The electric blue light flickers, again. The old man is humming a tune, probably one he learned back up from the business class lounge in the south side of Hell, where he goes to decompress. Everything is wrong here, and no one says a thing. Consign, by reason, and all consuming they slide alongside each other threadbare across the lowest level of sky. Packed in tight in their sardine canister lives.
People, like these, at the end of the day, don’t want to be free.
There is person who sits behind my back all day. He is the most desperate person I have ever come in contact with in all my life. A friend of mine said that. I agree. His face is not handsome, not by a long shot. He is, politely what one might term a dweeb back in the day, but he’s not smart enough, doesn’t read enough and doesn’t seek enough knowledge to fall into that category. No, he is a normal, and more than one. He is a barnacle on a sinking ship. Every day of his life here in this place, the last one like this I’ve ever know, is filled up fully and continually with fear. You can read it behind his eyes, around the low hanging corners of his dull, oversized mouth. His face looks like a ventriloquist’s dummy, and there is always a hand or two shoved up his backside which he needs in order to speak. He’ll say anything to keep his place here, as its unimportance diminishes into true uselessness before his shaking, cowering eyes. At any point in the day, if you turn round to look at him, whether on the telephone, sitting and staring into his computer screen, reading or looking at a piece of paper, he looks like he is crying. And he is.
And you know what? I don’t care. I don’t care that he chose this two bit, dinner theatre matinee showing of awful drama, comprised of endless free rides on the sycophant street car stacked up many tall buildings high. I don’t care that he has to feed and clothe his children. Learning to live without all comforts and possessions isn’t so bad as knowing your father is a dead creature, lacking of the light and substance of a man. Some people are made this way, but this dressed down dummy was born into it. He is quick with what energy he has, and he needs. He wants attention, and any single moment, memory or fact that goes above his head (which granted, isn’t hard at all to do) upsets his quaky balance. He would try and talk his way out of the guillotine, if his time came, and would bad mouth anyone to save his precious little place off and to the side of the greatest ship there ever was. He is mommy’s little wimp, who still wears tightly bound suspenders and a leash which keeps him well under control (not that he would ever note its presence, or have want to remove it….after all, he put it there himself and replaces it fresh and anew every single quarter). He has no sexuality (thank god), he has no intellectual self, and those two ideas wouldn’t ever come together in any knowable form that he’d recognize, that’s for sure.
He had a counterpart too. The Italian who worked across the hall from him. This guy gave the impression of being male, but was more officially low class and without scope or dynamic. He pretended he was a great caregiver to all who needed him, but of course only the very weak and wounded needed him. Women, real women, scare him to pieces. He liked to talk about tits, but he wouldn’t have a clue what to do with a pair of them if they came with a request for pleasure. He cannot connect, and lives happily in the ignorance of his familial bonds. They make a dynamic duo that surely beats any other round here. The Italian looks at me like I’m dangerous. I like that. I want him to know, I am very dangerous because I am made up of truth, I eat purity even when it destroys my joys and my illusions of greatness, I am fully realized in my implicity towards what he might consider illicit, and I want without need. Stupid to state these things. They don’t actually go Over the heads of these two or the rest of them. They seep down to the ground, where average joes like them walk (not even with the fervor of a stomp) over my ideals, my better natures, and the rest, mucking them up into dust which has no sounds that they can hear from their tiny, fenced in ears.
He’s on the phone again. He’s making the face. I have a feeling it’s been stuck that way for some time, and the banal, average angels who clamor around his buck toothed head, they’re not leaving him alone any time soon. He has to call his wife again now, to make sure she tells him everything he has to pick up from the store, cause what woman wouldn’t want a houseboy to run errands for you, and come home to you with his empty head of old parlour tricks and jingles, ready to occupy your bed every night with the voracity of an 80 year old man suffering from a bad back and incontinence? He’s picking up the thing at the sporting good store, yes….yes, he is. He will!
You know, they say that the best people talk about ideas, the average person talks about things, and the worst people talk about other people…….well, I guess I’m just not that advanced yet.
M Lucia
Wednesday, September 28, 2011
Monday, September 26, 2011
Case Studies
Case:
26
crying
talked down
doesn't express
pale face
tongue; thick
weak
lacks.
Stay With
Loss.
M. Lucia
26
crying
talked down
doesn't express
pale face
tongue; thick
weak
lacks.
Stay With
Loss.
M. Lucia
Thursday, September 15, 2011
How Graveyards Come To Life
So, about 7 years ago, I landed this job at this rich old lady’s house, estate I guess you’d call it. She had lived some life, she had, suffered and triumphed over numerous husbands, some dying under more than mysterious circumstances (I never trusted the last one – he had millions of dollars (and she had amassed quite a bit after her first two unsuccessful marriages) and yet she demanded he take her to Washington, DC on their honeymoon. I mean, her father was a known Communist, and no matter what, who goes to Washington, DC in the middle of March? She liked the look of the place, she said, constructed supposedly in some ancient, plotted out craftwork done way back when by the Free Masons (she had secretly wished her father was a Mason, rather than a Communist…..secrecy and pomp, robes beguiling men in the dark), but, still, him falling from that building seems a very rare case of circumstance to me). That fall, as well organized as the Masons’ triangular crossfire of structures, made her a true millionaire, so far off into the waves from the big boat of dependence that she was free to travel the world on her own, to each and every place her soul desired.
It was then, seven years ago, that I found myself in her employ – I was much younger, and still beating along from two year job stint to 2 year job stint, hoping for one of my many eggs to hatch. But they seemed to flourish loudly for a moment or two, offer me much in the way of hope, and then tremble from some unforeseen aftershock in my destiny, troubled and random as it was, and quietly fall over, the guilty foundation of some stack of cards not yet realized. This was another way to keep at it, on the sidelines, the back burner, whenever the free time would let me and spaces permit. She was smart, but kooky, this old woman and- in addition to the exotic objects acquired along her fields of travel since her need of a husband ceased, she had acquired mass possessions simply from the reams of said husband’s estates morphing into her one, very wealthy, eccentric and independent collection of life around her, in that big English Tudor home in the woods, just up an almost breath-shortening hill off of the main drag. My job? I was like a butterfly collector, organizing and logging in and separating out and piecing together all her life’s things. It was quiet – there were the other people in the house to talk to…nothing spectacular or earth shattering, I mean- the gardener, the lawyer who visited more often than I thought was possible, the accountant who practically set up rooms there, the cook, the maids, it wasn’t too many to keep track of, but enough that you grew to like some more than others, but deep down, you knew you’d be there only long enough for one of the constant few playing cards you had neatly tucked away in your stockings to erect itself and come to life, finally.
There was a period when the old woman got ill (brain tumor), and she had to let me go (funny thing is, in all that time she had about ten estate sales planned but didn’t sell one damn thing. She was just like me – except I thought I was trying to gather, while she (though she’d deny it) most definitively stepped back when it came time to release her little darlings for someone else to procure). I thought it would be a grand time to try my hand at long talked about escape from that old town, and a new way of life for me – in all ways. It began to burgeon, and then it didn’t. Stagnation and yet, a happy quiet time for me. Then, I had to work again, because – you guessed it! The house of cards was still a garden wall, half built (a whole other set of bricks, but the little piggies lied. They got blown down one by one, all the same). It was more of the same, with a couple years on me (and to add insult to injury, I never left the area surrounding the main drag near the big hill which led to the old lady’s place) and then one particular day, she bumps into me on the street. She was taking walks up and down her big hill per doctor’s orders. She had survived a brain tumor! Who does that, nowadays or ever! I knew she had a tenacity which was beyond most people’s and I always respected that. Whatever she had been given in life was done so, because of absolute action on her part.
Long story short, she wanted me back. Same job, same house, same possessions (again, not one had been sold off even since I had left), same people. I knew what I was doing wasn’t all that high profile or life long (who works for one person their whole life anymore? All day, not in charge, forced into relationships and perimeters that anyone with any sense of spirit would use as a stepping stone and not as a final destination. Might as well lie back into your grave and warm it up). So, more than a few years later, things became less ‘ok’ for me. Coming back I had made my peace with, and I –as always- could sleepwalk blindly through these over categorizations of her library of many, many things (she had ordered in even more people to dust and clean them, more inept and dullard like than the original set which were all still there, of course, mildly bleeding the old lady dry just enough to fit with their quiet desperation, their overly ordered lives which lacked any shred of inspiration. I came to find out from some of them (because even though I had, from the start of this and the last employ, always tried to divorce myself from them emotionally and keep my dignity intact, my dreams afloat and my world, more precious and satisfying than the dead air in that place, alive and breathing, they still somehow were like snotty little kids, grabbing at fireflies because of their light. I knew, deep down, that we All have this light, all Gods, Heavens and Hells within us, adventures and paths alongside us the whole time, but them – they didn’t see it, and I wasn’t letting go of my light to help them to see it. Each person must do this for themselves), small details of their lives, and my wings grew weary of their buzzing…..busy little bees around the few remaining divots of honey that the old woman had left to herself. She had lived out her dreams, one way or another, but what had They done with their lungs, full up with oxygen like anyone’s, their health and youth, but drain the old woman of her only children, just so they didn’t have to feel the nervous worry (fireflies call this excitement) of how to get out there and Do from the purest place in their foolish little hearts?
I had grown older, made bitter and made intensely aware of losing the experience, presence and delight of forces and people loved and cherished, and I came to re-appreciate my original mantra of not suffering fools. Sorry, fools. Even jesters learn to be tricksters sometime. My heart demands it of me, and I’ve learned not to cross her. Suddenly, the sight of them all, their ever growing and diminishing hoards made me physically sick inside. Joking about the old lady’s tumor, about the oddness of some of her treasures, which sounded to me as disturbing as a din of slaughter just a few feet downwards, over the slope of the hill. The reverb of bullet holes tearing flesh and sucking vitality from its most tender places. Nothing left but a hissing afterward; a mourning for the wrong things said yes and no to. Engaged, and ignored. There was one of the old woman’s army of accountants there, who I could tell felt the same things I did about the richness within, and what each moment Can bring, but he was so mired in so many things that there wasn’t much room left permitted for a conversation, much less anything else of worth. As usual, I had to go it alone and did so, hating them behind their backs. It’s funny – it all too rarely hits people that they do not have to experience the world in the way that they have been taught to, or expected to, but somehow this is fleeting for most and just sears itself off like clockwork screws misshapen and tossed right out the windows, shooed away by the rest of those surrounding them, those who would rather live in an open faced graveyard.
Speaking of…The old lady, God bless her, died finally at the ripe old age of 93. It’s a very special number to sail off upon, and sail off she did. Into the seas of her own making, to meet her bevy of husbands who would still, even considering, probably like to show her around and make time with her. It was Her energy that drew in all of them, and not the other way around. Her equally snot nosed son, not a man but more of a collection of spindly fears and malnourished black holes, took over for her estate and for awhile, all the members of the household bled as much of her money out as they still could. No shame. He tried to play daddy but it didn’t work, since there was no respect on either side. Her sold off every last piece of her stuff, every last one, and abandoned the house, and the property, firing them all. Not a surprise really – when no blood or life force can get to a wound, it pales and dies. Babies and rocket scientists know that. Oddly, turns out the place was sitting all that time over government land, which – if you go way back to the original deeds, revealed a shady clause to its original acquiring. When things are built on a lie, they never survive, and it’s always found out one way or another. Why live duplicitously again and again, when you can live as you want to in truth – just one, easy time. I never ever understood that. Guess I never will. The house was torn down, and a graveyard was set to be built over it. Those who are Actually Dead often get passed over, in lieu of those looking to cram themselves in with the early bird special. We don’t have to lie back down in the familial DNA of our generational coffins. By coming to life as ourselves we honor our bloodline and its many triumphs and devastations, limitations and specks of profound joy.
I walked by the place the other day…by the graveyard I mean. Thought out of the first few rows of the newly dead, I might find the old eccentric, or see her speckled ghost walking in late afternoon between the tall grasses and willows, looking for her long lost treasures (since her son never came. Afraid of the dead, it seems). I should have known when I asked the groundskeeper – the low back buckled, sun burned old man who used to tend her garden. He shuffled a bit, from all the lifting at his age. A smile crossed the far corner of his mouth, the one that lets in impetus, the sort that takes you west to the places without noise. He told me what I halfway knew to be so in the malar flush of my battered, regenerating heart. It happened far from this place, he said. How perfect, I thought, right smack in the most central point of the liquid world where all the routes meet to run astray in the chaos of all directions. I walked off, and realized how immense a late afternoon in the soft tide of early autumn it was. How it had been so full and beautiful every single day I had come to work there. How it robbed me of that same beauty, day after day. How I let it. I walked then, in the right steps, down the amber of the hill with the ease of a firefly who had managed to weave above and beyond the sticky, chubby hands of the clobbering kids who chased it, they not realizing that they had it the wrong way around. The tickle of the barley grass snuck up my skirt a few times, the stubborn dew that hide itself had up and kissed my bare ankles, and the sun baking at the hearth blanketed my back with its palm, motherly and forgiving. The old lady’s ashes had been scattered out at sea.
M. Lucia
It was then, seven years ago, that I found myself in her employ – I was much younger, and still beating along from two year job stint to 2 year job stint, hoping for one of my many eggs to hatch. But they seemed to flourish loudly for a moment or two, offer me much in the way of hope, and then tremble from some unforeseen aftershock in my destiny, troubled and random as it was, and quietly fall over, the guilty foundation of some stack of cards not yet realized. This was another way to keep at it, on the sidelines, the back burner, whenever the free time would let me and spaces permit. She was smart, but kooky, this old woman and- in addition to the exotic objects acquired along her fields of travel since her need of a husband ceased, she had acquired mass possessions simply from the reams of said husband’s estates morphing into her one, very wealthy, eccentric and independent collection of life around her, in that big English Tudor home in the woods, just up an almost breath-shortening hill off of the main drag. My job? I was like a butterfly collector, organizing and logging in and separating out and piecing together all her life’s things. It was quiet – there were the other people in the house to talk to…nothing spectacular or earth shattering, I mean- the gardener, the lawyer who visited more often than I thought was possible, the accountant who practically set up rooms there, the cook, the maids, it wasn’t too many to keep track of, but enough that you grew to like some more than others, but deep down, you knew you’d be there only long enough for one of the constant few playing cards you had neatly tucked away in your stockings to erect itself and come to life, finally.
There was a period when the old woman got ill (brain tumor), and she had to let me go (funny thing is, in all that time she had about ten estate sales planned but didn’t sell one damn thing. She was just like me – except I thought I was trying to gather, while she (though she’d deny it) most definitively stepped back when it came time to release her little darlings for someone else to procure). I thought it would be a grand time to try my hand at long talked about escape from that old town, and a new way of life for me – in all ways. It began to burgeon, and then it didn’t. Stagnation and yet, a happy quiet time for me. Then, I had to work again, because – you guessed it! The house of cards was still a garden wall, half built (a whole other set of bricks, but the little piggies lied. They got blown down one by one, all the same). It was more of the same, with a couple years on me (and to add insult to injury, I never left the area surrounding the main drag near the big hill which led to the old lady’s place) and then one particular day, she bumps into me on the street. She was taking walks up and down her big hill per doctor’s orders. She had survived a brain tumor! Who does that, nowadays or ever! I knew she had a tenacity which was beyond most people’s and I always respected that. Whatever she had been given in life was done so, because of absolute action on her part.
Long story short, she wanted me back. Same job, same house, same possessions (again, not one had been sold off even since I had left), same people. I knew what I was doing wasn’t all that high profile or life long (who works for one person their whole life anymore? All day, not in charge, forced into relationships and perimeters that anyone with any sense of spirit would use as a stepping stone and not as a final destination. Might as well lie back into your grave and warm it up). So, more than a few years later, things became less ‘ok’ for me. Coming back I had made my peace with, and I –as always- could sleepwalk blindly through these over categorizations of her library of many, many things (she had ordered in even more people to dust and clean them, more inept and dullard like than the original set which were all still there, of course, mildly bleeding the old lady dry just enough to fit with their quiet desperation, their overly ordered lives which lacked any shred of inspiration. I came to find out from some of them (because even though I had, from the start of this and the last employ, always tried to divorce myself from them emotionally and keep my dignity intact, my dreams afloat and my world, more precious and satisfying than the dead air in that place, alive and breathing, they still somehow were like snotty little kids, grabbing at fireflies because of their light. I knew, deep down, that we All have this light, all Gods, Heavens and Hells within us, adventures and paths alongside us the whole time, but them – they didn’t see it, and I wasn’t letting go of my light to help them to see it. Each person must do this for themselves), small details of their lives, and my wings grew weary of their buzzing…..busy little bees around the few remaining divots of honey that the old woman had left to herself. She had lived out her dreams, one way or another, but what had They done with their lungs, full up with oxygen like anyone’s, their health and youth, but drain the old woman of her only children, just so they didn’t have to feel the nervous worry (fireflies call this excitement) of how to get out there and Do from the purest place in their foolish little hearts?
I had grown older, made bitter and made intensely aware of losing the experience, presence and delight of forces and people loved and cherished, and I came to re-appreciate my original mantra of not suffering fools. Sorry, fools. Even jesters learn to be tricksters sometime. My heart demands it of me, and I’ve learned not to cross her. Suddenly, the sight of them all, their ever growing and diminishing hoards made me physically sick inside. Joking about the old lady’s tumor, about the oddness of some of her treasures, which sounded to me as disturbing as a din of slaughter just a few feet downwards, over the slope of the hill. The reverb of bullet holes tearing flesh and sucking vitality from its most tender places. Nothing left but a hissing afterward; a mourning for the wrong things said yes and no to. Engaged, and ignored. There was one of the old woman’s army of accountants there, who I could tell felt the same things I did about the richness within, and what each moment Can bring, but he was so mired in so many things that there wasn’t much room left permitted for a conversation, much less anything else of worth. As usual, I had to go it alone and did so, hating them behind their backs. It’s funny – it all too rarely hits people that they do not have to experience the world in the way that they have been taught to, or expected to, but somehow this is fleeting for most and just sears itself off like clockwork screws misshapen and tossed right out the windows, shooed away by the rest of those surrounding them, those who would rather live in an open faced graveyard.
Speaking of…The old lady, God bless her, died finally at the ripe old age of 93. It’s a very special number to sail off upon, and sail off she did. Into the seas of her own making, to meet her bevy of husbands who would still, even considering, probably like to show her around and make time with her. It was Her energy that drew in all of them, and not the other way around. Her equally snot nosed son, not a man but more of a collection of spindly fears and malnourished black holes, took over for her estate and for awhile, all the members of the household bled as much of her money out as they still could. No shame. He tried to play daddy but it didn’t work, since there was no respect on either side. Her sold off every last piece of her stuff, every last one, and abandoned the house, and the property, firing them all. Not a surprise really – when no blood or life force can get to a wound, it pales and dies. Babies and rocket scientists know that. Oddly, turns out the place was sitting all that time over government land, which – if you go way back to the original deeds, revealed a shady clause to its original acquiring. When things are built on a lie, they never survive, and it’s always found out one way or another. Why live duplicitously again and again, when you can live as you want to in truth – just one, easy time. I never ever understood that. Guess I never will. The house was torn down, and a graveyard was set to be built over it. Those who are Actually Dead often get passed over, in lieu of those looking to cram themselves in with the early bird special. We don’t have to lie back down in the familial DNA of our generational coffins. By coming to life as ourselves we honor our bloodline and its many triumphs and devastations, limitations and specks of profound joy.
I walked by the place the other day…by the graveyard I mean. Thought out of the first few rows of the newly dead, I might find the old eccentric, or see her speckled ghost walking in late afternoon between the tall grasses and willows, looking for her long lost treasures (since her son never came. Afraid of the dead, it seems). I should have known when I asked the groundskeeper – the low back buckled, sun burned old man who used to tend her garden. He shuffled a bit, from all the lifting at his age. A smile crossed the far corner of his mouth, the one that lets in impetus, the sort that takes you west to the places without noise. He told me what I halfway knew to be so in the malar flush of my battered, regenerating heart. It happened far from this place, he said. How perfect, I thought, right smack in the most central point of the liquid world where all the routes meet to run astray in the chaos of all directions. I walked off, and realized how immense a late afternoon in the soft tide of early autumn it was. How it had been so full and beautiful every single day I had come to work there. How it robbed me of that same beauty, day after day. How I let it. I walked then, in the right steps, down the amber of the hill with the ease of a firefly who had managed to weave above and beyond the sticky, chubby hands of the clobbering kids who chased it, they not realizing that they had it the wrong way around. The tickle of the barley grass snuck up my skirt a few times, the stubborn dew that hide itself had up and kissed my bare ankles, and the sun baking at the hearth blanketed my back with its palm, motherly and forgiving. The old lady’s ashes had been scattered out at sea.
M. Lucia
Monday, September 12, 2011
I'm Finished!
Anyway, so That’s over. Again. Not sure what comes over me, but I can only explain it as a rush…..a whirling dervish skirt being blown up by an industrial strength hurricane past the levys, the floodgates, the moats and filters, past and into a place where the light is so, not bright, but comely, so in a way that any little shred of average or below, any noise that is anything less than the perfect breath to that light, disappoints, scatters the shining parts, ruins and disrespects it to the point where I cannot be around any of it. My insides turn into a horror show- cut up, bloody and pus stained limbs, organs oozing and life force still whirling into muddy corners and choking on its own backwash. There is no other way to describe it and I am thankful it comes now and again and goes. And there will come a time, when all doors will be open and the keys thrown into the rushing tide, locking out all the stopgaps and excuses, the dead pan overcast air stuck in the middle of my brain.
When it was all over, and I wasn’t sleepwalking anymore, I saw the beautiful wild flowers I had picked at the farm nearby, where I hugged my friend the farmer, and kids danced to Motown he had blaring through the speakers, exciting the tomato vines and grasshoppers on late vacation. I felt every inch of the place I call home, cleaning away the dust and mite and fragments of the last months, and how I barely remembered them. I tasted the very virginal salty tears of little Lola, as I kissed her cheeks in the dark as she cried, watching her fall back to sleep as I sang her momma’s special song to her and backed away slowly, as the fireworks toasted the dying clouds in the sky, just off the water. I was in pre-dreamland, and no matter the realities of my life, my brain, my darkness and spaces unfulfilled, there was again imagination and feeling in my body, there was hope, there was living in the middle of many contradictions, there was Patience. That last feeling, that monster, that is the one that people like him felt in their heads for a few moments too long to turn back from offing themselves.
I can understand with absolute empathy and experience that same feeling. It’s as if the house’s been shut up for a hurricane that you and only you can see. The rush is moving and gathering all the same, with no place to dump out the rotten particulars, the patience cannot be felt, and you are trapped, you literally almost cannot breathe clear or at all. In my case, it is passive and you can let yourself go into lethargy and daydreaming (more like emptying your mind of all the missives) but to the literal point of suicide being a viable option, it’s just too much action for you to think about right now. The point is, people like him, they get to this place and it is, sadly, only their courage which pushes them forward into this void, but in their minds, the void is behind them any anything- Anything new and uninformed is for them, a new breath. I’m very glad I just visit this place now and again, out of sheer audacity, sensitivity mirrored by rage and reduction, and I don’t live there. I never will, but well, they only get caught in the reflections coming out from themselves and cannot see beyond the next bend, above their huddled heads, the darkness flying around their solid brainwaves, and convincing them that their place in the stars and safe in between the reeds has been taken. That they do not belong anymore and feel like a mass of thought is pushing them out, and moving on in.
Sometimes they see a crack in the slats, and that gorgeous light coming off the water, moving because They will it to, but sometimes they think it’s an illusion and they take that last courageous action and exit the frame. There is no way out, except to know that there is. Parts of my heart that I don’t even use daily wails for them in those moments, because moments for which I can muddle through and make it out, those moments become timeless, and a darkly etched world that instructs them as their master.
Eternity isn’t a long time; eternity isn’t About time. I hope they find solace in each other in the dreams of the living – they can build a boat mighty and strong and sail on out.
We need them more than they think.
(For DFW)
M. Lucia
When it was all over, and I wasn’t sleepwalking anymore, I saw the beautiful wild flowers I had picked at the farm nearby, where I hugged my friend the farmer, and kids danced to Motown he had blaring through the speakers, exciting the tomato vines and grasshoppers on late vacation. I felt every inch of the place I call home, cleaning away the dust and mite and fragments of the last months, and how I barely remembered them. I tasted the very virginal salty tears of little Lola, as I kissed her cheeks in the dark as she cried, watching her fall back to sleep as I sang her momma’s special song to her and backed away slowly, as the fireworks toasted the dying clouds in the sky, just off the water. I was in pre-dreamland, and no matter the realities of my life, my brain, my darkness and spaces unfulfilled, there was again imagination and feeling in my body, there was hope, there was living in the middle of many contradictions, there was Patience. That last feeling, that monster, that is the one that people like him felt in their heads for a few moments too long to turn back from offing themselves.
I can understand with absolute empathy and experience that same feeling. It’s as if the house’s been shut up for a hurricane that you and only you can see. The rush is moving and gathering all the same, with no place to dump out the rotten particulars, the patience cannot be felt, and you are trapped, you literally almost cannot breathe clear or at all. In my case, it is passive and you can let yourself go into lethargy and daydreaming (more like emptying your mind of all the missives) but to the literal point of suicide being a viable option, it’s just too much action for you to think about right now. The point is, people like him, they get to this place and it is, sadly, only their courage which pushes them forward into this void, but in their minds, the void is behind them any anything- Anything new and uninformed is for them, a new breath. I’m very glad I just visit this place now and again, out of sheer audacity, sensitivity mirrored by rage and reduction, and I don’t live there. I never will, but well, they only get caught in the reflections coming out from themselves and cannot see beyond the next bend, above their huddled heads, the darkness flying around their solid brainwaves, and convincing them that their place in the stars and safe in between the reeds has been taken. That they do not belong anymore and feel like a mass of thought is pushing them out, and moving on in.
Sometimes they see a crack in the slats, and that gorgeous light coming off the water, moving because They will it to, but sometimes they think it’s an illusion and they take that last courageous action and exit the frame. There is no way out, except to know that there is. Parts of my heart that I don’t even use daily wails for them in those moments, because moments for which I can muddle through and make it out, those moments become timeless, and a darkly etched world that instructs them as their master.
Eternity isn’t a long time; eternity isn’t About time. I hope they find solace in each other in the dreams of the living – they can build a boat mighty and strong and sail on out.
We need them more than they think.
(For DFW)
M. Lucia
Monday, September 5, 2011
Behind Closed Doors, or 36 Again
Something is wrong with me.
Every morning no matter who I’m with, alone, troubled, sick, drunk or blissful, I wake myself up from wet dreams and free drives by clutching myself from the inside and moaning, low with a greet of the day that only 1000 fucks from other lifetimes could bring, jettisoned into the high pitched innocent voice of a bright and cheery, turned on femme fatale, my own self contained grin that can't stop her smiling about it all. Thrusting, leg out, to get some fresh morning air, and some fantasies bred of simple trust in her gut, her cunt and her brainwaves. The heart bleeds, but it is less easy to decipher. And that's ok. Just fine, cause my heart always beats my head at night, and tells me to wake up when I need to. She'd never leave me without tears, at the muddy, polluted banks of a forlorn river, without a hand to hold, or a dream to unfold, anything that rhymes like violin, double down oxygen in her soul, it's mine and it's alive and it knows you. Still, the waves ripple like that.
One of my favourite books is The Collector, so much so I want to resurrect myself as a filmmaker and make it one day, mainly because the scenes where they fight in the rain turn me on. Henry Miller made me realize I am a male chauvinist pig in womanly form. Used to read Sexus in my old apt in Queens, not wearing underwear, crouched up on the easy chair, only to discover many of the long, drawn out passages of filthy French sex made me really, really excited and I had to then spend my time cleaning up the slight stains I’d made….even friends had said to me, it’s the sort of book after having read certain very lengthy passages of, that you need to excuse yourself and come back shortly thereafter, massivemasturbation (it should be one word, just like that) interceptions in between pages which were meant to stick together just so, so the words you had to work for were worth it, no matter if the first time or the 100th time reading them.
I am sometimes insatiable, a man’s woman thinking all the time, filtering all the time and fantasizing all the time. I am at home, at ease and with myself in all manner of what is today considered sexual attire – yesterday, considered attire. My pulse races when there are stockings, garters (w/ tucked in flask for safe keeping), my favourite place on my whole body other than my ass, and hips, is that area above my breasts which I feel I need to expose, frame and present to the world else I feel like there is a sack over my head.
Back when I was 13 I learned on my own accord, about all this. Not even sure about what men and women did, I learned quite liberally and physically of my Own accord. Hold it in when you need to pee, and god do the angels sing sweet dirty songs between your legs, but that's the thing. Before I ever knew the right ways to touch myself and touch the men who I caught looking my way when they thought they were alone, I could make this alchemy happen, in the liquid systems of my body, growing with weight and hips, but not sorted yet, and the height not making her way to the top of the class, a final finish like no other, no surprise, just a quiet signal that I was not meant to be a woman before I was fully ready to be. And I was worth this strange and longtime wait. Cause I could make a visit to the toilet (still do) like a Greek chorus of ecstasy and it wasn't so local as it is with the touch-- it's different than all that...it starts somewhere in the front of the hips, grows like the vines of Jesus (when he wasn't trying to impress his boss) seducing Magda in the garden, growing up and around them like joys which we all forget entirely too easily, moving easily through itself into my belly, above and beyond that child bearing place, but with an ocean view all the same, and into (somehow) my upper chest, my heart and my physical fingertips, my hands having an orgasm like ripples of a tide not come in yet....thirteen to thirty and beyond, this is always possible....so, with decades of this know how and humility at its roots at my (actual) fingertips, how couldn't all the rest finally fall into place for me? I keep thinking there is some guilt behind the next corner, alone in my bed, the memory of the blood on his wall, the mix in match of insecurities and emotions that one may call a woman, before she figures out that she can use this to her advantage (I will never use this to my advantage, since the killing of that sort of liberation and purity is a crime which I dare not commit) has informed the woman who can still make her muscles ache to the desperate tune of the world, and its men...
Something is right with me.
Tuesday, August 30, 2011
Sunday, August 28, 2011
Here Comes The Sun
...you know that certain light - it's not always visible, and it doesn't denote, connote, point to or relate to anything. Not at first, second or fiftieth glance anyway. You can't just look at it like that easy truck stop slut the sunrise, all sideways smiles and bright fuchsia nails...or that wistful, weepy woman- the sunset- crying at you and demanding your attention as she sits tear stained on the stairs, making you compliment her new, most comfortable shoes. No, not the happy go lucky sunny day, so clear and simple to understand - the bleached, yellow sky speaking small talk to you, even the horrors of the rains, the most dramatic thunder and lightning, taking out your diversions, the artificial lights you come to depend on, sadly....can't find your papers, to remember and tell you what you believe in, tripping over your belongings, your senses of yourself, taking down the night and the dreams that form murky rainstorm pictures in front of your grey night's pupils...chopped and layered waves smacking up against your shattered mind, making sharp and altering dance moves for you to gaze upon, when the blankets of the rain soak you into itself, down the sea wall, chipping off the moss at your sides, your barnacles making their way into the hard, lopsided stone...well, if you make it through the storm, the hype, the rising tide and the panicked masses of faces blanking you and feeling threatened by your initiative and by your thought to ask the audacious question "why should I listen to you". If you can wait out the fearful ones, the yelping dogs, the paper money throwing itself around, hitting the damp spaces around the foot of the stairs where the sunset sits, drunk on watered down gin, hand holding head and unable to stop her blubbering, because she can, not realizing that there is always a brightly coloured sunrise smoking outside the 24 hour diner round the corner....when the rest of them are stuck in their mired sleep, fashioning ways for their own to be led around by the nose, because it's much easier than opening the door after the storm and greeting it with the properly measured time, clicking your steps behind you as your shadow moves along. That ever so fleeting sense of light that doesn't tell you all its secrets, doesn't mind all of its leaks and tears, it will come out of the sky slowly, after the so called destruction process. Self-made, of course. It's all in how you took it. How you looked it in the eye as it came for you. How did you greet it as it moved slowly across your inspiration airs. How is it now, in the quiet of the outside time, the boats rocking without shame in the constant movement of the waters, white crested waves making not a peep. Some stories don't need to show you their plot lines, present to you their endings...they simply are, and simply are alive only when you allow yourself to be told their tales. Sitting motionless in the clean, supple puddles in the late afternoon light - the pale colours not defined, not sent to a cloud or an obvious sense of sun or rain. You are taking part in the destruction, in the resurrection, in the dreaming and the conjuring of alchemy, all the elements forming with every second....it does not unfold without your acquiescence. Your beholding is as crucial as the over-bloated sun fancies taking bows in your light every morning. Climb on in; take your place in the creation and movement of light without an absolute starting point, light coming alive when it does not offer up the sweetness of itself, all that easily...it still invites with each passing breath of breeze and droplet of rain slipping down the length of its neck, turning to meet your gaze in a world not yet expired in its definitions of story yet untold...
M. Lucia
Thursday, August 25, 2011
< The Rains Came >
Step back, heels in a mud puddle.
Better on your ass, than your knees…
A crow clears his throat,
shits on your head-
Remember:
The trees grow long,
branches to roots
surmising
your
fingers;
throwing anchor smack in the center,
the palms of your hands.
Their direction is Up,
and yours follows strands to whichever
directional Heaven you crave knowing the most.
M. Lucia
Better on your ass, than your knees…
A crow clears his throat,
shits on your head-
Remember:
The trees grow long,
branches to roots
surmising
your
fingers;
throwing anchor smack in the center,
the palms of your hands.
Their direction is Up,
and yours follows strands to whichever
directional Heaven you crave knowing the most.
M. Lucia
Tuesday, August 23, 2011
The Coming of Autumn
The downward slope of the street suited the arch of her steps, the spine of her walk. Autumn was nowhere near them; it was summer yet, but there was something rustling in the distance. So far away, that you couldn’t see it from the upward slope, but in your nerves you could feel its tingle.
A man smoking at the side of the road reminded of carnivals in the rural towns you once knew, before they disposed of you. The angling creak of the high swings that allowed your feet to fly above earth, the carny smoking his pall malls with one hand, the other steady on the rust of the lever that ran this whole damn thing. There’s a concept of God for you. A carny, possible ex-con, inability to shave without piercing his cheek at least once, haggard in clothes that smelled of other people, standing in overgrown tall grass, with one hand smoking his cigarette and the other held onto the lever of your carnival ride. Not held tightly, mind you. Loose, like your dad driving long highways --- one hand on his lap, just a bare cradle beneath the wheel. Like he was captaining a vessel on the sea.
This guy, the carny, he didn’t watch the kids up there, he wasn’t the sort to look up little and not so little girls’ skirts, their legs filling out into their hips with each year of good nutrition and mostly conditional love…no, he was just offering us and the rest who watched, a good, long stare just beyond the mountain valley, just shy and to the left of the treetops as they fiddled the sky into late summer night a few moments earlier each time. The blues shade a slope downward with each passing turn, as each of those girls realizes that her screams can’t hurt her, and they’re a great way to tell the stars sleeping in the evening sky to stand up straight and wake up! Skirts in the air, hot muffler special air drifting southbound in the weeds not far from the blatant and suddenly set up carnival ground.
As the girls grew and screamed with more pinpointed diligence and vigil, the late summer would go and be replaced with the might chill of early fall. The smell of fresh air always got her body excited in a way that sweating and heat did not. It was a strange state of affairs, wasn’t it. That smell of faraway fires, faraway borders, snow which hadn’t even thought about hatching yet, wind just waking up from its cozy sleep, as long as it was faraway it was meaningful to her. The thought of other lives, other days, places to move towards, to keep moving, was the internal beat that she kept time alongside. And that made her wilder, the brief sun and chillier breezes marking her beneath her skin, making the warmth of human touch even more delectable and more satiating.
She was still on those swings, bellowing to anyone who would hear her and singing backup to the whistling winds that would come as fall approached. Not yet, though. The heat was still about; all stifling and stasis and immovable. But down the slope of the street, past the arches of her and her hips, was the end of summer, like the coming of a new year, a new epoch. No one in the world owes you anything and you are responsible for the sum of your life. She knew that. Always did, somehow and no one, not the God of the carnival or the lessons she found in the mountain valley taught her that. It was bred inside of her, like soft earth pouring levels of time in through her ears. Autumn was coming, and she’d ride it out until it did. You can feel yourself coming a long while before you moan, and gush and shudder with the heavens and a lover. You can feel it in the works between your legs – small hunched shoulders in quiet conversation planning a revolt against tyranny, that aching, wanting feeling in the pit of your stomach when you kiss someone just right and they pour down your throat and make their way all the way in, the mind melting in slow backwards volcanic ash, slipping away from you as you feel the crux of it coming inside, then out, with him, and then outside of him. And then it belongs to someplace else.
It is the act of letting go of summer, it is the realization that we are dying, and only we can keep the life thrashing and waltzing inside ourselves. We are the gods in charge of our seasons, and how we weave the leaves of early autumn around and through us – breathing heavy, smell of newly struck fires alighting our grounds…the only ones we strive to reach, with each passing touch, and sense of flight.
M. Lucia
A man smoking at the side of the road reminded of carnivals in the rural towns you once knew, before they disposed of you. The angling creak of the high swings that allowed your feet to fly above earth, the carny smoking his pall malls with one hand, the other steady on the rust of the lever that ran this whole damn thing. There’s a concept of God for you. A carny, possible ex-con, inability to shave without piercing his cheek at least once, haggard in clothes that smelled of other people, standing in overgrown tall grass, with one hand smoking his cigarette and the other held onto the lever of your carnival ride. Not held tightly, mind you. Loose, like your dad driving long highways --- one hand on his lap, just a bare cradle beneath the wheel. Like he was captaining a vessel on the sea.
This guy, the carny, he didn’t watch the kids up there, he wasn’t the sort to look up little and not so little girls’ skirts, their legs filling out into their hips with each year of good nutrition and mostly conditional love…no, he was just offering us and the rest who watched, a good, long stare just beyond the mountain valley, just shy and to the left of the treetops as they fiddled the sky into late summer night a few moments earlier each time. The blues shade a slope downward with each passing turn, as each of those girls realizes that her screams can’t hurt her, and they’re a great way to tell the stars sleeping in the evening sky to stand up straight and wake up! Skirts in the air, hot muffler special air drifting southbound in the weeds not far from the blatant and suddenly set up carnival ground.
As the girls grew and screamed with more pinpointed diligence and vigil, the late summer would go and be replaced with the might chill of early fall. The smell of fresh air always got her body excited in a way that sweating and heat did not. It was a strange state of affairs, wasn’t it. That smell of faraway fires, faraway borders, snow which hadn’t even thought about hatching yet, wind just waking up from its cozy sleep, as long as it was faraway it was meaningful to her. The thought of other lives, other days, places to move towards, to keep moving, was the internal beat that she kept time alongside. And that made her wilder, the brief sun and chillier breezes marking her beneath her skin, making the warmth of human touch even more delectable and more satiating.
She was still on those swings, bellowing to anyone who would hear her and singing backup to the whistling winds that would come as fall approached. Not yet, though. The heat was still about; all stifling and stasis and immovable. But down the slope of the street, past the arches of her and her hips, was the end of summer, like the coming of a new year, a new epoch. No one in the world owes you anything and you are responsible for the sum of your life. She knew that. Always did, somehow and no one, not the God of the carnival or the lessons she found in the mountain valley taught her that. It was bred inside of her, like soft earth pouring levels of time in through her ears. Autumn was coming, and she’d ride it out until it did. You can feel yourself coming a long while before you moan, and gush and shudder with the heavens and a lover. You can feel it in the works between your legs – small hunched shoulders in quiet conversation planning a revolt against tyranny, that aching, wanting feeling in the pit of your stomach when you kiss someone just right and they pour down your throat and make their way all the way in, the mind melting in slow backwards volcanic ash, slipping away from you as you feel the crux of it coming inside, then out, with him, and then outside of him. And then it belongs to someplace else.
It is the act of letting go of summer, it is the realization that we are dying, and only we can keep the life thrashing and waltzing inside ourselves. We are the gods in charge of our seasons, and how we weave the leaves of early autumn around and through us – breathing heavy, smell of newly struck fires alighting our grounds…the only ones we strive to reach, with each passing touch, and sense of flight.
M. Lucia
Sunday, August 21, 2011
PLUTO HAS A NEW MOON aka Penis von Lesbian
Two fifteen. That's what time it is. I read the clock but the numbers don't make any sense. I say them, "two fifteen"...I might as well be saying bacon sans hockey puck. Those words sound more or less the same for all it means to me.
"Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams and he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect-like creature."
I get that. Kafka wrote, of course, in German which might as well be Greek to me. If someone said that the Metamorphosis begins with this sentence: "Ich bin ein Berlinner das der Fledermaus eins strasse nein brauhaus," I might protest that it sounds a little implausible but really I would have no standing to say it wasn't truly how Kafka began the story in German with any real certainty, not speaking German or ever really having had any prolongued exposure to the language itself, spoken or otherwise. Well, I guess I would know enough to say that it sounded LIKE German, knowing enough about the sound of the language to ID as such but not really enough to know what any of the words meant, or if the order of the words made any sense grammatically. But now, even the English translation sounds wrong to me. I awoke this morning feeling finally like some transformation had finally been completed.
I have the first sentence memorized of course. It's Kafka for God's sake. It's all up here in my brain. The words in my head sound like they make sense. As I sit here thinking about the first sentence I know that it's about a guy who wakes up as something very different from the thing he went to bed as. Human into insect. I also can grasp the metaphor, the irony, the plot device so cleverly at work in the story. Is he actually an insect or does he just FEEL like an insect? What does it mean to be an insect to Gregor Samsa? What has he lost? What has he gained? I can sit here and speculate all these things inside my own head. The thoughts are something somehow disconnected, I see now, from language itself. But when I try to say the first sentence out loud: "Bedbug Lagerfeld don frank bend poolside, chick spleen blond glandular hours condition isthmus cloister."
I listen to myself. It is my voice. And I can sense that the words are English. It is the language I know I used to speak. I even can think about what some of the words mean, if I focus on them as separate from the rest of the sentence, such as it is. "Chick" is a baby bird, or a derogatory word for a woman. "chick spleen blond glandular..." means nothing to me.
And I get too the inconsistency that you may be thinking about now as I write this--he's writing in English, he's communicating...I understand what he's saying so what's the difference? The thing is...I only understand this as I write it. As I am typing the words, because I'm such a capable typist, I can set down the thoughts in my head as they occur to me. There is little or no interference between my thoughts as I have them and the words as they are typed virtually by my fingers because there is no thought required by me, consciously, to shape the words using the letters of the english language. I think them and they come out here. If I go back and read them, as I did just now? Gibberish. Plank ink spot driveway clock by mechanism. That's what I read when I read what I typed. What the fuck?
Perhaps those of you more enlightened than I could explain this...maybe it's a psychological problem, yes? Something perhaps well cured by the administering of a mild anti-depressant? Something to ease the complications, narrow the pathways, tamp down the high-grown weeds and suppress the unhappy memories that cloud the otherwise well-adjusted marginalia. Maybe its glandular. Maybe it's a tumor. Who's to say? Not me of course. I don't speak English anymore, right?
I heard about a woman who lost the ability to smell; the "sense" of smell, that was what was lost. She retained the memory of smell, like she felt that she knew what beef stew would smell like, say, if she could "sense" it in the air...but she also knew at the same time that if she were to stand over a stewing pot of meat and vegetables that there would be...nothing. What kind of way is that to live you might think? I don't have the answer to that.
I can't get this tune out of my head...Gene Kelly singing...singing..."Singing in the Rain." You know it right? Images are conjured up just by me saying it, referencing it...you can see in your mind's eye, can't you? Gene Kelly's face upturned, enraptured by the pure joy of water on his face. Water from the heavens. Bestowed one might say. And as I wade into the psychological implications of this memory springing forth for me at this particular juncture in my life, the water is warm, as it were, it seems inviting...I think I get the point(s).
It is a profound little bit of musical theatre (cinema, more accurately,) because the underpinnings of the song, psychologically speaking, are so fraught with meaning, subtle and otherwise, as to make ones head spin. First, the simple statement of fact: "I'm singing in the rain." Seems simple on its surface right? It is what it is. He's just saying what it is that he is doing. Something about the statement seems to preclude interrogation too. It's a bold statement. It's more like "I'm singing in the rain and fuck all if you think you're gonna do anything about it." And then the re-statement of fact, reinforcing the first statement of fact: "Just singing in the rain." And then the real gist of it all: "what a glorious feeling, I'm happy again." You see the point? No? It is a profound metaphysical state that Gene Kelly's character has reached. One beyond ordinary language and expressions, whether through words or music, sights, smells or the most tender touch. Physical fact equals metaphysical state. I am singing in the rain and I am happy again. Words fail me. Well, clearly.
All mine schadenfreude island ich nick spray nickle nipple chip.
What would I say if given a lifetime to say it? Who would listen?
"Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams and he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect-like creature."
I get that. Kafka wrote, of course, in German which might as well be Greek to me. If someone said that the Metamorphosis begins with this sentence: "Ich bin ein Berlinner das der Fledermaus eins strasse nein brauhaus," I might protest that it sounds a little implausible but really I would have no standing to say it wasn't truly how Kafka began the story in German with any real certainty, not speaking German or ever really having had any prolongued exposure to the language itself, spoken or otherwise. Well, I guess I would know enough to say that it sounded LIKE German, knowing enough about the sound of the language to ID as such but not really enough to know what any of the words meant, or if the order of the words made any sense grammatically. But now, even the English translation sounds wrong to me. I awoke this morning feeling finally like some transformation had finally been completed.
I have the first sentence memorized of course. It's Kafka for God's sake. It's all up here in my brain. The words in my head sound like they make sense. As I sit here thinking about the first sentence I know that it's about a guy who wakes up as something very different from the thing he went to bed as. Human into insect. I also can grasp the metaphor, the irony, the plot device so cleverly at work in the story. Is he actually an insect or does he just FEEL like an insect? What does it mean to be an insect to Gregor Samsa? What has he lost? What has he gained? I can sit here and speculate all these things inside my own head. The thoughts are something somehow disconnected, I see now, from language itself. But when I try to say the first sentence out loud: "Bedbug Lagerfeld don frank bend poolside, chick spleen blond glandular hours condition isthmus cloister."
I listen to myself. It is my voice. And I can sense that the words are English. It is the language I know I used to speak. I even can think about what some of the words mean, if I focus on them as separate from the rest of the sentence, such as it is. "Chick" is a baby bird, or a derogatory word for a woman. "chick spleen blond glandular..." means nothing to me.
And I get too the inconsistency that you may be thinking about now as I write this--he's writing in English, he's communicating...I understand what he's saying so what's the difference? The thing is...I only understand this as I write it. As I am typing the words, because I'm such a capable typist, I can set down the thoughts in my head as they occur to me. There is little or no interference between my thoughts as I have them and the words as they are typed virtually by my fingers because there is no thought required by me, consciously, to shape the words using the letters of the english language. I think them and they come out here. If I go back and read them, as I did just now? Gibberish. Plank ink spot driveway clock by mechanism. That's what I read when I read what I typed. What the fuck?
Perhaps those of you more enlightened than I could explain this...maybe it's a psychological problem, yes? Something perhaps well cured by the administering of a mild anti-depressant? Something to ease the complications, narrow the pathways, tamp down the high-grown weeds and suppress the unhappy memories that cloud the otherwise well-adjusted marginalia. Maybe its glandular. Maybe it's a tumor. Who's to say? Not me of course. I don't speak English anymore, right?
I heard about a woman who lost the ability to smell; the "sense" of smell, that was what was lost. She retained the memory of smell, like she felt that she knew what beef stew would smell like, say, if she could "sense" it in the air...but she also knew at the same time that if she were to stand over a stewing pot of meat and vegetables that there would be...nothing. What kind of way is that to live you might think? I don't have the answer to that.
I can't get this tune out of my head...Gene Kelly singing...singing..."Singing in the Rain." You know it right? Images are conjured up just by me saying it, referencing it...you can see in your mind's eye, can't you? Gene Kelly's face upturned, enraptured by the pure joy of water on his face. Water from the heavens. Bestowed one might say. And as I wade into the psychological implications of this memory springing forth for me at this particular juncture in my life, the water is warm, as it were, it seems inviting...I think I get the point(s).
It is a profound little bit of musical theatre (cinema, more accurately,) because the underpinnings of the song, psychologically speaking, are so fraught with meaning, subtle and otherwise, as to make ones head spin. First, the simple statement of fact: "I'm singing in the rain." Seems simple on its surface right? It is what it is. He's just saying what it is that he is doing. Something about the statement seems to preclude interrogation too. It's a bold statement. It's more like "I'm singing in the rain and fuck all if you think you're gonna do anything about it." And then the re-statement of fact, reinforcing the first statement of fact: "Just singing in the rain." And then the real gist of it all: "what a glorious feeling, I'm happy again." You see the point? No? It is a profound metaphysical state that Gene Kelly's character has reached. One beyond ordinary language and expressions, whether through words or music, sights, smells or the most tender touch. Physical fact equals metaphysical state. I am singing in the rain and I am happy again. Words fail me. Well, clearly.
All mine schadenfreude island ich nick spray nickle nipple chip.
What would I say if given a lifetime to say it? Who would listen?
WINGS
Waiting in the wings. The make-up is piled on my face. I hate this feeling. This half-baked, caked on pregnant feeling right before. The ropes reach up into the darkness above the stage and all I can think of is the hangman's noose. The music is playing from the pit and I have this sinking emotion of dread--of how the orchestra and the audience are in cahoots against me. That they are sharing this marvelous thing and I'm out of the picture and how they're probably perfectly happy without me.
What I need is to get out there...out into the light where the heat from the ancient lamps will cook this pancake on my cheeks and it will rise like a souffle of character--a person whose body I myself will inhabit. Once that happens I will be set loose into the art of it all. The music will take me over and use my flesh and my aching lungs for good.
The bird is coaxed from its egg-bound nest against its will by a mother out on a clothes line harping a song, nothing but annoyance, to set to stir a rhythm in her heart that she can't help but answer. She aches to stay and longs at the same time to be out in the grass, not even knowing what grass is, or even freedom. She seeks only the chance to make her own way, without the squawking of impatience or of evolutionary design. I choose to stay here, she says, no matter how unsatisfactory the nest, baking in the heat of the summer, as long as my share is delivered, via direct deposit, of my own account.
The cue approaches. I can feel the air of anticipation electrify around me. The stage manager holds a finger to her headphoned ear, knowing what is said there in her ear by rote, but needing to actually hear it nonetheless. I can feel the steady building of beats off in the distance. I know that there is a point of light on the horizon that is me re-joining the collective telling of story, the relating of tale--it marches toward me but I know there will be a threshold at which the urgency changes hands--when there is no longer a march toward me as much as carrying forward by me, under my own power, of the narrative; when it is I who provides the impulse.
This is the never ending journey, as old as the earth and the sky, as deep as the deepest ocean. It suffers not of accountancy, it submits to no audit and to no know crisis of personality. It is itself.
It is.
What I need is to get out there...out into the light where the heat from the ancient lamps will cook this pancake on my cheeks and it will rise like a souffle of character--a person whose body I myself will inhabit. Once that happens I will be set loose into the art of it all. The music will take me over and use my flesh and my aching lungs for good.
The bird is coaxed from its egg-bound nest against its will by a mother out on a clothes line harping a song, nothing but annoyance, to set to stir a rhythm in her heart that she can't help but answer. She aches to stay and longs at the same time to be out in the grass, not even knowing what grass is, or even freedom. She seeks only the chance to make her own way, without the squawking of impatience or of evolutionary design. I choose to stay here, she says, no matter how unsatisfactory the nest, baking in the heat of the summer, as long as my share is delivered, via direct deposit, of my own account.
The cue approaches. I can feel the air of anticipation electrify around me. The stage manager holds a finger to her headphoned ear, knowing what is said there in her ear by rote, but needing to actually hear it nonetheless. I can feel the steady building of beats off in the distance. I know that there is a point of light on the horizon that is me re-joining the collective telling of story, the relating of tale--it marches toward me but I know there will be a threshold at which the urgency changes hands--when there is no longer a march toward me as much as carrying forward by me, under my own power, of the narrative; when it is I who provides the impulse.
This is the never ending journey, as old as the earth and the sky, as deep as the deepest ocean. It suffers not of accountancy, it submits to no audit and to no know crisis of personality. It is itself.
It is.
THE FUNNY THING
Writing has been stifled by the corporate bureaucracy but I'm not surrendering anymore. There's a me that needs to reassert himself and this is the first step. The conditions are perfect and I hold all the cards. Thus and so--take that all you weak-kneed, lily-livered, pinkie-ringed mother-fuckers. I object to being made to feel inadequate and wanting somehow. I resent the feeling that my life is being held hostage by people for whom I have little or no regard. They are caricatures...that's what's even more sad...they're just poor facsimiles of corporate monsters straight out of central casting. What do they add to the world? What do they do besides take away from something that they have had no hand in nurturing and developing, something that is itself already lacking substance and meaning? They are the greedy rapists, sodomizing the comatose body of a mannequin and then stealing its dress and taking a walk down a department store runway, modeling their latest fashion.
Mr. Block...that's RHI Entertainment
(beat)
You worked for RHI Entertainment?
What happened?
A luxury yacht slammed two torpedoes into our side. We was comin' back from lunch. We'd just delivered the bomb. The Rosamund Pilcher bomb. 47 men and women went into the water. Company went down in 12 minutes.
Didn't see the first CEO for about a half-hour. Corrigan. 5-1/2 footer. You know how you know that in the water? You can tell by lookin' from the pinkie ring to the wing tips. What we didn't know, was that our bomb mission was so secret, no distress signal had been sent. They didn't even list us overdue for a week. Very first light, CEO's come cruisin' by, so we formed ourselves into tight groups. It was sorta like you see in the calendars, you know the infantry squares in the old calendars like the Battle of Waterloo and the idea was the CEO come to the nearest man, that man he starts poundin' and hollerin' and sometimes that CEO he go away... but sometimes he wouldn't go away.
Sometimes that CEO looks right at ya. Right into your eyes. And the thing about a washed up former entertainment executive is he's got lifeless eyes. Black eyes. Like a doll's eyes. When he comes at ya, he doesn't even seem to be livin'... 'til he bites ya, and those black eyes roll over white and then... ah then you hear that terrible high-pitched screamin'. The ocean turns red, and despite all your poundin' and your hollerin' those sharks come in and... they rip you to pieces.
You know by the end of that first dawn, lost 3 men. I don't know how many CEO's there were, maybe a thousand. I do know how many men, they averaged one an hour. Thursday mornin', I bumped into a friend of mine, Jeff Ringler from New Rochelle. Cigar smoker. Salt of the earth. I thought he was asleep. I reached over to wake him up. He bobbed up, down in the water, he was like a kinda top. Upended. Well, he'd been bitten in half below the waist.
At noon on the fifth day, Frank Lupo swung in low and he spotted us, a young pilot, lot younger than Mr. Block here, anyway he spotted us and a few hours later a big ol' fat PBY come down and started to pick us up. You know that was the time I was most frightened. Waitin' for my turn. I'll never put on a lifejacket again. So, 47 men and women went into the water. 39 come out, the CEO's took the rest, August the 18th, 2011.
Anyway, we delivered the bomb."
Mr. Block...that's RHI Entertainment
(beat)
You worked for RHI Entertainment?
What happened?
A luxury yacht slammed two torpedoes into our side. We was comin' back from lunch. We'd just delivered the bomb. The Rosamund Pilcher bomb. 47 men and women went into the water. Company went down in 12 minutes.
Didn't see the first CEO for about a half-hour. Corrigan. 5-1/2 footer. You know how you know that in the water? You can tell by lookin' from the pinkie ring to the wing tips. What we didn't know, was that our bomb mission was so secret, no distress signal had been sent. They didn't even list us overdue for a week. Very first light, CEO's come cruisin' by, so we formed ourselves into tight groups. It was sorta like you see in the calendars, you know the infantry squares in the old calendars like the Battle of Waterloo and the idea was the CEO come to the nearest man, that man he starts poundin' and hollerin' and sometimes that CEO he go away... but sometimes he wouldn't go away.
Sometimes that CEO looks right at ya. Right into your eyes. And the thing about a washed up former entertainment executive is he's got lifeless eyes. Black eyes. Like a doll's eyes. When he comes at ya, he doesn't even seem to be livin'... 'til he bites ya, and those black eyes roll over white and then... ah then you hear that terrible high-pitched screamin'. The ocean turns red, and despite all your poundin' and your hollerin' those sharks come in and... they rip you to pieces.
You know by the end of that first dawn, lost 3 men. I don't know how many CEO's there were, maybe a thousand. I do know how many men, they averaged one an hour. Thursday mornin', I bumped into a friend of mine, Jeff Ringler from New Rochelle. Cigar smoker. Salt of the earth. I thought he was asleep. I reached over to wake him up. He bobbed up, down in the water, he was like a kinda top. Upended. Well, he'd been bitten in half below the waist.
At noon on the fifth day, Frank Lupo swung in low and he spotted us, a young pilot, lot younger than Mr. Block here, anyway he spotted us and a few hours later a big ol' fat PBY come down and started to pick us up. You know that was the time I was most frightened. Waitin' for my turn. I'll never put on a lifejacket again. So, 47 men and women went into the water. 39 come out, the CEO's took the rest, August the 18th, 2011.
Anyway, we delivered the bomb."
Monday, August 15, 2011
A Birthday for Rose
It was one of the continuous new mornings of their marriage. She was a stilted child, with a tough father, tougher than the tetanus that might sprout up from one of his rusty nails being left behind, down on pier 49. He was stocky, silver haired - they all said he looked Irish but what did they know. He used to slap her in the face when she would talk back (she had a smart mouth, she admits) or for wearing nail polish. Sitting in a car, across the street from her husband's grave in the woods, she says "it must have been frustrating for him; I can't imagine it was easy at all in those days". From those days to this one, in the woods, waiting for the tank to fill, there were those new mornings with her new male counterpart. The one, tough rusty nails and oversized boots smelling of dirty city river water, he wasn't like this one at all. This one was softer, fanciful, liked to tell stories and go his own way, a solid, but civilized renegade, taught all the manners that the world had forgotten, in the ruins of old empires. She was a woman, and he the only lover she would ever have. She may have still played with dolls, and not known much more of things, but the idea of forging forward without a hundred pre-determined ways out or final destinations was not altogether ignorant. It required all of you. And all she had, she gave. In her nightie, of which famous tales were told, she brought him a tray, when he still lay in bed, as was his way. On it, the same thing. A shot of whiskey in a small silver cup, an heirloom and a cigarette with a book of matches for lighting (back when he smoked). The same every time. If you're going to forge, might as well light your way pleasurably and happily so.
The trees in those woods, that lined the tiny filling station, across the route and across the tiny, catholic cemetery, swayed mildly and flirtatiously so. I could tell she was smiling, back there in the seat behind. All nostalgic compartmentalizing of human beings, their roles to us, and perceptions of parental shuddering aside, I'm glad he made and left such a twinkle in her eye.
M. Lucia
The trees in those woods, that lined the tiny filling station, across the route and across the tiny, catholic cemetery, swayed mildly and flirtatiously so. I could tell she was smiling, back there in the seat behind. All nostalgic compartmentalizing of human beings, their roles to us, and perceptions of parental shuddering aside, I'm glad he made and left such a twinkle in her eye.
M. Lucia
Sunday, August 14, 2011
The Outskirts
The dirt keeps climbing into her shoes.
Powder, shit-brown
baked by the high brow sun.
It paints her world and frames her,
as she walks along sedentary railroad tracks.
Question is, who's
driving the train she after.
Her inner thigh itches, measurements
neat and complete.
Not any question the dirt
will be there when she rounds the corner.
The light will grace her, drown in her
-the God, the One.
Stuck there in the might and folly,
the mired insides of her shoes.
Tap to tap, sun licks her lips
and bounding,
the birds set her into position.
Submission- the mission is clear.
As smoke rises bilaterally from her creation,
the trains birth noise in the distance.
M. Lucia
Powder, shit-brown
baked by the high brow sun.
It paints her world and frames her,
as she walks along sedentary railroad tracks.
Question is, who's
driving the train she after.
Her inner thigh itches, measurements
neat and complete.
Not any question the dirt
will be there when she rounds the corner.
The light will grace her, drown in her
-the God, the One.
Stuck there in the might and folly,
the mired insides of her shoes.
Tap to tap, sun licks her lips
and bounding,
the birds set her into position.
Submission- the mission is clear.
As smoke rises bilaterally from her creation,
the trains birth noise in the distance.
M. Lucia
Tuesday, August 9, 2011
My Heart Belongs to Daddy
It’s funny, isn’t it, how girls become women (those who do are few and far between), and their whole lives they see and interact with men, framed and determined by how they saw their own daddy. It seems to come down to this pleasing thing, doesn’t it. I know about that. I do. I loved making highballs for my dad, and sometime mom, and helping with the guest highballs for any of the variety of Croat friends and family that used to frequent our house. I knew I was American, as far as my birthplace, and friends and outside environment, but very few American types visited our house, unless it was a friend’s parent coming to pick them up (no big shock that everybody wanted to come to My house and not the other way around – was it the playroom built for inner fantasies, the many living room choices, the oversized bedroom which I pretended was an inn in the woods in some guarded, oddball fairytale, the levels of yard and hills, pond and swimming pool, trees, secret places, and woods behind a regulation tennis court? It was something). Regardless, I enjoyed being let to drink some iced down red wine with my father, and sharing in his beer when he was sweating outside, constructing one of the above reasons I (or my house) was so popular when I was still a little girl who hated talking to people, or the aforesaid making of the highball – the scotch, usually Dewar’s or Johnnie Walker, the soda, the ice, the mixing with the silverware knife. It wasn’t all about drinking, of course, but certainly these were some of the favourite rituals I had in “pleasing” my father.
Unlike these women masquerading as little adult girls (or perhaps the other way around), I wasn’t trying to get him to love me more, or differently. There was always this ease; this comfort between us, like we were confidants and friends from the start. Yes, just like everyone else, I used to reach up to him and stretch my short little toddler arms out until he picked me up. Yes, as my mother tells me, when asked how much I loved her she received a fair amount of hand to hand measurement (something like a foot long hero sandwich probably) and when asked about how much I loved my father the hands spread farther and wider than my arms could even reach at the time. All of that was true. I knew I was loved, but I was never lauded. He was very proud of me when I made good grades, and didn’t like it when I quit things – piano, dance, gymnastics (moving away was the reason for the latters, but the former I admit, I grew tired of on my own), and thought I looked like the beautiful women in his family, and like him, but I was never told I was the prettiest girl in the world, or the best, or the most important. I made my own importance, which is what he taught me without ever having to tell me. It meant I was as good as anybody and very special, and what I did with that was my doing, or undoing.
There were many car rides, right up until the end of his life, wherein he would talk about my mistakes, and I didn’t always love the way it made me feel, but he emphasized the same thing always. To learn from them and do better next time was Key. He had learned that, and not always listened to it himself, in his life. And no one – NO ONE – told him or me the way we felt about anything. Stubbornness not as much as a belief in ourselves and in the universe we made every day and with every action, thought and desire, and the strength of it- was the cause for this prime mover in our lives. We shared that so deeply, that most others in the family didn’t quite understand. Their motivations were not the same, simply put. I guess that’s why I don’t need to pretend to be anyone else to any man I’ve ever known since. It was never presented to me as an option, and the more I see of the state of it at the finish line or in the muddy ravine at the side of the racing road, the less it holds interest for me. Aren’t our lives short enough? Don’t they get pinned down so easily with goals, and experience, and mired in our hearts so and our cacophony of thoughts constantly at us, that why would we try to be someone else? We never thought of that, in my family, nor in the shared feelings between my father and me. He always told me to follow my dreams, and was certainly interested in the realities that might lead me there or might be too impossible to traverse logistically, and was interested in security for oneself, independence, safety, education, generosity, genuineness and, above all things, being true to yourself. I admit the degrees and schooling which left me lost to certain experience came from the part of him that wanted to see his children be educated. It did mean something to him, and it means something to me. While I am left with pieces of beautiful, stained paper tacked onto the walls of my bedroom closet, and a massive stockpile of loans which I intend never to pay back (I happen to believe education should be free, and they can wait until the sun rises in a sky of dancing bears before I pay them for the things I was taught), I still hold value to it. The same value that he held for me.
He wanted very few other specific things for me – I think he hoped that he would be healthy enough to help me build a house one day, like he had done so 4 or 5 times over. I used to tell him (during the wine nights or the car rides) how I wanted a house in England, or Ireland, because I had it in my mind that I wanted to live there. He complained about old houses, and the electrical/plumbing and heating, and how it would be expensive to re-wire something so old and such, and we’d argue, but all in all he’d have come anywhere to help me build and would have done a great job of it no matter his age or health. He was over protective, and so I was not one of those kids who got to ride the bus or train by themselves, and when the choice came to work while going to school, even though he could probably have used the financial assistance, he always told me he’d rather have me concentrate on my studies and education. I was never denied help when I needed it, and yet never was spoiled or expected to coast on through, nor have that horrible sense of “entitlement” that many have today. He wanted me to make it in film, and didn’t understand that my degree and my hard work might not be enough; that who you “knew”, and the idioms of nepotism and favorites played a bigger role than that. He wanted me to be happy, away from all those jobs I worked (and still work, for awhile) in order to be creative, be my own boss, and live out my dreams out loud and nothing less. He had a hard time thinking of me in terms of boys and men, and thankfully I only let that side of things surface towards the end of his life; he Did want someone to take care of me, but ultimately he wanted me to be independent, and not ever marry for security or anything less than the love of an equal. And not the kind of love that these women-girls went in for. Someone to listen to you co-sign on your own bullshit, a pushover to do your bidding especially in the form of possessions, gifts and dollar signs, or some asshole who ignored you, disrespected you and kept you in your place just like their mean old daddies did to them. Once more, so much time saved from our being ourselves from the get go.
He wanted me to be myself, and nothing less, always. It wasn’t just my heart that belonged to daddy. Daddy was my true friend. And he was right in that the true people you meet, love and are loyal to over your entire life could be counted on one hand, really. The rest were just fair weather (said ‘fare vedder’) friends. And daddy was right, and I hope he knows how right he was. Love without truth and shared adventure isn’t love at all and not honoring the stamp imprinted onto your soul long before you were made in its image (in his words went something like “be yourself. If they don’t like it, forget them (he wanted to say fuck them but still regarded me as his little girl so wouldn’t necessarily say so) and keep going”) wastes so much fucking time, when you could be having so much more fun with every sunrise, every new construction and challenge, every feast and every new highball made with the absolute love of a little girl who was allowed to become her own woman, and whose best friend was her daddy.
M. Lucia
Unlike these women masquerading as little adult girls (or perhaps the other way around), I wasn’t trying to get him to love me more, or differently. There was always this ease; this comfort between us, like we were confidants and friends from the start. Yes, just like everyone else, I used to reach up to him and stretch my short little toddler arms out until he picked me up. Yes, as my mother tells me, when asked how much I loved her she received a fair amount of hand to hand measurement (something like a foot long hero sandwich probably) and when asked about how much I loved my father the hands spread farther and wider than my arms could even reach at the time. All of that was true. I knew I was loved, but I was never lauded. He was very proud of me when I made good grades, and didn’t like it when I quit things – piano, dance, gymnastics (moving away was the reason for the latters, but the former I admit, I grew tired of on my own), and thought I looked like the beautiful women in his family, and like him, but I was never told I was the prettiest girl in the world, or the best, or the most important. I made my own importance, which is what he taught me without ever having to tell me. It meant I was as good as anybody and very special, and what I did with that was my doing, or undoing.
There were many car rides, right up until the end of his life, wherein he would talk about my mistakes, and I didn’t always love the way it made me feel, but he emphasized the same thing always. To learn from them and do better next time was Key. He had learned that, and not always listened to it himself, in his life. And no one – NO ONE – told him or me the way we felt about anything. Stubbornness not as much as a belief in ourselves and in the universe we made every day and with every action, thought and desire, and the strength of it- was the cause for this prime mover in our lives. We shared that so deeply, that most others in the family didn’t quite understand. Their motivations were not the same, simply put. I guess that’s why I don’t need to pretend to be anyone else to any man I’ve ever known since. It was never presented to me as an option, and the more I see of the state of it at the finish line or in the muddy ravine at the side of the racing road, the less it holds interest for me. Aren’t our lives short enough? Don’t they get pinned down so easily with goals, and experience, and mired in our hearts so and our cacophony of thoughts constantly at us, that why would we try to be someone else? We never thought of that, in my family, nor in the shared feelings between my father and me. He always told me to follow my dreams, and was certainly interested in the realities that might lead me there or might be too impossible to traverse logistically, and was interested in security for oneself, independence, safety, education, generosity, genuineness and, above all things, being true to yourself. I admit the degrees and schooling which left me lost to certain experience came from the part of him that wanted to see his children be educated. It did mean something to him, and it means something to me. While I am left with pieces of beautiful, stained paper tacked onto the walls of my bedroom closet, and a massive stockpile of loans which I intend never to pay back (I happen to believe education should be free, and they can wait until the sun rises in a sky of dancing bears before I pay them for the things I was taught), I still hold value to it. The same value that he held for me.
He wanted very few other specific things for me – I think he hoped that he would be healthy enough to help me build a house one day, like he had done so 4 or 5 times over. I used to tell him (during the wine nights or the car rides) how I wanted a house in England, or Ireland, because I had it in my mind that I wanted to live there. He complained about old houses, and the electrical/plumbing and heating, and how it would be expensive to re-wire something so old and such, and we’d argue, but all in all he’d have come anywhere to help me build and would have done a great job of it no matter his age or health. He was over protective, and so I was not one of those kids who got to ride the bus or train by themselves, and when the choice came to work while going to school, even though he could probably have used the financial assistance, he always told me he’d rather have me concentrate on my studies and education. I was never denied help when I needed it, and yet never was spoiled or expected to coast on through, nor have that horrible sense of “entitlement” that many have today. He wanted me to make it in film, and didn’t understand that my degree and my hard work might not be enough; that who you “knew”, and the idioms of nepotism and favorites played a bigger role than that. He wanted me to be happy, away from all those jobs I worked (and still work, for awhile) in order to be creative, be my own boss, and live out my dreams out loud and nothing less. He had a hard time thinking of me in terms of boys and men, and thankfully I only let that side of things surface towards the end of his life; he Did want someone to take care of me, but ultimately he wanted me to be independent, and not ever marry for security or anything less than the love of an equal. And not the kind of love that these women-girls went in for. Someone to listen to you co-sign on your own bullshit, a pushover to do your bidding especially in the form of possessions, gifts and dollar signs, or some asshole who ignored you, disrespected you and kept you in your place just like their mean old daddies did to them. Once more, so much time saved from our being ourselves from the get go.
He wanted me to be myself, and nothing less, always. It wasn’t just my heart that belonged to daddy. Daddy was my true friend. And he was right in that the true people you meet, love and are loyal to over your entire life could be counted on one hand, really. The rest were just fair weather (said ‘fare vedder’) friends. And daddy was right, and I hope he knows how right he was. Love without truth and shared adventure isn’t love at all and not honoring the stamp imprinted onto your soul long before you were made in its image (in his words went something like “be yourself. If they don’t like it, forget them (he wanted to say fuck them but still regarded me as his little girl so wouldn’t necessarily say so) and keep going”) wastes so much fucking time, when you could be having so much more fun with every sunrise, every new construction and challenge, every feast and every new highball made with the absolute love of a little girl who was allowed to become her own woman, and whose best friend was her daddy.
M. Lucia
Thursday, August 4, 2011
Notes on a Future Work: "Shock and Awe"
No responsibility
All the time the symptom
Interrogation without a purpose
Woman wakes up
in the room
Can’t feel or remember
The sorrows of a zombie
Dehydrated cannot cry
Memories of her family
The numbness of things
The inability to daydream
But what worth
No one gave her their umbrella to share
The man who drove the bus
saw the black baby with the white poncho
running towards him
He did nothing
Why do we feel this is alright
What do I lose by sharing with you
The feeling of her baby passing through the gates
Then never to breathe
Stasis
A place to be safe
Only from safety can you break free.
M. Lucia
All the time the symptom
Interrogation without a purpose
Woman wakes up
in the room
Can’t feel or remember
The sorrows of a zombie
Dehydrated cannot cry
Memories of her family
The numbness of things
The inability to daydream
But what worth
No one gave her their umbrella to share
The man who drove the bus
saw the black baby with the white poncho
running towards him
He did nothing
Why do we feel this is alright
What do I lose by sharing with you
The feeling of her baby passing through the gates
Then never to breathe
Stasis
A place to be safe
Only from safety can you break free.
M. Lucia
Wednesday, August 3, 2011
Coups de Grâce
Blows of Mercy come in many forms.
Like the Sisters they can beat the truth out of you with the tooth nailed splinter of a ruler.
Like the sisters, before they married the Bridegroom of the Father, they might blow gentle braided seizures of breath into your hair, and across your eyelashes, formulating wishes as they go.
The hooded man in black, built like an outhouse of shit and stone, he offers the same if you forgive him first, and he gives you his hand, made from the same God as we all are, in order that you may not suffer anymore.
The joyful whore who kneels under you, smiling stars across her chest and face, well- that is a completely differing set of commandments, but your cries of mercy are just what she wants to hear, even after she’s done wiping the corner of her generous mouth.
It’s all in how you look at it, I suppose.
What kills you, what smashes your head in, what drives you to ecstasy worth ringing the doorbell of Heaven for, even after you get whispers of “we don’t want any, thanks”…what makes you the victim, the saint, the circumstance, lies within your hand- the martyr is the one who wins the prize, and the prize might be to die in front of a large and expectant audience, but-
If you go to your death like a God -just the same god as did get fellated by the grinning, kneeling woman of Christ- who does lift his hands to the pictures in the sky to say “Mercy” and take what has come to him, and to you, then the Blows of Mercy stay true to their name.
Say it with the Sisters….Slap your rulers with the might of an angry Old Testament Father. "Rejoice” in all its forms. The battle ax comes down on your limbs, the air outside draws you into its mannerisms, and she dusts herself off after you zip up your fly, and onto the next wheel we go.
M. Lucia
Like the Sisters they can beat the truth out of you with the tooth nailed splinter of a ruler.
Like the sisters, before they married the Bridegroom of the Father, they might blow gentle braided seizures of breath into your hair, and across your eyelashes, formulating wishes as they go.
The hooded man in black, built like an outhouse of shit and stone, he offers the same if you forgive him first, and he gives you his hand, made from the same God as we all are, in order that you may not suffer anymore.
The joyful whore who kneels under you, smiling stars across her chest and face, well- that is a completely differing set of commandments, but your cries of mercy are just what she wants to hear, even after she’s done wiping the corner of her generous mouth.
It’s all in how you look at it, I suppose.
What kills you, what smashes your head in, what drives you to ecstasy worth ringing the doorbell of Heaven for, even after you get whispers of “we don’t want any, thanks”…what makes you the victim, the saint, the circumstance, lies within your hand- the martyr is the one who wins the prize, and the prize might be to die in front of a large and expectant audience, but-
If you go to your death like a God -just the same god as did get fellated by the grinning, kneeling woman of Christ- who does lift his hands to the pictures in the sky to say “Mercy” and take what has come to him, and to you, then the Blows of Mercy stay true to their name.
Say it with the Sisters….Slap your rulers with the might of an angry Old Testament Father. "Rejoice” in all its forms. The battle ax comes down on your limbs, the air outside draws you into its mannerisms, and she dusts herself off after you zip up your fly, and onto the next wheel we go.
M. Lucia
Sunday, July 31, 2011
The Princess and the Pea
Jigsaw strains my mind awake. The witching hour sends hard shards down the outside of my thigh, particularly in a nestled coupling of insect bites, as if they knew the crux of my sweetness. They're flying circles low, somewhere above the bar, drunk on me as is everyone who manages to swim the moat of foul words, crass promises and detached obsession. That's the sound my leg is making, quietly pulsing each dream-wake thought running the river round itself, made drier each hour by the white of the moon, which laughs every time I think I'm healing within circumstance.
Face down, into the thick wheat coloured rug, pillows form my princess bed, no pea any prince could feel for, when there's lots more interesting maneuvers above the lone green proof of my forgotten royalty. Quiet hum of a/c, cats raping and running as my stillness refuses to shut itself up, and return to the business of dreaming...The witching hour provides none of the gusto it once held above me; no ghosts, no fear- of anything outside of myself. I feel as if the world has died into its night, and I am the only one left. I try to get away from the leg, from its connections to my ankle, my calf, the back of my knee, the rupture of my ass, with its crucifixion process laying the latest jesus in my mind down onto me, blanketing me with every sounding note. A man sits at the piano- I hear its wood gently pushed up and in. A few chords, but mostly lone notes soothe me, as my ear listens to the carpet earth, thick and muffled and 3 floors up.
Soon I'm back in bed, dreaming thirty or forty explicit and well lit adventure stories - pulp, plot, fears and noises coming back to me, and no matter which way I turn, it's not what I thought it was. Too many pictures to focus in on one serious thing. Before you know it, the pain dulls, my mind keeps its working into itself, even without me at the helm, light searing in from far off sky, over the small, abandoned factory that hasn't let a soul in for some length of time. It holds within it all the dreams I'm not finished with yet. My claw marks are from climbing In, and not holding on- the ship sails because of their force, and is not held in stasis anymore.
The pain has been my close friend, and comfort and reminder of all that is not finished with me. I've got time, and I've felt that feeling too, the one of understanding what it feels like to know the pain is outside of me and not coming back, even when it does. Once I figured that out, the feeling of being healed with invisible elixir, whatever face it may take (it's always my face so I better get used to it) I know there's an open road. It knows I can live without it. Not even a good fuck can keep pain under my spell. So I put my heart wild and bloody into it with each deadpan sensation of sickness which remains. And I wrap myself around him and take him in every night. One day the final dream will have me waking up in utter peace and good health. He'll have to thumb a lift on down the road to the next sucker. We all take our turn after all.
M. Lucia
Face down, into the thick wheat coloured rug, pillows form my princess bed, no pea any prince could feel for, when there's lots more interesting maneuvers above the lone green proof of my forgotten royalty. Quiet hum of a/c, cats raping and running as my stillness refuses to shut itself up, and return to the business of dreaming...The witching hour provides none of the gusto it once held above me; no ghosts, no fear- of anything outside of myself. I feel as if the world has died into its night, and I am the only one left. I try to get away from the leg, from its connections to my ankle, my calf, the back of my knee, the rupture of my ass, with its crucifixion process laying the latest jesus in my mind down onto me, blanketing me with every sounding note. A man sits at the piano- I hear its wood gently pushed up and in. A few chords, but mostly lone notes soothe me, as my ear listens to the carpet earth, thick and muffled and 3 floors up.
Soon I'm back in bed, dreaming thirty or forty explicit and well lit adventure stories - pulp, plot, fears and noises coming back to me, and no matter which way I turn, it's not what I thought it was. Too many pictures to focus in on one serious thing. Before you know it, the pain dulls, my mind keeps its working into itself, even without me at the helm, light searing in from far off sky, over the small, abandoned factory that hasn't let a soul in for some length of time. It holds within it all the dreams I'm not finished with yet. My claw marks are from climbing In, and not holding on- the ship sails because of their force, and is not held in stasis anymore.
The pain has been my close friend, and comfort and reminder of all that is not finished with me. I've got time, and I've felt that feeling too, the one of understanding what it feels like to know the pain is outside of me and not coming back, even when it does. Once I figured that out, the feeling of being healed with invisible elixir, whatever face it may take (it's always my face so I better get used to it) I know there's an open road. It knows I can live without it. Not even a good fuck can keep pain under my spell. So I put my heart wild and bloody into it with each deadpan sensation of sickness which remains. And I wrap myself around him and take him in every night. One day the final dream will have me waking up in utter peace and good health. He'll have to thumb a lift on down the road to the next sucker. We all take our turn after all.
M. Lucia
Friday, July 29, 2011
AFTER THE FALL-THREE
I never get used to the way they come out blue. {STOP}
And bloated. {STOP}
When you look up close. {STOP}
You can see sand like black pepper in every corner and crevice. {STOP}
Why do they always swim at night? {STOP}
Panies, condom, car keys, tissue. {STOP}
Find the girl but I know the story. {STOP}
There used to be a factory along here. {STOP}
Made bricks out of the stone from this hole that they dug.{STOP}
They say the shovel is still down there deep under the water. {STOP}
Dug down so deep there was no getting that machine out again.{STOP}
The spring water did the rest. {STOP}
Boys will be boys. {STOP}
And bloated. {STOP}
When you look up close. {STOP}
You can see sand like black pepper in every corner and crevice. {STOP}
Why do they always swim at night? {STOP}
Panies, condom, car keys, tissue. {STOP}
Find the girl but I know the story. {STOP}
There used to be a factory along here. {STOP}
Made bricks out of the stone from this hole that they dug.{STOP}
They say the shovel is still down there deep under the water. {STOP}
Dug down so deep there was no getting that machine out again.{STOP}
The spring water did the rest. {STOP}
Boys will be boys. {STOP}
AFTER THE FALL-TWO
In the dark I can see the black line of trees, a slightly less inky midnight sky, and a small moon of reflection wallowing on wind-wave pond-ripples.
It's like a movie.
I drop in a dive from the overhanging embankment, my feet finally freed from dirt and from weed, leaving behind everything that just now happened back there behind me in the woods. Until that moment, now aloft, she hung on me too but then with the plunge into the water all her traces were gone and she became again only a thing in my head; a thought, an idea, a memory.
Baptized (again) by the water's chill, below the surface it is all solitude, complete. The fish, you know, have nothing to say and only the bottom calls out its black purpose: "stay here." There are always spirits at the bottom of a pond in the woods; they are taunted by the wood-witches gliding above the surface and by all manner of gnomes, goblins and billy-goats-gruff with mossy beards and hiding corners down at tree root, ferned-in by the cloud of magic surrounding the dew-dappled deerdoes.
She sleeps there among them, her spell cast off and then turned on herself.
Submerged I take rest.
It's like a movie.
I drop in a dive from the overhanging embankment, my feet finally freed from dirt and from weed, leaving behind everything that just now happened back there behind me in the woods. Until that moment, now aloft, she hung on me too but then with the plunge into the water all her traces were gone and she became again only a thing in my head; a thought, an idea, a memory.
Baptized (again) by the water's chill, below the surface it is all solitude, complete. The fish, you know, have nothing to say and only the bottom calls out its black purpose: "stay here." There are always spirits at the bottom of a pond in the woods; they are taunted by the wood-witches gliding above the surface and by all manner of gnomes, goblins and billy-goats-gruff with mossy beards and hiding corners down at tree root, ferned-in by the cloud of magic surrounding the dew-dappled deerdoes.
She sleeps there among them, her spell cast off and then turned on herself.
Submerged I take rest.
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