Why Holiday Thoughts are Simple

My mother told me rather non-chalantly that when they were younger,(*), the plan was for my father to die around 85 or 86; she would be around 80 and this would be just fine.
Also slightly in jest (but you never know) she suggested he stab her and then shoot himself (a loud, rambunctious, slavic romeo and juliet but funnier).
That she didn't want to be part of the f*cking widows club.

(*) represents the even more simply uttered aside of
"because you know, he was my whole world".

I dreamed of him in their bedroom from my childhood home, with our german shepherds, his roosters and chickens from his childhood and some fresh running water, waiting for her, and for us. Mismatched shapes like the shadow seahorse I saw the other night in silhouette, and groggy disciplines. I was saying to someone who'd never met him that "he could find the best and most pure qualities in you, he'd just find them right away and connect to you on your best level." Then eyes opened, tears, too many blankets, cat drinking the water at the side of my bed. Bristle ring, wet snow. It didn't stick.

hope

I hope this is what you really want.
Still hope all your dreams come true.
I hope you are yourself, always.

bitters

Rainy days of country music just aren't enough.
Sweep out the ashes, choke on the filth and the dust,
clean air is all I'm hoping for.

To miss is one thing, swirling in the curve of nostalgia and the glassy eyes of a memory.

But actually needing the command of Those arms, Those hands,
That tongue...craving
the smell of That skin,
actually still Wanting That One.

The Body and its Heartbeat is not interested in what my mind tells me
to do.

I think I've stopped listening to that system altogether.

You can have the straw and the shit and the dust and your thoughts
about who you think you are.
I'll take the gold instead.

Got him locked up, do you? At the base of your closet floor, suffocating
underneath filthy unwashed clothes and dreams.
I love that man and wish you'd let him out.

I would have $^@%*& you til the end of time.

“On Through”

**The last poem (2002?) of a time that no longer is around. But reminds me of now, too**






-----------------

Scales of time enter heartily along the circles of sun;

Downing dragons muddle
like housewives to the jostle of a conspicuous beating.

The throngs of life upon the wet shores of
operatic earth.

Tripping seconds as does the air in our ears – sweet with mindful relations
comatose rapture and ceasing beatitudes.

Look up and away
fall down and kick your skies together:
Trace palms not inward to withstanding but outward
past green battalions of leaves,
our sleeping spirits caress in misty trees
on through, on through.

On through dead earth
on through fire
on through the shock of wombs,
on through, on through.

On through all madness
on through forms of God
on through grace invisibly,
on through, on through.

On through time
on through the sleep
on through the dream,
on through, on through.

Recourso

This is mostly from already posted writing of early 2007 but it feels like a mantra is in order and it's a bit different so as in life, here we go again.
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...As I stare down with my high and mighty glare, I did not come here to judge...You can, in fact, Become something else. All the way to your core...Perhaps this just makes me a crazy gypsy bitch who comes from a long line of crazy gypsy bitches, but, well, like a scar, yours is yours until the end of time, and not belonging to anyone but you.

Sipping side effects and glazed eyes poolside while your insides rot and your thoughts dull, dreams reduce into a stock of mushy even-keel thoughts, a porridge of average, a cauldron of acceptance. You can have it. I'll dive deep into that black hole, hear the hissing in all my broken places and bind them every morning, keep diving, curious to know what's to come and knowing that I am the captain gypsy bitch of this ship. And I'll take you with me too. I'll slap, then seduce you into submission, set you free, love and heal you without losing myself, name every of your fears and let them fly off to a country where they belong, and we'll keep on sailing.

I'm strong enough to take you all on. There is no bottom to my eyes, or my heart or the depths otherwise. I know what forever means and I live it every second. You don't know what's out there, but pack a sharp tongue and knife, and full heart, some good strong steps, and GO.

And, as long as my heart beats loud, my body wants what it wants, my intangibles keep on the journey and I know the fact that the mystery shouldn't be dissected on the street corner, operating table, therapist's chair, bar or in the rooms we hold inside our secret selves, you won't be seeing me in the Emergency Room anytime soon. That's a promise.

Spookies

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

---anonymous 5 year old, many years ago.

7th Cavalry

A fellow gypsy once spoke from the waves, calling himself the seagypsy, shouting the tenets of the 7th Cavalry of Truth. He had a lotus flower growing up from beneath his track marks. They never leave you, no matter if they are etched onto your skin, your memory or your soul's perimeter. Might as well grow yourself a garden to climb on out. You can never forget that it rides down in addition to up. Most people make this mistake.

He spoke of the universe not letting you get away with lies. Lying to yourself is worst of all......

Do you really think you can keep this up? Playing personalities off of one another through your secret chess game between mistaken identities at your own tea party?

Your looking glass may be dirty, but I can still see right through to you.

One thing at a time. One feeling at a time. Not every idea and action can be forgiven by immature circumstance. Those chess pieces are going to boomerang right back to you and knock you across the base of your skull. One by one.

I didn't come here to judge. I want to despise, conquer and deliver the world entire. But wrapping gauze around your wounds, your ego and pretending from crack of morning sun to truth telling lady moon of night, I can tell you, it won't work. No matter how smart you think you are.

It will catch up to your skin and your insides one day soon.

(Hear it?)

.......the quietest whisper of a march.......

{Rumble, rumble}

Dust gathering, feet stomping louder and louder.>>>>>>>}}}}}}}]]]]]]]

They're coming for you.

You can't stop the 7th Cavalry of Truth.

And when you've been warned by a seagypsy whose seen the depth of the ocean floor, and the darkness sprouting beneath, disguised in ego by the grandest clouds of the false skies you think you know, you think you own, you know its no lie.

Be sure to expose your hissing holes, smile without fear, and outstretch your arms wide when they reach you.

Seems like there's no way out of it.

(*dedicated to J. Valdivia)

Deep Sea Diving

Billowing down the levels of psyche til you find your outer shore.

Climbing along treetops and telephone wires, your past hits you right in the face. Bloody nose trickles down your ego and childhood circumstance until you’re knee deep in a treasure chest of toys, painted with old fears and seen through new desires. Your dreams are your reality and there’s nothing stopping you from thinking so.

Scratch to the surface of that faded old photograph. Who are those people and why is there a cauldron of blood between you? Why do their actions need your forgiving, and why must you miss them so much. Some pairs of eyes belong to us and others just swim on by. The mermaids are old, and their scales tattered, as they try not to nod off every night, preventing the theft of your possessions from the chest, deeply rooted in the ocean floor. They’re not getting raises anytime soon, and the pills aren’t keeping them awake as they once did.

So what did you find there? Past that old scratched up photograph and those security blankets? The same belonged to your parents and the same to theirs. My father didn’t know his father as well as I thought he did. His father came to Farrell, Pennsylvania, up from Pittsburgh and just over from Youngstown, Ohio. Worked in the mills and factories. Sent money home to his family in Croatia. His wife lived with him for a time in Farrell, but for the most part he traveled back and forth for months at a time, from being an American to being himself, a Croatian (then Yugoslav). I am made to believe he was a good, honest man, but hard to think he was completely loyal to my father’s mother. The dark one blamed for my eastern looks. Whenever he came back, he’d find my father a little older, a little less scrawny and much more rambunctious. One such return found my grandfather not recognizing my father who had dark brown hair like me, but was born blond. He told him “you were a blond the last time I saw you”. So, the many things he missed flew past, as did the rocks my father threw at the soldiers when scampering across the water, a fatherless creator of his own pathway.

You found a story which told you that your father was not just a provider, or an over protector, and more even than just an adventurous child. He slept on the streets on Christmas Day, he got everywhere on his own accord, and he, like others, got fucked over by our economy, by George Bush the First King. The story will find a cycle and that joyride can take you to the end of the forest, the crux of the desert, the worlds beneath the ocean floor and inside the mind’s eye. Everything reflecting on everything else, as a dream reflects on the water at which a child gazes through her grandmother’s eyes, which held secrets that conquered men’s hearts and informed their decisions, who then dreamed up goals to live and die by. And more dreams each night, all the same, filled with numbers lost in history and families of every universe across these great divides.

Hurt is a strange thing. It feeds on you as long as you feed on it. Hurt, like ego, belongs in a performance. Without the curtain falling and the roses pricking you on your nose as they sail to your feet, you won’t know what to do next. Whirling dervishes also eat supper and bed their wives. Memory is a swing line, low and repulsive which gathers moss and seaweed around the treasure chests of our youth. Time to let the mermaids take their ascent. They need time off too, and it’s time for a tag sale. The contents will always remain; some more so than others. Like the touch of a fabric you will never forget or a smell that is burned into the fire pit of your nostrils, they never leave you. But you have a choice in the arrangement of the show.

They move into dreamtime, which makes me wonder – we can fly in our dreams, soar and experience supernatural occurrences, events and stories. We can have a million faces and experience a million lives, but how does living time affect that of the dream? Could the cave men have dreamed of the automobile and think it a fantastical sleep voyage? Could the Romans have dreamt of the Second World War and thought it a demon or a sickness that was at their constitution? Just because time in the world is progressing, does that mean that time is progressing in the dreaming side of things? As far as dreaming in the ‘other’ world goes?

I wish my father were here to talk about these things with me. I look at the old photograph of him now (and I have dreamed him a dozen times since as I knew him, as he was when I was a child, as he was before I was born or even near gazing a star) and separate my life from his, my choices from his, his choices from himself and see him as a man. As someone I would give anything in this world in order that he could have shared a night staying up late, drinking with you and I. As a great and loyal friend. As a friend I miss very much.

Nazdravlje.

The Nature of Sacrifice

It was a moving train, stilled as its home station. Old, Bettina green and black like the piers, but filled with thick woods of ceremony, blood and dirt, bark reaching up high past the open ceiling, where the others invisible in trees found themselves watching us. No windows, but pale, far off sunshine. It didn’t matter, I wasn’t Here anymore.

The experience was a ritual simple and pure as the snow that fell. It fell from a higher sky, like golden stars shimmering in neutrality, floating down and changing from gold to white, a rushing stream. All over us. You were there, and you were as Christ. I was too, though I couldn’t see to tell. The snow came down harder in its stars, caking on your hands, which were mine. Hurting, from the intense cold of it. Stinging our faces. I told you without speaking that we had to bear the pain, and you did.

Then, you were in a hot fiery furnace, aching your eyes and tumbling limbs at me as to why. I placed you there, but I was in the fire with you. You rolled around as a pig without a spit in that rusty orange barrell and came back again; you were re-forged, made into yourself once more. The cold was gone. We joined up as humans and tried to make the train connections to the show. Timetables, conductors and our starry snowfall; Christ burning alive without a cross - we came back from the abyss like gods, though still ourselves the whole while, and not on time.

But we had each other for the long train ride out east, smelling like ocean.
It was a good show.

You've been blocked.

By a man with a Quill, taunting you and poking it at your face.
Writer's block disguised in busy busy busssssssy.

So, out comes the past again, for now.

I Think this reads less flowery if read as the Beastie Boys song "3 minute rule". Figure that one out.
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“Vines” (March, 2003)

Wrote it down someplace in dream,
my jaunt ascending from the trench,
every day an old warrior prays
me not
to ever flinch,
when you came riding up beside me
paving way with sound grins
tearing lessons out of noise,
my trance home supping lemon gins.

You and me veered down diving
upon those deepest glens,
water filling up our ears baptizing us
at the bend;
bass lines they bought a groove and
took her home to bed,
rabbits strewn out of their hides,
the sun baked petals in the bread.

We went shaking down the trees so their
blossoms
then would lend,
fall back bleeding from their nest,
we might rise up on the mend;
bursting breath and smelling skin
to cruise course winds that we can feed,
at all an ungodly hour,
our roots set fire to new breed.

I’ll take you bareback through the garden
honey,
gazing you in my best-
Be my vine, palms open wide, sailing waters
pounding on your chest;
Reflections past your eyes drowned my feet
burning down in gold
every fearful, indignatious,
cowering
lie I ever told.

Never held a wider path than this
one
as it seems;
The day’s walk is just too narrow,
I can’t see beneath the trees,
but we’ll spend our nights projecting
tidal stars through current waves;
Let’s ride shotgun with the vines
undoing footsteps as we pave;

Soaring over pyramids that we dreamed,
drew and became,
it’s their passage alongside ours
that stands to make us brave.

A Night Ends at the Parliament

I hate saying this, but I am too busy to write anything new today. So, reaching back into the younger years again. From 2002 this one from a night on Dublin town with Mundy.
Good ol' times.

“A Night Ends at the Parliament”

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

Eternity in your ink dries up and you’ve nowhere bright to go but your own backgarden – clutching onto modern convenience and salty residency in the front room. So Warhol never struck a chord like dancehall did open up my bleeding limbs, doeful eyes that, bright the sight, teaching could possess, when strangest courage takes to the stage. Accepting yourself to be wise in the face of free drinks left at the back doorway. The underwater railway into your hometown, breathing raucously. Late night noise patrols slamming the silence in your wide-eyed brain, while others scratch their chins in marked stupidity and you turn away from us all to keep your fantasies to yourself without even them whispering, to flicker past your eyes.

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

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

“Sweet Dreams on a Sarajevo Eve”

Written on a bus to Sarajevo - 23.9.97

The sun sets deep onto a soulful Slavic East
The moon rises pretty showing off her forlorned bruises
The many men do drink, their eyes wells of starry,
teary dreams once forgotten
too shy to say on the dim eve of this day
their hands like fruits on a tree;
to confused in blame, and scared to see
what has happened to their bountiful East
She stands beneath the heart’s belly of all that eternally
pines, only to ask why
but right now do not care what it is
or on what purpose it stands
only know-
only know that they’ll drink down the ashes
of this ruined house
until She springs to life luminous again.

Missing Paradise (#48)

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

The Moving Box

In the last 37 minutes of sleep, when my brain fixings halt, too nudged, bladder full of piss and head full of troubles; alarms and men backing their trucks into nowhere and the silence before shoppers make claim; steak dinner on the waterfront, bed I hate to get out of, there was you.

I was flying in this dream, but that’s not right. Soaring down escalators in a far off city of tin and business bullshit. Mine, but elsewhere. Couldn’t get downstairs and workday was long done. I managed to glide down, impossible lengths and stairways, thinking I should die if I don’t land right, but I always did. No one else had this but me. Thing is, no one really looked over to notice the girl bearing past them, the wake in my breeze offering up some scent of “away from here”; the impetus to shout “run!”. They just kept chatting verbiage from their old bones in young bodies, their smoke breaks and their puddles of shitty brown complacency. That This is just fine, and That is not something to think about. The easy life.

For our bodies to function as they do with this clearly schizophrenic can can bonanza of a mind, percentages go dying or stand dormant under the covers, while we inject it again and again with routine, and facts and ego. That ridiculous thought that you are…..actually in control of the life. Victor Frankel, not in my dream but always sitting just behind my judging glares in bars to people left lonely, tells me everyday that asking what life owes to us means nothing, but what are you giving It, elevator enthusiast? I’m flying overhead and landing just fine, even when the fear takes hold. Stop pressing the buttons and riding to the top floor just to feel the selfish thrill that you may fall off, stop sliding back and forth to the usual place of employ, when you don’t even work there. Coffee machines and lunch hours, paper clips and water coolers….the same dull blade but without the thrill of drugs, the mystery of the sailing ship or the multi faceted sweet face of the wandering (no desert required).

After all this, there was a house. There is always a house, the soul one single diamond in the castle with many rooms to see. I woke up, but I wasn’t awake. In a bed, in a cottage, not here but in the country. Which country? THE country. I felt you with your arms wrapped around me, half-asleep as you are now, trying to budge and wake up. I spoke, but you didn’t answer. Still, I was afraid it wasn’t really you. But I looked down in a lucid spell of a focused dream-eye, and saw your arms. The arms I have memorized. The scars, the hairs, the skin, the hands. Wrapped around me so tight. There was some comfort in that. A bandage on the right hand and wrist told me for true. Still more movement, still no talking, but still you wouldn’t wake up. But you seemed to hold me to you just the same. I looked up at the Lollygagging lady who passed in the doorway – looking at me and smiling and making to leave us alone as she always did.

I caressed your hands as it was the only way to speak your language. I wondered if you’d figured out that the elevator trip takes you nowhere, and is only popular as it’s what everyone else feels they have to do. I leaned back into you, so I could rest in my final moments before the alarm would go off, as my mental fact checker would always wake me in time. In that comforter of your body and mine, I silently hoped for your fears to leave you. That you’d know you could rocket to the stars, down through the dirty underworlds and up through the skies and treetops, taking every fragrant noise with you, if you just knew that you Could.

Writing will commence with a sore hand on Friday.

This is more important today:

Ode to James O'Shea

Written by James O'Shea on paper with a pen and dropped in the post.
He's as free a man as I've ever met.

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"Yo Maryana! I miss you. I checked the porch swing a couple of times in case you had forgotten to leave. Alas, still no you. But I know you're there in spirits. Deux ex machina. Dea. et vous?

I just got back from working a Chairman gig at the Children's festival in Saskatoon. It was great but there were too many children! The place was packed with them. Yipper yapping hand clapping let's all count to 3.

Also on the radio today was the following story: World Nude Bike ride day was to be held for the very first time in Nelson, BC. But, oho, it was too cold and rainy for those naked cyclists, so the event was cancelled. But Five "rogue nuclists" decided they were gonna pedal their petals through town any way. Hooray for hippies! Unfortunately, it was not [FUCKING HIPPIES] uneventful. No-one would have even noticed them but that their butts ended up at Riverside Park, which as everyone knows is used on weekends as the kids soccer park. So there they all were, hundreds of kids and mums and dad and coaches and oranges and water bottles and two naked grown men. The hippies had no time to explain. They were chased out of the park by angry dads who wouldn't listen to any world nude bike day excuses. Foul dogs!



Also I am having a recurring sense of horror as I realize we are going to live in Saskatoon for a year or two. Why? I have the latest BC virus. Why? Why bother? You are already here. The cold out there. The cold. Have you ever felt 40 degrees below? It's the same temperature in both marking systems. F & C. Here Comes Everybodies! Jesus its cold. Not cute snowflakes cold. Cold like it hurts. Cold you just ache. Fuck I love it. You must come there. You must.

In other news Chloe is still a long legged goofball wandering both aimlessly and purposeful around the deck. It still hasn't warmed up here so she would rather be inside. If she gets bored she hunts Flies. She thinks they are tiny birds and she dreams of the mean streets of Mexico. My brother kept telling me - "watch out man: that dog is gonna drop a balloon of heroin in its turd one day and 2 guys are gonna jump out of the bushes and take it from you man - the dog is a mule - a drug mule!" He was teasing. But still. Whenever that dog shits I get ready for the cartel to seize the turd. Why else smuggle a dog across 2 borders? Chloe won't say - she's still not talking. Love, James"



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This letter is forcing me to ravamp, writing wise and come back to the gypsy ship a much plainer speaking, non flowery woman. I'm gonna try. I'm really gonna try. Love you James and Patty, Keelin and William O'Shea. And Chloe, you cocaine cowgirl.

Barnacle 6.13

a few poems in one, just spewed out in this lil window...

Dis one is for Nora.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The inability to remember none but naked things.

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

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

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

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

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

You know, that novel you've been writing...?

**Well, it's been more than "3 years, hmm?" for me, but I thought I'd bring this pile of verbal bile out for the day, again about strippers. More of a newer draft, and it will change again and again, but here's draft part {}**
---------------------------------------------------------------------------


Lucky was a candy cane stripper who Ryan and Louise had come across in Indiana somewhere, just outside Gary. Not much of a strip joint to speak of, but these places were scattered wildly all over. The less people, and less things to do, it seemed, the more of these little shacks rose up with no fury, only garnering a drink license and sometimes just the guilty grey promise of one. Calm driving by, not while inside.

On the trains, Lucky would soon be known as the one who shifted her eyes too many times when listening to Ryan and Louise talk of their rememberings -- the last town, the mean outskirts, the horror of the center place. Lucky's eyes keep forcing themselves to shutter closed -- back in the strip, back to working. She didn’t have a real problem with the job to tell the truth. Since Lucky was little, which was a time hard to believing, when she wasn’t exploding out of her sequined t-shirts...she pretended to be a stripper in her upstairs bedroom. All by herself, she’d dress up in her mother’s shawls and wrap herself in scarves like a Pompeii whore and she’d undo it all in perfect sweeping arpeggio time in front of her parents’ mirrored closets. No one ever came to find her, or caught her there in all those years. She’d make it with her stuffed animals without knowing what slots and tabs were involved in all that raucous motion or the particulars; it just felt comforting, good, less lonely. Or she’d do up the whole soap opera of the date, the affair with the boss, quite lewd for a girl of five, as her father stood outside, in the backyard below, making hamburgers. She had asked for cheese on hers, she could smell the bland, processed American square melting onto the burger, steaming, as she victimized her teddy bear, black and white dog, took them all to heaven with her. Within five minutes of meeting Louise, Lucky would animate these childhood tales to her, and top them off with the idea that she blamed television, the nighttime soap operas, but that she enjoyed the experiences, even then.

Lucky had been running after the train. Ryan was in the middle of falling asleep in Louise’s lap, mid-afternoon. It was one of those perfect moments, when the leaves were catching sun and you could smell it and they were swinging with just the proper amount of aggression. Ryan was too. He was a simple boy, but the way that his fists had of cupping like the angry infant he was onto Louise’s knees minded her well, and he slept wildly, still needing to touch when he was fast asleep. The breezes were kissing their foreheads, as the railway car door was open – in this territory, no one was around and seemed to care and they could meet up with some of Ryan’s old school mates down in Illinois. Like always, there were people passing, here and there, but when she finished running, Lucky knew she had found friends for sure. On a mission.

Louise was always watching for the world as it printed itself across people's faces. Lucky was no different. Out of breath when she joined their train car, Lucky was dressed in her pink undersized t-shirt, not washed properly. She was a mound of matted shit brown hair, too light for richness, spreading out from the corner of the picture frame. Pants jacked up, loose only at the shins. Tiniest loose bag on her shoulder and face still made up with drug store cosmetics on sale for this her premiere appearance in the world of the trains.

After she flashed the most desperate squeaky smile onto them, Lucky climbed into the railway car. Ryan awoke, manners instinctual, and helped her in, though the train was crawling like the dead as it usually did when passing through the lowlands. Lucky wasn’t flirtatious, though. She clearly thought Ryan a sweet looking boy as Louise did, but it was as if they were five years old and he was one of her father’s friends. Not proper. Lucky had declared to Louise that they were sisters from the get-go, with Louise not knowing why she needed to have one in a place such as this. She told them of her time in Gary, as they all had just come through. The strip club where she had worked since she was fifteen. All these places were like libraries, Lucky had convinced herself, as she chattered to Ryan and Louise at three hundred miles a minute. Yes, they were small town libraries, and these men that came were all scientists of a certain sort who paid their tuition to come into darkness and research.

They could find out all sorts of things from a girl like Lucky. She was an Aries, as so clearly worn when she had on nothing else. Her paganesque sign of the Ram planted in the beaded sweat droplets that nestled her neck when she did the deeds. They could see she was of German stock, her build, her bosom, the dangerous clarity between her wide-set blue eyes. It was Americana at work, Dresden style. A disarray of voices from the pills the other girls would give her sometimes made her dissociate like she were in front of a painting, but in the space that it occupied, the murky sorts of fields and thick figures blending more and more the closer you stepped towards it. The female form is like a painting, she said, becoming another girl every new day, and there were no paintings to look at in Gary. So, these men came to Lucky like a Greek Goddess of old, to study her form, to be true to the darkness clouding up in rotten smoke and to stay with her while she danced right past them in that darkness, following the paint as it spilled to the floor and tripped the goddess for good, twisting her ankle on the way down like always happens when little girls try to dance in their momma’s oversized shoes.

After more than an hour of this bullshit verbiage, Ryan stared off one too many times, forcing Louise to look Lucky straight in her wide eyes – Louise told her about the one time she went to a strip bar, when her older brother’s friend was getting married and they had no babysitter. She had used the bathroom there almost immediately, though would have preferred to hold it in, probably. She found her way and all the girls were most obliging, since she was girly enough in her big funny, fake fur coat, like a twenties do-gooder slumming it for a change in the night. She crouched above the dirty toilet to pee and heard two strippers, one asking the other if she wanted one of those pills. Lucky’s face sank with recognition at this phrasing. The only other thing that Louise remembered in that bathroom was the mound of colourful, cheap, used underwear that was piled outside the stalls like the stinking defeated dead from a roman battle of some kind, as the girls adjourned in the backstage/changing area. It might have been three feet high; all meshed together, worn like gypsies gone to hell, or some dark basement in Florida, whichever fell closer on that day.

Ryan squeezed Louise’s hand and Lucky looked outside the car for the first time, at the passing streets of the next town, and another strip bar, as cheap and bright and tiny as hers must have been. Lollipops. Lucky preferred the 1950’s vintage flair of Calendar Girls. Lucky’s eyes shifted to Ryan. He was fixated on Louise’s forearm, which was stretched across her lap, while she sat Indian style. It was as if Ryan was looking for a vein. But he then only held Louise's wrist. Ryan's eyes were testing some grand ideas to gently bite her wrists, his teeth shifting slightly, as he swept his fingers across and down Louise’s forearm, again, slowly, and again. Methodically, as he cracked a smile. Louise couldn’t help being in a state of sermon-like calm at this, as she looked straight with compassion through Lucky’s dubious policies, no light gesture as Lucky was still looking over at Ryan's artful game. Lucky wasn’t really looking at Ryan all this time, but at the kind of attention he gave. It wasn’t like a man’s, or any she’d seen recently. Those darling, infantile boys like him, they never made it in to Calendar Girls.

Lucky grew up through teenage weeds like a rotten rose pushing and showing itself to any available light, seeing again and again those boys after they gave up and became repetitive, lewd old men; or, what’s worse, those silent, morose types somewhere in between in age, who were trying to calculate their love of losing inside the blankness of a mind’s page, while watching Lucky strip down to her childhood limbs, swinging the umbilical shoelaces of her gaudy costume at their deadened, dim eye-lights. Fumbling for change, they would only see the girls’ supposed power over them in terms of vulnerability calculated through lack of age that would play out in years to come, when the obviousness of the change bouncing off the liquor-stained floor would grow complacent, silent in the taciturned dollar bills that work provided to them as they grew older. Their dollars silencing their minds, their tongues yelling audacities at any young thing to shake her ass in their faces. Their mouths would be silent no more. Lucky just sat there facing the air, turning occasionally back to Ryan and Louise, just letting them be. Louise sat, calmed by the tremor of her fertile boy’s silence, which still spun verses through fingers softening, lips touching;and any right-minded girl will tell you, there’s nothing more soothing than a young man’s vibrancy – brown fists of hair and the furtive conquer of his beating heart galloping towards the maze of oncoming towns.

Hump Day

I went looking for the bruises that bring me dead pan concrete luxury, sleeping quietly under blankets, the stone of them keeping me in place. But this time, nothing------

The quiet tide of you left me with no insects marching towards light; the faraway of you an actual relief to the incest on the streets that maybe ought to lease themselves out for prey.

The nights resemble a going away into nothing / my eyes don't see the others, or hear them or know them. Just that middle ground of brown between dark and amber that swivels its hips to and from, mangles its intentions before it even sets a plan between our sweat and endless sleep.

[Don't
mind the snoring Ganesh.
Lord of Beginnings < > Lord of Obstacles.
Yes}

Where does this leave it? The sun keeps waking up hangovered with its limbs intact. Bruises of luscious, beautiful fiery bronze and red golden hue. Same as you on the inside.

There is comfort in that never changing.

Kansas City (1999)

*An oldy but goody written in Sackville, New Brunswick Canada - an ode to my canadian jaunt and an ode to the notion of Kansas City from last night*
----------------------------------------

curling limbs like a powder dry child
grouches mildew shopping list
sun curiously mild

narcotics bellow
beast of yellow-stained grace
crackling pavement
liquid petals medicine betrayed
circling town from walls misguided

inspiration fails
violence never will
curves promising
greed yielding
strums its mindful way
to hamlets trees old family ways

dull knife butters day old bread crumbs
cuts inside childrens sleep to pieces
never returning school days

before creaking bed
wicked wills
whining temples
toward little isolating room

touch of mother’s love
destroys clustering completely
nearly noon a spiraling tune
slips over and beneath conscious play
just as mistress of the house
fains ravaged claims victim
in the false blood

Kansas City back bedroom

Logic is Yellow 5.7.08

(*Disclaimer: cannot indent certains lines so it doesn't read as well as it should since the form adds to the sounds I think.)

At water’s edge the muck sinks hard from factory bombs
the memory of language dripping on
its spit
once standing stone now gave way to collapsing;

Falls into puzzle place, steadily
and with the joy of new life
backwards.
beyond its disappointment
the well paved sky ahead
clouds moving as family dreaming forward
the early sun too afraid
to mix
and mingle with the primary colours
the collapse of reason
the ritualizing of a vigorous sexual night.

Superstitious golden shards
breaking time into the meaning of collective fire
forgetting that Their story isn’t
worth shit
not to be trodden down by the pick-a-penny passengers
dancing in the grease of their very own lie –

Why does your ego think itself a master of reason;
cannot control whether to take a piss lively,
in the night.

my anger subsides………
into gentle, debaucherous bounding sky.

Alone, trying to pry sense from it all,
into the desperate feel of thighs –
the smell of a wooden plank, salty sound of scales
biting down
a meal to a worm, finally advancing the line.

Springtime

Slipsliding down the neon dream of days
into a falling tree’s bum knee, to ship
hideaway.

Messing tidbits ironed doors---my city’s nightshade;
sunny into bed
under covers of light to rushes for tomorrow:
hatching plans of near laughing cord----
umbilical God.

O tell me all about anna livia! I want to hear all about anna livia! Well, you know anna livia?...Tell me all. Tell me now. You'll die when you hear.

**That is for EJ's rap of ALP. Dedicated to the FWBC (also coined by EJ). Tshirts and tattoos to come. This was written in 1999. Bear that in mind by a 23 yr old**

-------------------------------------------------

“The Midnight Swim”

dizzying flowers in her dampened hair,
anna livia’s gone swimming before her man returns,
the moon breaking into her minimized sky –

regretful of her purchases.
the names that the customers offered her;
when she let a pack of cigs their way for free:
hand still, clutching the pack, waiting-

a wink and a misused grin
ushers them far from her burning stars;
chased between the backwood waters,
her soul robbed of her . . .

drowning in the swagger of a rare, real man
who’s off to play cop for the swimming ladies
after running away with their swollen fireflies;
pilots his rustling chariot, roars off in dust
to wear the saving grace, crown of the undressed gaze-

touch them and they quiver beneath
barefoot glow encircling at his feet,
touch anna livia underwater and she drowns,
stung by the tangles in her foolhearty hair.

on the waterfront 02.08

The trains left her behind.

Not sure what city or town she lived in now. The smell of the murky waters, the imagined sound of their lapping in and around the outer shores. Strippers danced in peacock dresses upon clouds in the might of the sky. The surrounding birds ran a hunting party over to the sailor’s lofts and the street vermin, nestled in after a long run, inside their newspaper feather beds, wishing on reduction.

We are not the realization of ourselves, and no one wants to do the mathematics to build the final equation - bruised, dirty, full of might and cowardice, turning round and round in a firepit of ego and need, while the tribe encircle us, dancing and praying and breathing through the storm in our paper cuts.

Admitting they’d turned into whores, the strippers continued to their sleep in the clouds, smoke in their curls, stink from their knees, love somewhere deep inside their broken hearts. So much love buried in the black hole found at the tip of a needle. Out of it flies their first blood, their empty rooms, the can-can they did at the age of 5. If only it was as it used to be. A couple, broken in sacrifice, going to their communal death for the good of all, Fucking into eternity, burnt into the wood’s natural etchings, as the town ate and drank. Lift up your faces, look skyward - kick up your heels and spread your legs. The colours will bleed through the cracks in your eyes whether you want them to or not.

People see your insides, they just don’t bother to try. They can rip you to shreds, dress up in your entrails, play dice with your fears and arouse your sunshine to see-saw time. After the couple gets back up again, putting their strewn limbs back on, reacquainting themselves with the spaces beneath their experimental skin. The whores in the clouds will tell them that strippers never keep anything on, that rituals the very first time bear a different name, that a home becomes a house once the windows are clear. That it wasn’t what they thought it would be. Not even close.

The payout is shroudy, lost in the shadows of a gun barrel. It’s more than you can imagine. Piles of invisible cash in empty briefcases, littering a dry, straight highway. Always just waiting for the sun to break free from behind a cirrus cloud. He’s too busy making time with those dancing ladies. Seahorses sewn onto their fast moving dresses. They enact their superstition, leaving your belly wrapped tight around childhood.

Sweet leaves blown through trees, you were so young and could do anything.

He is the reason I believe in the might of gods, in the morality of the wise man, in the faith for the hero.

The sun shone differently then. It always broke through clouds of painted ladies. Their feathers shone fresh and bright, their feet quick and fancy-free; no one ever knew about their cuts and pregnancies, their ineffectual starry eyes, wanting to borrow some gold of sunshine before the next go around. They’d let you have it back, they can’t manage two things at once at that distance.

You return from the ritual embers, thinking that the humblest hearts make the largest, near silent sacrifice. Passed out, with sideways tears that glide down your neck with each crisp, clean feeling of memory. It serves to reinforce the constant void, lapping and retreating as the waves of this mystery border town outside the window - filling with appreciation, Christmas dinners, silent car rides and warm, amber stories, falling away to the worst road, the future one.

To the girls, touched, who wipe a tear with their grandmother’s embroidered handkerchief, take their pills and wash their underwear in the sink. Lastly, they fill up their wet eyes with the black dirt shadows of everyone else’s family secrets. One sip of waterfall whiskey rising in the smoke of the dance hall of jousting erections, life plans demarcating napkins and the glimpse of a way back home, through the eyes of a girl whose head is forever soaring above the clouds in the colours of the mythology that stands beside, watching and wondering how the story will end, what side of the coin will the gypsies win and steal at and what strangers will be stretched out on the fire escape when the hangover passes, and your realize you missed the daylight again. When the light hits your face and I finally don’t feel like I am floating anymore. You put my head and my heart in the dirt here on earth. Thank you. The sands will stay white, your homeland truer than you remember it. And I promise to breathe, to walk, to give, to taste and to love of everything you gave me, of everything I am.

The terror of stillness, the romance of a mighty squall.

The girls, still small, innocent and dreaming manage to gawk, shake off their ashes and smile. He’s telling them a story. He’ll be off to tell you one next time you sleep, or smell firewood or think of home without a place. The littlest girl, with her oversized stockinged legs, whispers that there must be gods up there in the clouds too. The taller, motherly one with the strong, brown curls and false eyelashes shakes a half-grin and bumps her shoulder, remarking that it’s only them up there. “Well then”, the little one squeals. And the waves continue, leaving an old faded photograph on the shore.

The trains blew noise in the distance.

Stripper Poetry 9.15.07

*Written on a napkin at the ACE OF CLUBS, Cairo, NY*

Dedicated to Jack, AC/DC & "Victoria"

crinkled memory
bustle on a dim, dirty
wedding day;
plastic jewelry cradling
stretchmarks
of a mother's love,
completely.

Shaking off your
poverty
into the clear glass slipper
of a poison
cigarette stick, teaching
you to come
into circumstance.

Firmly, like a damp
fine-toothed comb.

Selling their hair,
wares
to the drugstore population
too trembling as they
sweat
their nerves, and families
away.

Heavenly hosts in clear
plastic heels;
deciphering holy scripture,
crumbling limestone and ink
through the insides of
her thighs.

Won't be around tomorrow
when she's lying to the soft-
ball coach about her
streetfights,
nights out
and overnight flights--

to the grime marble floors,
tongue-licked clean
in a see through nightie from
another lip-stained,
sunny day.

Goodbye, Hello (ides of march)

*The truest moment of my life*

--------------------------------
The ides of March, they got me. They made pictures, relics and memories come alive, a broken guitar string ripping through my throat and tearing up my full heart as it left my mouth in a cough filled with spit and mucus. I saw the birth canal on Friday night.

A few hours earlier that Friday, I was hastily driving up the highway in a rental car, nails on fingers gripping the wheel as I hadn't even time to think about how much I hated driving busy highways. Kept looking for sunshine, but it only just barely promised over the far off mountains in the distance, promise never coming. J, the perfect driving companion, falling asleep and smoking, singing along and drumming to Cat Scratch Fever, as I remembered the comfort of him on top of me the day before. I didn't feel bad about that. I think my body would have collapsed internally without that fulfillment. An hour later, sitting in the hospital room, as I walked down the awful, sterile hallway, I knew my father could not, nor would want to walk out of this place. Either you were in full recovery or on some manner of your way out.

Shock and denial stretched across my face as I saw him, propped up so high no one could ever sleep that way. It smelled like shit and I was told he had just taken one, but though the rest of us knew it, he never could. He had died the day before last, after going downstairs to the basement in the unfinished house of his soul, the one that did him in and the final act inside his Coliseum, building and stopping, while my mother was out, moving from one to the next (he had told my mother to tell me over the phone about a week before that he was thinking about me all the time and loved me), not knowing what project to finish so starting as many as he could manage, to confuse the black cat that searched him out, on his way. My black cat died a few weeks earlier - he should have known it would be ok. The cat was probably only looking for a little attention, seeking out my father's world traveled hands.

I couldn't stop staring at my father's hands. They had thick needles protruding from the skin, but that was nothing compared to the tubes in his head and face. Other than being swollen, the hands were still my father's. Every mark, bruise and scar across them on display. Just like M's hands. Strange parallel these two men were on, like adjoining highways. I began to worship his hands, as my mother and I spoke, calmly. We didn't clutch ourselves together or wail. We even talked about channeling that into something better for him. Two days before, in the midst of his drilling and working on a countertop, he ate lunch: pasta fagioli, prosciuto, red wine...something in my mother's hands knew too. They talked- about the homeland, about the mountains. At one point soon after, he grabbed his head and uttered "I'm sick" (this was the first moment he let his body register with the oncoming and the last words he said) and fell back into the soft chair (which I've been sitting in ever since I came back to the house). Asleep. Of all the thoughts surrounding the reasons that could have kept him with us, I know that none of the answers could have kept the strength of him, the whole of him. He was no rotted apple, no yellowed page.
As I sat there with my mother, worshiping his hands and all they made, right down to the thumbnail, the nails trimmed by pliers and the black marks from the foundation of a house, the ground opened up in the quiet, curtained, sterile room, through the fibers in my mother's curly hair, which I did not inherit. In the empty spaces in between the machine's beeping its cheap grandfather clock ticking, I was partial to the worlds between. It was as if the walls in the cramped room had disappeared. We were waiting for the slow, learned, tedious process that occurred when ready to let go, or say hello. I was having an internal conversation with him the whole time. We held his cold, puffy hands a few times in between, but as we sat there, we were joined. Even my scared mother whose nature was to distrust her instincts her whole life, felt the calm. Like everything moving in distinct slow motion; a dance, during which he hadn't really seemed to be there with us until around that time.

Now he was mingling in and out, as the waters were lapping, retreating. We talked about how he worked harder his whole life than any man, and not for any man, but for himself, and for us. And, despite my mother's self proclaimed "bitching", she admitted to those houses he built bringing her a lot of fun, how it was all such an amazing adventure which he gave to her. Just us four - my father, mother, brother John and I - no others were ever truly HOME, like we were. To live nearly all of your childhood and coming adulthood in a house your father built (more like 5), it does things to you. It expands your mind, convinces your hands, and expedites your heart's dreaming early on. You see that sifting through blueprints and pencil sketching with his bold European hands, grows to carving out a naked piece of land and seeing, piece by piece, your home being born out of the patience of your mother and the strength and vision of your father, the same that spent Christmas hungry on the streets in Zagreb when he left home, the black sheep not wanting to be ruled by anyone, including his father, knowing that it was Christmas only by hearsay. That kind of love supporting your insecure child's feet from the floorboards beneath, constructed with you in mind, that is irreplaceable.

And so calm grew to appreciation, and at those moments, we did not need to cry. The term choking back tears is true; I never experienced that closing of the throat as your whole body is being made by your invisibles to hold itself up, rightly. My mother's legs were shaking "from the inside", as she put it, and she was overdressed for the weather (my father collapsed on the first day of Spring). Her face was flushed and red. I've never seen her try so hard in all my life. We knew my brother was having his own discussion with my father from inside His home, his head. I had begun thinking 'I will not waste time, will not fail', more importantly will not cease trying, will give the fullness of energy and love to this life and to those particular ones I had a feeling for. Something seemed so loud and clear...when I had a son, his name would be Ivan, the name of my father as a child. Without an inch of vanity, I felt beautiful. Clear and deep seated in my mother's almond shaped sockets were my father's big brown eyes of truth. Looking back at me and the world. I was a little fearful. Amidst all this otherworldly design, I thought about what A had told me. About her father recognizing her before he died. I knew the lack of oxygen left my father's brain near gone, and they told my mother from the moment he arrived in the hospital that there was no chance the massive heart attack would leave him with any ability to wake up. This man who had spent the freezing night in a sleeping bag in the woods with his grandfather and a bunch of found grenades during WWII in Croatia (and got a beating for it), who had stood atop his house's Spanish tile roof on the Gulf of Mexico at 50 years old, with a farmer's tan and hammer in hand, who kept building the foundation to this last house in the winter woods after he was told all of that was behind him, he wouldn't stand for much more of this tubes and needles business.

We thought Last Rites would be good, since he was raised Catholic (and mainly associated the traditions of it with the happiness of his youth and village more than anything else. He didn't need all that to speak to God). The priest had been at the hospital and couldn't come back out until later that night. Our natures looked between my mother and I and we knew he'd prefer it as being just us- his priests, his relics, his church, his stained glass windows, his evening sky. We talked about being awash with appreciation, thinking of the old men of the villages in Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia, who were massacred like pigs and left strung up in the trees outside their homes for their families to find, and of so many young, vibrant people without fathers or a chance, who had to endure this end alone.

My father had been given morphine. We had our own, coarsing through our veins, like stars mining for the gold of its onlookers. They began to take out the tubes and vessels from his face. He had no teeth. We would have laughed at him had it been a normal Friday night. His gums flapped and his body grew warmer. We each held a hand. I was on the left side. His face looked so clean, more perfectly shaven than he ever managed. We started talking to him- my mother lost her embarrassment and spoke to him in Croatian, telling him to go home, that mamma (his) was waiting. I thought I felt something from his hands, but disregarded it. His face began to have a natural color and he looked alive again, in charge. His brow was sweaty and his hands clammy. It felt so good to feel the warmth of his hands. My mother had called my father 'daddy' throughout their lives; the old-fashioned style, and somehow I adopted the sense of not calling him daddy too often. I was sad to know this was going to be the big reveal, but proud to know I wasn't afraid anymore.

All of a sudden, we felt his hands clutching us; my mother teared up for a moment, exclaiming "I can feel him gripping my hand". And we kept talking and clutching. She told him that I was "here", that my brother John loved him, I said that my best friend CD and the boy M loved him too, and she made mention of my cousin who recently got to spend time with them. My father picked up my hand and pulled it up and across his chest to my mother's, with so much strength that I could see the bones and muscles in his arms light up like olive branches growing in the Mediterranean summer sun. I leaned into my father and said "I love you Daddy" and kissed him on the cheek. He sat up about a half a foot in his bed, turned to me, saw me with the black star eyes that hid beneath the clouded, sickly glow of his failing eye sockets, while I gave him one more kiss on the cheek and said "Goodbye, Daddy". And as if arms were easing him back down into the pillowed ground, the door was wide open. The grip held tight, my mother told him to go home, I told him to go get the homeland, and my father slowly went unconscious, with his eyes caught towards me, before sliding back like a snake's, half-closed, looking at me, with a bright, new tear surfacing in the wrinkled pool around his left eye. His breathing slowly lowered, quieted. His grip gently became looser. His color faded and his warmth lessened. My mother kissed his forehead and I kissed his hand, before we sat back down, in the calm. The breathing was barely audible. I listened to his chest but just heard one or two heart beats. After a few more minutes, a beautiful doctor came in and told us that she thought he may have passed. She examined him and I chuckled to myself, thinking that in his last official breaths, he got a feel from a beautiful lady. She looked over at us sweetly and nodded. And we saw him walk off, and our hands smelled like the last of his energy that came back to us to say goodbye, and the last of his structures stood.

The door closed. The noises returned. We said our less intimate goodbyes to his body, and walked off together to find J, with a faraway message of a few frustrated but pure words of love from M, who I wanted to hug so desperately then, and later that night a jug of wine that would have made my old man proud. As we exited the hospital, the sun had come out. It was swirling through the glass doors down the distance at us like a passage to rebirth, welcoming me to a place completely free of childhood. My father was light as a feather, sketching and blueprinting the clouds. I knew he'd have a lot of work to do, but I knew he had been ready, and I was ready to help him. He would soon be working from within me, and I felt like the luckiest little girl in the world.

Mother's Little Helper 3.07

*Wrote this in a calm before the storm....*

---------------------------------
I hate the smell of hospitals. I've never met anyone who didn't feel less than repulsion, fear and sometimes utter nausea at the scent of one. Even if clinically clean, with happy attendants dressed in crisp white, the sort of white only those of sound mind wear, it just feels dirty. Like the ailments of those surrounding you will somehow creep into your body, into your thoughts and limbs. That you will step out of there with the liquid stench of sick and death on your footsteps. At the very least, it's not a fun place to spend a day.

A friend of a friend of mine apparently overdosed on pain pills last week. My friend was caught in the emergency room, waiting to hear. There apparently weren't hard drugs involved so no rock n roll suicide in this situation. Only the daily grind of maintaining a stable mood and a disappearing stomach lining to wallpaper the situation. She got out of there once it was apparent that all was relatively ok. And the patient? All he got was a free ride to the hospital and some overdramtics that he thankfully, slept through. You know the sort. When people suck out the trauma nectar from other people and make it their own. Like a mentally ill transubstantiation, without the wine.

Back to the idea of pain pills. I will only ever call them pain pills, and not medication, treatment, therapy, anything else that cushions the situation. This world is rough, and for some it can be absolutely fucking brutal, so who am I to comment on what people need to get though their day. Some like cold turkey, some like warm Prozac. A side of denial and a generous helping of over-analyzing? Maybe. It's really not the idea of taking a pill for a mental condition or situation that arose out of the life lived of the person surrounding the brain that irks me. It's the recent development of the Norm of all this- not for the abused, not for those who survived hellish families, or were abandoned by them when tanks came rolling in, it's the idea that when you don't feel happy, you must now take a pill so you will. The replacement system. People are running, bolting, streaking practically to the drive through drug store to get their medications. They cough when you smoke near them, they worry about those who drink too much but they, in return, step up to the barstool in their bathroom and watch themselves silently get drunk. The sort where there is no imagination, no jovial undertaking, just them – their own bartender for free looking back at them. Like drinking alone.

But let's be honest. Pills, when taken moderately don't make you "drunk". But maybe it's just my love of the double dog dare that asks the question: what would happen if there were no pills? Would they collapse? Would they have a breakdown? Would they commit suicide, hurt themselves or others, would they sleep for days or check out of life while sleepwalking in the same way as the rest of us? The answer is different for everyone I suppose. As I stare down with my high and mighty glare, I did not come here to judge. But only to say, people should start asking themselves why they NEED certain things. And in the tradition of the dare, and in the idea of stubbornness, try to let that black hole inside of you remain, untouched. The hissing will turn into sweet music, or into a good conversation or even if into screaming and yelling, it needs to be looked at and not drugged or put to sleep. The dormant stinking gases of what Hurts needs comforting, and as you wrap your arms around each one with a mother's sweet embrace, they could just happily burn in the fire and rise up from you, and be transformed. No one seems to believe in the idea of transformation anymore. That you can, in fact, BECOME something else. All the way to your core.

The bottom line – I don't think there is one. I tend to go the route of this: We, as human beings, have been around a LONG time. For eons, centuries, nights and days into millennium and endless mornings, we have been disappointed, enslaved, hit, raped, killed, disregarded, enraged, fucked over, unloved and abandoned. Some of us made it to something better, some of us didn't. We should put down the pills and turn to the right or left and not forget that we are here for each other. No pill can save us from ourselves, each other or this beating heart. Neither can a drink, a fix, a binge; neither can pushing away those we love, shutting ourselves down and banishing ourselves to our own private padded room, hurting and hurting so when the good disappears we won't feel it anymore. Saying yes instead of no, saying no instead of yes, tempting ourselves ands trusting that there is more to this breath than our own anxieties, doping ourselves up so we can sleep through life. It's not a hangover, it cannot be slept off. You wake up and it's all still there. Hard, razor sandpaper in your skull, sloughing off the cells of empty promises.

My father once told me that my mother would believe the first person who told her that she was crazy and needed to be put away in a mental hospital. That most people would believe, say, the third of fourth person. But that he and I were different. That the whole world could call us crazy and we'd simply say "na-uh". Perhaps this just makes me a crazy gypsy bitch who comes from a long line of crazy gypsy bitches, but, well, like a scar yours is yours until the end of time, and not belonging to anyone but you. Sipping side effects and glazed eyes poolside while your insides rot and your thoughts dull, dreams reduce into a stock of mushy thoughts, a porridge of average, a cauldron of acceptance. You can have it. I'll dive deep into that black hole, hear the hissing in all my broken places and bind them every morning, heal them and keep diving, curious to know what's to come and knowing that I am the captain gypsy bitch of this ship. And I'll take you with me too. I'll slap you into submission, set you free, love and heal you without losing myself, name every of your fears and let them fly off to a country where they belong, and we'll keep on sailing. I'm strong enough to take you all on. There is no bottom to my eyes, or my heart or the depths otherwise. I know what forever means and I live it every second. It's like living in a cluttered attic room when the house is empty, you don't owe any rent and you can have your run of it. Why stay cooped up in that room? You don't know what's out there, but pack a lunch, some good strong boots, and GO.

And, as long as my heart beats loud, my body wants what it wants, my intangibles keep on the journey and I know the fact that the mystery shouldn't be dissected on the street corner, operating table, therapist's chair, bar or in the rooms we hold inside our secret selves, you won't be seeing me in the Emergency Room anytime soon. That's a promise.

Needle and Black Thread 2.07

*About a year old this one...It's nice to capture rage in such a way....*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Old Poetry #1 12.2005

For someone I used to know.

“Driver”

Warm grain sand, fixate hands
looking back at you,
bumblebees leaping grass to weed,
plowing through trees,
intoxicated moon rising,
stumbling to take a leak;
that same second: atoms splitting,
in the arc of a god’s arrows-
angry teenage thumbs stuffing combat shells
embracing like a mother’s love
the bat dung, glistening gunpowder
in collective armory, filling
righteous ears and ten hearts
all scattered to the reaches
of the desert, as biblical text undeciphered
secret scripture coming up through crevices
where hides battle tactics and hippie schemes,
where no one tells him he’s wrong
or so right that his dream
should reach further than the world
in which he disbelieves.

Breezy wheatfield youth,
softest in secret,
clinging to you at night,
afraid to invite the silence
the science of Alone-
noises heard, not yet learned
the courage to possess,
made into an addictive nose bleed
sunrise, prizefight mind,
body moves hard, a suit of armor,
kidnapping you to every seaside
carnival you could ever crave--
to overdose on saddling the sky
a tragic carride accident,
comic ferris wheel junkies falling fist-first
like thoughts into waves, laughing them under,
begging for a smoke, a chance to save.

The broadest calm, a father sits to judge
his unborn children, from behind
selective, fluid and slipsliding eyes;
the truth pounds
wishing well-bound
refurbished garden shed door,
already reaching his dreams since the hour
before he was born-
conqueror of every shore,
to the root of the outer albatross,
the giant kept dragging blind to the side,
breeding new ideas that die,
then scream, laugh-like:
a horde of school children,
monkey fish with 10,000 voices,
soaring opera of strength and weakness,
feeding from this world,
then found alone and calling,
nestled in the leafy greens, high
above treetops, waiting and gone,
beaming mad with boredom
from the off ramp, dead end street of excess,
u-turning in a circle of fire water ritual.

Cult leader without a tribe
Come to take a drive
bleeding into the sun as it sets
on the shores-- one day promised to recalculation,
eavesdrop to its unspoken ground
the soul born free, beneath
grand confusion, collapsing star,
live to walk on top of carriage rides,
soar through verbal skies, believing
that the stars twinkle above, shining
even in the paleness of daytime, from within
broken bones, scattered- abandoned playground
shrouded in the deepest equation of blue.

Chieftain of foreign tours, sands of war, civilization
in every pore, peace in the valley in the soles of light shoes;
rainbows hailing colors like cabs in each second
of his eternity, the moment before it runs from itself –
always around the bend, just never close at hand,
trapping movement in the meadow pond, still conceiving
even sleeping, telling lies small and overblown,
unclaimed truth that’s lived and known;
Soul glides down the waterfall; cascading heart beats
filling with sounds, stories emptying from veins
like children and rules, surrounding his multitude
shooting at midnight starry skies---
The day is old, fades to a close, bold
that it will construct him forward,
forever on a roam, in search of haven,
boundless Home.

Drink up...

Pop the cork (or screw cap), strap your boots on, it's prose poetry time (never learned how to tell a story proper) on the gypsy ship. The waves are high, it smells like hops eating thunderstorms and sometimes desperate drunken silly rhymes. Here will be old & older, new and nearly new poetry, prose, blogs, writing, rambling, drunken scrawling (usually on arms), forgotten memories and fantasies from beneath a shot glass, bottom of the sea floor to searing up into desperate blue-gold quiet skies.

If you fall off the ship, I can't be held responsible.

Enjoy the ride.