May, 2018

you always loved, despite the art
the impetuous
the impoverished
loved the submissive, smaller, quieter version

made regular retreats to holy landings
awash with dolls, records, bad dinners, and holocaust
replete with sanitizer, blood, spinal fluid, and remorse

we couldn’t find that signal
looking, days, mornings, fire, from behind
in crevasses, tantrums, fantasies and heroic feats
of cosplay she-roes, of mystical magical beasts.

You went down slow, imperceptible.
Carrying the porous bones through sand
wishing them lighter, but more important
wanting a simpler story
for us, you said.

catcalls and dance halls,
you took me in ecstatic arms
and showed me what forbidden was
in the mist of the midst of
that ocean sadness, that Mack truck of

fuck, I can’t.
I need to fly, you know?
I won’t endure the thumb
or the girl boy her they him madness

love me, and see my dark rooms
all I ask, is twenty seconds of this
thirty or more, and I’m done
whisper your prophecy so only I will hear.

And say my name, sweet, sweet one.
Sing it like a howling Memphis

July heat.

Flurry, Memphis 2018

So we start again.
It turns out we don’t need a Delorean for time travel
Just a flight delay, or a scent on a midday breeze.
A plush pillow with a thread bare
or a random Memphis flurry on a cold morning
(Brings me back to laughing in the Berkshires
in some house in some hill town
recovering from some deviant switchback
and becoming pure again.)

Let’s get back to wildness in this year.
Talking back, taking back,
and wearing defiance like a leopard-print thong.
We are like the women in Mucha,
Languorous, wealthy in fabrics, grace
Sex in swirls, libidinous in our words
Our lens is warped for hope
we are the new world.

We write a man, gynic, fertile and bursting
We write a woman, jock, gallant, resolute
We mix our bloods in our babies making rainbows
We, two-fisted, pound our history into the backs of those
who, head-hidden, die off like white-hooded raptors
ripe for the welcoming rebirth of earth that will only remember them
as fertilizer for hydrangeas.

We close our eyes and let go.

The cynics say there is an art to stocking the cache.
Reaping repose and required wealth with a click.
Substituting stuff for status, serving rapacity before the homeless
Filling mouths, coffers; the artists in avarice.

The bridge still stands, majestic.
The statues are coming down, Delta town.
The rock stars still go to the theatre, and we sing a song of
judicious enchantment.

A search for soul, worship and welcomed weakness in the new year.

12:06 AM, Irma, Fire and Verona.

It’s 12:06 Am and there are quiet hours at Gatito Vito’s salon except
there is no quiet to be had, but vague ethnicity and troubled
dreamers wondering where supper is next week and where the
next handshake will emerge in this orange drowned town north of Mississip-

And fire burns and ash churns and so many foxes and hawks find silence
in cubbyholes and sand traps made for scorpions but now they house
refugees of fur and far and hope and wet and the new world in spades
and Trump(s) and storms, cataclysms, conundrums, holes of comfort.

There are not enough water bottles to sell, enough aid, not enough
purifiers, too many diapers to hold feces, piss of fleeing babes,
not enough gas to fuel the flying multitudes. It is dangerous, you know.
The storm will come, you know. It is here. IT IS PRESENT. It’s now the

bedfellow you needed to look in the eye, only the electric is gone and
the water is red with cruiser escapes filmed for the pleasure of
so many internet wanderers, and they know their time is limited, so
precious this time they have to bear witness to it all, bone and marrow,

and we write each others’ books, we do. Like some kind of Victorian
journalist, bearded and boheme. Finding the chinks, the holes. and
calling it all for scandal. It’s a business, these days, the scandal.
it’s all we can do to keep up, to sleep and strum, to remain upright and

here we are, at the cusp of eternity wondering who we can be in the wake of it
all, is all, is some, and we love each other don’t we? Don’t we? Or rather yet,
Do we hope for the moment we understand melody again? Do we pine to wake
and know that we have become enough, and the screen is safe to close?

Your body surges with the cancer, looking for a sweet spot, and you, warrior, let it
know the eye is near, and it will have to stay the interest until Tuesday. You
smooth tiny Evan’s hair with promise as you board windows, knowing the wind
cannot rival this year, this trial, this manifest of scars. It is a day, a week of

wheat from chafe, light from stark, wonder from womb, and tender lullabies.

 

In no particular order, you are constructed.

I placed your thought next to me.
nestled it in tight
fed it fondness, gave it coffee
worried when it got the sniffles
mourned when it faded into vapor and left.

I played your rock and roll loud
All night, all day it played
(as not to wake the newly wed neighbors from the child making practices above I pumped it likewise into my ears with silky headphones of purpose whilst the ritual pounded on)
It didn’t conjure. You never appeared.

I traded in those tired headphones for a sweet bowl of slippery gelato
Hazelnut, Drizzled with caramel.
at nine exactly, as the prophecy decreed it slid through my delta
down the long throat. Resting deep in my belly, as foretold.
bringing the requisite goosebumps,
it tasted of Boats, firelight and sunburn
but I couldn’t find your smell. Couldn’t savor your palm.
couldn’t place the tang, recognizable, of you after a day in the garden.
There was only a shiver, slight, and the sticky sensation of want.

I went to the top of the precipice and stood,
Moxie on that temple floor
I brought you white peaches and peppery biscuits.
I peeled off my dress and made offering
covering the freckles in Tennessee dirt to show you

I. Just. Can’t. Go.
My hands were shaking, by God they were.
But I needed you to see. So I waited for the thunder.
It took three days and nights, but I heard a distant boom boom.
I had eaten your fruit, spread it on those biscuits
and buried myself a foot deep in the ground by then.

So I brushed off. Knowing the revelation was not far.
Not so far from now.
Hope has fucking feathers, and a bird in the hand can be a dirty choice
without proper equipment so
Let me bate from your wrist, let me wrap it up: your hope,
and send it to the multitudes
Count freckles, itemize, name each and wander to Afric. Egypt. Abyss.

Let us be quiet and count the inspirations.

Take a walk, tell secrets, and wish for rain.

 

Basil in the window

Shifting in molar, sliding shove ways
I see the day for what it is
What song are you?
How is it, world dwellers, that we human so well
And still eat the night so that it will in turn swallow us?

The dark, a cheval glass, spoke the volumes we needed
For intimate solitude and a resounding hand check
The silence made us stone deaf with want
The emergence of our renaissance
catechizing our throats in the heat

The trees burst like overripe oranges
Each breeze a torpedo, a lesson for the contented, rested, untroubled.

Metallic crunch no lunch close your door it’s dark and they are coming for your television.

Sigh in amorous eve, close to what we need
Pestle the tight spots, bruise the tradition
Take only the most tasteless of pictures

In the mind’s eye of the storm
There is a quiet, quiet clue
A hushed doctrine, spoken in some ancient tongue
It whispers of secrecy, nectarines, and the wind.

I closed my eyes so tight I saw stars.
Got so naked I felt the inside of the womb
Sweated so endearingly, I became a pillar of salt
Danced so hard I was ecstasy, Holy Ghost!
A lover zealot, a rain shaked parodist, a libidinous priest, torpid, hot, pious.

The score was populated with strings, crickets
sand castles
and the oldest religions.

I thought how nice it would be to kiss your eyes.

I would love to, OR, how we might behold.

III
a guitar pick and a romp for the black cat
3 bands later it was still moving and
I could feel the calm start to seep in
We can rest here

(and the drummer’s mouth is open because he’s pounding, the guitar player broke his third string, the microphone is just receiving screams because after so many songs what is there to do but scream)

I can’t hear anything
and planets surge forward
in this two-horse town of trees
and all those barren bodies look in frenzy for the tonight in the ones next to them, across from them, upstairs from them, down the bar…
but the pounding is still ferocious
and how can they ignore
oh the best
part
when all the drinks bought make the guys on stage a little reckless and
shit gets louder, even
and each word is a prayer said over
sinewy arms, ringed fingers, nicotine lips…

And that fateful moment
“Thank you, Goodnight”
the white light blast our eyes
making women wish waterproof was for real
making stagger a zip code
making cabs chariots
making the cold night a question mark for the leftover
the lonely
the lascivious

the cold slaps me
and on nights like last night
I start running fast into the black
into the cold
splitting it in two
with The Queen is Dead across my chest
just to feel the blood pound into my face

I know it’ll come again because
the Pour house is there, the Lincoln there
and so many to see
and so many nights to
welcome
this breakneck, lovely cold splitting Midnight.

(when we replace the thought of us with birds, and release us into clouds that eat us whole, spitting out the seeds)
There’s a novelty to breathing
Held fast tight fat pockets grasping inside hand reaching
Angelwhere.
I wished you would hold me
Just for seconds of course
I can’t stay the course
I gotta bang-bang all over my psyche and talk future like
Wanting for ambition to take hold
Waiting for the wings to melt
I gotta slam into dem bones I see
In my dreams, vain, glorious
Wanting for a darker knight, a darker fight
A false fevering fleshed out soldier
Wanting more of that light, six shooters bright
But it just gets colder
Those sheets just get colder,
that sunbeam where you were gets colder.
That hotel room, that coffee those moments
Like smoke, get colder
A double A
double offering, the sky,  sucked us right in.
Changeling children and
Madly doting lovers reminded me that I could laugh.
For extra comfort I held my own hand.
And the blue up high had a circling bird
Tethered to Jehovah and the angels it flew circle wise into darker
Tree ridden areas for rest.
And I got a letter from Jehovah today.
Those chain letters that
piece together all of the unknowns

II
Whether I be chicken, deviant, cartoon mug or frost
I am shrouded in hair, black
guarded by feet, convex
healed by the same means,
warmed and cooled by the same summer and wisher
I can’t help but think that those rocks in
Virginia’s pockets each had a weight of their own
One, four pounds, one twenty
Each girded in express melancholy

I
Feel ten degrees warmer thinking of you
Gentility in approach
Fingers on the underside of my chin
Hands grasping lower back for fear of slipping
Perspiration lining the runway of spine and hip
Each freckle accounted for
Triple Decker sunshine candy girl has five feet
Of surging words for apathetic ears
I miss that room where boys dance on heads,
girls shake words from a stone
Jesus freaks with crayons pattern stigmatic guitar rifts
And Queen of nightlife moves through the room like some silver
Beauty ghost with eyes that stop trains
And hands that can hold a child with no fear
So yeah, I’ll spout them, three and with heart
I’ve run out of what calms the race, so we’ll see if
Grass will grow on faster ground
On hands made of war, and breath composed of brown eyes, wandering
Consumption just doesn’t work, but I keep it up despite
Monster premonitions and tighter belts

Angel come, come and fit fever on your wing
Angel run your hand through my eyes and pull out the softer girl
With hair of silk
thighs of green

thoughts of pounding hooves.

Dreaming big, and dainty, winsome, poet-honey.

Sometimes its the sound of it. The way it drags across skin, sand and other deterrents
Sometimes its the perfect way it slides into spots, unaware
Sometimes its the way it shoves down into the horizon, plowing day into inky black
Sometimes its the way it slows me as a walk out Midtown door in morning time

Last night I dreamt of someone next to me
In t-shirt sheets whispering instructions
On how to get to Mexico. It wasn’t so very far.
Completely unlit we only shared territory and exhalation
Wilting blue covering head neck chin and so forth
We vaulted the window with unseen pinions,
Alighted in some desert place.
I could see who it was then.

I was surprised you followed me here.
My compromise for Mexico was justified and
the scorpion dancing the jig, told me
we didn’t have far to go
You picked a far off orange tree for rest
And my palm was traced by your forefinger, unique
“-comer de mi boca, comerme mi peligro.”

It was a subtle kiss when it landed. Thirty seconds or more
We were less than an inch lip to lip.
Then the distance closed,proximity was everything
It tasted of three things:
ice, lime and sweet honey.
You whispered a small prayer, there, over my eyes
some Latin ditty meant to seduce
( Your hands rested in chastity on my sunburned knees)
(My hands, aching, did not rest, but remain good at heart).
When my lids lifted back over my eyes, of course, you were gone.
Gone to some other dream, I suppose.
Ginger, freckled, Sandman.
And again I was in some foreign place filled with wet trees
And fog like fingers, alone.
The sun was makin his descent, and I heard some creature moan for moon

Call me back. I ‘m gonna be baptized
By that rain, hold it holy, like the Grotto, in my hands
and pray for economic mercy, digging in the dirt mercy,
medicinal mercy, theatrical mercy
I’m gonna burrow my black head into those metabolic fantasy trees
I’m gonna have to be sucked
sucked into that river again
where I have to swim for light
where I have to find my feet, lashes, breasts
again.
skin brown, freckles ablaze, muscles sore, time snarled
and tree after tree after mountain after hipster after hippie after sea to shining sea after California, Oregon, Mount Saint Helen’s, Memphis, Portland, Chicago oh

Oh, oh.
I’m with you
I’m with you
I’m with you in charred remains of great lands
I’m with you in bunk beds
campfires, estranged houses
under those crazy stars with the bugs that light in symphony for us
splash me in that rain, get me wet up to my hazel eyes in it
drown me in what is right in front of me,
teach me angel ways
Cataclysmic lovers, poets, carnal midnight madmen
I love you
(And god’s fingers are here
lipsticked in drag-queen red,
howling a sticky ballad
every celestial vein)
(And those crazy Thracians!
Philomel in her hut,
having those things done that he did
and then  all becoming those crazy birds)

Maybe we can do that
become those birds– when we get the nights back,
When the explosions stop.

Just so you know,
the house in our dream was made of glass,
each several window blown sugar,
each strand of sugar spider webs,
each web the finest dew line,
each dew line the stuff of dreams
I have the smell of it by my bedside,
It produced tributary tears in the getting of it,

To report an outage, call quickly.
And wait. Wait.
It will assemble. And things will be free of bands of paper, case, and cage.

But I knew it was you, Velour bottomed and cat cradled
vehicular comrade and cloud kissed
Street sweeper of The brave new world!
You spoke in tongues and the bribes were left unanswered
And the bush burned and tomorrow came
And I tasted hope metallic on Soft palette
It swam with so many other sweet things
The treble of your solitude suicide in my ear, your eager million dollar hands on my face, the halo of pursuit in the covers, the dim light of morning and
Beethoven only a whisper and a promise away.
This was the stuff that the cinema can’t even catch
It housed too much paint and long fire to be funnelled into in any dark room
It canvassed a field somewhere in some land sans gravity, eloquence, and
Free of heat and cold where rivers run pure plasma attacks and fish leap to the sky

And
Just
Keep
Going going was the night in the way of the bells and the grand ball
Where ladies dance and Gatsby he watches and documents from a balcony somewhere
And you and I took our time
We took it and woke up alone with possibility in our beds
hope on our porch
light, that blue light, los latidos del corazón,

the light of what you touch is what we have,
air we heave,
world we grab: mashed in dirty fingers, stuck in beards, lost in sheets
The here and the danger,the four days,the sound of a whisper
Etched here
in blues

on the palm

of my hand.

 

Even on my tallest day I still can’t reach the damn light bulb.

The lights in my kitchen in my ugly puppy of an apartment here in Memphis are slowly, one by one, going out. While I love the high ceilings in this quirky pad, I am, and will always be, 61 and three-quarters of an inch high. No amount of staring straight up will release these dead bulbs from their elusive sockets. No matter what surface in my apartment I put under me, I can’t reach. I cannot WILL them out. They will not be swayed by smart rhetoric. Even yelling has not worked. Ignoring them has no yield either. I’m just dumbfounded by the hilarious metaphor of it all screaming in caps,

“YOU NEED TO LET SOMEONE IN”.

A ladder would do the trick, or possibly scaling the stove to fridge and then a 3 foot reach… but seriously? If you know me, you know that both of these ideas are just nucking futs.

I’m easing in. Last night I welcomed new friends by means of games, fire, and loud music. Today I receive friends by reading at the Spartan City Poet’s May Day. Tonight I participate in some small way as an actor in a rehearsal. Tomorrow, more immersion, more opening, more tooling around exploring this city with new eyes that are reminding some of my new Memphian pals why they stayed here, and why it’s beautiful.

Mid forties are super weird. You kind of can’t make up excuses for your behavior anymore, lest you just fall into the category of the non-evolving. It’s exciting to REALLY love people in a deeply grounded way. It’s trailblazing to speak with a whiff of authority about your experience, particularly when you’ve made the maverick move of waiting to dive in with folks until you can see past the fog of craftily and attractively packed baggage you have accumulated over said forty plus years.

“So when you are sitting with a new tribe in a tiny lounge off of Madison,  the music is good, and the laughter is the whitest of noise, you can believe that none of this, not one part of it can be done alone, Carmen, so shut up and listen to me. Let someone come over and change the damn bulbs. Everyone is taller than you anyway.” – The Universe

Μου λείπεις

There is an art to missing people, I believe. It is quiet, it is active, and it is slow. The layering effect of it is staggering; the amount of energy a human has to love, and the expansive room humans have to invite more and more people into that space of nostalgia. Just when we believe we can’t do it again, we fall in love with people, we dote on moments, we make heroic even the most tempestuous of friendships in their absence. We expand and romanticize the briefest of possible flirtations. Each time we engage in hatred or discrimination we fight our most basic desire: to be home. To find resonance. To dwell in the familiar, whether it be tangible or no.

Two toddlers on a swing-set in a park don’t give a shit about Donald Trump. Or a hijab. Or a prayer. Or whiter teeth. Or even what they are named. They want to together feel that sensation in their bellies when they are suspended by the swing, inexplicably in the air, caught  by physics in a moment of shared ecstasy. That’s as real as it gets. Distilled. While all of these other things come into play later, this one moment is the fodder for remembrance.

So, I’ve been remembering. And doting. And breathing through it: the painful birth process of change. It’s baffling, swollen, pulsing, and pushing, and it’s going to happen whether I like it or not.

I’m happy to say, my life has been full of swing-sets.

Secondary leaves, Or mid-life growth spurts

It’s been a solid three weeks since my little life began here in the deep south. In that time, I have figured out the GOOD grocery store, the BAD date sites, the BEAUTIFUL garden walks, the WILDLY FRUITFUL yard-sale neighborhoods, and the inevitable MIRROR UP TO NATURE that is alone time. All of this, of course, yields incredibly useful information, albeit sometimes with great discomfort.

There has not been great success personally in raising things from seed in my life. I am a scavenger of disposed-of plants behind grocery stores, and while those forgotten plants usually live in the world of dry, old, or ugly– I try to revitalize them and bring back some of the good old days of green living. But from seed? There was a pitiful tomato plant once. It yielded one lone tomato, about an inch in diameter.

It was a momentous occasion. My friend Caitlin and I divided it in two and ate it with panache, as we did many beautiful meals in that dearest old stinky house we occupied in Pittsfield Massachusetts, so many moons ago.

But, due to Memphis dirt, divinity, dedication, decidedly good counsel, and delicious Tennessee light, we have secondary leaves.

There does seem to be life here. In so many forms. The relish of fellowship, the love of music, the surge of urban art, the evolution of plants, neighborhoods and organizations, the REBIRTH of itself, the phoenix-like qualities of those who are marginalized –the sheer TENACITY of this resilient city is infectious on so many levels.

On this precipitous Friday, we look into that mirror, and rest with the ghosts who are becoming most transparent.

We wish them well, and they fade into thin air, like smoke.

“All things are engaged in writing their history…Not a foot steps into the snow, or along the ground, but prints in characters more or less lasting, a map of its march. The ground is all memoranda and signatures; and every object covered over with hints. In nature, this self-registration is incessant, and the narrative is the print of the seal.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson