrified face. Bottles should come neatly, one after the next, with no cause of stopping until it’s a natural act having nothing to do with the supply. White wine, Lambrusco, sparkling rose, anything like this will do. You’ll have your choice of afternoon drinks later, long past the time you sleep all this madness off, and look your cunt in the eyes again, bellybutton first. Lastly, this ritual is only complete with a good, strong coffee or tea – black only, caffeine always, and don’t you know, always tipped with a little extra something. Be careful here. You don’t want to fall overboard from too heavy a pour of whiskey or brandy in your coffee, or in your pot of tea (always a pot, never just a cup. It’s bad luck, or so the gypsy told me before she fucked those sailors for free. Wonder if she saw them coming in her crystal ball). Savour this last piece of the pie, it will stay with you, allying you throughout your day, here on this earth, creating and destroying yourself, your gods, each other and the light inside the darkness hour after hour. There is always time for a surprise crucifixion and you, dear one, are now ready for it all. Old Testament and new, birth and death sacrament, tongues inside you and pricks making their way up your river Nile…the deed is done, the first one and now all the rest can follow.
Most importantly, make this breakfast last as long as you possibly can, preferably do it with people you love in one way or another (but by yourself has its place too, long as there is love, acceptance and a rough and ready desiring). Stand up from the table, and if you’ve the courage, recite some words which construct inside your esophagus, the sweet, the bubbles, the fallen beast, all mingling and creating a poem that God himself could not pen without this call to the sun to move his teetering ass across your sky, since you are already riding him from behind, belly up full of taste and fanaticism. Get up and shit it all out, and then make your way into the world. The sun’s not going anywhere just yet, and we still have supper to consider.
~ M. Lucia
Monday, December 13, 2010
Wow, nice ass. Bicycle pants. You don't see women wearing bicycle pants that often. At least I don't. And not this early in the morning. I actually knew a female bike messenger once. She had a pretty nice body - fit, you know, but nothing really sexy about it though--like not anything you would fantasize about. Not like this ass here. And maybe it's the way she's pulling at the Spandex, adjusting it there standing at the phone booth. Not many phone booths anymore and none really used as phones either. Like this chick here, using it as a changing room. Is she getting changed? Did I miss an even better show earlier? Like pulling these pants up over onto a bare ass? Man, look at the way she's smoothing the material across the cheeks. That's right baby, make it nice and tight. Look, even that woman in the bank window is checking it out. I always found it funny these people with their desks basically right on the sidewalk except behind a window. Must be weird to have people watching you work all day long. Fucking tourists traipsing by the window on the way to take another picture of the fucking tree, just looking over your shoulder at the spreadsheets. And weird that tree, right--how popular it is? Like a city as amazing as NYC and the tree is a destination. It IS a nice one though this year but why is it I always feel bad for the tree? How do people just give a tree in their yard up for sacrifice? Man, I wish she would turn around a little so I can get a better look at what else besides the ass she's got going on. Just let someone come along and cut a tree that's been around for, what, 100 years down? The only upside for the tree I guess is that it becomes "the most famous Christmas tree in the world." I wonder if the tree finds that a consolation. I wonder if, given the choice, the tree would opt for death knowing that it would be famous in death - and beloved even, and become the background to hundreds of thousands of pictures in photo albums - OUR CHRISTMAS TRIP TO NYC!!! What's with this bank woman - what's her problem? Fucking women - so catty and jealous of each other. Can't let a hot chick strut her stuff a little without being a hater. What if the shoe was on the other foot and it was the trees that controlled everything and all we did was photosynthesize carbon monoxide all day long or whatever trees do. And the trees had some annual celebration where they took a human and propped his dead body in their public square, hung lights on him and took pictures for a month before grinding him up into mulch. What human would opt for that honor? I think there might be a few takers. A blaze of glory after all as opposed to the slow march downward to an undignified end. Maybe it's sounding a little attractive? Live fast and die young and be the center of tree attention for a moment? Well, I know for me, I take too much pleasure in this life. Like this woman here in the bike pants. Who would ever want to give it all up when there's this to look at?
Wait.....
OK - full disclosure time. I'm a block away now looking at the damned tree. Turns out the bank woman wasn't far off. I didn't catch the curly grey hair coming out of that skinny MAN'S (that's right, it's a man baby) bike helmet. Grey hair because my hot chick was actually an old MAN with a nice ass but clearly not my kind of ass it turns out. Either way, no big deal. The big deal is that old man - he didn't really look like a crazy man or, like, homeless or anything like that - anyway the big deal is the reason he was in the phone booth was because he was fucking the phone for some reason. He's standing there with his wrinkly pecker stuck in the coin return slot, like banging the phone. Jeez - never mind the gaddamm Christmas tree, what about the phone? How do you think the phone feels?
Wait.....
OK - full disclosure time. I'm a block away now looking at the damned tree. Turns out the bank woman wasn't far off. I didn't catch the curly grey hair coming out of that skinny MAN'S (that's right, it's a man baby) bike helmet. Grey hair because my hot chick was actually an old MAN with a nice ass but clearly not my kind of ass it turns out. Either way, no big deal. The big deal is that old man - he didn't really look like a crazy man or, like, homeless or anything like that - anyway the big deal is the reason he was in the phone booth was because he was fucking the phone for some reason. He's standing there with his wrinkly pecker stuck in the coin return slot, like banging the phone. Jeez - never mind the gaddamm Christmas tree, what about the phone? How do you think the phone feels?
Saturday, December 11, 2010
Little Boys Are The Toughest
Or so they say. I hold you, little girl, and I could sit with you passed out in my arms for a good one hundred years. You, with the dark and stormy blue eyes, your quiet, supple and gentle limbs (when you are not squeezing my finger with your full fist of fury, or kicking with the best roundhouse a little girl could bring to this world) and your absolutely tuckered heart, sleeping and beating and storming castles in her dreams on my belly, against my chest. One of our friends asked "what do you think she's dreaming about? All her adventures she's experienced in 5 weeks of being here" with full sincerity and in all seriousness. But. I knew it was so much more. She knew my whole life, all of the bullshit we encountered, all that we lost from each other day by day by day...she knew of the heavens, and the pits of self made despair, the weeds that grew from the art we drove from ourselves with complete destruction and non-intention, she knew of it all. She lay slumped against me with the un-held weight of a body not yet knowing how much it would cling to itself, to all the fears and fright and unaccomplished storytelling that she didn't know of yet. She didn't know about the raconteurs known as angry young men with blue eyes.
They came to you in the night, when they remembered that they had no one else but you who believed in them. It was a balmy summer night --always-- when they finally succumbed. You had been out, one of the last nights out in your 20's...with the ridiculous one whose presence was there only because you let him be. The other, was the dirty tipped angel, tough and scabbed thick fingers, and the skin of an old man in a boy's body, helter skelter all summer long and guilt and the ability to have mormon love running through your blood and yet never possess it. It finally happened. He finally (again) kissed you ferociously in a bar, on 3rd avenue, then tried to pick up the homely bartender, because it would prove something and be easier. Then he ran away in a cab (he couldn't walk; such a lightweight) and told me to ask "him" why he had to go home. Me and the lesser one were at my home within the hour - he thought he was going to be sick out of the cab, but made it home to astoria (my home where I took care of him and he didn't belong, to my body, soul, mind or heart), and puked repeatedly -- I couldn't stop thinking of him - the other with hurtful and innocent blue eyes- all night, and I passed out on the bed with this one. This lack. He was down for the count. The tv was still on and I was relatively drunk, just before 30 in a way I cannot repeat now.
He had a special ring back then - it was "Mama's, Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Cowboys". It was right for the night, and for my re-telling on this night, in nearly winter. Electric lights bounding around my heart, cavalcade of deities. Pulling down on my lungs, stringing me to my past and to who I am being tiny shards of who I used to inhabit, in every pore still me as ever. My little boy came to me. I woke up, after him calling me with that repeated song about 10 times, and the other one never woke up (in so many ways) and I told him, to come here. He had a bad fight with his brother in law, a good man, and there was embarrassment, violence and already forming the foundation of regret. He was on his way. I lay on the sofa, in the dark, waiting. He came. He grabbed my shirt as he walked in --- utterly incapacitated, and devastating. We sat on the couch and he told me to lean on him, as he told me how when he met my parents, that they would love him, they would. We talked soberly, and I don't remember who kissed who but I had him in my arms, and he had me under him, and then - we left. We went upstairs to the 6th floor rooftop, and his strong arms broke the lock. We were alone up there, and we stared at the stars, and he fucked me up and down, and I tore him apart, and he came on top of me, with no ego, no stains and no life experience- just the bare nakedness of innocence, the tree growing up straight with no women, apples, serpents or creeds, in his deep asunder of blue eyes.
We slept there for awhile, on that chilly, hard cement rooftop, and one blanket. That strong, self made man of a little boy and me, 9 years older, and not a day's worth more mature, in each other's arms cradled - with no heaviness, or knowledge of how to make this continue much further into the future, or much sense of reality - under an utterly imperfect, navy black Astoria sky, I feel alright in New York City, Finally. In his warm, soft Arizona arms I felt right. And I cried, for my first happy night in the big city under the skylights of the warming stars, in the same building as my mother went for her doctor's appointments, my aunt, now gone, would escape her agoraphobia to run by and say hello, my dad, now gone but not away, took 5 trips to my old apartment to help move me into this new place, sickened and tiring as he was, with not a moment's complaint, in this place where I learning to stop running, and slept for a short while. We went inside, we kissed goodnight, and I woke up next to the wrong one, and told him that the young boy and I had finally had our night on the roof. He didn't get it. Some are born clueless and there's not a wise word what can change that. I turned 30 with them the next night.
So, my cotton ball soft, long worked for little girl, with the red-dark hair and the old junkie's stare, you are perfect in this world, here with us who stuck it out. Our words might not impress you, and our excuses none but lame, but our worlds collide in your nap time dreams tonight ---beware of blue eyes, girl, they'll slaughter your every name. They might kill you where you sleep, infect the textures of your dreams and take you...as you fall sweeter and moister into the crook of my arm, asleep - be glad you were born a girl, in your ability to fall against me with complete abandon, and pride. Keep wriggling, to bend over the tide.
~ M. Lucia
They came to you in the night, when they remembered that they had no one else but you who believed in them. It was a balmy summer night --always-- when they finally succumbed. You had been out, one of the last nights out in your 20's...with the ridiculous one whose presence was there only because you let him be. The other, was the dirty tipped angel, tough and scabbed thick fingers, and the skin of an old man in a boy's body, helter skelter all summer long and guilt and the ability to have mormon love running through your blood and yet never possess it. It finally happened. He finally (again) kissed you ferociously in a bar, on 3rd avenue, then tried to pick up the homely bartender, because it would prove something and be easier. Then he ran away in a cab (he couldn't walk; such a lightweight) and told me to ask "him" why he had to go home. Me and the lesser one were at my home within the hour - he thought he was going to be sick out of the cab, but made it home to astoria (my home where I took care of him and he didn't belong, to my body, soul, mind or heart), and puked repeatedly -- I couldn't stop thinking of him - the other with hurtful and innocent blue eyes- all night, and I passed out on the bed with this one. This lack. He was down for the count. The tv was still on and I was relatively drunk, just before 30 in a way I cannot repeat now.
He had a special ring back then - it was "Mama's, Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Cowboys". It was right for the night, and for my re-telling on this night, in nearly winter. Electric lights bounding around my heart, cavalcade of deities. Pulling down on my lungs, stringing me to my past and to who I am being tiny shards of who I used to inhabit, in every pore still me as ever. My little boy came to me. I woke up, after him calling me with that repeated song about 10 times, and the other one never woke up (in so many ways) and I told him, to come here. He had a bad fight with his brother in law, a good man, and there was embarrassment, violence and already forming the foundation of regret. He was on his way. I lay on the sofa, in the dark, waiting. He came. He grabbed my shirt as he walked in --- utterly incapacitated, and devastating. We sat on the couch and he told me to lean on him, as he told me how when he met my parents, that they would love him, they would. We talked soberly, and I don't remember who kissed who but I had him in my arms, and he had me under him, and then - we left. We went upstairs to the 6th floor rooftop, and his strong arms broke the lock. We were alone up there, and we stared at the stars, and he fucked me up and down, and I tore him apart, and he came on top of me, with no ego, no stains and no life experience- just the bare nakedness of innocence, the tree growing up straight with no women, apples, serpents or creeds, in his deep asunder of blue eyes.
We slept there for awhile, on that chilly, hard cement rooftop, and one blanket. That strong, self made man of a little boy and me, 9 years older, and not a day's worth more mature, in each other's arms cradled - with no heaviness, or knowledge of how to make this continue much further into the future, or much sense of reality - under an utterly imperfect, navy black Astoria sky, I feel alright in New York City, Finally. In his warm, soft Arizona arms I felt right. And I cried, for my first happy night in the big city under the skylights of the warming stars, in the same building as my mother went for her doctor's appointments, my aunt, now gone, would escape her agoraphobia to run by and say hello, my dad, now gone but not away, took 5 trips to my old apartment to help move me into this new place, sickened and tiring as he was, with not a moment's complaint, in this place where I learning to stop running, and slept for a short while. We went inside, we kissed goodnight, and I woke up next to the wrong one, and told him that the young boy and I had finally had our night on the roof. He didn't get it. Some are born clueless and there's not a wise word what can change that. I turned 30 with them the next night.
So, my cotton ball soft, long worked for little girl, with the red-dark hair and the old junkie's stare, you are perfect in this world, here with us who stuck it out. Our words might not impress you, and our excuses none but lame, but our worlds collide in your nap time dreams tonight ---beware of blue eyes, girl, they'll slaughter your every name. They might kill you where you sleep, infect the textures of your dreams and take you...as you fall sweeter and moister into the crook of my arm, asleep - be glad you were born a girl, in your ability to fall against me with complete abandon, and pride. Keep wriggling, to bend over the tide.
~ M. Lucia
Friday, December 10, 2010
THE KING--AN ORDINARY ODE
There's a picture of him that I have and keep out. He doesn't know his photo's being taken. He's coming home from work. His arms are laden with papers, books, folders and for some reason a large cardboard tube askew to it all. He's wearing a windbreaker/rain jacket. It's green. I know it's consignment. I know it has chalk in the pockets. Did I say he doesn't know the picture is being taken? Someone - the photographer - is peaking out the living room window, an anti-paparazzi. Anit- because no one would ever pay a nickel for this man's photo. No one wants to see that face, with the weight of the world just barely poking through that look of determination, in any magazine on the doctor's office coffee table. He climbs the front steps the way he has a thousand times before to join his wife and five children at the dinner table. The house, the table, the food, the electricity, the beloved TV, the absolute sense of love and security all there because he climbs up and down those stairs and drives back and forth on the highway day after day. So much so that the momentum of going and going and going sustains him even to this day into his seventies. He hasn't stopped. He hasn't been able to.
Always, on top of his duties, he maintained a belief in humanity and its basic goodness. Assailed constantly for his moderate voice, and by jealousy of his instinctive ability to know what it was like in the other guys shoes. Despite all of that he was optimistic. Optimistic about the people around him, none of whom were fit to hold a candle to him (or whatever the dumb expression is), who criticized him, who called him a moderate--he believed always that they meant well and he knew that they struggled just as he did. Maybe they weren't equipped to handle it as well as he was. Maybe they didn't have his gifts. He knew his ultimate duty, to himself, to his family, to his community and to the God he put his faith in despite having the mental capacity to know better, was to lift the tide where and when he could. Add just a little water to the ocean and we would all float a little higher. The King and his subjects.
I have my own gifts, my own passions. One of them is the perspective to know that the footprints on this path I'm walking on are his. My inclination is not to believe in my fellow man the way he did--the way he does, even now as death's indignities are raining down on his friends and life's ultimate betrayal is coming into sharp focus. Having been loved the way I was I walk with a confidence that only can come from the sure knowledge of own worth - knowledge I only received because of close proximity to him. And so I'm over-confident. I'm cocky. I sometimes think I'm better. But I am his princely son and have also been inured with his instinct for taking the back seat. For discovering the beauty in my community of mediocrity. For celebrating the ordinary all around me. And in that way becoming ordinary myself, but I belong, and by belonging I make the group better. There's virtue in giving your life for your brother, even when he doesn't deserve it. If only because that act in itself is uncommon. It's radical even. Most people are too scared to do it.
I know how he feels now, the King. I know that look on his face when he thinks he's alone. We don't want pity, we don't want glory. We want the path. We want the journey. We want the struggle. It ennobles us. It makes us kings.
Always, on top of his duties, he maintained a belief in humanity and its basic goodness. Assailed constantly for his moderate voice, and by jealousy of his instinctive ability to know what it was like in the other guys shoes. Despite all of that he was optimistic. Optimistic about the people around him, none of whom were fit to hold a candle to him (or whatever the dumb expression is), who criticized him, who called him a moderate--he believed always that they meant well and he knew that they struggled just as he did. Maybe they weren't equipped to handle it as well as he was. Maybe they didn't have his gifts. He knew his ultimate duty, to himself, to his family, to his community and to the God he put his faith in despite having the mental capacity to know better, was to lift the tide where and when he could. Add just a little water to the ocean and we would all float a little higher. The King and his subjects.
I have my own gifts, my own passions. One of them is the perspective to know that the footprints on this path I'm walking on are his. My inclination is not to believe in my fellow man the way he did--the way he does, even now as death's indignities are raining down on his friends and life's ultimate betrayal is coming into sharp focus. Having been loved the way I was I walk with a confidence that only can come from the sure knowledge of own worth - knowledge I only received because of close proximity to him. And so I'm over-confident. I'm cocky. I sometimes think I'm better. But I am his princely son and have also been inured with his instinct for taking the back seat. For discovering the beauty in my community of mediocrity. For celebrating the ordinary all around me. And in that way becoming ordinary myself, but I belong, and by belonging I make the group better. There's virtue in giving your life for your brother, even when he doesn't deserve it. If only because that act in itself is uncommon. It's radical even. Most people are too scared to do it.
I know how he feels now, the King. I know that look on his face when he thinks he's alone. We don't want pity, we don't want glory. We want the path. We want the journey. We want the struggle. It ennobles us. It makes us kings.
Wednesday, December 8, 2010
Double Reed
The vines always locate me, in the outer reaches of my deepest theta states, warm and comfortable, well at rest, stepping off the edge of the cliff, in tandem. The song writes itself from the growing and blowing breeze insides the holes in my arms. I should explain how they got there.
This was not the ultimate trip back in time to the ancient smell, dusty, sex stinking, fanatical and livid that I had hoped for. The aesthetic was not right at all. Not romantic, like I had hoped. No swept up hair, no kohl marking my eyes for the slaughter of the sort of love affair that I would gladly follow into the grave, my own or any poor bastard I had to kill to please my love. Yes, I know I've always been that sort of woman, in this or any incarnation. Anything for the man, the woman dies by my hand. I never made that decision, but somehow it seems it was made for me, like a cattle being stamped for her master.
This was some kind of mosaic - a no man's land of my past, the childhood, the other in between mundane worlds that gripped into a fist all my most recent, imaginary or made up memories, and images and sands of electric light on a wall. I fall with full force every time through this wall of sand, of glass, of television light--the sort reared in dreamland. Lately I have been attacked. A good deal of it has produced a fever; a running, a constant paranoia, a mental overload of people just trying to put me in the ground everywhere I turned. But somehow, amongst this constant battle for my dream body, there was no fear. I always seem to know it's a part; there is the feeling of people watching though I cannot see them, and the sky no matter where or when, feels endless, like there are worlds outside of, beyond and in front of it, all sides now beneath my feet, kicking the dirt of my daily life (this one) about the plot I am half-constructing, half creating and half ruled by. My ego has no place here. I am simply a grain, washing up at the foot of God, he a grain at my feet, the abyss there right next to me all the time.
There were elements of the ancient world. More the words used to describe the scene than the feeling and details of the scene itself. Ships at sea, waves tossing and turning. Made of wood - creaky, planks, wet wood soaked to the brim, but dry inside where who but members of the Velvet Underground lived, played and rehearsed - here in this boat, which I find myself upon. He is blond, attractive. I think to myself that I don't usually think this of the yellow haired ones, but he has a familiarity. Then again, I cannot think who in the world he is. There were no blondes in the Velvet Underground. Save Nico, and I don't like the ladies nor was she anywhere to be seen. I thought, is it John Cage? He's dark haired and Welsh. I stopped trying to figure it out. An older, skinny man who seemed to know more than this morose, bohemian lot of figures knew, he was around in the peripheries (he had been part of the dream before this one, where I was having to climb a big tree outside the back woods of my childhood home - it seeming huge like the soul castle. A killer was after me, then I was he - a cat climbed the tree, became him, became me, and I escaped, cutting a thick rope and swinging pirate like back into my old bedroom window. He was there, but I don't know if he was the cat, or the killer, or me, or the police sent to find me).
Back to the tall ships. There is no modernity without a feeling of the profane, and oh did I allow the profane to rule the day. Once the skinny overseer left (by, of course, silently diving into the impossibly tall waves and finding his connecting ship nearby, out of frame), we took this decadent party to nothing less plebeian than a trailer/RV. The rest were gone, and it was our turn to act out the plot. It played like the usual porno, we fucked this that and the other way. I could sense, feel and exalt from everything - the viciousness of him pulling me close to him by holding suddenly onto my hips and then, my wrists, as he fucked me harder and I started to come, and then, in between the drivers and passenger seats (what a equanimous relationship this was), the blond and I fucked against each other, tongues, hair and sweat my newest cavalcade of connection. It was something else. After it was all done, and it did seem to keep going on and on to which I had no complaints, a woman seemed to appear out of nowhere. She was average, and dressed more like the modern day (I wouldn't know what we were dressed like, since we seemed naked from the start). I felt heavy with his fluids, and my own, and there she was, meek and bothersome in the corner of the vehicle, trying to get him to seduce her. Knowing myself, I was having none of that. Let her find her own way to the pornographic epicenter of the romano-modern-white trash-rough fuck-no frills world in which I had found myself. Let her sail her own ships and make her own story. I didn't so much throw her out of the trailer, as I just opened the latch of the door behind her, and the bitch just fell on out.
Well, this skinny little thing set upon a rage at us both. I yelled at him to start locking the doors, since she was out to destroy us (funny I had missed her stalking presence when I was in the trees in childhood). We both started securing the vehicle, but somehow there were so many steps to doing this and reaching outside became a part of the locking up ritual, so there were ultimately loopholes. She grew like a stunned animal outside in the dirt, and flailed at us, mostly at me, in every moment she could find a few inches to snub her way into, on the inside of our fucking contest to ride shotgun. Soon, we seemed to have escaped, and I was up high on a large platform indoors; still a sort of audience nearby, small, meaningless, silent, watching. Her, not me. He tried to get the knife from her, but it was Huge and she hurled it up at me, from right below, so she couldn't miss. It seemed to penetrate my right upper arm, at least 4 or 5 times, in and out, like a sewing needle raping my outer layers of skin and tissue, muscle and blood. I recognized that she "got me" but then, somehow, even after she was chased out by the now woman in charge (business suit and all), no one payed me any mind, but I wanted them to. Because I was ok. My tattoo, the roman one with the vines and the provincial words usually found on my upper left arm, was now on the right one, where she had landed her steel into me (and out of me, since I had ripped it non-chalantly out and dropped it onto the floor below. It had made a definite "ding" sound on the floor). The wounds were incredibly deep, but somehow, like certain puncture wounds are, complete in their containing of the blood that I had thought would have flowed from them like merlot, the cheap, thick sort. It didn't hurt, and she was gone, and I had smiled at him, since our good time was un-affected. You can't take back a fuck like that one.
Somehow, after a few more tosses and turns, elysium took me one step further removed from action, and people, and the story, so-called. I was travelling up the mountains far upstate, and the colours were achingly beautiful. I knew my father was farther up, along with so many others whose atmosphere was not allowed to mingle with ours. Maybe it was he, and they, the invisible ones, watching me all the time, standing beside me in all my adventure, crudeness, foreplay and denouement. Always there, in the brightest of colours, blinded by sunshine, just up and around the corner of the mountain. My last thought was one of houses, always in my familial mindset. I would have to buy an old one, made of stone, not of wood, since that far up the mountain must get really cold in the winter, so we would have to have one of those to see us through to the new face of Spring- bounding plot lines, revengeful women, lustful men and myself being the same in all of these worlds, complete in each vine, wrapping further through me in my quiet trip up and around the mountain, wrapped in a shroud of my own ego, and my own making.
~ M. Lucia
This was not the ultimate trip back in time to the ancient smell, dusty, sex stinking, fanatical and livid that I had hoped for. The aesthetic was not right at all. Not romantic, like I had hoped. No swept up hair, no kohl marking my eyes for the slaughter of the sort of love affair that I would gladly follow into the grave, my own or any poor bastard I had to kill to please my love. Yes, I know I've always been that sort of woman, in this or any incarnation. Anything for the man, the woman dies by my hand. I never made that decision, but somehow it seems it was made for me, like a cattle being stamped for her master.
This was some kind of mosaic - a no man's land of my past, the childhood, the other in between mundane worlds that gripped into a fist all my most recent, imaginary or made up memories, and images and sands of electric light on a wall. I fall with full force every time through this wall of sand, of glass, of television light--the sort reared in dreamland. Lately I have been attacked. A good deal of it has produced a fever; a running, a constant paranoia, a mental overload of people just trying to put me in the ground everywhere I turned. But somehow, amongst this constant battle for my dream body, there was no fear. I always seem to know it's a part; there is the feeling of people watching though I cannot see them, and the sky no matter where or when, feels endless, like there are worlds outside of, beyond and in front of it, all sides now beneath my feet, kicking the dirt of my daily life (this one) about the plot I am half-constructing, half creating and half ruled by. My ego has no place here. I am simply a grain, washing up at the foot of God, he a grain at my feet, the abyss there right next to me all the time.
There were elements of the ancient world. More the words used to describe the scene than the feeling and details of the scene itself. Ships at sea, waves tossing and turning. Made of wood - creaky, planks, wet wood soaked to the brim, but dry inside where who but members of the Velvet Underground lived, played and rehearsed - here in this boat, which I find myself upon. He is blond, attractive. I think to myself that I don't usually think this of the yellow haired ones, but he has a familiarity. Then again, I cannot think who in the world he is. There were no blondes in the Velvet Underground. Save Nico, and I don't like the ladies nor was she anywhere to be seen. I thought, is it John Cage? He's dark haired and Welsh. I stopped trying to figure it out. An older, skinny man who seemed to know more than this morose, bohemian lot of figures knew, he was around in the peripheries (he had been part of the dream before this one, where I was having to climb a big tree outside the back woods of my childhood home - it seeming huge like the soul castle. A killer was after me, then I was he - a cat climbed the tree, became him, became me, and I escaped, cutting a thick rope and swinging pirate like back into my old bedroom window. He was there, but I don't know if he was the cat, or the killer, or me, or the police sent to find me).
Back to the tall ships. There is no modernity without a feeling of the profane, and oh did I allow the profane to rule the day. Once the skinny overseer left (by, of course, silently diving into the impossibly tall waves and finding his connecting ship nearby, out of frame), we took this decadent party to nothing less plebeian than a trailer/RV. The rest were gone, and it was our turn to act out the plot. It played like the usual porno, we fucked this that and the other way. I could sense, feel and exalt from everything - the viciousness of him pulling me close to him by holding suddenly onto my hips and then, my wrists, as he fucked me harder and I started to come, and then, in between the drivers and passenger seats (what a equanimous relationship this was), the blond and I fucked against each other, tongues, hair and sweat my newest cavalcade of connection. It was something else. After it was all done, and it did seem to keep going on and on to which I had no complaints, a woman seemed to appear out of nowhere. She was average, and dressed more like the modern day (I wouldn't know what we were dressed like, since we seemed naked from the start). I felt heavy with his fluids, and my own, and there she was, meek and bothersome in the corner of the vehicle, trying to get him to seduce her. Knowing myself, I was having none of that. Let her find her own way to the pornographic epicenter of the romano-modern-white trash-rough fuck-no frills world in which I had found myself. Let her sail her own ships and make her own story. I didn't so much throw her out of the trailer, as I just opened the latch of the door behind her, and the bitch just fell on out.
Well, this skinny little thing set upon a rage at us both. I yelled at him to start locking the doors, since she was out to destroy us (funny I had missed her stalking presence when I was in the trees in childhood). We both started securing the vehicle, but somehow there were so many steps to doing this and reaching outside became a part of the locking up ritual, so there were ultimately loopholes. She grew like a stunned animal outside in the dirt, and flailed at us, mostly at me, in every moment she could find a few inches to snub her way into, on the inside of our fucking contest to ride shotgun. Soon, we seemed to have escaped, and I was up high on a large platform indoors; still a sort of audience nearby, small, meaningless, silent, watching. Her, not me. He tried to get the knife from her, but it was Huge and she hurled it up at me, from right below, so she couldn't miss. It seemed to penetrate my right upper arm, at least 4 or 5 times, in and out, like a sewing needle raping my outer layers of skin and tissue, muscle and blood. I recognized that she "got me" but then, somehow, even after she was chased out by the now woman in charge (business suit and all), no one payed me any mind, but I wanted them to. Because I was ok. My tattoo, the roman one with the vines and the provincial words usually found on my upper left arm, was now on the right one, where she had landed her steel into me (and out of me, since I had ripped it non-chalantly out and dropped it onto the floor below. It had made a definite "ding" sound on the floor). The wounds were incredibly deep, but somehow, like certain puncture wounds are, complete in their containing of the blood that I had thought would have flowed from them like merlot, the cheap, thick sort. It didn't hurt, and she was gone, and I had smiled at him, since our good time was un-affected. You can't take back a fuck like that one.
Somehow, after a few more tosses and turns, elysium took me one step further removed from action, and people, and the story, so-called. I was travelling up the mountains far upstate, and the colours were achingly beautiful. I knew my father was farther up, along with so many others whose atmosphere was not allowed to mingle with ours. Maybe it was he, and they, the invisible ones, watching me all the time, standing beside me in all my adventure, crudeness, foreplay and denouement. Always there, in the brightest of colours, blinded by sunshine, just up and around the corner of the mountain. My last thought was one of houses, always in my familial mindset. I would have to buy an old one, made of stone, not of wood, since that far up the mountain must get really cold in the winter, so we would have to have one of those to see us through to the new face of Spring- bounding plot lines, revengeful women, lustful men and myself being the same in all of these worlds, complete in each vine, wrapping further through me in my quiet trip up and around the mountain, wrapped in a shroud of my own ego, and my own making.
~ M. Lucia
Mild und leise
It's all very amusing. You think because you've seen a few movies, a few TV shows, maybe you've read some books or a magazine article you think you understand. You think you might have some insight into what makes me tick. You think my mother complex defines me. You think my abandonment issues inform my actions. You think what you interpret as my indifference to human life must have some basis in childhood events, some signature moment when I was exposed to death at too early an age. What is the right age to watch something/someone die I want to ask. What's too young? What's old enough?
You stare at me confused. Don't worry, it's a look I've seen before. Don't be embarrassed. Despite all your schooling, the books, magazines, movies and TV shows, I'd venture you've never met someone like me before. And I know I lot of people might say that. Expecially people with my healthy ego. (I know I misspelled that word back there believe me. I like to see it that way. I like to hear it too--EX-pecially-- but the visual just toots my trumpet. The "X" in the word--it reminds me of Sue Coutes in Racine Wisconsin. It was a business trip and I met her at the bar in a restaurant called...what was it? The Yardarm! That was it...Bar and Grille, with the "e" there at the end. [I feigned a poor recollection just then; it was an effect for your benefit. It sounded stylish somehow. Truth is I remember EVERYTHING from that night and all the others too.] She (Sue) ordered an "EXpresso, please" and I felt a stir in my boxers and no amount of whiskey then could stop me, poor Sue. In the end Sue looked confused too but eventually she seemed OK with it all. And here, in a movie, the "killer" would say something like "I never heard her complain!" and laugh maniacally, but didn't say anything like that.)
So, my ego. It's something I hold tightly onto. And I'm well aware what happens to me when it slips. It's not necessarily a "looking on the bright side of things," the ego, but it is close. Anyway, I just know that it helps me to keep up an outlook of self-encouragement, one might call it, and not give in to negative thoughts. I don't know if you're thinking that the ego is the thing that keeps me out of trouble; that the positive outlook and my conscious aversion to the "down side of things" helps me function "normally" and that the occasional slide into a kind of loose, non-clinical depression might be the thing that brings about the bad stuff. And by "bad stuff" I'm assuming that by now you know what I mean. Anyway, though, the truth is it's the opposite--I think it's the ego that makes me immune ultimately to those feelings that might otherwise prevent someone else, someone not me, from relishing the feeling of someone's heartbeat conducting through certain kinds of wash-line rope being pulled tightly enough around a neck, making an X with the twine from behind, you know, to constrict and limit ones intake of air to a level low enough to cause slow death. It's like a telegraph, the stutter-step blips of panicked heart beating vibrating through rope, but you have to listen closely.
And so it's the old him or me scenario, back to questions and statements of ego. (Mostly though they're "her or me" scenarios in my case.) But what I'm saying is that I could suppress my ego and just feel sorry for myself. Maybe that would help stop the killing. Allow the remorse to overcome me when it peeks in and makes me hide my face in the bathroom late at night; early in the morning maybe that's supposed to be, while I'm pissing in the dark, listening to the sound of water on water, and the memory loud enough in my head to sound like it's coming from behind the shower curtain, of Sue Coutes saying "expecially" right before I did what I did to her because right before I did it she was just talking on and on even as I started taking off her clothes, (and in this exercise she helped me, I guess she was into it for a time) and gabbing away even as I made fascinated circles with my finger tip around her huge left nipple protruding through the tank top I left on even after she was dead, part of it yellowing in the gathering pool of urine. But I'm not willing to live that life. I'm not going to crawl in the muck of my insecurities and second-guess myself constantly. I do what I do because it brings me joy and it makes me feel alive and vital. The alternative is death - living death but death all the same. And it will be me that dies. So I'm not willing to die. It's her or me.
I've read all the same books you have. I've seen the movies. It's not at all like that and you don't really know me. I'm here, among you. Sitting in the next office, riding across from you on the train, sleeping in bed with you at night. I'm here and I'm alive.
You stare at me confused. Don't worry, it's a look I've seen before. Don't be embarrassed. Despite all your schooling, the books, magazines, movies and TV shows, I'd venture you've never met someone like me before. And I know I lot of people might say that. Expecially people with my healthy ego. (I know I misspelled that word back there believe me. I like to see it that way. I like to hear it too--EX-pecially-- but the visual just toots my trumpet. The "X" in the word--it reminds me of Sue Coutes in Racine Wisconsin. It was a business trip and I met her at the bar in a restaurant called...what was it? The Yardarm! That was it...Bar and Grille, with the "e" there at the end. [I feigned a poor recollection just then; it was an effect for your benefit. It sounded stylish somehow. Truth is I remember EVERYTHING from that night and all the others too.] She (Sue) ordered an "EXpresso, please" and I felt a stir in my boxers and no amount of whiskey then could stop me, poor Sue. In the end Sue looked confused too but eventually she seemed OK with it all. And here, in a movie, the "killer" would say something like "I never heard her complain!" and laugh maniacally, but didn't say anything like that.)
So, my ego. It's something I hold tightly onto. And I'm well aware what happens to me when it slips. It's not necessarily a "looking on the bright side of things," the ego, but it is close. Anyway, I just know that it helps me to keep up an outlook of self-encouragement, one might call it, and not give in to negative thoughts. I don't know if you're thinking that the ego is the thing that keeps me out of trouble; that the positive outlook and my conscious aversion to the "down side of things" helps me function "normally" and that the occasional slide into a kind of loose, non-clinical depression might be the thing that brings about the bad stuff. And by "bad stuff" I'm assuming that by now you know what I mean. Anyway, though, the truth is it's the opposite--I think it's the ego that makes me immune ultimately to those feelings that might otherwise prevent someone else, someone not me, from relishing the feeling of someone's heartbeat conducting through certain kinds of wash-line rope being pulled tightly enough around a neck, making an X with the twine from behind, you know, to constrict and limit ones intake of air to a level low enough to cause slow death. It's like a telegraph, the stutter-step blips of panicked heart beating vibrating through rope, but you have to listen closely.
And so it's the old him or me scenario, back to questions and statements of ego. (Mostly though they're "her or me" scenarios in my case.) But what I'm saying is that I could suppress my ego and just feel sorry for myself. Maybe that would help stop the killing. Allow the remorse to overcome me when it peeks in and makes me hide my face in the bathroom late at night; early in the morning maybe that's supposed to be, while I'm pissing in the dark, listening to the sound of water on water, and the memory loud enough in my head to sound like it's coming from behind the shower curtain, of Sue Coutes saying "expecially" right before I did what I did to her because right before I did it she was just talking on and on even as I started taking off her clothes, (and in this exercise she helped me, I guess she was into it for a time) and gabbing away even as I made fascinated circles with my finger tip around her huge left nipple protruding through the tank top I left on even after she was dead, part of it yellowing in the gathering pool of urine. But I'm not willing to live that life. I'm not going to crawl in the muck of my insecurities and second-guess myself constantly. I do what I do because it brings me joy and it makes me feel alive and vital. The alternative is death - living death but death all the same. And it will be me that dies. So I'm not willing to die. It's her or me.
I've read all the same books you have. I've seen the movies. It's not at all like that and you don't really know me. I'm here, among you. Sitting in the next office, riding across from you on the train, sleeping in bed with you at night. I'm here and I'm alive.
Monday, December 6, 2010
THE DRUMS OF WAR
Our troops are gathered at the border.
This is the moment I was made for. Leading men in battle is my destiny. Why then did God make in me the heart to reflect on, and fret over, the consequences?
Even now, after emissaries have returned, two riders to a horse, our enemy having ignored the ancient rites of chivalry--they have taken the young one, so the report reads on the table before me, and spilled his blood, dishonored his corpse and sent dignified men, outraged, in hasty flight back to camp as an effrontery to my person and my royal office--even now I question the righteousness of so much death, death surely to come, one way or another, the moment I stand and exit this tent and mount. Just showing my colors will join the battle. This head, sheathed in the metal and mail of father and grandfather, and his before him, a deadly signal to the hoary grey-hairs, veterans of the majestic battles of old and keepers of the order of knightly conduct, and to the quickened tempers of the hot-heads, the youngsters, all hoping for glory and spoils. No one out for death.
But it will surely come, and perhaps to me too. But I cannot linger any longer. The field is before me and has yielded already to the promise of my march, as it always has. I know not why, this time, I presage disaster. Was it the bird and her perch atop the standard pole, a dark shadow, a soundless dark void, unmoving day and night, sun and rain? Was it the downcast to the queenly countenance, barely able to meet my farewell gaze, perhaps sensing more deeply than I the coming doom? Was it the impossibly cheerful prognostication of the soothsayer, for victory and the subjugation of the enemy, an unprecedented auspice for conquest?
No matter. I can set aside these harbingers, these second-thoughts, this weakness of spirit, for that is my other great gift, besides an instinct for warfare--I can walk the path, mindful always and completely of my duty. As I ride forth, this coward I see before me in the glass will sink back beneath the muck and grovel in the hodgepodge. Soon the memory of this "other" me will be more than a distant one. I shall rake the offending assemblage of our enemy and carry my countrymen into the naked horror of the skirmish showing full the face of imperial war.
Oh honor--spread your cloak of exaltation and consecrate my sword for the bloody blessings it will bestow. I am your servant. Do with me as you will.
This is the moment I was made for. Leading men in battle is my destiny. Why then did God make in me the heart to reflect on, and fret over, the consequences?
Even now, after emissaries have returned, two riders to a horse, our enemy having ignored the ancient rites of chivalry--they have taken the young one, so the report reads on the table before me, and spilled his blood, dishonored his corpse and sent dignified men, outraged, in hasty flight back to camp as an effrontery to my person and my royal office--even now I question the righteousness of so much death, death surely to come, one way or another, the moment I stand and exit this tent and mount. Just showing my colors will join the battle. This head, sheathed in the metal and mail of father and grandfather, and his before him, a deadly signal to the hoary grey-hairs, veterans of the majestic battles of old and keepers of the order of knightly conduct, and to the quickened tempers of the hot-heads, the youngsters, all hoping for glory and spoils. No one out for death.
But it will surely come, and perhaps to me too. But I cannot linger any longer. The field is before me and has yielded already to the promise of my march, as it always has. I know not why, this time, I presage disaster. Was it the bird and her perch atop the standard pole, a dark shadow, a soundless dark void, unmoving day and night, sun and rain? Was it the downcast to the queenly countenance, barely able to meet my farewell gaze, perhaps sensing more deeply than I the coming doom? Was it the impossibly cheerful prognostication of the soothsayer, for victory and the subjugation of the enemy, an unprecedented auspice for conquest?
No matter. I can set aside these harbingers, these second-thoughts, this weakness of spirit, for that is my other great gift, besides an instinct for warfare--I can walk the path, mindful always and completely of my duty. As I ride forth, this coward I see before me in the glass will sink back beneath the muck and grovel in the hodgepodge. Soon the memory of this "other" me will be more than a distant one. I shall rake the offending assemblage of our enemy and carry my countrymen into the naked horror of the skirmish showing full the face of imperial war.
Oh honor--spread your cloak of exaltation and consecrate my sword for the bloody blessings it will bestow. I am your servant. Do with me as you will.
Saturday, December 4, 2010
PHANTOM LIMB
The pavement seemed irregular. There was something off, in the pitch or the texture, he couldn't place it. He felt as if he would tip over, or that he had to work extra hard at walking straight. And he was hot as hell, though the day was bitter and icy, and the wind had probing fingers. Everything was just a little different.
In his pocket was the rock she gave him. She didn't say where it came from. She wouldn't, but not out of any penchant for mystery or secret, more that she was, "less" that way, which of course ended up being "more" according to the old adage. She handed him the rock from her own pocket and looked straight ahead. He wasn't sure if she meant him to keep it or to just get the feel of it for a moment. She said only "check the pockets of any coat of mine and there'll be a rock somewhere in there." He chuckled trying to maintain the same sense of ease that she just carried without effort. He hesitated for a moment and then pocketed the stone. She just took it in stride like it was what she had intended although he had no way of really knowing.
Now, later, he still walked in the winter sun, after she had left him on the sidewalk. The rock was warm in his pocketed hand. The buildings glistened all around him. The sun reflected off, what, the 30th floor of a black building high above him. He felt a surge of strength like something out of an ancient Greek tale of heroics, like he was suddenly at the center of an epic struggle, the battle formed around him, the cell eye of a thunder cloud. The cyclops stared down at him, into him, knowing his every weakness, anticipating everything at once. The monster owned him, had been awaiting this destined stand and had angled for eons back into time to engineer every advantage up to this circle in time.
Except for the rock.
He arched his arm behind him, like David's sling, and sent it perfectly aimed upward but expecting, in an exquisite moment of reflection that encompassed the sum of all his hopes and fears at once, the rock to humpback and fall, but it lasered upward instead even as the sun eye widened in knowing surprise. They regarded each other as the rock between them moved from one to the other, for an eternity.
Friday, December 3, 2010
Haiku in the Name of Beauty
Russian rena rips
me; small talk over crass cunt-
sealed with a wax kiss
~ M. Lucia
me; small talk over crass cunt-
sealed with a wax kiss
~ M. Lucia
Tuesday, November 30, 2010
Valve Release
I have achieved it. It is accomplished. I can now do my job, as it were, as I might refer to it in a beggar’s paradise, halfway to lying down. Like a new slice of easy going heaven for me, this pathetic dreamer, non-achiever, in the work-a-day world. I look forward to those bodies, who idle in the same fashions as I, nearby and far far away in their caricature worlds of holiday and dinner commutes, gazing upon This – my half elated, half fearful stretched out form lying back with my pretty little head just a few feet from the radiating bliss emanating from my colour printer, the one it took six months to get moved one desk over to mine. Now, I can lie back, eat my bon bons, read my Sade and put my feet up (I will have to secure a foot stool of some kind, preferably one with golden tassels around it, to match my demeanor and mood) while my heavy, fulfilling mind sleeps the sleep of drunkards on the cobblestoned alleyways that exist just atop this loud, sleepy printer. The yellows of its radiations reminding me daily of why I am here; a simple pillow for a wayward girl, and me, in my kimono robe of red, creams and black silks, taking a nap poolside. The trees gently swaying above me, the sunset I have never been allowed to see here, always and forever out of reach.
I dream of that day, when my witchy gypsy medicinal fact sheets are checked, my hands their most adept, never cold again, when I can stand up, in the robe of course, flip off my crystal clear high heeled slippers, knocking every other person who irked me in their eyes, circle my model graveyard of places gone and picking up the bon bon wrappers and the old coffee and tea cups (my god, how many of them would there be by now, if I counted all of them), climbing upon the high level shelving all the way round the place, like a mangy cat in heat, and walk away, going the long way, gazing with a grin at that warm, golden orange sunset though glass, misting in between the panes at me and ushering me onwards, away and beyond (but actually away and beyond, not just the away and beyond which exists in my head, pulsing with an anxious heartbeat all the time….like when you can feel your heart beating in your arms and legs; you want something so badly…when your body tells you there is not another way).
For now, I rock back and forth, a traumatized queen of circumstance, and sip my 3rd hot beverage today, happy to think about blue waves, and French wine, and those slippers I still have to buy. My chair moves in all directions, now. Soon, I will follow it and spin myself a new tale, spin myself some comedy gold – right into every freedom I can still recognize. Eat the dust that kicks up as I leap out of here barefoot, you motherfuckers. Sorry the circumstances under which I exist here force me to never allow you people to see my softer side. Better to hide the softer side, than let the mean, hard one out when people least expect it. As I suspect more of you than not, do.
I have cried, laughed, been dejected, mourned, celebrated, aroused and numbed myself in this place…this chair is going to shoot straight up to the heavens, in those holes between the stars and the atmosphere- billowing blue smoke expressing itself from the truth, catching itself in my lips as it exits my mouth and cascades me past the dirty carpet. I’m taking the chair with me.
~ M. Lucia
Sunday, November 28, 2010
Thanksgiving Haiku
quiet, then vicious
raining as we walk the streets
yet never absolved.
~ M. Lucia
raining as we walk the streets
yet never absolved.
~ M. Lucia
Wednesday, November 24, 2010
Two Straight Lines Make a Circle
A pounding pain in my head brings me back to this place. A wet blanket cradling my extremities, as they grow warmer and warmer with each passing day. To match the powerful center flame that threatens each night to put me out in the rain again. In our naming of ourselves, we lose contact with the meaning. We lose contact with the meaning in just about every area of our lives – one bold, and flesh eating thread pulling us out of ourselves in a straight, un-ending circle (not a line, as most people think, but a circle, which can mean the opposite of infinity in the mundane shadow of a day) thwacking us on the back of the head, right beneath our remaining Cro-Magnon ridges where our necks meet our craniums, upwards and into the brain like an old Italian mother who didn’t need threaten you when you weren’t doing right, or a handful of a woman who followed her impulses one act at a time. Back upon us, back into us, the thread circles round and removes another layer of memory, of passing, of creative imagination which we once gathered loosely round our hearts. Remember what it felt like to be twenty years old? The meaning was so close. We didn’t know fuck all what to do with it, but it was right there. Alongside. The thread hadn’t sprung up from our coverings yet. All that pacing, and wasting and wanting got us here. Then, one day, it happened. Didn’t even notice it for a good number of years…took it for “maturity” and a life less chaotic. By the time the occasions would grow closer to each other, when we suspected the run had started in us, it was too late. Like telling a woman in the throws of birth to close her legs.
Then, after you’ve consigned yourself to this place and try to find all the good within its walls, just as occasionally you feel, in the midst of an auld song or photograph or even just the smell of a place, in the crook of your elbow, the coming of winter, the home fires burning somewhere else in someone else’s home, you feel it. Zing, like a shot up your veins and bursting through the doors of your heart. You are in that youthful place, but now with this knowledge, with this regret, with this experienced energy. It doesn’t travel alone, though. Never again will it come to you by itself. Accompanying it is its twin- the loss, the pain of nostalgia, the straight line (which the thread, feasting and devouring and circling through, doesn’t let you know it’s after shape-wise). The straight line comes down on your chest like a mallet, beating out the feelings and the moments and the now of things and the Meaning. Gone again. Into the cold, teal and rainy night. It leaves you with the rain, viscous and comforting, gliding down in a sheet outside your eye sight. The best part of this ritual is that you don’t know when it’s coming, where or how and if it will ever show up again, around the bend of a summer’s day, the same home fires burning in the heat of the evening sky. In this loss, something is gained --- always. Your name remains the same, whatever that means. Your name comes from your parents, your family, an actress your aunt adored…those sounds come from colours and metaphorical pictures of things we cannot say to each other. That can also be reduced to a lineage, a grouping, a set of human beings cut from the same cloth --- from which we all were nipped from.
Most people cannot abide this deconstruction and hold on so tightly to this name, to this persona. I hold onto mine but let it slip in and out betwixt my fingers, as if I’m dancing and its going out for the night…it always comes home, a little drunk, a little world weary, often horny and needing some sense of satisfaction. I take it to sleep and dreams with me, set it to vacations in the other worlds of my psyche, so-called, and let it weave its wonders around the cracks and fissures, bouncing its way into people and back down to earth again, across the nebulas in the needle’s eye. Prying open secret doors and alleyways, roads that keep travelling round again. Always around again. My sense of identity in this place, in this body, in this space and time, is both veiled in strength and completely raw, Because I set it free to re-create itself in the colour of someone else’s eyes, in the empathy for which I feel like a piece of flint for not rising up to my best of natures, in the desiring which I can and will never detach myself completely free from – not free just yet. There is so much more work to do. It’s as in a horrific nightmare: when that thread lurks behind you and you get that sinking feeling of it coming after you again (shielding the back of your head and neck, cowering over your chew toy heart, chewing your lip with each passing second you’ve missed) and you could try to out run it. Send it away, as I have often done. But every now and again, you should stop in your tracks. Turn around, and look him in the eye. He’s following you; he has been all of this time, because he emanates from you, between your legs and in your brain he grows, and finds his voice to counter your own. Smile at him, from the very primordial place of who you are. He will always recognize you, there, as yourself. Put down your dukes now, gaze on out and then in, and learn to abide.
~ M. Lucia
Then, after you’ve consigned yourself to this place and try to find all the good within its walls, just as occasionally you feel, in the midst of an auld song or photograph or even just the smell of a place, in the crook of your elbow, the coming of winter, the home fires burning somewhere else in someone else’s home, you feel it. Zing, like a shot up your veins and bursting through the doors of your heart. You are in that youthful place, but now with this knowledge, with this regret, with this experienced energy. It doesn’t travel alone, though. Never again will it come to you by itself. Accompanying it is its twin- the loss, the pain of nostalgia, the straight line (which the thread, feasting and devouring and circling through, doesn’t let you know it’s after shape-wise). The straight line comes down on your chest like a mallet, beating out the feelings and the moments and the now of things and the Meaning. Gone again. Into the cold, teal and rainy night. It leaves you with the rain, viscous and comforting, gliding down in a sheet outside your eye sight. The best part of this ritual is that you don’t know when it’s coming, where or how and if it will ever show up again, around the bend of a summer’s day, the same home fires burning in the heat of the evening sky. In this loss, something is gained --- always. Your name remains the same, whatever that means. Your name comes from your parents, your family, an actress your aunt adored…those sounds come from colours and metaphorical pictures of things we cannot say to each other. That can also be reduced to a lineage, a grouping, a set of human beings cut from the same cloth --- from which we all were nipped from.
Most people cannot abide this deconstruction and hold on so tightly to this name, to this persona. I hold onto mine but let it slip in and out betwixt my fingers, as if I’m dancing and its going out for the night…it always comes home, a little drunk, a little world weary, often horny and needing some sense of satisfaction. I take it to sleep and dreams with me, set it to vacations in the other worlds of my psyche, so-called, and let it weave its wonders around the cracks and fissures, bouncing its way into people and back down to earth again, across the nebulas in the needle’s eye. Prying open secret doors and alleyways, roads that keep travelling round again. Always around again. My sense of identity in this place, in this body, in this space and time, is both veiled in strength and completely raw, Because I set it free to re-create itself in the colour of someone else’s eyes, in the empathy for which I feel like a piece of flint for not rising up to my best of natures, in the desiring which I can and will never detach myself completely free from – not free just yet. There is so much more work to do. It’s as in a horrific nightmare: when that thread lurks behind you and you get that sinking feeling of it coming after you again (shielding the back of your head and neck, cowering over your chew toy heart, chewing your lip with each passing second you’ve missed) and you could try to out run it. Send it away, as I have often done. But every now and again, you should stop in your tracks. Turn around, and look him in the eye. He’s following you; he has been all of this time, because he emanates from you, between your legs and in your brain he grows, and finds his voice to counter your own. Smile at him, from the very primordial place of who you are. He will always recognize you, there, as yourself. Put down your dukes now, gaze on out and then in, and learn to abide.
~ M. Lucia
Monday, November 22, 2010
Orion's Belt
boots unzipped--- snarky;
you'll be quite the man someday
remember me, still.
~ M. Lucia
you'll be quite the man someday
remember me, still.
~ M. Lucia
Friday, November 19, 2010
FOXWHOLE
What of memories from the foxhole?
What about those days spent in the mire, muddied and manly, yet unmanned by the free flow of fear forming and foaming in your pants. We happy few indeed, we branded brothers, with scars to prove it inside and out.
The only fully-formed memory I have is of that guy Marty. He was colossally uninhibited. Even when he didn't have to shit on a shovel like we did most days in the hole he would anyway, no matter where he was. Even in the mess that time. He took a mouthful of 'stew,' got up, pulled the spade out of the sergeants kit by the wall, dropped his pants and shat on the blade. Huddled in the hole with your head down this was the easiest way to get rid of shit so it didn't pile up around you. You just dumped on the shovel and heaved it like a hunk of dirt over the wall. Preferably in the direction of the cock suckers trying to kill you. There really wasn't any reason to do it in the mess hall with the latrine out back. Marty never liked the latrine though anyway because it made him feel trapped he said. I never felt trapped in the shitter though--it was the one time I could really let it all go so to speak. Can't tell you how many times I cried in the john back then. Now the tears just don't seem to come. Anyone tells you they didn't cry in the war is a liar. We all cried like babies. Dying's some scary shit.
So Marty--he crapped and pissed in front of everyone like I said. I mean none of us was shy about that kind of thing but Marty wouldn't even try to maybe angle himself even a little bit to avoid full-frontal. And he'd moon anyone any chance he got, especially jerry (by which I mean the Germans) across the wire. We saw his pud up close when he showed off the purple scar on his nuts. His teeth, his toe nails - even all the stories about his father and the car dealership and the cabin in the Kentucky hills. I think Marty never really had anyone in his life maybe so the war was like his one chance to have someone to really talk to. We were a captive audience most of the time. There was nothing else to do but be killed.
When Marty got it funny enough you couldn't even tell. For someone who showed everything it was weird I thought later how when he died it looked like he was sleeping. You would have thought someone like him would have died with his guts hanging all out--sharded bone and deli meat. I'm still not sure where the bullet got him. I only heard later he got shot after they took him off.
Oh and I remember Frankie Wolff--he was the fattest fuck you ever saw leave basic, like Paris Island went in one ear and out the other at least in terms of getting "battle ready." That didn't stop the Corps from sending his ass to the line ASAP though. War though, war straightened ole Frank right out. Scared the fat right out of him. He never looked better in his life right before he bled to death out on the field, the last of him just leaking away by the light of the flares.
What about that foxhole? What's the difference now? I talk to my dog about it from time to time. She doesn't seem to mind. She's a good girl. I named her after that whore I spent the night with in France that first summer I was there. I can't remember the whore's name but the dog's name I know. I keep it secret though. No one needs to know about that stuff.
What about those days spent in the mire, muddied and manly, yet unmanned by the free flow of fear forming and foaming in your pants. We happy few indeed, we branded brothers, with scars to prove it inside and out.
The only fully-formed memory I have is of that guy Marty. He was colossally uninhibited. Even when he didn't have to shit on a shovel like we did most days in the hole he would anyway, no matter where he was. Even in the mess that time. He took a mouthful of 'stew,' got up, pulled the spade out of the sergeants kit by the wall, dropped his pants and shat on the blade. Huddled in the hole with your head down this was the easiest way to get rid of shit so it didn't pile up around you. You just dumped on the shovel and heaved it like a hunk of dirt over the wall. Preferably in the direction of the cock suckers trying to kill you. There really wasn't any reason to do it in the mess hall with the latrine out back. Marty never liked the latrine though anyway because it made him feel trapped he said. I never felt trapped in the shitter though--it was the one time I could really let it all go so to speak. Can't tell you how many times I cried in the john back then. Now the tears just don't seem to come. Anyone tells you they didn't cry in the war is a liar. We all cried like babies. Dying's some scary shit.
So Marty--he crapped and pissed in front of everyone like I said. I mean none of us was shy about that kind of thing but Marty wouldn't even try to maybe angle himself even a little bit to avoid full-frontal. And he'd moon anyone any chance he got, especially jerry (by which I mean the Germans) across the wire. We saw his pud up close when he showed off the purple scar on his nuts. His teeth, his toe nails - even all the stories about his father and the car dealership and the cabin in the Kentucky hills. I think Marty never really had anyone in his life maybe so the war was like his one chance to have someone to really talk to. We were a captive audience most of the time. There was nothing else to do but be killed.
When Marty got it funny enough you couldn't even tell. For someone who showed everything it was weird I thought later how when he died it looked like he was sleeping. You would have thought someone like him would have died with his guts hanging all out--sharded bone and deli meat. I'm still not sure where the bullet got him. I only heard later he got shot after they took him off.
Oh and I remember Frankie Wolff--he was the fattest fuck you ever saw leave basic, like Paris Island went in one ear and out the other at least in terms of getting "battle ready." That didn't stop the Corps from sending his ass to the line ASAP though. War though, war straightened ole Frank right out. Scared the fat right out of him. He never looked better in his life right before he bled to death out on the field, the last of him just leaking away by the light of the flares.
What about that foxhole? What's the difference now? I talk to my dog about it from time to time. She doesn't seem to mind. She's a good girl. I named her after that whore I spent the night with in France that first summer I was there. I can't remember the whore's name but the dog's name I know. I keep it secret though. No one needs to know about that stuff.
Wednesday, November 17, 2010
Ward 21
I am not amused.
I do not enjoy collecting myself to the nurses' station, banging quietly on the glass asking for my pills.
Watching the janitor have to take the back route in order to drag his bulbous mop and bucket with him, disguising his steps because he is not "one of us".
Eating the cafeteria food which is served up with a heavy dose of arsenic, bubbling from beneath the crumbs and the complimentary beverage. Looking into the colours of the wall and dreaming dreams I might not have a right to be dreaming. Examining the closed up sources of power which dwindle from the bodies seated near me, and feeling like I've stepped into the wrong room - again.
Thank god for the doodles I make at night, in the stolen notebook I keep beneath my dirty pillow.
When the lights go out, I make worlds and adventures and pathways that they could never find their way to. Thing is, I would Want them to, if they really wanted to, but they don't. WANT to. The pills, the slanted view, the old soap opera reruns on the rickety old TV near the ceiling, hoisted in the corner. It plays stories that have happened already, interplay between TV stars who have died, or divorced, or had breakdowns themselves. Maybe one of them might show their face here, in the "rest home", one day.
Thing is, the beds are pretty comfortable, you get to make the occasional phone call, they let you walk the grounds (supervised of course), even on a weekend day, if it's sunny, there are trips to the nearby museum, where you can see the colours of other people's pretty artworks, and keep doodling in the dark, messing with yourself because you need some kind of release in this place. The bathrooms are good for that too. Just don't let the guards catch you doing that. I think they prefer us to be as pent up as possible and don't realize that making a self imposed stop over the rainbow (it never rains anymore here, like it used to) is good for us; they don't like the glimmer of sexual freedom in our grins when we emerge for a moment, before the afternoon nap settles in. It's like being in kindergarten for Christ's sake.
I don't think it matters that much, in the end, if my notebook of doodles is seen by them outside, those not in the ward. Well, it could die as happy as sunshine unbridled, in the shadow beneath my pillow, the sheets never getting changed. But it must live out there, stand unabashed in the middle of the open field, with the breeze kissing every single page, bringing every word to righteous climax again and again in full step with myself. And there might be a spectator or two. People like to watch, even if they know they shouldn't.
The janitor just slinked outside the back door again. The soaps are over for today...guess we'll have to wait until next time to see if he'll ever find out that "the baby wasn't his". Granted, the others here love to watch, even though they already know the end to the storyline.
Sometimes I fold up my doodles and stick them under S's door across the ward. S had found ways to sneak in contraband to his end of the ward. Whiskey, cigarettes, magazines....I myself keep a tiny hip flask tucked in the tank behind the corner toilet. Good to keep all your vices as close to you as you can. S got busted for his, but he tries and won't be dissuaded so easily. No one's found me out yet, but I hope that janitor doesn't catch wind of it. He'll sip it up like there's no tomorrow. On his salary and with his life, he needs it more than me.
I know I'll get out, and I hope S does too. This is no place to grow old, when there are fields to be run miles and miles away, and even just outside the recreation room window. I can't keep letting the sun set in fanatical colours and me not there to see it, my feet sorted in earth. Whoops - time for my 5pm medication. Should kick in by dinner time. I think it's chicken tonight.
~ M. Lucia
I do not enjoy collecting myself to the nurses' station, banging quietly on the glass asking for my pills.
Watching the janitor have to take the back route in order to drag his bulbous mop and bucket with him, disguising his steps because he is not "one of us".
Eating the cafeteria food which is served up with a heavy dose of arsenic, bubbling from beneath the crumbs and the complimentary beverage. Looking into the colours of the wall and dreaming dreams I might not have a right to be dreaming. Examining the closed up sources of power which dwindle from the bodies seated near me, and feeling like I've stepped into the wrong room - again.
Thank god for the doodles I make at night, in the stolen notebook I keep beneath my dirty pillow.
When the lights go out, I make worlds and adventures and pathways that they could never find their way to. Thing is, I would Want them to, if they really wanted to, but they don't. WANT to. The pills, the slanted view, the old soap opera reruns on the rickety old TV near the ceiling, hoisted in the corner. It plays stories that have happened already, interplay between TV stars who have died, or divorced, or had breakdowns themselves. Maybe one of them might show their face here, in the "rest home", one day.
Thing is, the beds are pretty comfortable, you get to make the occasional phone call, they let you walk the grounds (supervised of course), even on a weekend day, if it's sunny, there are trips to the nearby museum, where you can see the colours of other people's pretty artworks, and keep doodling in the dark, messing with yourself because you need some kind of release in this place. The bathrooms are good for that too. Just don't let the guards catch you doing that. I think they prefer us to be as pent up as possible and don't realize that making a self imposed stop over the rainbow (it never rains anymore here, like it used to) is good for us; they don't like the glimmer of sexual freedom in our grins when we emerge for a moment, before the afternoon nap settles in. It's like being in kindergarten for Christ's sake.
I don't think it matters that much, in the end, if my notebook of doodles is seen by them outside, those not in the ward. Well, it could die as happy as sunshine unbridled, in the shadow beneath my pillow, the sheets never getting changed. But it must live out there, stand unabashed in the middle of the open field, with the breeze kissing every single page, bringing every word to righteous climax again and again in full step with myself. And there might be a spectator or two. People like to watch, even if they know they shouldn't.
The janitor just slinked outside the back door again. The soaps are over for today...guess we'll have to wait until next time to see if he'll ever find out that "the baby wasn't his". Granted, the others here love to watch, even though they already know the end to the storyline.
Sometimes I fold up my doodles and stick them under S's door across the ward. S had found ways to sneak in contraband to his end of the ward. Whiskey, cigarettes, magazines....I myself keep a tiny hip flask tucked in the tank behind the corner toilet. Good to keep all your vices as close to you as you can. S got busted for his, but he tries and won't be dissuaded so easily. No one's found me out yet, but I hope that janitor doesn't catch wind of it. He'll sip it up like there's no tomorrow. On his salary and with his life, he needs it more than me.
I know I'll get out, and I hope S does too. This is no place to grow old, when there are fields to be run miles and miles away, and even just outside the recreation room window. I can't keep letting the sun set in fanatical colours and me not there to see it, my feet sorted in earth. Whoops - time for my 5pm medication. Should kick in by dinner time. I think it's chicken tonight.
~ M. Lucia
Friday, November 12, 2010
Shadowplay
In the crumbling pieces of dead, dried flesh lie your ideas of yourself.
knitted together macabre-like,
a chainsaw divides a wire which connects the
flat, pinky tissues together.
Forming the face of an egotist
come one come all,
there is a matinee showing
a second try at life,
again more words to be found at the bottom of the barrel head.
dirt gets mixed in with the decapitated beauties,
killing one killing all
until there is nothing left, but billowy white
floating in the space which lies unabashed
between the places in the wax.
Dripping down your thigh, on its way to mine,
let it find home, and see yourself through its
safer shore, the one at the end of a long,
and journeyed tale.
~ M. Lucia
knitted together macabre-like,
a chainsaw divides a wire which connects the
flat, pinky tissues together.
Forming the face of an egotist
come one come all,
there is a matinee showing
a second try at life,
again more words to be found at the bottom of the barrel head.
dirt gets mixed in with the decapitated beauties,
killing one killing all
until there is nothing left, but billowy white
floating in the space which lies unabashed
between the places in the wax.
Dripping down your thigh, on its way to mine,
let it find home, and see yourself through its
safer shore, the one at the end of a long,
and journeyed tale.
~ M. Lucia
Wednesday, November 10, 2010
Haiku for the Rest of You
My only weakness:
I could never suffer fools.
Choking on themselves...
~ M. Lucia
I could never suffer fools.
Choking on themselves...
~ M. Lucia
The Point of No Return
In my sight
in all my sights
I come to the depression between
the bone and the sorrow.
When the medial of my
wicked selves sweeps up
after dark and stands naked
in the windows,
on the wharf of the watched world.
Sail on by, street
paving the planners' way home
Late. again-
Boom says the punk inside of
me crawling, my son stands with
oversized, idle boots.
The legs shake one by one -
stop, freeze then
retort, both at the same time.
One heel up towards me,
one pulling back to the wall.
Aren't we all sitting up in the shitter
reading past pictures
in the paper
chewing the fat of our
complacency, at low tide.
We'd be better served
ripping out the stitches between our lips,
sending the fools among us out to massacre,
and breed a new, clean rising fire;
one they can't see, smell,
or trample on.
~ M. Lucia
in all my sights
I come to the depression between
the bone and the sorrow.
When the medial of my
wicked selves sweeps up
after dark and stands naked
in the windows,
on the wharf of the watched world.
Sail on by, street
paving the planners' way home
Late. again-
Boom says the punk inside of
me crawling, my son stands with
oversized, idle boots.
The legs shake one by one -
stop, freeze then
retort, both at the same time.
One heel up towards me,
one pulling back to the wall.
Aren't we all sitting up in the shitter
reading past pictures
in the paper
chewing the fat of our
complacency, at low tide.
We'd be better served
ripping out the stitches between our lips,
sending the fools among us out to massacre,
and breed a new, clean rising fire;
one they can't see, smell,
or trample on.
~ M. Lucia
The Adventures of Small Man
I pass Small Man every day driving to work. He's walking up the hill I'm driving down. He looks very industrious. He strides with a purpose, quickly up the incline. It seems to not bother him. His boots are large and practical and efficiently and tightly laced, his pants some non-de-script brand encasing his lower body like a super-heros. Plaid shirt is well-tucked. His face concentrating, no-nonsense, serious. His eyes might even show a little anger. In any event, his whole person should be set to music--action music, Super(small)man music.
I provide the music myself now when I see him. "SMALL MAN!!!!" I yell in my ironic-announcer voice and hum the Small Man theme. Our schedules overlap but the timing fluctuates. Sometimes it takes until I get all the way down the hill to see Small Man; sometimes I see him right in the beginning. When I don't see him right away looking for him will take on an urgency. "Where are you Small Man?? Where have you gone?"
I think Small Man knows I'm looking at him. I don't know if he's self-conscious about his stature or if he just has Super-Hearing, but lately when I yell "SMALL MAN" inside the car with the windows up I think he can hear me, and he's not happy. I wonder if maybe I'm Small Man's arch enemy but just don't know it. Perhaps he thinks to himself "there goes Large Man. Look at him with his fancy suit and his grossly large features. Him and his big hair. I HATE you Large Man!!!!"
Tuesday, November 9, 2010
For "Lola", or As-Yet-Unnamed Lola
Night alone in the room
cherry cola,
and Lola oncoming.
There is a star outside the window,
no other star in the sky.
Gabriel is here-
shining peacefully upon the both of you.
I look for you over from the view of the bridge.
So happy to witness him;
No one left on the street but me.
It's that mixed up, murky confused kid
of a world, except for Lola.
He and I look over to all of you now,
in triumvirate of 3. Cannot stop smiling---
Lola's coming, Gabriel.
A fog horn booms, sounds as deep as her heart.
Just above the clouds, still and centered,
Here runs in to the center stage, Lola.
~ M. Lucia aka Aunt Ginny
cherry cola,
and Lola oncoming.
There is a star outside the window,
no other star in the sky.
Gabriel is here-
shining peacefully upon the both of you.
I look for you over from the view of the bridge.
So happy to witness him;
No one left on the street but me.
It's that mixed up, murky confused kid
of a world, except for Lola.
He and I look over to all of you now,
in triumvirate of 3. Cannot stop smiling---
Lola's coming, Gabriel.
A fog horn booms, sounds as deep as her heart.
Just above the clouds, still and centered,
Here runs in to the center stage, Lola.
~ M. Lucia aka Aunt Ginny
Saturday, November 6, 2010
6 Inch
The question that paced limply round my mind was would I still be able to defeat the might of an entire army with just the brittle jawbone of an ass (arse? does an Irish donkey go by arse?) Would my ability to slay without the toss of my long biblical hair hold weight? A very valid question for someone who let the other girls play with her hair at school, who occasionally flung it in the face of women who needed a wake up call, who loved having it pulled while being fucked, yin and yang in perfect harmony, who could count on it to cover the tattoos when skillfully placed clothing failed...I refused the complimentary glass of wine, since I knew I'd be drinking whiskey within the hour, also apologizing profusely for such an offence as saying no to the vino. I saw the long dark tree trunks of hair fall one after the next to the floor, half wet and half dry, just like me. I haven't felt this way in awhile, like the first flutters of love, the intent lightness of lust, imbued in the shoulder bones, now slowly more and more exposed as I let loose with my past and let it braid its slipknot secrets down, with a swift tailwind. Nothing but a wavy brown mound of interwoven, dead hair, swept up into a pile that looked like the cheap toupee of a wannabe gangster. Pity - I didn't want them to take it away. I kept a lock of the complete half a foot, two years worth, 6 inches of hair..."what are you, a Jew?" Always the most inappropriate thing said becomes the thing I smile at the most; sceptre in ashes at my side. Nice to dethrone yourself sometimes, tie yourself down, crumple the crown, and look forward to the night all the same.
~ M. Lucia
~ M. Lucia
A Gamble
The morning sun tumbled into the living room like dice chasing down green felt
skittish, bounced, bump.
The pert coffee tables' fierce leg toeing its shadowed line deep into the fleshy carpet, across the childlike smiles of my warm sun
selfish, diagonaled, dark.
The silken ties of the tent felt only when the penumbra intrudes and the Frost wind rips
tauten,billowed, blown.
Craving freewill at the mercy of the squall, navigating opaque truths-
Choice is only free when the alternatives are known.
shaven,bared, bone.
Not tangible, I suffer the difference on my skin between sun and shadow
foresaken, trampled, tied.
skittish, bounced, bump.
The pert coffee tables' fierce leg toeing its shadowed line deep into the fleshy carpet, across the childlike smiles of my warm sun
selfish, diagonaled, dark.
The silken ties of the tent felt only when the penumbra intrudes and the Frost wind rips
tauten,billowed, blown.
Craving freewill at the mercy of the squall, navigating opaque truths-
Choice is only free when the alternatives are known.
shaven,bared, bone.
Not tangible, I suffer the difference on my skin between sun and shadow
foresaken, trampled, tied.
Friday, November 5, 2010
Feral Feline
Occasionally a bird would attempt flight, winging from some bush or stand of grass, but then vanish, yanked violently back down into the scrub, made a meal presumably. From under the dumpster the eyes will stare impassively. Some make that noise walking to their cars in parking lot, trying to woo them from out of their hiding place.
"Kiss, kiss, here kitty kitty."
Is there a flinch? Not even in an ear. Maybe the eyes narrow but maybe really that's just me projecting onto them, wanting perhaps some emotion, a reaction maybe, a sign that they could be comforted, poor babies, in their poverty. But they know that I would only pet them, a scruff behind the ears, and then leave them like everyone else. They know this in their DNA. Its been bred into them over the generations--a river-bound culture of solitude and of Darwinian death. Who needs a vampire movie? A zombie story? Linger sometime after the trains have gone and the commuters have charred a path up the hill. Wait for the mist to part and allow yourself stillness for a moment, focus there, on the underbrush, and you will see them. You will see the low crouch, the tension under mottled fur, the clawed feet perfecting their launch pads, the tail-end hooked, measuring wind and balance. Eyes like cold empty death, waiting, counting down, sensing every inch of vulnerability. Bird, human, cat--blood pounding in unison.
"Kiss, kiss, here kitty kitty."
Is there a flinch? Not even in an ear. Maybe the eyes narrow but maybe really that's just me projecting onto them, wanting perhaps some emotion, a reaction maybe, a sign that they could be comforted, poor babies, in their poverty. But they know that I would only pet them, a scruff behind the ears, and then leave them like everyone else. They know this in their DNA. Its been bred into them over the generations--a river-bound culture of solitude and of Darwinian death. Who needs a vampire movie? A zombie story? Linger sometime after the trains have gone and the commuters have charred a path up the hill. Wait for the mist to part and allow yourself stillness for a moment, focus there, on the underbrush, and you will see them. You will see the low crouch, the tension under mottled fur, the clawed feet perfecting their launch pads, the tail-end hooked, measuring wind and balance. Eyes like cold empty death, waiting, counting down, sensing every inch of vulnerability. Bird, human, cat--blood pounding in unison.
* * *
And then she appeared. A slender tower, even from above. White haired but hooded. Hands pocketed. What shadow had she stepped from? Maybe it was the pigeons that called my attention as they quietly fled, wings impossibly silent. Were they afraid? Alone, I swallowed hard and her head turned, or more like tilted. I looked down on her from the station as she stood at the fence around the vacant field below. The lights of the power plant a few miles up the river signaled a toxicity in the air. I imagined her eyes following the cock of her ear, her eyebrow raised in consideration, coming to a conclusion about me as her witness, or maybe inviting me to flee in this one afforded moment, to take flight with the other birdies, safe home to roost at my sitcom hearth, my candy-dished coffee table.
She stepped, impossibly, through the chain-link. My eyes strained to decode the illusion. Where was the gap? What shadow conspired to trick? But then her gliding gait was yet even more magic, her stride a wind-part on the weeds. What was this thing? I felt a bladder urge, like a shiver of fear, and I held myself to stop the flow, like a child dancing in front of a TV cartoon not wanting to part with the color and delight. No color here though. What I watched was a drab autumnal blanket of weed spread at dusk, carpeting down to the slow-flow of water, the Hudson here an eddy-turn north against the stoic, estuarial tide, a bold ignorance of the commerce of humanity. And there, at its center, a white witch.
She called them to her with raised hands and the drape of coat over her shoulders and arms. And they came. They moved like lions, a pride of cats, a community of monsters, through the grass and reeds, out of hiding places and off of regal perches. They closed perpendicular through the concentric wraith-wreath around her, deliberately. At her feet they would one by one disappear under the narrow circle of her long skirt, an impossible amount vanishing inside her clothing until all were gone. A wet draft rose and the moon light broke free of the sooted clouds of night. She bent at the waist drawing into herself and the air was charged with the static foretelling of a lightening strike. A warm flow ran down my legs and the acrid litter-box stink of stale piss burned my nose.
Then, a white cloud of hot light mushroomed with the witch at its center. It was for a moment like a summer day and then gone. I was knocked back sitting into a puddle and banged against the brick wall of the station. The roughly finished cement of the rustic building digging into the scalp at the back of my head and the nape of my neck. I don't know if I slept or just waited to clear my head. There was a light in my face and a man's urgent voice. I shaded my eyes and saw a police cruiser idling at the curb and shafting a flashlight at me, the obvious drunk passed out at the station.
"Hey! Move along buddy."
I stood. Smoothed my suit coat. Tried to gather myself and give an impression of sobriety. Down in the field all was still, dark, empty.
"Take a cab would ya? Do me a favor, OK?"
"But I'm not...I haven't been-"
"Cab."
"OK."
He drove off. I went down the metal stairs to the street below. The cabs lined the fence on the other side of the tracks and the drivers dozed waiting for the next train. I sat on a bench thinking I should wait; give my pants a chance to dry out. From under a car in the parking lot a pair of eyes reflected greenly, indifferent. I looked away.
Thursday, November 4, 2010
ANOTHER CHAPTER IN THE FLESH-EATING OEUVRE - 1
XOMBIE - That word, the brand name really, dominates the pink packaging, the 'X' and the 'O' part of some tic-tac-toe theme that was hard to decode at a glance, but, then again, who ever lingered long enough to ponder the packaging with such a promise of adventure inside? And, truth-be-told, the crude marketing and packaging that had rolled-out with the toy's initial release persisted even now, adding that campy quality that had become such a part of the product's overall perception and XOMBIE company gestalt in the minds of the American public.
The packaging was pink because it was a XOMBIE - Girl, with 'Girl' in smaller lettering but indicating that this was the girl-directed version of the #1 'toy' in America, the run-away popularity of the product even now memorialized by the president of the US on the cover of Time Magazine laughing along with his photogenic son as Pogo, the "first dog", ran in terror (though never really in any danger-thus what otherwise might've appeared to be callous laughter) from the family Xombie (-Boy in this case) as it lurched and shuffled its 6-inch body (the action uncannily frozen in time in rich saturating color by Annie Liebovitz) across the Rose Garden lawn, the gnashing of its teeth and darting of its rancid bloodied tongue appearing blurry in the photo contributing to the overall quality of action, caught in the act, while at the same time, like a Rockwell painting, showing each face telling a different story, zombie-flesh-lust, bug-eyed canine & glaring, over-the-shoulder panic, toothy presidential glee and blue-blazer, red-tied confidence.
This packaging, OUR Xombie's packaging, had already been disassembled and left here on the dining room table along with the UPS box it came in and the family scissors that had been used, with no apparent physical damage to any children, thankfully and miraculously, to slice everything open. Also on hand here on the table were the "directions for care." The Xombie itself was no where to be found and my wife's car was not in the driveway. I maintained my typical well-worn serenity but began the search. Quick glance in the living room? Nothing. Kitchen? No. I'm reading the instructions.
"1. Remove Xombie from box.
2. Peel back plastic cover but do not remove. Avoid physical contact with dry ice.
3. Fill loaf pan or similar container with warm (not hot) water.
4. Submerge Xombie, in packaging with plastic cover, in warm water. Let stand for 24 hours. THERE IS NO DANGER OF XOMBIE ACTIVITY DURING THIS STAGE. EVAPORATION OF DRY ICE MAY APPEAR DRAMATICALLY OMINOUS TO YOUNGER CHILDREN AND OTHER HOUSEHOLD PETS. IT IS RECOMMENDED THAT PATENTED MELTING BE ALLOWED TO PROGRESS OUT OF REACH OF INDIVIDUALS 16 AND UNDER.
5. After melting process let thawed Xombie stand on enclosed drying rack for 20-40 minutes. Some odor may be noticeable and is completely normal.
6. Use alcohol swab to disinfect the index finger of individual to whom the Xombie will link. (XombiCO and the AMA recommend parents of small children perform linking steps under the care of a family physician.) Use enclosed needle pen to quickly pierce the flesh of the disinfected finger. Squeeze digit to bring forth a small drop of blood.
7. Apply a small but firm amount of pressure to your Xombie's abdomen below the ribcage. The Xombie's mouth should open. Some additional odor and/or mucousy disgorgement is normal at this stage.
8. Holding the finger with the drop of blood at least one inch above the open Xombie maw, allow at least one (1) droplet of blood to be released into the Xombie's mouth and then release the pressure on the abdomen. It is recommended that no more than three (3) drops of blood be consumed by Xombie during linking phase as this may cause increased flesh-lust in activated Xombie.
9. Let Xombie stand an additional 10 minutes.
10. Use enclosed band-aid to dress the bleeding index finger.
11. After 10 minutes Xombie will be ready for use. PLEASE SEE 'SAFE PLAY AND CARE.'"
I had heard the Xombie preparation was elaborate but everyone I had talked to had said it ended up being a lot easier than they had thought. I open the door to the basement. There is a foul stench and what sounds like small sneezes - like little 'a-choo' sounds from Tinkerbell. My daughter immediately goes into defensive mode at the sound the door yanking open and my agitated footsteps on the carpeted stairs. Before I even turn the corner she starts to explain.
"There's something wrong with this one Daddy."
I reach the bottom of the stairs and see her sitting on the floor in the shadow of the television, enveloped in a horror-movie cloud of vampire fog, billowing and snaking in the drafts of the basement. The fluorescent lights cast a greenish glow on the scene. At her knees is a large serrated bread knife, its edge almost absurdly bloodied. She is holding her hand suspended above an area of carpet to her right that has become blackened by the blood collecting and absorbing into its shag and pooling in the empty Xombie-less space in the block of dry ice resting there.
"Angie told me she fed hers blood to make it come awake but this one is broken."
The fog parted for a moment and I glimpsed a tiny, raggedly-dressed "man" laying on its side. The tiny sneeze sounds were its retchings--it was violently aspirating my daughters blood onto the freshly painted basement wall and onto the Wii console tossed in the corner.
END OF PART ONE...
The packaging was pink because it was a XOMBIE - Girl, with 'Girl' in smaller lettering but indicating that this was the girl-directed version of the #1 'toy' in America, the run-away popularity of the product even now memorialized by the president of the US on the cover of Time Magazine laughing along with his photogenic son as Pogo, the "first dog", ran in terror (though never really in any danger-thus what otherwise might've appeared to be callous laughter) from the family Xombie (-Boy in this case) as it lurched and shuffled its 6-inch body (the action uncannily frozen in time in rich saturating color by Annie Liebovitz) across the Rose Garden lawn, the gnashing of its teeth and darting of its rancid bloodied tongue appearing blurry in the photo contributing to the overall quality of action, caught in the act, while at the same time, like a Rockwell painting, showing each face telling a different story, zombie-flesh-lust, bug-eyed canine & glaring, over-the-shoulder panic, toothy presidential glee and blue-blazer, red-tied confidence.
This packaging, OUR Xombie's packaging, had already been disassembled and left here on the dining room table along with the UPS box it came in and the family scissors that had been used, with no apparent physical damage to any children, thankfully and miraculously, to slice everything open. Also on hand here on the table were the "directions for care." The Xombie itself was no where to be found and my wife's car was not in the driveway. I maintained my typical well-worn serenity but began the search. Quick glance in the living room? Nothing. Kitchen? No. I'm reading the instructions.
"1. Remove Xombie from box.
2. Peel back plastic cover but do not remove. Avoid physical contact with dry ice.
3. Fill loaf pan or similar container with warm (not hot) water.
4. Submerge Xombie, in packaging with plastic cover, in warm water. Let stand for 24 hours. THERE IS NO DANGER OF XOMBIE ACTIVITY DURING THIS STAGE. EVAPORATION OF DRY ICE MAY APPEAR DRAMATICALLY OMINOUS TO YOUNGER CHILDREN AND OTHER HOUSEHOLD PETS. IT IS RECOMMENDED THAT PATENTED MELTING BE ALLOWED TO PROGRESS OUT OF REACH OF INDIVIDUALS 16 AND UNDER.
5. After melting process let thawed Xombie stand on enclosed drying rack for 20-40 minutes. Some odor may be noticeable and is completely normal.
6. Use alcohol swab to disinfect the index finger of individual to whom the Xombie will link. (XombiCO and the AMA recommend parents of small children perform linking steps under the care of a family physician.) Use enclosed needle pen to quickly pierce the flesh of the disinfected finger. Squeeze digit to bring forth a small drop of blood.
7. Apply a small but firm amount of pressure to your Xombie's abdomen below the ribcage. The Xombie's mouth should open. Some additional odor and/or mucousy disgorgement is normal at this stage.
8. Holding the finger with the drop of blood at least one inch above the open Xombie maw, allow at least one (1) droplet of blood to be released into the Xombie's mouth and then release the pressure on the abdomen. It is recommended that no more than three (3) drops of blood be consumed by Xombie during linking phase as this may cause increased flesh-lust in activated Xombie.
9. Let Xombie stand an additional 10 minutes.
10. Use enclosed band-aid to dress the bleeding index finger.
11. After 10 minutes Xombie will be ready for use. PLEASE SEE 'SAFE PLAY AND CARE.'"
I had heard the Xombie preparation was elaborate but everyone I had talked to had said it ended up being a lot easier than they had thought. I open the door to the basement. There is a foul stench and what sounds like small sneezes - like little 'a-choo' sounds from Tinkerbell. My daughter immediately goes into defensive mode at the sound the door yanking open and my agitated footsteps on the carpeted stairs. Before I even turn the corner she starts to explain.
"There's something wrong with this one Daddy."
I reach the bottom of the stairs and see her sitting on the floor in the shadow of the television, enveloped in a horror-movie cloud of vampire fog, billowing and snaking in the drafts of the basement. The fluorescent lights cast a greenish glow on the scene. At her knees is a large serrated bread knife, its edge almost absurdly bloodied. She is holding her hand suspended above an area of carpet to her right that has become blackened by the blood collecting and absorbing into its shag and pooling in the empty Xombie-less space in the block of dry ice resting there.
"Angie told me she fed hers blood to make it come awake but this one is broken."
The fog parted for a moment and I glimpsed a tiny, raggedly-dressed "man" laying on its side. The tiny sneeze sounds were its retchings--it was violently aspirating my daughters blood onto the freshly painted basement wall and onto the Wii console tossed in the corner.
END OF PART ONE...
Chin Up
It is how you carry yourself that makes an impression on people. It matters not how fine the cut of your trousers or the quality of your cashmere. You could look quite regal in a sack if you comport yourself well. Walk tall and straight and at all costs prevent the soul suckers from making eye contact with you. Do not look for solace where it cannot be found. You should be the only one who is aware of your burdens, the secrets you keep in the tuck and fold of your skirt, hemmed within an inch of your knees and stitched up tight like Frankenstein.
The passion of black and white
Today it is raining and I am lost
Not depressed as one might expect on such a day
I've been kicked into that pit before and climbed out hand over fist
But in the nebulous funk of truth and lies and electronic devices
I have no pithy Haiku
There is no unconditional ear-
My mother has crossed the line from being helpful in my life to being protected from it.
I have noone else's husband to tell me I'm great
I absorb the quiet in my life
this is preceived as less passionate than those who are vibrant and outspoken
but there is no deception in my actions
when I am with you, it is you that I am with
I don't think that needs to be loud to be heard
I could never sustain two watered down lives
Slogging through the emotions of both
All that passion diluted to
ironically mediocre
Not depressed as one might expect on such a day
I've been kicked into that pit before and climbed out hand over fist
But in the nebulous funk of truth and lies and electronic devices
I have no pithy Haiku
There is no unconditional ear-
My mother has crossed the line from being helpful in my life to being protected from it.
I have noone else's husband to tell me I'm great
I absorb the quiet in my life
this is preceived as less passionate than those who are vibrant and outspoken
but there is no deception in my actions
when I am with you, it is you that I am with
I don't think that needs to be loud to be heard
I could never sustain two watered down lives
Slogging through the emotions of both
All that passion diluted to
ironically mediocre
Tuesday, November 2, 2010
Bicycle Thief
Someone took my bike. My $100, bought off of craigslist, vanilla coloured California beach bike. Bought right around the time I said yes to this place (after many gin and tonics at Rocky Sullivan's, the bar below and to the left - then called Liberty Heights Tap Room and owned by my current landlord. Rocky's, where I had first cavorted over whiskey and Guinness with the minstrel boy from Birr nearly a decade earlier, was on Lexington Avenue in the 20's, then. He and I certainly took a lot of cabs together). Now, the Irish bar of my earlier memories had found its way to this neighborhood in Brooklyn, where I finally would descend to the waterfront, and ascend in every other manner. I felt it fate and knew it was right. I had been working my way here for awhile. The three gins helped a great deal.
Whether I said yes to the place or bought the bike first I can't remember. I rode the train with my friend Lala, down to the Orthodox Jewish avenues, South. Early Saturday morning - Hot, dusty bare streets. No one out. I met the girl who sold me the bike in front of her family's house and then, she sold me me the bike. I love the Cali beach bikes, but suspected even then that the hills around here might pose a problem. There were similarly vanilla coloured fenders, sold separately and to be put on later.
We filled up the tires to the max and rode all the way from Avenue U back to Red Hook. Prospect Park's hills proved my first challenge. This would not be easy. I wore summer dresses to the angry, shouting chagrin of Latino ladies who caught their husbands looking at the tops of my thighs as I passed. I would yell back to them "Mind your business!" (internally: "Dumb Cunt. It's not my fault your thighs are the size of a whale's. Try eating fewer empanadas".) This would distract my biking, so I would cut out those angry retorts quick as I could.
My stuff was in the local storage (where the bike was going when I was done with it that day), as I waited for the dual apartment(s) to be renovated - always taking longer than they said. I had been staying with Jack, and just past the last golden arc of dramatics that would burst that impossible bubble. Was well over a year and a half after, before I finally walked away, and still credit any and all of my love/relationship fucked uppedness to he and I (not just him, of course. Who could blame like that with a straight face?) Lala and I were going to share these two apartments, joined by a pocket door and taking up the entire 3rd / top floor of the building. Like living alone, but that I would use the only kitchen on her "side" -- Fine by me, as she wanted to be able to sit there and "look at it" and I much preferred the street side (I liked to see people coming), the warm, southwest sunset light and the roundabout view of the waterfront.
We headed, sweaty and unkempt, to the local bar, which I never had the courage to head into, when I had lived previously in the adjoining neighbourhood ( I know I could now probably fall asleep there and feel safe as an unwanted orphan in a basket, drink in hand). No one was there, but for the short, boyish blond bartender who clearly, like others we found out (and us too), had escaped to the waterfront away from something. We sat there in the cool of the bar, drinking beer and watching T-Rex videos on the TV screen. Then, he walked in- whirlwind, vulnerability, young dark haired man with the sweetest white pit bull puppy ever. We talked for a good long while, and Lala could talk anyone's ear off, so I listened mostly, commenting when I felt I wanted to, and caught him looking at me rather intensely more than a few times. When we finally left, he told Lala it was nice to meet her, and then put his hand on my bare shoulder and said with much solid and isolated intention "it was Really great to meet you, M_ _ _ _ _ _" (this was before my childhood nickname of Mimi was resurrected and sticks to this day in the neighbourhood); eyes alight, warmth of his smile, little did I know all that would transpire from this man-child. Somehow, in my fateful way, I sensed that there was plenty more to come. I was already in love with his dog.
Point is, I rode that bike a lot that first summer, mostly to that bar, to his house on the back streets I now drive home from the bar along; in the cold, slightly drunk, and even managed to make it up the steep hill to the train station for a good deal of that Autumn. But the logistics of that half commute bike ride were too much for me - the bags, the dresses, the boots, the makeup and the sweat. It was rough, and after one too many haughty Smith Street women commented on my dripping face, I decided to hold off for a bike with gears, or just ride it when it cooled down some. Between that time and last weekend, I probably kept the bike chained up outside my front door for over two and a half solid years without use.
It was embarrassing, really. Recently I thought about getting it fixed up, and received many a promise to help do so, but they never came to pass. The tires, flat beyond recognition, the spokes and kickstand all rusted to the hilt. Not sure I could even grease them free. Not too long ago, someone from Rocky's (or patron) draped a blue motorcycle cloth cover over it; a cheap something to cast veil over this eye sore - this reminder of my laziness, my complacency, my inaction - I found it funny, and even showed him that last late night I stayed up and out to hear his woes, even when he wasn't speaking them out loud very much. He had his trusty flashlight out and checked it out. Said it could be fixed, but I knew he had a lot on his mind and didn't want to make it a point. I would do it. I would.
Then, Halloween night. Well, the night before, technically, as it was a Saturday night. I had my trademark bruises on, my operatic makeup, my torn clothes, my strength shining out happily from my victimized costume and fur coat. Happily drunken on white russians, I posed on my dad's old car (now mine), still alive and kicking due to myself and some others. Splayed on the hood, I raised my purposefully torn black stockings up into the night sky and stared off into the distance, beyond the frame, to a light somewhere which reflected the industrial waves of the nearby water and the deep boom of a boat in the distance. All for the camera, as the inner egomaniac in me always wanted to be an actress. I was giddy, and shallow. I think I got punished for it. My mother visited the next day, on actual Halloween, and remarked "your bike is gone...do you know that?" I was shocked, but at the same moment, relieved. I looked outside and even looked a second time, when we went downstairs later, as if it would re-appear all souped up and ready to go, shiny and vanilla as that first day I rode her to my home before it was my home. She was gone, blue cover and all.
I thought I was being reprimanded for not taking care of her, not helping her, or minding her or getting her back on the streets I loved. I'm sorry I forgot about her, but I knew some kids must have just up and awayed with her, for parts, or maybe they could get her going again. Why anyone would choose this bike, after all that neglect and time, I know not. I still can't figure out how they broke the massive, heavy chain and lock I had around it. Then I think it was him (who studied lock picking for one of his many past times), who looked with so much intent at the bike that night a week prior, just as he once looked at me, the first times we spent in each other's company. Maybe he had stole it and has it back at his house and is working on reviving the bike, as we speak. Maybe. I'll find out at some point. Wherever she is, I hope she knows I loved her always, even though I didn't show it much after the start, nor keep up with her as I should have. That empty space in front of my home looks completely new to me --- in all the time I've lived here, over three and a half years nearly -- the bike was always there. Feels strange to come home in the cold, in the dark, to that empty space. It's a new chance, though, to put something else there. Pity- I still have the fenders, which I never did get around to putting onto the bike. What the hell am I going to do with no bike, and ultra smooth, never-before-used, vanilla coloured fenders?
~ M. Lucia
Whether I said yes to the place or bought the bike first I can't remember. I rode the train with my friend Lala, down to the Orthodox Jewish avenues, South. Early Saturday morning - Hot, dusty bare streets. No one out. I met the girl who sold me the bike in front of her family's house and then, she sold me me the bike. I love the Cali beach bikes, but suspected even then that the hills around here might pose a problem. There were similarly vanilla coloured fenders, sold separately and to be put on later.
We filled up the tires to the max and rode all the way from Avenue U back to Red Hook. Prospect Park's hills proved my first challenge. This would not be easy. I wore summer dresses to the angry, shouting chagrin of Latino ladies who caught their husbands looking at the tops of my thighs as I passed. I would yell back to them "Mind your business!" (internally: "Dumb Cunt. It's not my fault your thighs are the size of a whale's. Try eating fewer empanadas".) This would distract my biking, so I would cut out those angry retorts quick as I could.
My stuff was in the local storage (where the bike was going when I was done with it that day), as I waited for the dual apartment(s) to be renovated - always taking longer than they said. I had been staying with Jack, and just past the last golden arc of dramatics that would burst that impossible bubble. Was well over a year and a half after, before I finally walked away, and still credit any and all of my love/relationship fucked uppedness to he and I (not just him, of course. Who could blame like that with a straight face?) Lala and I were going to share these two apartments, joined by a pocket door and taking up the entire 3rd / top floor of the building. Like living alone, but that I would use the only kitchen on her "side" -- Fine by me, as she wanted to be able to sit there and "look at it" and I much preferred the street side (I liked to see people coming), the warm, southwest sunset light and the roundabout view of the waterfront.
We headed, sweaty and unkempt, to the local bar, which I never had the courage to head into, when I had lived previously in the adjoining neighbourhood ( I know I could now probably fall asleep there and feel safe as an unwanted orphan in a basket, drink in hand). No one was there, but for the short, boyish blond bartender who clearly, like others we found out (and us too), had escaped to the waterfront away from something. We sat there in the cool of the bar, drinking beer and watching T-Rex videos on the TV screen. Then, he walked in- whirlwind, vulnerability, young dark haired man with the sweetest white pit bull puppy ever. We talked for a good long while, and Lala could talk anyone's ear off, so I listened mostly, commenting when I felt I wanted to, and caught him looking at me rather intensely more than a few times. When we finally left, he told Lala it was nice to meet her, and then put his hand on my bare shoulder and said with much solid and isolated intention "it was Really great to meet you, M_ _ _ _ _ _" (this was before my childhood nickname of Mimi was resurrected and sticks to this day in the neighbourhood); eyes alight, warmth of his smile, little did I know all that would transpire from this man-child. Somehow, in my fateful way, I sensed that there was plenty more to come. I was already in love with his dog.
Point is, I rode that bike a lot that first summer, mostly to that bar, to his house on the back streets I now drive home from the bar along; in the cold, slightly drunk, and even managed to make it up the steep hill to the train station for a good deal of that Autumn. But the logistics of that half commute bike ride were too much for me - the bags, the dresses, the boots, the makeup and the sweat. It was rough, and after one too many haughty Smith Street women commented on my dripping face, I decided to hold off for a bike with gears, or just ride it when it cooled down some. Between that time and last weekend, I probably kept the bike chained up outside my front door for over two and a half solid years without use.
It was embarrassing, really. Recently I thought about getting it fixed up, and received many a promise to help do so, but they never came to pass. The tires, flat beyond recognition, the spokes and kickstand all rusted to the hilt. Not sure I could even grease them free. Not too long ago, someone from Rocky's (or patron) draped a blue motorcycle cloth cover over it; a cheap something to cast veil over this eye sore - this reminder of my laziness, my complacency, my inaction - I found it funny, and even showed him that last late night I stayed up and out to hear his woes, even when he wasn't speaking them out loud very much. He had his trusty flashlight out and checked it out. Said it could be fixed, but I knew he had a lot on his mind and didn't want to make it a point. I would do it. I would.
Then, Halloween night. Well, the night before, technically, as it was a Saturday night. I had my trademark bruises on, my operatic makeup, my torn clothes, my strength shining out happily from my victimized costume and fur coat. Happily drunken on white russians, I posed on my dad's old car (now mine), still alive and kicking due to myself and some others. Splayed on the hood, I raised my purposefully torn black stockings up into the night sky and stared off into the distance, beyond the frame, to a light somewhere which reflected the industrial waves of the nearby water and the deep boom of a boat in the distance. All for the camera, as the inner egomaniac in me always wanted to be an actress. I was giddy, and shallow. I think I got punished for it. My mother visited the next day, on actual Halloween, and remarked "your bike is gone...do you know that?" I was shocked, but at the same moment, relieved. I looked outside and even looked a second time, when we went downstairs later, as if it would re-appear all souped up and ready to go, shiny and vanilla as that first day I rode her to my home before it was my home. She was gone, blue cover and all.
I thought I was being reprimanded for not taking care of her, not helping her, or minding her or getting her back on the streets I loved. I'm sorry I forgot about her, but I knew some kids must have just up and awayed with her, for parts, or maybe they could get her going again. Why anyone would choose this bike, after all that neglect and time, I know not. I still can't figure out how they broke the massive, heavy chain and lock I had around it. Then I think it was him (who studied lock picking for one of his many past times), who looked with so much intent at the bike that night a week prior, just as he once looked at me, the first times we spent in each other's company. Maybe he had stole it and has it back at his house and is working on reviving the bike, as we speak. Maybe. I'll find out at some point. Wherever she is, I hope she knows I loved her always, even though I didn't show it much after the start, nor keep up with her as I should have. That empty space in front of my home looks completely new to me --- in all the time I've lived here, over three and a half years nearly -- the bike was always there. Feels strange to come home in the cold, in the dark, to that empty space. It's a new chance, though, to put something else there. Pity- I still have the fenders, which I never did get around to putting onto the bike. What the hell am I going to do with no bike, and ultra smooth, never-before-used, vanilla coloured fenders?
~ M. Lucia
Monday, November 1, 2010
Ode to Eire
Thick and viscous, membranes pulsating within the droplets of sweat that come from hard work in a damp climate, Ireland soars on its knees for you, muttering and scraping its legs and soles of feet as it moves along, beast of a brain incapacitated by drink and obligation. Wanting the other guy to know he’s no better, but stepping back into the shadows that others placed for it when its turn arises…the spotlight shining a rare but soft sun around the back of its neck, sore from crouching in safe houses, empty embellished halls of parliament, and on the lawns of Trinity, where it still is quite legal to shoot a catholic, if warranted. Ireland warrants every minute of every workday, no time for payday, already spent and around the bend it ambles; insides of lungs, stomach lining and bladder eviscerated by the amber clockwork that ticks beneath the witches’ brew – Barry’s, Guinness, Hard Grain in every corner, never to be swept up, just swept under the rug. Into the gene pools of the world. Hands cover mouths which talk double time to your front and your behind, the ever shifting necessity arriving and departing of perfect social hours intermingled with quiet, shameful alones. Shake any family tree and an Irish woman falls out---between her knees, falls from the tree the hoards of red blooded over workers, overbearing mothers and easy lays (on St. Patrick’s Day). Girls with something to prove, everything to lose and a collective heart beating which tries ever to not look at its own face, impossible to stop believing what reflection is shown to it by the empires that laid claim. Embedded with myth that knows not a reality or a truth; one that is forever trapped by the original name with which it was once slain and re-connected. Trembling and hopping mad, spinning in Celtic circles of death and reclaim, until it finds itself yet again, sneaking around the house at night, out to visit with the Thing it most enjoys, covertly wrought over, to the extreme, alone, so no one else can sit and judge, or try to understand. Secrets seem to hold more weight, fleshing out the poem into a lifetime of land reforms, of contradiction unsatisfied and identity undone, all in the timbre that fills out its life in between lives, in the notes that are heard, before and after, but never during the outpouring of song. Drowning in these sound waves, Ireland comes up for air, flails its arms about and screams like a banshee on a late night visit to the off licence.
~ M. Lucia
~ M. Lucia
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