There was a tunnel, deep and long and gray in the peripheral. The exit was black not white. Black ghosts swam in out, melting, peeling, cracking, and swirling through her, pulling at her wrists, her fingers, her toes. No she cried, I don’t want to go. There was no light, just darkness. It was black. She fought, they pulled. The beings whispered and sneered. She opened her eyes. It was all still there, the struggle. She was dying. They were laughing. She wanted white noise, her bed, silence and peace. Their whispers grew louder, they pulled harder. Her body grew weary, she ached, her wrists tender, sprained. The tunnel dispersed into particles fading into the shadows of her room. The whispers stopped. She sat up right in the pink of her bed, gasping deeply for air. She choked and sobbed and popped some pills. She would not sleep for days. She couldn’t. She wasn’t ready to go.
There was a party, a bonfire; a hole in the ground and stones and dirt and drums and white rabbits. The air was crisp, a tingle to the skin. Sweaters and caps and boots covered in mud. She was walking to the end of the world. There was an end. She could hear it, smell it. She knew where it was and she searched, for hours. A train track began. She followed. She tripped over the slabs of uneven wood. It was an old track, rotting it appeared. The track ended and she wandered until she found it again, this time in another direction. She followed, she knew she would come to the end of the world. Was it a cliff, an empty abyss, a tunnel? She didn’t know, only that it was calling her name, waiting, expecting her discovery. Time passed. She became lost. The night grew colder the snow began to fall. White flecks everywhere. White noise. White tracks. Footprints amiss. She looked back. They say don’t look back. She did. Tracks descended behind in every direction. Her tracks looked askew. They made no sense. She grew weary, frightened, confused. It wouldn’t end. Hours before she would come to wake in the field, in the snow, shaking from her bones. Wetness beneath her spine.
There was a dream, a belly, swollen. She stood before a double window, naked, bulging breast and stomach. There was a dagger in her hand. She gripped. She stabbed. Upon her head and arms and legs and in the center of her rounded abdomen she cut X’s. Her chin to the ceiling she screamed. There was no pain, only astro-turf digging into her knees. She slipped somewhere in between and fell onto a pad of lawn that padded her into sleep and wrapped her wounds and erased the Xs from her body.
There was a street, on which beggars and prophets roamed. There were speeches in graveyards, idealism, heroism, rank unshowered beings enveloped in the stank of stale cigarette smoke and boozed body odor. They blamed society, claimed society, wanted to change society. They were all crazy, insane hypocrites. It was a joke. She laughed. He had a knife. He put it to her neck. I could kill you. She knew he could, she knew he wouldn’t. She choked on her stomach. She ran. Escaped. Escaped from it all. Made it out. Into the light, into the day, the reason, the right.
9/26/05
9/19/05
Funkier than a Mosquito's Tweeter
At the tip of my tongue I feel a terribly romantic notion that life as I want it would be some sort of reveling: to wake up in the morning guiltless, with no conclusions, pretexts, misconceptions, prejudices, and a glass of orange juice instead of coffee.
Life, as I’d want it, would exist within the perimeters of bliss: to revel in my lust and love, to never have to make excuses or pay a bill, eat fennel or comb my hair after I’ve been driving with the windows down. I’d never have to laugh because I am supposed to. My daughter would never shit on the floor and paint the walls with it. I would never work in a bar or a restaurant or around food and drink, unless my job was to participate in the eating and drinking of it all. I would be open-minded. I would love back hair, egos, bad sex, vanity, and rich fuckers.
Life, as I’d want it, would be simple and glorious. I would sleep for days.
Relationships are fickle and I am always edgy, but no one knows. I once dated a guy that told me reading reduced people to assholes and that my nail polish would come off when I took a shower. Sometimes.
I once dated a guy that told me I look like Iggy Pop naked. Perhaps.
My family has been referred to as white trash, as porch monkeys. My older sister once ran away with a butcher knife. People thought she was crazy. She is. But that’s not the point.
We used to always live in trailer-parks. We once lived in a trailer-park in Jacksonville, Florida. Hurricanes happened often. Folk in Maryland have a hard time understanding the logic of this. Understand.
Life, as it is, makes me out to be a hypocrite. I want to be something I am not. I want to love people in spite of themselves. I want to wear my heart on my sleeve. Nina Simone has a song, “Funkier than a Mosquito’s Tweeter.” That is my life. That is our lives. It is a rat race. A place where fuckers hate to get fucked and lovers hate to be loved.
I hate to hate. I love to fuck. I love to love and be loved. But sometimes life isn’t that simple. Simple and glorious?
Life as I’d want it would be without demons in everyone’s closet. There would be action without war. Guinivere wouldn’t dream about sharks.
War? You don’t even know, said Rory on Christmas Eve. He was stuck in Faluga, while Carl was getting court marshaled for shooting some guy in the face. Happy Holidays.
9/12/05
Purple muumuus and a Pruny thumb
Purple silky shine pressed between the index and thumb of my right hand. Soft soggy left thumb pruned by intense salivation. Suck and rub, suck and rub. There was nothing better.
My mother hated that I sucked my thumb. She hated that I carried around a muumuu. And she especially hated when my muumuu would consist of one of her lingerie, ribbon and bowed undergarments.
One morning, at church, after a good long lecture about the “noise-factor” of my thumb-sucking, I produced from my cabbage patch-head purse, a perfectly sized, purple silk thong with a large eighties styled silk, purple bow located on the back, at the top of the crack area of the thong. I was semi-discreet. Sitting four siblings away from her, I held my prized muumuu between my fingers and rubbed. I thought it was beautiful in every sense. It was after all purple, my favorite color.
I restrained with much difficulty, however, my thumb sucking. I did not want to go to hell. Children’s Time came, and my four siblings and I shimmied out of the pew and up front to sit on the gray carpeted ledge with our classically robed minister. I gripped my purple muumuu tightly, fiercely with my right hand. It was slightly balled-up. The minister was an odd looking fellow with thick blue-tinted glasses, and a perfectly round bald spot on the back of his head, the size of a softball. He had a nasal-like voice and would always rub his hands together quickly, like he was cold. It was usually cold in the church. My eldest brother always had the most to say and as a result always sat fairly close to the man clad in pale cream. We would follow our brother. During this particularly long Children’s Time, however, I began to get an itch to rub my secretly palmed muumuu. So I un-balled my hand, shook out the crinkles, held it up high and then brought it down to my lap in order to rub. There was a gasp from the congregation. It was my mother. What are you doing with that? Shrieked my brother. Ew, gross, shrieked my other brother. The minister said nothing. He appeared entertained, perhaps even turned on. My mother had been a hottie. Who knows?
Children’s Time soon ended. My mother marched me out of the church and I received a thrashing in the name of embarrassment. I also received a life-long tormenting by my siblings, who all through the awkward years of elementary school, middle school, high school, and even college will remind me, along with any new outsiders I have with me, of my awkward childhood moment.
I do not feel dirty or ashamed. Instead, I feel a slight heat in my neck and a fond fuzziness in the back of my mind when reminded, for the comfort of a good thumb and a purple muumuu.9/6/05
Crispy Leg-Pulling
I’ve always found something comforting in the crackle of tobacco and the hiss of burning rolling paper. With the springboard of a striking match or a clicking lighter, the sound is practically music. Breathing adds originality to the composition, with short, quick inhalations and exhalations sounding a bit like a series of staccatos, and those with long deep expresses reminiscent of a fortissimo.
My dad, or papa, as we called him, would always roll his own cigarettes. He claimed the rolling was therapeutic. He’d come home, weary from work, grab a Bud, and sit to the right of our thick-threaded tan plaid couch. There was a coffee table on the right and on it a reddish tobacco can, a small book of rolling papers, a ceramic blue ashtray, and a wooden pipe-set. My younger sister and I would climb up on his lap and watch him as he placed the tobacco in the paper, lick the edge, secure the tips, and light.
As he smoked he’d tell us stories. He’d always begin the story with something familiar: people we knew of or his childhood home. The stories were always in first person with him being the explorer or the troublemaker or the miracle worker. He’d blow smoke rings and French inhale while he spoke, and we would hang on every word he said. I wanted his stories to be real, and they were, as long as they continued. But, more often than not, he'd finish his stories with a line about how he was pulling somebody's leg, which of course was usually ours.
When we got older, we realized that most of his life was a bit like fiction, but also that most of what we had thought was his real- life was truly fiction. Papa had always been a bit of a fibber and an extremist. He still tells stories these days, but with the presidence that they are real. We know that they are not, but we also know that he just wants more than anything to still be able to sit on that old couch, that has since burned away, and tell his two youngest daughters a tale or two.
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