to all
you are
all,
but
all of -you.
to all
you are [caged]
mockingbird can't sing
while tied to a
string.
to all
you are not. all
a ruse, to confuse, amuse, bemuse?
into all
you d i s a p p e a r...
p a r t i c l e s
dispersing,
shedding,
MOLTING
like a snake.
crisp.
papered. funnels.
left
in your
...... wake.....
to all.
9/16/09
11/27/08
Bugs
Unfurled from my web, he meanders,
Sidestepping my venom en rout.
I want to spit, but cannot
Want to pounce and devour,
But cannot.
I know your games, your sly little exit
Through the side exit.
You melt into the shadows,
Scampering like a roach
In my kitchen,
When I’ve turned on the lights.
Be a coward, slip away.
Keep it easy, baby.
Cradle yourself…
Be what you need,
Because I know,
I had you in my web,
and I didn’t eat you.
Sidestepping my venom en rout.
I want to spit, but cannot
Want to pounce and devour,
But cannot.
I know your games, your sly little exit
Through the side exit.
You melt into the shadows,
Scampering like a roach
In my kitchen,
When I’ve turned on the lights.
Be a coward, slip away.
Keep it easy, baby.
Cradle yourself…
Be what you need,
Because I know,
I had you in my web,
and I didn’t eat you.
8/3/08
Dirty fingernails tap it out, trail the end of the end of the beginning.
Swallow your pride girlie, you weren’t worth it. Keep telling yourself it wasn’t meant, just not meant, to be meant to be. Youth evades your grasp, for beauty is temporary in the eyes of its beholders, flawing quickly, fading into the banal, lost to another moving image. Another moving fantasy. Another false attempt, to make what is not meant, meant to be. Measure it, tap it out, who was here, and who was there. Present, past, present past, it’s all a void, a wanting. Pulse accelerating, while you’re stuck contemplating, debating, truth? Truth……….is pulling you to self-destruct, a ticking time-bomb knifing its way through your mind. Can’t stop shouting, while Reality laughs in the wake. Reality is, girlie, you don’t matter anymore. Reality is hell, and this hell is the truth. Wear blinders, put cotton in your ears, but know it. Tap it out. Accept it. Fade it out. Accept it, until the end is the end, and love can be filed away and categorized as something it never was.
4/1/08
curdling
Stuff my hand
Beneath the pillow,
Nights not the same
Without you.
Its getting better
My mind now coasts
Right past you.
And when I pray
Its not for you;
Its for me.
Not us
To work,
To last,
Because it doesn’t matter
Anymore.
Too much lost,
Too much gone,
Too much past.
I can’t face you in life
I can’t face you in sleep
We’ve curdled
And all that was sweet
Has soured.
3/10/08
In the process of...
Starting now, I am going to sta
rt posting paintings that I am working on. I haven't painted in a while, and so I can use all the help I can get. So artistic people, please help me out with any ideas or tips you have for me. This is Pat's painting (right).He wanted a tree with a green and cobalt color scheme.He wants it to look like this other tree painting here (left). It doesn't. But this painting is annoying, my hearts not in it....and he likes it as is.....so yes, I am copping out. Unless, anyone has some quick tips to spice it up?
This is one of the other paintings I am working on. The theme is metaphysical wit....yes John Donne bladee bla bla! So my idea is to make the table a compass....and then either skeletalize the body...or make it naked and feminine...I think I need to get rid of weird mannequin torso in the background, and what the hell am I doing with the background??? I just don't know! This is one of those "it made sense in my head" paintings, but once I started barfing it out it doesn't work so well. Help!
I don't know
Under my skin, you cling,
a tendon running the length of my torso.
My heart entangled amongst a web of nerves,
tentacles, twisting a hangman's noose -
you have pulled,injecting my veins
with your hurt. I feel it.
I feel
you-
lining me, salty as bone-marrow.
I have lost you,and now I lay on the floor,
collapsed, a puddle of flesh and fluid and tears,
my backbone in retreat. I have broken my bones,
and so they have fled.
In every piece, in every cell
you live, like resin.
My body betrays me.
Perhaps, in time, I will shed you.
a tendon running the length of my torso.
My heart entangled amongst a web of nerves,
tentacles, twisting a hangman's noose -
you have pulled,injecting my veins
with your hurt. I feel it.
I feel
you-
lining me, salty as bone-marrow.
I have lost you,and now I lay on the floor,
collapsed, a puddle of flesh and fluid and tears,
my backbone in retreat. I have broken my bones,
and so they have fled.
In every piece, in every cell
you live, like resin.
My body betrays me.
Perhaps, in time, I will shed you.
1/19/08
Reverberation
Palm in cupshape,
Fashioned,
Drum a sound.
Sound a beat,
Beat a rhythm.
Fingers dash, dash and tap
Breath,
Exhale.
Louder, louder, louder!
Pulsing, steady, harder,
Accelerando!
Panting, panting,
Gasping, but steady,
Hold steady!
Hold steady!
Silencio!
Tapping, lightly tapping;
Rising, calm
Trickle,
Like rain,
Beading, gathering,
Then streaming,
Blending
Into sound,
Into sounds,
Into beats,
Into rhythm,
Into me,
Into us.
1/8/08
Side Note on B-more
With rockets and bombs we have blast forth the New Year, 2008. Ripe with potential, and frothing at the lip of a full glass of champagne, this virginal calendar burgeons for us a new beginning, a fresh start. For Baltimore: The Greatest City in America, the New Year provides an empty page, and akin to a wash of Listerine, Baltimoreans are hopeful that this New Year will cascade through our streets, blast our beloved cat-sized rats from the alleys, and irrigate the innermost trenches with the motto of Believe.
Believe, the motto plastered to bumpers and billboards, and costing over 2 million dollars, was to perpetuate optimism among locals and ramp up tourism in spite of dire statistics. Did it? Does it work to Believe in
Instead, I believe that Believe was to resonate a more numinous definition, that of hope and faith. Hope and faith by association typically refer to something that hasn’t happened, may not happen, has yet to be seen, is continuously challenged, and potentially always disappoints. Within this context, Believe makes entirely more sense as our city’s motto.
Perhaps for you, Believe, or hope and faith are terms that you apply toward a lover, a friend, a son or daughter, maybe even God. Words like these are optimistic in tonality, romantic at the root, and vague in expectation. They insinuate that something could potentially happen, could potentially change, but at the current time has not. They refer to a blind state of optimism, an intrinsic, irrefutable love toward something or someone. These words ignite desire and passion; they elevate emotion, but unfortunately fail to deliver.
Year after year
At the core of Believe is a city of stifled, intelligent, creative individuals who must arm themselves for battle, and for once put up a fight, carry it out, and make a difference. It is easy to rant discontent, to point out what needs to change. Baltimoreans are good at that, in fact I’m doing it right now. But, it is quite another thing to implement a direct course of action.
We need to organize an infrastructure within our city, with the sole objective to bring about change, start a chain reaction, and fight within the boundaries of a muddled system. We need an infrastructure built by the actual individuals who live within or around
11/26/07
Maybe for Nancy and Tom
We are selling the couch today
to some couple –Nancy and Tom.
Nancy and Tom were definitive;
Exact in what exactly they were looking for
Eager, precisely, for a tan and pleather couch. In fact,
They’ve got to have it today, “As soon as possible,” they said.
My response was delight, “No problem!” I said, wanting
to rid myself of the tan and pleather object.
How I hate its obtrusive shape and abhorrent texture.
If only they knew-
How we fought over who was responsible
For the ugly couch.
The ugly couch upon which we made love,
Our bare skin chilled against the cool plastic-like fabric.
Perhaps Nancy and Tom will experience the same.
-Being pressed between the confutation of warm, slapping flesh
And the cold stiff arms of
Our couch.
When the couch is gone- it will be empty.
The space, the place, we once called home.
The space, the place, we must then scour,
And clean until it is bone dry,
Absolve it of all that was
Left
In the wreckage.
We must erase any link to
A time when nothing was linked,
Couldn’t be, wouldn’t be
Shouldn’t have
Been always.
But maybe for Nancy and Tom.
11/4/07
TO Joe
"I’ve got to fold because these hands are just too shaky to hold,
Hunger hurts, but starving works when it costs too much to love..."
‘you’re crazy’ he says with a flick of spit and a point to his head. ‘you’re crazy’ I thought, my stomach like lead. I want, I dream, I hope, I try and I have a bad day..there’s only so much to do and not to do…barreling through eggshells like it will make…like I will make it…still…but instead I’m stiff with mucus, covered in slivers cut by shells that I broke. If only I wouldn’t stomp…if only I would tiptoe
over your ego, wedging myself between your insecurity and the scrutiny of an eye…unforgiving, ready to leap at the culprit, to notice the invasion into …? Explanation. I know not…the limits of who it is and was that you want me to be, that you expect me to be, could I be any more? Could I survive anymore, could I not love you anymore? Damned if I do and damned if I don’t –I guess you feel the same way…I think. I think.
Undertow
You say for you there will be no between—
Between the two of us.
Click your heels, raise your voice, bitter the scene;
Count the stars, number our days, fluff and preen.
But, do not, my friend, fly the cusp.
Do not invade the sanctity behind
Sullen instigation.
Instead, let us be, as is; think to find
Resolve shucking pebbles within our minds;
An inebriation.
In pulling thread, gray, through the head, to know
Of once we were and are—
Needles gouging, mending; gapped flesh to sew;
Broken scars in the currents, we do tow.
How we have come so far.
In between, the in-between is solace
To break awaiting falls.
Yet, we slip beneath the storm with distress,
Masking truth with irony to be less
Than was meant; safe in a deep lull.
Little Dreams
Child Guinivere cries in her sleeping,
Undulating beneath the damp thick of sweat.
Her chest quavers in fear of dreams dark.
Hidden below her pillow, silvery sharks slash babies to tears.
Somewhere, in a place dry,
Dragons do scorch and rear to save.
Burgeoning, inaccessible truths.
False calamity awaits her slumber,
Mother goose, to mollify, awaits,
Spinning the spun across the wreck of youthful aware.
Her hands, in shade of pink, caress to comfort the fear.
Web of black sky broken in clouds
quick to pace,
Fish-eye hook of a moon milking the mask of bleak.
Inside the hearts and minds of children,
is chance of requite,
Fervent love bedded beneath their simple hopes.
Keen of the “it”, too keen for it
Swimming a little harder now.
Then, from the folds of sheet, a child awakes with aged eyes.
10/17/07
Walk Poem
It’s 9:30 in the morning, and either their early or I’m late.
Heavy high in hue of hate
of remnants of an early rising state.
Cherry blossoms blooming, pink- pale
-Peace. Solemn in stride stale sobriety. Eight weeks clean, now.
Guinivere dreamed her way into a bed of water.
I found her treading the pillows, the mattress
Screaming of a shark, pink-pale.
With human arms. Reaper reaching to right wrongs
I have done.
Wake child. Trauma resides, so we swim the bed
Butchering sharks until the waves are red
And the waters safe.
The day before
yesterday we picked up smooth shells from the shore
Of a
We grinded sand in our teeth, as the wind whipped
Salt gritty strands of hair in our eyes.
We talked of sharks, then, and dolphins.
Guinivere dreamed of sharks.
I went to a meeting last night.
Hippies high on life on the hard flat floor. No carpet,
Just gangsters and businessmen, bawlers and shot-callers
Upright in their aluminum chairs. And yet,
There was myself, young mama
Slouched in pretty pink-pale.
Addiction, they said, an infantile tendency
To clumsily cling to a catastrophic comfort.
The speaker clung to the vertical brass of the lamp
-post. Posing to illustrate defeat due to dependence.
I nod. The hippies twirl dreadlocks into the ceiling
As businessmen tap the faces of their gold watches
Late for dinner with the wife.
Wish I had a wife to wake me in the morning.
8/6/07
Bricks
I stand against the current
of vertical laid brick,
red hard beneath my
leathered feet.
The sun against my back
warmth pressing into my
spine. I rest in its
arms, swaying
only when the current
of brick and breeze
buckle me to my knees.
Ever moving in this stand still,
this perpetually stationary stance,
bracing me, I bracing,
eyes drooping, black beneath
bottom lashes, purple.
“You look so tired,” they say.
“It’s the brick,” I say,
“its rising from the morter to
pound me in the face
with reality, the reality of living in a world
of flying bricks”. “What?”
Bowing my stance.
Lean into the sun,
Brace yourself my dear.
Sun,
hold me steady,
Wrap your fiery fingers around
my shoulders;
tender my wounds if only
for a second.
12/6/05
summertime and the living is easy
First there was a vegetable garden: tomatoes, zucchini, squash, rosemary, thyme and sage. We patched it together with four wooden slabs and a chunk of rocky earth. It rained hard in the evenings, but the sun was heavy and hot. The herbs were moved indoors and a tomato plant perished.
My daughter refused to swim. She thought sharks lived in swimming pools. In the night, she would awake, terrified, swimming through her sheets and fighting off her pillows. She kicked a girl in the face at a birthday party who was swimming and neighing like a horse. I guess she was afraid of horses too.
Fourth of July was barbequed in Chicago. We sat in lawn chairs in front of dad’s house drinking boxed red wine and singing Fleetwood Mac against the bands playing in the park. Debbie danced barefoot in the street. Fireworks exploded. The grass was wet. It had rained all day. Two young boys lost in the festivities had me drive them home. When I dropped them off their father began to beat them at the door. I tried to explain how good and polite they had been and how it had not been a problem to bring them home. But their father would not listen. He told them to get the fuck in the house and then he slammed the door in my face. Sweet boys. Ugly man.
We ate chocolate chip cookies in the sand in Ocean City. It was foggy for days. I got sunburned. Pictures show women and children squinting, grinning, and surrounded by toys and junk food. I guess it was fun. I don’t really remember.
August was spent out West, picking sage off the side of the road and living in tents. We road tripped. Four women and a child crammed into a hatchback. We ate tuna and vegetables out of cans for days. We slept under a tarp, our cotton sleeping bags soaked by morning from the nightly desert monsoons.
In Arizona we stayed a night on a reservation. The Navajo gathered around midnight somewhere near where we slept, yelling into the dark and beating drums until we had fallen asleep. It was lovely. The sky was so large, filled with skipping stars. The earth hard and toned by dust and dogs, wild, wandering starved through the canyons.
We backpacked into the Grand Canyon, rotating between the four of us a twenty-five pound child in a twenty-pound backpack. We dripped and panted and struggled for four days: in and out and in and out. Hardcore.
In another part of Arizona we hiked into a lush canyon, shimmying through rust colored rock and jumping gaps between the trails. We ate tuna next to a herd of mangy sheep. They were herded by an archaic Native American woman, her skin leathered, brown, her hands, thick, held a carved walking stick.
In Utah we passed children playing basketball in the middle of an empty abyss as a dark storm gathered in the distance. A group of shacks cluttered together appeared vulnerable, naïve to the impending clouds. Beyond, lay nothing but gray mountains and a cliff with a stone portrait of Jerry Garcia.
For weeks we ran the coyote fences of Sante Fe, drinking Tequate and philosophizing, solidifying and romanticizing. I fell in love with Jackson. We painted, sewed, and slept. Jalapenos and black beans with everything.
Maryland humidity was suffocating. I couldn’t sleep. East coast was harsh, brittle. Hard to be back, in the grind, in the bitterness of it all. Summer halted.
Now all the leaves are brown and the skies are gray …
11/1/05
Walking in the Write (week 9)
I write in necessity. Like taking a long awaited shit in the privacy of your own home or gulping down a cold glass of milk on an empty stomach, I find that writing is impulsive, unpredictable, and an urge that will hit me sporadically, and often indefinitely.
There is no method to the madness, only a few rules. I cannot write while someone is chatting with me. I cannot write while listening to music with words, unless it is the Grateful Dead. And, I cannot write during the day.
Often I write mid-task, while cleaning or completing homework, reading, cooking, or even while gardening. I cannot write for long intervals at a time. Two hours straight is the maximum, yet I doubt that I have ever reached that point without an excessive amount of interruption, self-imposed or not.
I despise rewriting, even though I know it is always necessary and never completed. Writing, at least my own, I feel can always be reworked, played around with. Writing, for me, is play. Often, it is in the rewriting that I will lose or choose a piece. Rereading something I have written has the potential to be quite frightful. I tend to cringe whenever I reread. I try not to.
Essentially, then, it is the cringing that is responsible for the constant separation due to interruption. I am always with intent, even though it may not appear so.
In fiction writing and now literary essay, I cannot plan ahead. I just write. I barf it out, and sometimes it works and other times it does not. This has always been a problem. I know what I want or what I want to say, but often what I do write is something entirely different. That is the magic, the gamble of writing that I so love.
And just I am taking a gamble now, I am distracted.
There is no method to the madness, only a few rules. I cannot write while someone is chatting with me. I cannot write while listening to music with words, unless it is the Grateful Dead. And, I cannot write during the day.
Often I write mid-task, while cleaning or completing homework, reading, cooking, or even while gardening. I cannot write for long intervals at a time. Two hours straight is the maximum, yet I doubt that I have ever reached that point without an excessive amount of interruption, self-imposed or not.
I despise rewriting, even though I know it is always necessary and never completed. Writing, at least my own, I feel can always be reworked, played around with. Writing, for me, is play. Often, it is in the rewriting that I will lose or choose a piece. Rereading something I have written has the potential to be quite frightful. I tend to cringe whenever I reread. I try not to.
Essentially, then, it is the cringing that is responsible for the constant separation due to interruption. I am always with intent, even though it may not appear so.
In fiction writing and now literary essay, I cannot plan ahead. I just write. I barf it out, and sometimes it works and other times it does not. This has always been a problem. I know what I want or what I want to say, but often what I do write is something entirely different. That is the magic, the gamble of writing that I so love.
And just I am taking a gamble now, I am distracted.
10/24/05
Whole of hOly
The Whole of Holy
We live in it; we eat from it; we screw from it or in it; and we are born from it, and die to it. It is a form of transportation: psychologically, spiritually, emotionally, and physically. It is a transformation, transcendence: a motion, an action, an entity, a love, a loss, an answer, a void, a wanting. It is a geographic location, a connection between space and time, desire, infinity, closure.
The Beginning:
I was pacing the walls of a dim, curtained space. The walls were pale and gray, but white. The room was lined in closed cupboards without handles to open. There was a metal- framed bed with pink paper sheets, and cotton-slippered stirrups. I paced: back and forth, around and back. A paisley-print hospital gown flapped open. There was a chill. I held my lower back, gritting my teeth, hissing under my breath. Sit down, the nurses said. Calm down, do your breathing exercises. I didn’t know any. I paced for forty-five minutes, while my lower back contracted. They did not think I was in labor. Two freshly admitted medical students had examined me and declared I was only four centimeters dilated, when the previous day I had been dilated to eight. I knew she was coming. Give me drugs, now. But, it was too late. I was dilated to ten, plus two, cursing like a mad woman. She was fast, I split, my vaginal space eroding into blood and mucus and new flesh, to life.
From a hole emerged a fresh being. A clean slate of person in utter perfection, from nothing and from everything. So close to God, or what may be, I had thought of her. And into the void of living and circumstance, the unpredictable, the unavoidable, the earth of the black hole, she was planted, a tiny stalk of potential.
“…to plug up a hole means originally to make a sacrifice of my body in order that the plenitude of being may exist…” - Sartre
Jean Paul Sartre wrote that the hole in and of itself is an existentialist entity in being. He felt that the hole, presented, was an empty image of him, an excavation to be carefully molded about his flesh. Sartre felt that the emergence through a hole at birth was correlated with the human tendency to indulge orifice. On the most basic level, orifice indulgence is for one to put their finger in their mouth or ear or nostril, or to put food in one’s mouth. Sartre also compared women to that of a hole. He found them to be a gaping wound, with their power relying predominately on that they contain this empty space between their legs, a void expecting fulfillment. The male desire to complete the hole, he feels, is largely related to the idea of castration, as men lose power in their instinctive drive to feel whole, imbedded in the recesses of their minds from birth with their initial emergence. The Middle- Exchanges:
There was always that saying, about men, you know? About how they spend the first part of their lives trying to escape from it, and the rest of their lives trying to get back in. Assumably, they try both literally and figuratively. I know. I am a single mother. I tend to date men who have lost their mothers. It is an odd coincidence.
Darren wanted to keep me in a box, under lock and key, to encourage and maintain only as he desired. He mourned his mother’s death into my life. Charming his way into a world he did not belong, he was a rigid type, sharp to a point, never wavering in his morals or expectations. He was an immediate father for my young daughter, but always so strict and cold. He hurt to his bones. Eventually, though, his sincerity became disenchanting, as I learned that he had sucked me dry of my desire and ambition. Books harden people to the real world, he would argue. You don’t need an education, as long as I am supporting you, he would say. I had become a housewife, minding at all times my p’s and q’s. Covering my mouth when I coughed, excusing myself when I burped, attending to my specified duties, and ultimately dying inside. I became someone I never wanted to be.
“A human being is a part of a whole, called by us _universe_, a part limited in
time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest... a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.” - Einstein
Albert Einstein explains black holes as regions of space with an excessive amount of concentrated mass, so much so that any nearby object could never escape its gravitational pull.
Greg called to tell me I was going to die. You’re going to die, he said, they did. He was talking about the women before and after me. They had died. The first was of a broken heart and then a stroke. The second was from an accident. She had been drinking and had asked him to pick her up. He didn’t. He loved them. He had never loved me. Years later, one phone call sucked me back into his world and the void, the wanting, the black hole. Love me, please. Want me, please. But, he was lost to the black hole of pain and self-pity, depression. Just like Darren, he was drowning and wanting to take me with him. I found a wormhole.
“Deep in my body my green heartturns, and thinks of you. Deep in thepond, under the thick trapdoor of ice, the water moves,the carp hangs like a sun,
its scarlet heart visible in its side.”-Olds
A white hole is a reversal of the black. It is a hole into which nothing can fall. Theoretically, it is the wormhole that connects the two, serving as a tunnel in which travel between great distances is made considerably more convenient. Just as the implementation of a third party to a relationship can aid in the momentum at which things crumble. Einstein was well aware that the gravitational pull could not explain or define love, yet some part of him knew, to an extent, that they were connected. The Revelation:
I sat, once, on the tip of a limestone outcropping that jutted out, high above the deep colorful folds of a great fissure. There was a shaded crack, black, running deep through the green of the bottom layers. The shadows of clouds cloaked the earth in dark blue patterns. I watched a storm in the distance move closer, the lightning fierce, determined. My mind felt the grandness, the capacity of the universe, the possibility. I was small. It was Grand, indeed. In one moment, I could be gobbled up, in a great big hole.
I realized, then that pressed into that space that great big hole, the cavern, the abyss, was nothing but myself. I was and I am. The awe.
“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom this emotionis a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.” -Einstein
The End:
Death brought them to a resounding halt, yet not without expectation. In the elder years of two women, grandmothers, the end was delivered. Tenderness void, their last days were crude, raw, and ugly.
We called her Rose. She was of no relation. Five feet, eleven, withered, but still lanky despite her age. Long fingers and large feet, she was a sea of peach colored limbs, bone thin. When I knew her, she would sit, always in an orange chair, reading Reader’s Digest and watching Soaps. She thought I was her husband’s sister. I was her son’s stepdaughter. We loved to paint small ceramic-gnome figurines. Our paint was in tiny plastic vestibules attached much like the plastic rings keeping a six-pack of soda together. Always our talk was of her dead husband, of the after-life, and of her visitations from the otherside. I would catch her talking to it, to him, or to them. She knew when she was going to die. She told us all. She did. She left the known and drifted away, into somewhere; a void it is felt to us, here, still apart of the known, the side of birth and life.
My mother’s grandmother, we called her Georgene, lived in Alaska most of her life. Born on a reservation, she was a French Sioux, birthing three children before the age of twenty-one. Her skin was dark, her hair red; she was short and thick, with a passion for bickering and cooking. She lived to cause ruckus, and when I lived with her, I hated her, and it wasn’t until she developed dependency due to age that I learned to love her and all of her hardness. In her last moments, she screamed in denial. She didn’t want to go. She refused. Arthritis pained her joints, bloating her entire body. I visited her in the dank dark beige of a shared hospital room. Georgene was frightened. Don’t leave me, she begged, stay with me. I’ll haunt you, she said, if you don’t play the piano at the funeral. So you are dying? I asked. No, absolutely not, it’s not time yet, she said. But, she died anyways. I had believed that she wouldn’t. There was no resolve, a lack of acceptance. We mourned her ashes into the river.
Rose kept her body. She wanted a place in the earth for it. So next to the grave of her late- husband, Rose was buried. I watched as they lowered her. Stubborn roots poked through the sides of the red-brown dirt, scratching against the shined cedar of the casket. A crimson bouquet of roses, elaborate, almost ridiculous, was still atop. I don’t know if they ever removed it. It seemed as if they should. My stepfather dropped the first handful of dirt. We followed, dropping moist clumps of earth into the crease of petals. It was strange, her being put into that hole and covered with dirt. Her long thin arms crossed across her abdomen, limp, awaiting decay. Into the hole went the casket, topped with a swollen belly of dirt. In time, the brown mound turned green with grass, and eventually yellowed from draught.
Georgene’s body was burned to ashes. We took a tiny boat out into the Chesapeake and with rose petals, ash, and memory showered the waters. She showed up, clouded with ruckus, delivering a hailstorm and a broken boat to her family. We were helpless, stranded beneath her fury. We swam to shore. But, there in the sky, was a hole. Not into the earth had she dropped, but into the sky through fresh-water veins.
The hole is an ending, a break in life, perhaps, of something or for something else. The hole is the unknown for the before and after, the middle circumstance or indeterminable ground, a vacuous vacuum of time and space. In which do we resume, within or without? Is it coming or going? Are we traveling through it, always, in a systematic notion of presumption of what is and as it should be, or as we would like it to be? But it is a hole, and it may after all be then, void of meaning; unless, meaning is only what is prescribed, the individual’s associations. In art, the debate is often whether or not art should be left to the viewer’s discretion, or should art exist entirely within the artist’s intention. But, does it matter? In the end, in the vacuum of a whole of holes, does it truly matter? Is life fulfilling, or is it the before or the after? Why is it that “hole” is apart of the word “whole”. There may or may not be a grand master plan, but, indeed, there is a question.
“Coming home, an intersection,crossing of one and many,having all, having nothing-…this must be the edgeof being before the thought of itblurs it, can only try to recall it.”-Creeley
We live in it; we eat from it; we screw from it or in it; and we are born from it, and die to it. It is a form of transportation: psychologically, spiritually, emotionally, and physically. It is a transformation, transcendence: a motion, an action, an entity, a love, a loss, an answer, a void, a wanting. It is a geographic location, a connection between space and time, desire, infinity, closure.
The Beginning:
I was pacing the walls of a dim, curtained space. The walls were pale and gray, but white. The room was lined in closed cupboards without handles to open. There was a metal- framed bed with pink paper sheets, and cotton-slippered stirrups. I paced: back and forth, around and back. A paisley-print hospital gown flapped open. There was a chill. I held my lower back, gritting my teeth, hissing under my breath. Sit down, the nurses said. Calm down, do your breathing exercises. I didn’t know any. I paced for forty-five minutes, while my lower back contracted. They did not think I was in labor. Two freshly admitted medical students had examined me and declared I was only four centimeters dilated, when the previous day I had been dilated to eight. I knew she was coming. Give me drugs, now. But, it was too late. I was dilated to ten, plus two, cursing like a mad woman. She was fast, I split, my vaginal space eroding into blood and mucus and new flesh, to life.
From a hole emerged a fresh being. A clean slate of person in utter perfection, from nothing and from everything. So close to God, or what may be, I had thought of her. And into the void of living and circumstance, the unpredictable, the unavoidable, the earth of the black hole, she was planted, a tiny stalk of potential.
“…to plug up a hole means originally to make a sacrifice of my body in order that the plenitude of being may exist…” - Sartre
Jean Paul Sartre wrote that the hole in and of itself is an existentialist entity in being. He felt that the hole, presented, was an empty image of him, an excavation to be carefully molded about his flesh. Sartre felt that the emergence through a hole at birth was correlated with the human tendency to indulge orifice. On the most basic level, orifice indulgence is for one to put their finger in their mouth or ear or nostril, or to put food in one’s mouth. Sartre also compared women to that of a hole. He found them to be a gaping wound, with their power relying predominately on that they contain this empty space between their legs, a void expecting fulfillment. The male desire to complete the hole, he feels, is largely related to the idea of castration, as men lose power in their instinctive drive to feel whole, imbedded in the recesses of their minds from birth with their initial emergence. The Middle- Exchanges:
There was always that saying, about men, you know? About how they spend the first part of their lives trying to escape from it, and the rest of their lives trying to get back in. Assumably, they try both literally and figuratively. I know. I am a single mother. I tend to date men who have lost their mothers. It is an odd coincidence.
Darren wanted to keep me in a box, under lock and key, to encourage and maintain only as he desired. He mourned his mother’s death into my life. Charming his way into a world he did not belong, he was a rigid type, sharp to a point, never wavering in his morals or expectations. He was an immediate father for my young daughter, but always so strict and cold. He hurt to his bones. Eventually, though, his sincerity became disenchanting, as I learned that he had sucked me dry of my desire and ambition. Books harden people to the real world, he would argue. You don’t need an education, as long as I am supporting you, he would say. I had become a housewife, minding at all times my p’s and q’s. Covering my mouth when I coughed, excusing myself when I burped, attending to my specified duties, and ultimately dying inside. I became someone I never wanted to be.
“A human being is a part of a whole, called by us _universe_, a part limited in
time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest... a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.” - Einstein
Albert Einstein explains black holes as regions of space with an excessive amount of concentrated mass, so much so that any nearby object could never escape its gravitational pull.
Greg called to tell me I was going to die. You’re going to die, he said, they did. He was talking about the women before and after me. They had died. The first was of a broken heart and then a stroke. The second was from an accident. She had been drinking and had asked him to pick her up. He didn’t. He loved them. He had never loved me. Years later, one phone call sucked me back into his world and the void, the wanting, the black hole. Love me, please. Want me, please. But, he was lost to the black hole of pain and self-pity, depression. Just like Darren, he was drowning and wanting to take me with him. I found a wormhole.
“Deep in my body my green heartturns, and thinks of you. Deep in thepond, under the thick trapdoor of ice, the water moves,the carp hangs like a sun,
its scarlet heart visible in its side.”-Olds
A white hole is a reversal of the black. It is a hole into which nothing can fall. Theoretically, it is the wormhole that connects the two, serving as a tunnel in which travel between great distances is made considerably more convenient. Just as the implementation of a third party to a relationship can aid in the momentum at which things crumble. Einstein was well aware that the gravitational pull could not explain or define love, yet some part of him knew, to an extent, that they were connected. The Revelation:
I sat, once, on the tip of a limestone outcropping that jutted out, high above the deep colorful folds of a great fissure. There was a shaded crack, black, running deep through the green of the bottom layers. The shadows of clouds cloaked the earth in dark blue patterns. I watched a storm in the distance move closer, the lightning fierce, determined. My mind felt the grandness, the capacity of the universe, the possibility. I was small. It was Grand, indeed. In one moment, I could be gobbled up, in a great big hole.
I realized, then that pressed into that space that great big hole, the cavern, the abyss, was nothing but myself. I was and I am. The awe.
“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom this emotionis a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.” -Einstein
The End:
Death brought them to a resounding halt, yet not without expectation. In the elder years of two women, grandmothers, the end was delivered. Tenderness void, their last days were crude, raw, and ugly.
We called her Rose. She was of no relation. Five feet, eleven, withered, but still lanky despite her age. Long fingers and large feet, she was a sea of peach colored limbs, bone thin. When I knew her, she would sit, always in an orange chair, reading Reader’s Digest and watching Soaps. She thought I was her husband’s sister. I was her son’s stepdaughter. We loved to paint small ceramic-gnome figurines. Our paint was in tiny plastic vestibules attached much like the plastic rings keeping a six-pack of soda together. Always our talk was of her dead husband, of the after-life, and of her visitations from the otherside. I would catch her talking to it, to him, or to them. She knew when she was going to die. She told us all. She did. She left the known and drifted away, into somewhere; a void it is felt to us, here, still apart of the known, the side of birth and life.
My mother’s grandmother, we called her Georgene, lived in Alaska most of her life. Born on a reservation, she was a French Sioux, birthing three children before the age of twenty-one. Her skin was dark, her hair red; she was short and thick, with a passion for bickering and cooking. She lived to cause ruckus, and when I lived with her, I hated her, and it wasn’t until she developed dependency due to age that I learned to love her and all of her hardness. In her last moments, she screamed in denial. She didn’t want to go. She refused. Arthritis pained her joints, bloating her entire body. I visited her in the dank dark beige of a shared hospital room. Georgene was frightened. Don’t leave me, she begged, stay with me. I’ll haunt you, she said, if you don’t play the piano at the funeral. So you are dying? I asked. No, absolutely not, it’s not time yet, she said. But, she died anyways. I had believed that she wouldn’t. There was no resolve, a lack of acceptance. We mourned her ashes into the river.
Rose kept her body. She wanted a place in the earth for it. So next to the grave of her late- husband, Rose was buried. I watched as they lowered her. Stubborn roots poked through the sides of the red-brown dirt, scratching against the shined cedar of the casket. A crimson bouquet of roses, elaborate, almost ridiculous, was still atop. I don’t know if they ever removed it. It seemed as if they should. My stepfather dropped the first handful of dirt. We followed, dropping moist clumps of earth into the crease of petals. It was strange, her being put into that hole and covered with dirt. Her long thin arms crossed across her abdomen, limp, awaiting decay. Into the hole went the casket, topped with a swollen belly of dirt. In time, the brown mound turned green with grass, and eventually yellowed from draught.
Georgene’s body was burned to ashes. We took a tiny boat out into the Chesapeake and with rose petals, ash, and memory showered the waters. She showed up, clouded with ruckus, delivering a hailstorm and a broken boat to her family. We were helpless, stranded beneath her fury. We swam to shore. But, there in the sky, was a hole. Not into the earth had she dropped, but into the sky through fresh-water veins.
The hole is an ending, a break in life, perhaps, of something or for something else. The hole is the unknown for the before and after, the middle circumstance or indeterminable ground, a vacuous vacuum of time and space. In which do we resume, within or without? Is it coming or going? Are we traveling through it, always, in a systematic notion of presumption of what is and as it should be, or as we would like it to be? But it is a hole, and it may after all be then, void of meaning; unless, meaning is only what is prescribed, the individual’s associations. In art, the debate is often whether or not art should be left to the viewer’s discretion, or should art exist entirely within the artist’s intention. But, does it matter? In the end, in the vacuum of a whole of holes, does it truly matter? Is life fulfilling, or is it the before or the after? Why is it that “hole” is apart of the word “whole”. There may or may not be a grand master plan, but, indeed, there is a question.
“Coming home, an intersection,crossing of one and many,having all, having nothing-…this must be the edgeof being before the thought of itblurs it, can only try to recall it.”-Creeley
10/18/05
Ceramic Heaven
I love my new bathtub. It is a haven, a ceramic utopia, a bowl of rest, of steamy hot water rushing against my naked skin and stiffened muscles. I clean it often. I scour the yellow tile walls and the browned white of its bottom almost daily. In the morning, in the midst of my morning pee, I will dream of it, of the time, of when I am able to basque in its potential for glorious satisfaction.
In the warmth of a bubbly bath I am silent; I am aware; Iam naked, at rest, in the deep of thought and feeling; I am clean, whole, stark in the truth of the day.
Drama aside, I have a deep fondness for the bath, as I have lived for four years without one. I remember in the aftermath of birthing my daughter, I wanted nothing more than the relief of a hot bath or a massage. I had neither. I had a 4’x4’ shower, with minimal water pressure and no companion. I lived completely alone. My back burned from the heaviness of breasts like stone boulders, my legs ached, my arms numb from the minimal, but unusual weight of carrying about a small child; my vaginal area torn, cut and swollen. I craved a bath. I visited relatives with baths, and stayed the evenings, just for the exscuse.
I work in restaurants. I am always in bodily pain. I require consistant back rubs, and above all else, a tub. Recently, I moved into a larger apartment, with not one, but two baths. It was very important to me, that my new space, above all else, contain this entity.
Loves in my life, have in the past, found humor in my obsession with their tubs. In fact, I have often been wooed by use of the bathtub as a place of romantic inspiration with rose petals, lighted candles, sensual music and so forth. It works. It most likely, always will. I guess my fondness stems from my hours I spent as a child playing in the bath, sharking my way about the edges and fishing for naked barbies from the depths of the lego covered bottoms.
I will never take a bathtub for granted. It is a source of simplistic, but relative and required comfort and joy. And, I believe, that anyone who has one, should take the time and thought to enjoy theirs, because, perhaps, one day, you will no longer have one. Go forth, and bathe.
In the warmth of a bubbly bath I am silent; I am aware; Iam naked, at rest, in the deep of thought and feeling; I am clean, whole, stark in the truth of the day.
Drama aside, I have a deep fondness for the bath, as I have lived for four years without one. I remember in the aftermath of birthing my daughter, I wanted nothing more than the relief of a hot bath or a massage. I had neither. I had a 4’x4’ shower, with minimal water pressure and no companion. I lived completely alone. My back burned from the heaviness of breasts like stone boulders, my legs ached, my arms numb from the minimal, but unusual weight of carrying about a small child; my vaginal area torn, cut and swollen. I craved a bath. I visited relatives with baths, and stayed the evenings, just for the exscuse.
I work in restaurants. I am always in bodily pain. I require consistant back rubs, and above all else, a tub. Recently, I moved into a larger apartment, with not one, but two baths. It was very important to me, that my new space, above all else, contain this entity.
Loves in my life, have in the past, found humor in my obsession with their tubs. In fact, I have often been wooed by use of the bathtub as a place of romantic inspiration with rose petals, lighted candles, sensual music and so forth. It works. It most likely, always will. I guess my fondness stems from my hours I spent as a child playing in the bath, sharking my way about the edges and fishing for naked barbies from the depths of the lego covered bottoms.
I will never take a bathtub for granted. It is a source of simplistic, but relative and required comfort and joy. And, I believe, that anyone who has one, should take the time and thought to enjoy theirs, because, perhaps, one day, you will no longer have one. Go forth, and bathe.
10/17/05
Bag it (week 6)
From large kiddie-printed plastic, spill-proof duffles to a mini-bright red leather pit-purse, I have found one consistency: I carry junk. Old receipts, unopened bills, notes, gum wrappers, emptied old plastic baggies, and business cards stuff my bags to the brim, hiding anything of importance.
I once felt that the bigger the purse, the more potential I had of bringing with me everything I could and would possibly need. This is not true. The bigger the purse, the more junk I would acquire and carry. If I saw an unwanted grocery store add floating through a parking lot- I would snag it and stuff it, knowing my larger bag would allow for it. If I saw an excessive amount of litter at the playground, (an old Styrofoam cup, a plastic wrapped potato bun, mowed chew toy), I would bag it. If I found old cigarette butts floating on my basement apartment patio from an upstairs neighbor, I would bag them, and usually in the old plastic of another garbage item I had acquired. As a result, the larger bags became a problem. I understand that I had the opportunity to discard these items when presented with a trashcan. The problem was that I never did. I don’t know why. It’s embarrassing.
But amid the trash, I have some essentials: my wallet, my keys, a cell phone, a Swiss army knife, and a pen. I lose everything. I lock myself outside of my apartment at least once a week. And, I used to lock my keys inside my car regularly, until my brothers bought me a keypad for my door. I have lost my cell phone a ridiculous amount of times, not to mention left it on the roof of my car only to run over it. I have also lost sets of keys to the Grand Canyon, the Appalachians and a department store. I also enjoy leaving my purse, especially when it is full with a week’s worth of tips, in random locations. This week it was Q’doba.
Unfortunately, what I carry is also pertinent to the survival and comfort of my daughter. So, at all times, I must have an extra set of panties, pants, socks and shoes; a sippy-cup, baby-wipes, and hand sanitizer. These, being the most important items on my person, I usually never forget, or misplace.
I have always been disorganized. I use a one-section spiral notebook for up to six classes at times. I jam everything I ever receive from any professor in books and nooks and sometimes the very spiral notebook that is essential to my functionality. I lose papers, notes. Two years ago I started a planner. To this day I religiously keep up with what I need to get done, only I rarely ever look back, and usually resort to relying entirely on my memory. This can be a problem.
What I know of what I carry, or don’t, is that I am continuously scatter-brained, yet somehow consistantly conscious of my surroudings. I am often caught in contradiction, the butt of a joke when its about someone disorganized and spacy, or the provider of clean underpants to a freshly wetted child. I have it together, sometimes, but a lot of the time I don’t. I am in control, but there is much that I am not in control of. I have learned that frustration gets me nowhere, and that acceptance is key. I don’t always understand myself or why I do what I do, or why I have a tendency to make things ten times harder than they need to be. But, I do, and I learn, continuously.
I once felt that the bigger the purse, the more potential I had of bringing with me everything I could and would possibly need. This is not true. The bigger the purse, the more junk I would acquire and carry. If I saw an unwanted grocery store add floating through a parking lot- I would snag it and stuff it, knowing my larger bag would allow for it. If I saw an excessive amount of litter at the playground, (an old Styrofoam cup, a plastic wrapped potato bun, mowed chew toy), I would bag it. If I found old cigarette butts floating on my basement apartment patio from an upstairs neighbor, I would bag them, and usually in the old plastic of another garbage item I had acquired. As a result, the larger bags became a problem. I understand that I had the opportunity to discard these items when presented with a trashcan. The problem was that I never did. I don’t know why. It’s embarrassing.
But amid the trash, I have some essentials: my wallet, my keys, a cell phone, a Swiss army knife, and a pen. I lose everything. I lock myself outside of my apartment at least once a week. And, I used to lock my keys inside my car regularly, until my brothers bought me a keypad for my door. I have lost my cell phone a ridiculous amount of times, not to mention left it on the roof of my car only to run over it. I have also lost sets of keys to the Grand Canyon, the Appalachians and a department store. I also enjoy leaving my purse, especially when it is full with a week’s worth of tips, in random locations. This week it was Q’doba.
Unfortunately, what I carry is also pertinent to the survival and comfort of my daughter. So, at all times, I must have an extra set of panties, pants, socks and shoes; a sippy-cup, baby-wipes, and hand sanitizer. These, being the most important items on my person, I usually never forget, or misplace.
I have always been disorganized. I use a one-section spiral notebook for up to six classes at times. I jam everything I ever receive from any professor in books and nooks and sometimes the very spiral notebook that is essential to my functionality. I lose papers, notes. Two years ago I started a planner. To this day I religiously keep up with what I need to get done, only I rarely ever look back, and usually resort to relying entirely on my memory. This can be a problem.
What I know of what I carry, or don’t, is that I am continuously scatter-brained, yet somehow consistantly conscious of my surroudings. I am often caught in contradiction, the butt of a joke when its about someone disorganized and spacy, or the provider of clean underpants to a freshly wetted child. I have it together, sometimes, but a lot of the time I don’t. I am in control, but there is much that I am not in control of. I have learned that frustration gets me nowhere, and that acceptance is key. I don’t always understand myself or why I do what I do, or why I have a tendency to make things ten times harder than they need to be. But, I do, and I learn, continuously.
10/3/05
Lets Play Ball (Week 5)
I once was a criminal. That’s what they said. Cuffed, arms twisted, metal tight, cold, pressed, digging into my wrists.
Life was moving at a rate I couldn’t comprehend. I was good in my bones, I could feel it, I knew it, but raw in my skin. Morality? What a question. Criminals may be moral, and often more than not, they are. I was moral at the core; three crimes within four years; three different jail cells, jail mates, good cops, bad cops.
I’m a lady I’d think. Treat me like one. They never did. Seven escorts the last time. Who did they think I was? A mass murderer? They always blow it out of proportion. That’s what I told myself. The criminal justice system is faulted, it’s a fraud. I am not a criminal, I would tell myself. I would tell them. I would tell the system. Nobody believed me. I was nothing, a delinquent, a hassle.
Criminals feel sorry for themselves, that’s what they told me in rehab. Was I? Self pity, was that what it was all about? Fuck the system I thought. Age made me wiser to the law, the games. I played, skipped through the boundaries. I'd been hit hard, twice, it couldn't happen again; I thought. Morality? It was there in the recesses of my mind. Its cat and mouse. I was Robin Hood, Joan of Arc. Crimes validated by the system, not without cause or justification in the back of my mind.
It was the last time, the fluke, the near death, and a conversation that finally brought me to a halt. There was a good cop. He wrote me a letter. I would like to talk to you, he said. He was not my arresting officer, just a jolly old sideliner in the passenger seat of the car. What are you doing? He said. You are young and beautiful and intelligent, don’t you know that? He said. Why do you put yourself here? He said.
You put yourself here. I did. I did. I did. Ithought. I put myself here. I put myself here, and I am not a victim of the system. I am a criminal; a girl, still, but a criminal. Who was I? Where was I?
I had to work hard. I had to grow hard. I had to take responsibility for my actions. I had to claim choice. I had to love outside of myself. I had to exchange self-destruction and chaos for morality and social consciousness. It was life or death, and it took three strikes for me to finally get a home run.
Set my elbows straight, I asked.
No one answered.
No one answered.
They’re too tight, I said.
No one heard me. One cop looked, rolled his eyes. You should’ve thought of that, he said. I should of thought of that. That’s what they always said. I wasn’t a criminal, just a girl. They didn’t get it. I didn’t get it. I didn’t want to. I didn’t know.
No one heard me. One cop looked, rolled his eyes. You should’ve thought of that, he said. I should of thought of that. That’s what they always said. I wasn’t a criminal, just a girl. They didn’t get it. I didn’t get it. I didn’t want to. I didn’t know.
Life was moving at a rate I couldn’t comprehend. I was good in my bones, I could feel it, I knew it, but raw in my skin. Morality? What a question. Criminals may be moral, and often more than not, they are. I was moral at the core; three crimes within four years; three different jail cells, jail mates, good cops, bad cops.
I’m a lady I’d think. Treat me like one. They never did. Seven escorts the last time. Who did they think I was? A mass murderer? They always blow it out of proportion. That’s what I told myself. The criminal justice system is faulted, it’s a fraud. I am not a criminal, I would tell myself. I would tell them. I would tell the system. Nobody believed me. I was nothing, a delinquent, a hassle.
Can I get some respect? No.
Will anybody listen? No.
I couldn’t handle the lectures. At fifteen, a bad cop fucked with me, told me I was going to die. He was chewing tobacco with his mouth gaping, grinning through blackened teeth. My eyes were heavy, dry. He spit in a Folgers can inches from my foot. I despised him. I despised the law.
Will anybody listen? No.
I couldn’t handle the lectures. At fifteen, a bad cop fucked with me, told me I was going to die. He was chewing tobacco with his mouth gaping, grinning through blackened teeth. My eyes were heavy, dry. He spit in a Folgers can inches from my foot. I despised him. I despised the law.
Criminals feel sorry for themselves, that’s what they told me in rehab. Was I? Self pity, was that what it was all about? Fuck the system I thought. Age made me wiser to the law, the games. I played, skipped through the boundaries. I'd been hit hard, twice, it couldn't happen again; I thought. Morality? It was there in the recesses of my mind. Its cat and mouse. I was Robin Hood, Joan of Arc. Crimes validated by the system, not without cause or justification in the back of my mind.
It was the last time, the fluke, the near death, and a conversation that finally brought me to a halt. There was a good cop. He wrote me a letter. I would like to talk to you, he said. He was not my arresting officer, just a jolly old sideliner in the passenger seat of the car. What are you doing? He said. You are young and beautiful and intelligent, don’t you know that? He said. Why do you put yourself here? He said.
I didn’t put myself here, I said.
Yes, you did, he said. Never argue with a cop, I knew. He had the last words. They stuck. They marinated, stewed.You put yourself here. I did. I did. I did. Ithought. I put myself here. I put myself here, and I am not a victim of the system. I am a criminal; a girl, still, but a criminal. Who was I? Where was I?
I had to work hard. I had to grow hard. I had to take responsibility for my actions. I had to claim choice. I had to love outside of myself. I had to exchange self-destruction and chaos for morality and social consciousness. It was life or death, and it took three strikes for me to finally get a home run.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
