Morning Muse-ly

It is December, and the snow and the cold won’t come.

Outside in the morning, I walk the dog away from the parking lot behind our apartment building, half guiding her to the graveyard two blocks away where she likes to shit.

For some reason, walking into the morning air, again disappointingly dry and just not quite warm, elation sneaks up behind my ankles and cocks my stride confident as I tread the familiar concrete. There is nothing beautiful about this neighborhood. It’s the kind of place where corner stores and barber shops shoot up like cold sores, and fester with pairs of men in their vicinity having conversations so loudly and gesticulating so extravagantly one thinks they believe people are interested in what they have to say.

I pass a couple of such men, hoisting up their belts and readjusting their pot bellies over the buckles, windbreakers fluttering in the breeze. An abandoned lot behind the used car emporium is being worked on by a misdirected construction crew. Every day they appear to be doing something industrious and inconvenient to traffic, but there never seems to be anything built when the dust clears, just a few more mutilated dunkin donuts cups caught in the exposed scrap of the foundation.

I glance at my wild hair in the window of the dance studio. A few weeks ago, it froze stiff by the time I got this far, but, today, the water from my shower evaporates slowly leaving it to get snarled by the wind.

The cemetery is an oasis in this paved wasteland. The fallen leaves of autumn are thick and soft on the ground beyond the wrought iron gates. Many of the stones are dated before the nineteen hundreds, and each bears the ashen complexion of aged rock. A few are practically torn out of the earth and a couple like flat beside their foundations, and I wonder if anybody actually attempts to manage the appearance of the place. I doubt it. I never see another person here, and the latest date on a stone is sometime in the nineteen twenties, so I imagine it’s all but forgotten by everybody except me and my dog.

She gets about three yards inside the gate, and squats beside one of the upended stones. Most of the trees in the cemetery were hacked down at some point to keep the place tidy, but their stumps are all overgrown with lichen and vines now. There’s only one untouched tree, and it’s very tall and scraggly. Somewhere in the uppermost branches there’s a squawk and I peer up to see the silhouette of a massive crow against the muted sunlight and the gray sky. It sounds a little like it’s throwing up when it caws, but the picture: Crow. Tree. Cemetary. It’s all just a little too perfect, so I gaze back down at Cass, who is snuffling under a pile of leaves, her squatting business concluded.

A few days ago she found a half eaten hank of fried chicken someplace near here, and began proudly trotting it back toward the house. I must have been off in my head, dreaming, because I didn’t notice until we were crossing the street back toward the apartment, and it took the rest of the walk to get her to drop it.

It makes me wonder what kind of a life this graveyard leads after dark. I like to wonder if teenagers come here and dare each other to tell stories, kiss under the tree, scream when the crow screeches, and scamper off into the night. It’s not that kind of neighborhood though. If anybody comes, it’s probably teenage boys, or boys in their early twenties, who drink beer and eat fried chicken and then push over the sad tombstones who witness their mortality and fallibility as men. I hate these imaginary vandals, and I take a little comfort in knowing that the graveyard has the last laugh. Someday, it’s their own stone they’ll tackle to the earth.

Melenchronic Thrombosis of the Pocket

As this year draws ever nearer to the end, and the encroaching winter seems to pity the inhabitants of the east coast by holding off her true power for yet another day, I find I am locked in a constant epic battle between wild lush optimism and isolating despair.

There’s something about fall that calls for self examination, and winter for self extermination. Perhaps it is the hibernation mentality.

I can feel the light meter of the world slowly being wound lower. The blacks and whites and colors are all creeping with grey. The shadows and light are seeping into one another and it becomes difficult to differentiate.

Why is it I become so dolorous, so melancholic this time of year, though perhaps, I never really came out of it in 2008. I spent the entire year holding my breath underwater, petrified of the inevitable moment my lungs gave up and I took the long scorching suck of seawater held only for me.

Yesterday at a Wal-Mart in New York, when an employee began to unlock the doors to their store at four in the morning, the materialistic lemmings desire to hurl themselves to the conglomerate evil maw of the holiday season overwhelmed them, and the crowd broke the doors of the store down and trampled the employee to death.

TO DEATH.

Are we the first country in history to have a SHOPPING MARTYR?

A man who gave his life for the CRAZY CRAZY CRAZY HOLIDAY DEALS TODAY ONLY AT 4AM! How do you explain that to a family? How do you reassure a mother or a daughter or a wife or a husband that their beloved died because this country’s economic circumstances made this Black Friday a Black and Blue and Blood spattered one?

I have spent the last year of my life balanced on the scythe of abject poverty. I have racked up credit card debt for items like groceries and deworming my cat. I don’t recall the last time I bought a new piece of clothing. I eat so poorly I delighted in the array of vegetables my parents served at Thanksgiving, because I couldn’t remember the last time I ate a vegetable that wasn’t a pickle or a stewed tomato slice stolen at work and smashed to oblivion between two pieces of bread. I cannot regret more the quantity of time and energy I’ve wasted on the entire money bullshit problem. And you couldn’t pay me to go near a store on Black Friday.

Where are the priorities really?

I am so tired of being miserable because I can’t afford x or y. There is so much free and beautiful in the world, so much joy and passion and pleasure to be had merely in the company of friends. To relish my walk with Cass in the morning through the graveyard up the street from the apartment costs me nothing. An oasis of history, a perspective on mortality, a daily sobering stroll through the passages and markers of those who have fallen before me and cried their last tears over the finicky nature of life, while my dog defecates delicately under a copse of maple and birch.

This morning, while walking, my mind wandered to the cemetery somewhere in New York, where a man is being returned to the earth,

ashes to ashes,

dust to dust,

coins to coins,

in god we trust…

Fury.

What true ugliness, what true darkness, what real greasy film of grey creeping over the landscape is not winter, but cruelty flushing the pallor of a population of faces.

Self preservation, preparation for the “hard months ahead”. When they come.

When it is my day to breathe my last and give my earthly shell back to the mother from whence it came, I would rather die owing a million dollars to the faceless, evil companies of the world, if there could be a heart inside a million bodies I touched in some way.

mane of consciousness

October and its tar-clad lions drive a chariot of cornstalks and birch limbs with pumpkin wheels and tall wild torches burning eyes and streaked locks of mane through the night.
You stand aimless in a dark lane dark like an underwater cave. And suddenly in the blurry, fuzzy, all consuming blackness there glitters the vehicle and her minions -time drawn by her burning clocks.
These torches roaring toward you faster and faster, brighter and hotter and so huge the tinder of your lungs flares up like newspaper curling and frying with scream after scream composed of dust storms and dry heat and bleached bones whiter than the cotton filament of pain, the smitten heart of lightening, the unfaithful, blind eye of the candle.
And then, just as sudden as it came upon us, the chariot draws on.
The pressure, the heat, the fear of death bigger than any chasm in the tender, foolish earthen skin, leaves off, and the absence of it is almost more than a body can bear.

The lane is dark and silent, and relentlessly empty.

What comes after is a kindness of nature.
The pity of soft, warm rain to rinse upturned cheeks and wrecked, cracked eyes.
A hoarse sigh through peeling lips and the moment of desperate panic is passed for now. One returns completely to the present, to the body and its myriad levels of destruction.
A glass of water like a dream and a promise.

In the aftermath, there is preparation, and the nights grow so long they stain the days with their coal dust skies. The rain does not let up, and it becomes the solace of routine. One begins to carry an umbrella, forgets why the sky was welcome to crash down on one's head long ago. The solemn songs of the encroaching cold call from steeple to weathervane, garret to gable, and yet there is some forgiveness still. There is a little longer to stand in the veiled night and examine the moon.

Autumn-fall-thought-quake

As october works its way up from frothy turmoil to roiling boil i find myself standing on a street corner at a quarter to six in the morning waving to my younger sister as she sets off on her grand adventure across the country to L.A. with a forest green ford focus named 'the lesbian' packed to the gills with her clothes and junk and books and stuff.
As i wave, her little red tailights become smears in the morning darkness, and i climb the stairs to the apartment i will only live in for two more weeks with a heavy heart.
Many things are coming to an end this fall, and the earth tricks and trembles a bit with every moment reminding me now i have run out of excuses, and this is the time, this is the winter, that i have to begin living my life again. the opportunity, the affirmations, the whole fuse is there spitting and sparkling and trying to decide whether or not it's lit, and i stand above it, looking down wondering if i have the guts or the lungs to blow on it.
bob's niece was born five days ago, abigail olivia, a new baby entering a very unstable, unreliable world on perfect, untouched legs.
Friends wax and wane like the moon, rounding into focus and blasting light into unseen shadows and alternatively cowering and covering themselves and holing up for their own reinvention.
For the first time i am throwing words around, hurling them like reluctant baby birds into the air and screaming for them to open up before they hit the ground.
Walking about two days ago, i came across a wing torn from some poor aviator, the bone protruding from the feathers where the joint connected to the body, a small tendril of red sinew coiled on the pavement. Somewhere a cat smurks and licks its whiskers.
The familiar repetitive actions of the bakery are comforting because i know what results they will glean, and there is nothing else in life right now quite so dependable. i keep taking inventory, scraping together what i think i know about what to do and where to go and trying to figure out if the numbers all make sense, and perhaps it's not the point.
Maybe the point is to let of all the plans, like leaves in fall and let them scatter, skip and find their own places to lie down for winter.

Crazy Going Slowly Am I 6 5 4 3 2 1 fridge!

The fridge across from the workbench at the bakery has started emitting these high pitched sing song noises at completely random intervals. Sometimes it will be a half hour before I hear one, sometimes they go off every two minutes. They're not loud enough to be piercing, but they do get obnoxious after a while, or they would if they didn't change keys frequently.
The first day I thought I was going to get a migraine and die, but afterward, my brain started getting acclimated and decided somewhere in between alien craft siren and whale communication the fridge is definitely singing.
It seems to get noisier when there's music on.
Don't ask me why! I work alone a lot damn it!
I may in fact be going legitimately bananas.
Sara and I definitely sang back to it on friday night.
I don't see how you can do a job like mine and not give the large, weird machines you depend on human attributes.
The Oven: BRUCE.
He is big and beefy, kind of dumb. Get's angry fast and you have to work around whatever the hell he feels like doing. You can trick him into doing something for you, but you have to make him think it's for his own benefit.
The Mixer: Marge.
Dopey, crotchety, not nearly as old and decrepit as she pretends to be. She just wants you to do EVERYTHING for her. If you aren't looking though, she's really quite fast and efficient.
The Scale: Pepe.
Pepe is french. Pepe is annoying. Pepe does not ever say for sure what he's doing. You get very frustrated with Pepe and say fuck it, we're going to do this anyway.
The fridge doesn't have a name yet. It still freaks me out a little. Perhaps it will be Ping or something.
I wrote a short story last week. I am editing it today and throwing it at a contest tomorrow. Perhaps it will win. There's got to be some reason my mind does things like lend personification to kitchen appliances.
Wouldn't that be nice?

Fur-Fur-Furious up in here

While blabbing about anything and everything is my most forefront forte, I never truly recognize my own verbal cavalcades until I am at work.
During the daily baguette-a-thon is when this trait is at its finest. For some reason, around seven in the evening, when the night baker(s) have about an hour to wail on shaping the next day's number, all the usual topics of conversation are exhausted-i.e. weather, daily pre-work misadventures, culinary philosophy, rants on coworkers, spousal commentary, etc-and I find myself simply opening my mouth and letting streams of no consciousness whatsoever pool onto the kneading bench.
Tonight of course, I was finished yowling about how much my fucking back hurts, how the apartment I looked at today may as well have been the inside of a nuclear chimney for all its appeal, the masochistic ego dances of the lizards in my kitchen, the essence of the perfect caramel espresso milkshake, how difficult is it for a biped of even incomplete cerebral development to clean the fucking dishpit at the end of its shift, I stumbled upon my last reserve,
"Hey...Bob wants to be the green man for halloween this year, and he's totally buying faun pants!"
Ahem.
While my sister in "no pain no pain" stared blankly across the bench at me, I veered off toward the personal crises the faun pants had brought me to earlier in the day, "What the fuck am I supposed to be this year?"
Still no response.
A few beats, during which the folding of the couches around the maggot-shaped bread dough was audible enough to make me gulp, and then in a much tinier voice,
"Maybe a faerie...or a sprite of some kind..."

Sara guffawed.
"No," she shook her bandana, "any of the retail girls can be sprites, pixies or whatever, but I don't think that's something you could pull off."
"Eh?"
"Something darker, something bigger...a fury perhaps. One of the three...you know?"

A fury.

So I go home after I finish my bake. Bob and Scully pick me up in a tiny black rabbit with two surfboards bound to the roof. They reek of salt and sexwax and euphoria. I am charbroiled with jealousy.
Still...a lady can't be truly furious when she knows full well her sweetie's been busting six day work weeks for six in a row now, plus she has plans to go to boston on sunday and catch up with anybody she can. Er...does that mean a lady doesn't get even she gets sloppy?
A fury certainly doesn't.
After the tired, salty boy went to bed, I sat down and plied that most excellent search engine (starts with a g...) for a refresher on my Greek Mythology.
Goddesses of vengence, sisters of punishment, snake haired, blood sobbing, crow feathered justice mongrels with not only the taste but the birthright of blood after the Titans took down their Daddy.
The three: Tisiphone, Alecto and Megaera.
The original avengers.
But vengence is bad says good karma student Jess. We shake our fists at the nasty wasties and placate our darker impulses with the assurance that mister asshole will get his and mistress fucktard will be royally whomped a la universal energies.
Still...even with an entire week of Laurie Cabot's teachings about how even the slightest thought can have power, isn't it sometimes lovely to let your imagination go completely off the rails? Don't you sometimes just want to imagine the douche-bag who cut you in the whole foods line is going to get shat on by a goddamn albatross in the parking lot? Don't you want to believe, every time a dirtbag spooks you on your long, shadowy walk across the parking lot/alley way/street/park/etc that wild cobras will spring out of the sewer grates and lay into him like that japanese dude goes at nathan's hotdogs?
And can't you help wondering if that time you actually kifed the pen the waitress brought with the check because you keep forgetting to get them when you're out, and dammit if you never have anything to write with on you, and you wrote your grocery list out on a receipt with a broken crayon last week is really worth the migraine you have today, or the dog's pyrotechnically inclined sphinctor, the splinter under your frigging fingernail, the chunk missing from your engagement ring, the sleepless night thanks to some unidentifiable new pain in your anatomy?
I mean come on!
It's enough to invoke anyone's personal goddesses of "fuck you, world! i'm staying home today!"
I mean if nothing else, they lead an army of harpies, and who doesn't want a flying legion of ripshit old ladies with bird claws and superhuman justice glands at their back?

Well.
I do.

the first shiver

Once upon a time a season changed perceptibly from the hot passionate roller coaster of summer to the sober, pensive, emotionally raw fall. The people walking under the trees felt the leaves begin to die, though nothing let go yet. Nothing withered visibly. It was merely a change in the air, a death of such smallness, nobody actually registered what it was. Only they began stuffing sweatshirts and cardigans into the backseats of their cars next to balled up beach towels and sandy sticky grocery bags.
The ice cream truck circles the playground, a great white shark, and the music tinkles eerily, but the children cling to their mother's legs, and the toys in their hands tremble a little, but then they turn back to the game and the chalked out pavement, and the man behind the wheel knows his dominion is coming to an end.
It is this grand switchover that is my favorite time of year.
I love what power the wind begins to threaten.
It gets so strong and mischevious, pulling dogs down alleyways, birds like paper trash flapping and darting between branches and cars.
Couples stroll down the brick walkways, the heat no longer separating them with a layer of disgust, they let their bodies drift a little closer. She lets the breeze coil her hair around her and in his eyes. He lets the jacket whip around him, and thrill his arms with an idea of how much wings could weigh. They lean toward each other, wrap around like garments, button limb to limb and something in the air makes the other smell like promise and excitement and fear and plummeting and before the stomach can drop much further the kiss is already happening. Stunning. It's still out there. It's still making everyone crazy. It's just different. Falling in love in autumn is like nothing else in the world.
I miss maine at this time more than anything else.


Ah...such a good time to listen to the cure and daydream.
For now...i take it. The first shiver. And welcome it like the return of an old friend.

Bread Muse

Strange things happening as this summer begins to saunter more sedately down serious paths and treads with a step slightly wiser than may or june.
Beautiful...the way a moon in august is more like a pearl earring softly resting against the hollow of a smooth neck. Less sensual like the rotund bead of sweat moon from early july, not searing and dangerous like the red moons of october.
Running.
Running becoming part of me.
I like it. I like how strong it makes me feel, how capable. I like that I feel my body working for me, with me, and under me. My command and it falls like tree limbs, or roots i suppose, maybe not a tree at all but the wind in the tree. Nonsense. It's okay though. It's late, and my dreams are not a place I wish to return tonight.
The bakery.
I prop the door open during my late night shift. After Sara, the other night girl leaves, it's just me, the oven and the radio.
At ten, I take a breather. The last of the sour doughs is loaded. I have ten minutes before I should really finish mixing my starters and begin cleaning the place. The rocky soundtrack comes on the radio, and I take a hot, soft olive roll from the cooling rack, tear it into steaming halves and dip one in the reserved oil from this afternoon's garlic roasting pot. Sara left half a blood red tomato on the counter and I smash it between the hunks of warm bread, a clumsy pinch of salt, and I eat my dinner leaning against the open door watching clouds dart across the moon. My nails thick with paste, skin heavy under a mantle of sweat and oil and flour, clothes dusted white, legs aching, and this moment of solitude is perfect.
The first timer on the bread goes off.
I take a deep breath.
Jam the rest of the sandwich in my mouth, and on the way back to the oven I hear eye of the tiger begin. This is when my job feels like a fucking event. I jump up, grab the huge peel from the top of the oven, and crank open the top deck. The blast of heat whacks me in the face with the dry, slightly sour smell of the bread. Yeah bitches, it's plebian, it's a dirty job, it's hard and it makes me as energetic as a bowl of oatmeal when I get home, but at the end of the night, when I push the cooling racks out into the hallway and lock the door, I saw the genesis of something all the way through, and I can go home and sleep and battle the fucking mental chess pieces with a giant wooden peel.

Vampires too hate sand in their picnic lunches

I'm feeling bret easton ellis withdrawal symptoms.
I have the desperate need to consume cocktails in the afternoon. I never want to take my sunglasses off, even in the midst of afternoon downpours. My lust for new items is beginning to consume me. My social commitments, starting in about a week's time, will exhaust me, and I simply have no host of vapid, soulless trend mongrels to lap up my uber savvy whinge-fests.
With all that being said, it's been a couple of years, BEE, time to dump another mind-bending, culture schlock, pain tome on the slavering masses.
Solitude...
like my daily multivitamin, is beginning to give me a vague sense of nausea, and I'm afraid I'm forgetting what either one is good for anymore.
I feel so removed from all things as they happen. Perhaps this is the preferred state of the author. I should, by all rights and purposes be writing my flour addled brain out. It's not as if I have an abundance of cognitive challenges in my current line of work. In fact, I am at the point where i no longer feel present in the bakery for most of my time there. I measure out the recipes, assess whether my employers are suffering any breakdowns and, provided the air is mostly clear, my conscious mind climbs out of my skull and goes walkabout. In the rare instances it does stick around it gets so bored, I find myself telling long wandering stories (not that I don't do that anyway) but I've begun tossing in full blown lies just to keep myself entertained.
I know how this one ends, I think petulantly, blah blah blah, and he frog walked out of the gymnasium on tiptoe...I might as well toss in a blood spattered pair of sneakers by the locker room, or some missing electrical tape-oh what the hell-"so that's when his crotch hemorrhaged and we had to use a back pack to keep back the fountain of blood nevermind Mr. Brault battling the vultures with an improvised jockstrap slingshot..."
I suppose I'm doing my brain absolutely no good coming home after work and watching Weeds online until I'm too tired to keep my eyes open anymore. Meh.
In other news, Bob and I are watching Roman Polanski's 1967 film The Fearless Vampire Killers. It's freaking hilarious. I think we have to find it for owning sometime. How our collection managed to survive this long without it is beyond me. It is a bit unnerving to see Sharon Tate in all her redheaded, 60's glamour, but Polanski himself is actually foil to the Professor Helsingish Vampire hunter in the movie, and he's just so bumbling and adorable and hilarious you can't help being sucked in (oh dear god I didn't see the pun until it was in writing, forgive me).

Life consists of gueurilla pastry gifting...doorknobs beware lest ye bear such strange fruits as scones, croissants and oatmeal cinnamon raisin rolls. I gave my downstairs neighbor a loaf of garlic sourdough, and she told me to swing by the edgewater for a margarita. I guess this means she's not a vampire.
Also running in the morning down by the willows I enjoy the views of Salem's fattest; the yacht club, SUV driving, oversized sunglass camouflaged trash rubbing shoulders with hispanic barbecue parties at ten in the morning with lots of little girls with incredibly long dark hair in many variations of ponytail screeching and running while fast food trash blows by like tumbleweeds amongst the geriatric ocean gazers literally out to pasture while their scrub-clad caretakers smoke and curse by the arcade. I run beside bitchy girls on cell phones slumping off to the filthy beach, beer bellied fathers giggling as their yoohoo bellied sons taunt the seagulls, every variety of soccer mom running faster than me, and the somehow still pure and perfect tiny children toting sand buckets, eating popsicles, digging at their ill-fitting bathing suits and crying while their parents rub gallons of sunscreen into their flesh.
This is summer in massachusetts.

Sometimes you have to be alone with a dog and the moon

Can't sleep for some reason.
I'm tired, and there's a cuddly sweet lump of boy in bed, but I can hear the wonderful, soothing sound of summer rain drumming on the asphalt outside, and every so often a wink of lightening reminds me that no matter how tightly my thighs grip the mechanical bull, I am so not the one pulling the lever from "graze" to "murderlation".
After everybody was gone from work tonight, and I was all by myself peeling north shore sourdough out of the oven, I started singing out loud.
It's been a long time since I listened to my own voice. I realized I've forgotten most of the songs I used to know by heart. It's sad, sort of like, looking down at the ground and thinking about not tripping over tree roots while you walk, then looking up again and realizing you missed the best parts of the walk, and that parakeet in the tree back there, because you were worrying about the little stuff.
Yeah...I don't know what happened to the vast wasteland of depeche mode lyrics I had at my disposal once upon a time. They all rinsed away down the drain of "shit that I need to worry about because I'm obsessive about being a grown up and getting my life together".
I'm really bad about that lately.
I don't want to go see anybody, and I have the biggest trouble making plans when a friend volunteers to see me. I don't feel as though I have anything remotely interesting to contribute. At work, I listen to my stories. I become irritated as my voice seeks to fill all the hollows and cracks of silence. There is such a blanket of weird when nobody's talking in that place. I just go on and on about nothing. Already I've talked too much about my childhood, growing up weirdness, all that bullshit you don't share with people unless there's a solidly decent bottle of wine nearby, and your hair is literally let down, and with one hand you massage your scalp and gesticulate wildly, while the other bobs the glass of shiraz up and down and all around.
Oh my god.
I have no idea when I last had wine...let alone any decent stuff.
I am coming to the realization that the quality of my life is beyond poverty stricken and romantic. I've careened desperately into boring and paralyzed...at least that's my worst fear.
Three in the morning, not a soul to talk to. No idea what I'd say if I had that soul clutched in my gritty, dough-crusted little fists.
I miss people.
I miss the girl I used to be.
I think I brushed by her a couple of nights ago while the moon was full.
Out on the common, walking Cass at midnight. Threads of black cloud wove the darkness unsteadily enough so that I couldn't read the book I was hauling around with me. Suddenly I became aware of soft strains of violin music coming from somewhere nearby. I followed the sound, until i reached one of the many big old houses split into apartments that make up my neighborhood. Standing across the street from it, I could see the windows of the top floor on the right hand side, lit up and the curtains drawn. The glass itself must have been opened, because I could clearly hear somebody practicing on their instrument.
I stood under the unreliable streetlamp in plain view of the musician, vaguely impressed by the proximity of the funeral home and the shadowy-ness of the entire experience. More than anything else though, I wanted to see the person making the music, and he never appeared. It was difficult to believe that I was anything but alone and enjoying a particularly imaginative auditory hallucination.
I don't think I would mind I were.
At any rate. Solitary violin stalking and the compliment bob gave me on Monday morning are the two things keeping me alive this week.

The Lonelies

Terror has been seeping slowly into my breathing patterns for a while now, this very discombobulating sensation that I am losing losing losing losing pieces and people and places and memories and giant hunks of my own self which drop off as I lumber along barely noticing the itchy spot where I was once complete.
Hi,
my name is terror. I am the bandage you wrap around yourself to keep it all together, and guess what? Now you suffocate.
I sometimes really feel like I no longer breathe. I just anaerobically survive in the placating madness of routine. Somehow, if I just make it through this next hour, I am one hour closer to life being better.
Life being butter?
Forgive the madness...it comes much quicker, much sleeker in the night, in the wee hours, in the lonelies.

Perhaps that's where I should have begun in the first place.

Lonely Mountain

On De Lonely De Mountain,
is a quagmire fountain
a precipice field
and a garden of fleas

Where the quagmire's stucking
the fleas do their sucking
the field unmakes plucking
of the mountains vast seas

So we built it a mansion
a manor of speaking
a house with a voice
and a window that sees

without blinking our fingers
the house made of tinders
is aflame and then cinders
if you only say please

yet no travelers come striding
nor sailers their riding
and the ventured unwinding
their breadcrumb trapeze

so a girl sits unwriting
a song for inviting
and watches all the fleas blighting
under a famine of breeze

come to me someday
and play on the wordplay
i still think of you fondly
and our exchange of disease



goodnight.

In the literal sense

My free-will astrology horoscope says I should ask a lot of questions this week.
Question #1:
Why did I let Bob talk me into deleting all the music off my laptop, in an effort to prolong its life? Erasure...erasure I miss you!
Question #2:
How could I have overlooked the cure for so long? I've been losing my mind for two years now, and I just dabbled in the auditory wonder that is robert smith. As of the concert last monday, I've simply given up any sense of decency, and tumbled headlong into a mad orgy of cure albums. Lucky for me, bob has been decadently dimples deep in cure albums since forever, so I have plenty of choices. I delve into album after album, era after era, tube after tube of blisteringly red lipstick, and I just can't get enough. Currently, the album Wish, is completing my life.
Question #3:
Ever have one of those moments, a perfect one, and have an odd thought strike you? Okay, that was vague...
I was sitting on a bench in the common today, drinking a gigantic stein of peach iced tea, reading Neverwhere, and enjoying the breeze and the sunshine. A little ways off a group of children were throwing themselves into soccer practice, a man in a black business suit was dragged by his tethered dog through the foreground and high school kids lounged around the gazebo. Sitting there alone, it suddenly popped into my head that someday, forty years from now, I will probably be doing the exact same thing. I will be musing about lost opportunities, grieving losses, thumbing through memories, tripping over people I haven't thought about in years, and then yanked back to the present moment by something very small, a tickle of hair on my ear, a distant giggle, the smell of a flower, sudden strong and beautiful.
What will I think then? I wonder, in that identical perfect moment, forty years from now. How lonely will that bench be really?
Question #4 Speaking of lonely, How long will it be before Bob and I have a day to spend together again?
Almost two weeks.
NOT IMPRESSED.
Our schedules are flagrantly incongruent, and so i must content myself with brief tickle fights in the morning, slow descents into sleep in the crook of his arm while movies natter through the night, notes on phones, dishes left behind, a fucked up razer in the bathtub...I'm living with the ghost of my fiancee half the time it seems. Or maybe I'm just haunting him.

That's it for now...plenty of questions left I'm sure...

Still here

Okay, sure.
You write a bunch of journal entries about how you hate everything, and it all starts clawing up out of the tar like a big hairy tarantula with thousands after thousands of legs, and it begins putting sticky blackness in your nose and mouth and eyes, and soon you just spew it all out, back and forth, but it keeps coming like the tide filling holes in the sand.
Then something happens.
Something small and insignificant makes you start thinking about the good things, how they used to feel, how the breath in your lungs was once sweet and light and beautiful, and then you start writing about how maybe you can't see it and feel it but you can at least remember what a mouth empty of poison felt like, a mouth that shaped words and sang music and screamed with laughter.
It begins to write itself, and you can press your eyelids up a little further than you could the day before, and suddenly slits of light begin appearing between the blackness, and you start shaping things out of those bars of light, you start pestering yourself to push the skin further apart and let your eyeballs breathe a little deeper, and then one day the universe hurls a chance at you, and maybe you'd given up and thought this was it and nothing would ever come for you, no rope would ever tumble from the clouds, but it does, and you grab it, and it's terrifying, and the rope burns your hands and runs hard and scratches your legs, and you cling to it anyway, and then suddenly spiders are peeling off you like layers of your own filthy skin, and fuck it's blinding, the pain of so much light is unbearable, what is the smell of something coming back to life, and nothing pressing hard against your eyes makes you frightened to pry them apart from your cheeks, but the lashes come unstuck, and breathing gets thinner, easier, more liquid, and you open everything all at once, eyes lips lungs nostrils fingers legs ears and everything is more beautiful than you ever remembered or imagined or dreamed, and you wonder how you ever lived in that half existence, how you ever managed to hang on, but this is real now, this is life, this is hope, and it's all still here, and so are you.
So are you.

The Sow and the Lord

Alas my darling pig!
Bob and I recently began netflixxing (I heart making up verbs) seasons of the television series Lost. I was somewhat proud of the fact that I have managed to duck pretty much every tv trend of the last ten years by extremely limited exposure to the great evil box, but dammit, a few series have sunk my battleship and rendered me slavering for the next installment. Previous offenders include Queer as Folk and Six Feet Under.
Bob, that dastardly boy, was tipped off by some toolbox coworker at Church (otherwise known as guitar center, where he works, but we call it church, and you pronounce it like pimp lucius: CH-UH-TCH) to the addictive qualities of the stupid show, and here we are, balls deep in season two.
Now, along with a desperate desire to know just how does miss evangeline lilly keep her armpits baby bottom smooth on this nairless, razorless paradise, comes the ever constant idea of what I would do if I were in a similar situation, stranded, marooned, lost, completely cut off from everybody I'd ever known.
Before I could really think about this, I decided to do a little research, and I sat down and read Lord of the Flies, another one of those supposed "classics" that I just never got around to, and lo and behold if there isn't one hell of a sow killing that goes on.

What do I make of this?
The Lord of the Flies is decapitated head of a sow the boys slaughter in an overtly sexual display of violence (lots of mounting, stabbing downward, butterflies flap nearby, and the boys anally rape the creature with a spear before slitting her throat).
Post-gutting, the leader of the hunters, apropriately named jack, offers the head of the sow on a spike as a sacrifice to the much feared "beast" of the jungle. Later, a boy named Simon, lost in that neck of the woods, awakes from a stupor face to face with the leering skull, and conducts the theme-solidifying conversation with it. "I am part of you" says the lord of the flies, as the buzzing (symbol of hell) grows louder, and slowly unconsciousness approaches the boy in the form of the head's black hole of a mouth.

The desecration of the loveliness of sow is perhaps a delicate subject for me, being that I'd so recently named it the masthead to my Jess-gets-back-to-fucking-writing-and-making-her-life-mean-something project, but just the same I feel like the two must do battle inside everybody's head at some point.

The desire for perfection in oneself versus the unavoidable evil imbedded in humankind.
I know I've sought the unattainable before, and I thought settling on being the best damn sow i could be was pretty transcendental, but what if my evil is inherent?
What if seeking the perfect contentment of self is what makes one the perfect victim, and only after we are violated, murdered and desecrated, offered to the fucking invisible fiends of the jungle, do we reach the point of true enlightenment?
All the artists who die...their lives so lamented, their work so much more valuable due to the brief time of its creation. Yeats, Plath, Lennon...were they pigs who reached their artistic apexes and had to be cut down in order to become the ethereal gods of art they are today?
From the time I was ten until I was seventeen, I was certain that in order for any of my writing to be worth a damn, I had to die before my eighteenth birthday. All the greatness, all the poetic justice in the world wasn't worth the deification of a torrid fling at creation and then an abrupt tragic end, and I know now it was of course a foolish and ridiculous desire/notion, but perhaps a kernel of truth was there.
In order for a person, say a writer, to truthfully encapsulate the human experience mustn't he experience both sides of the extreme; the sublime perfection and the death and slander of oneself?
Should it be at the hands of his greatest fans that he be destroyed? Is that what makes it all the more poignant? In showing the writer the end of his humanity are his executioners actually revealing the path to his finest art?

Leave me alone on a train too long, and this is where we end up.
Weigh in people.
I'd love to imagine somebody, somewhere actually read this.

All that glitters is sometimes snail slime

I've been trundling about my daily business under the mantle of some serious misery for the last five months. It's amazing to write that number and realize it really has been so long since I last felt unencumbered.
I keep trying to put my finger on precisely what it is that makes me so desperate, and all the usual suspects line up next to the height chart, and some are defiant (money), some are ashamed (eating), some are virtuous (writing), and some refuse to turn around and be identified.
So I make another cup of coffee, crack the spine on another book and log in another train ride.

I am adding another instrument with which I can notch the wall.

A writer without writing is like a snail without a shell. Sure, it's heavy as fuck, and you curse the damn thing as you slime a trail up the garden walk, but damn it, it's yours, it found you, you made it, and it loves you as you love it, and you'd die if someone tore it from your back.
So I've been starting journal entries and abandoning them, beginning stories and deleting them, writing blog entries for an hour and then when the internet craps out and deletes them, just walking away from the computer and making another cup of coffee, sitting down and watching Lost.

Bob practically yelled at me last night to finish the story I started almost four years ago. I kept fighting him because I haven't written on it in so long, I didn't think I had it left. I made a thousand excuses, and then I opened the document and stared at it for an hour.
Tonight I started writing again, and maybe it's garbage, but it's my garbage, and I'm lugging it around until it's done.

Tres Angeles

On tuesday nights I close the cafe.
Usually I am accomplice to the amazingly youthful, impressively moustachioed Weston, whom 4 out of 5 randomly polled folks agree looks like he sprung from the frame of a 1920's silent film. Tonight was no different.
Usually, I get the job done just in time to miss the 9:30 train from north station and spend an hour and ten minutes hanging around with all the other vagrants, vagabonds and vigilantes waiting for the next one.
Tonight there was a guy who sat on the bench across from me and wept for a while.
Three little girls, dressed like different flavors of bubblegum and speaking spanish really really fast crowded onto the bench beside me and tittered and squealed for a minute or so before one leaned forward and asked the man why he was crying.
He told this long story about how a year ago today his girlfriend overdosed on drugs and died, taking with her his unborn twins. He talked about how he was trying to get home to vermont and he had thirty two of the fifty one dollars needed for a greyhound ticket. He talked about his mom and how he used to be a boxer and how he never cries and he has too many bags and he talked and talked and talked.
One of the girls began crying too.
Another lent him her cell phone to call his mother.
The third brought him a soda from dunkin donuts and handed it and twenty dollars to him.
The girls blessed him and told him god had a plan, and then went right back to teasing each other and giggling.
He hugged them.

I am still not sure if he was telling the truth. Sometimes, there's a lilt in the voice of a liar...a willingness to elaborate too easily...a gushiness to the story or the repetition of a few facts over and over. All these, and a nasty feeling in my stomach told me that the three sweet girls were being had.
But what can I do?
They deserve to keep the kindness within them which allowed for such generosity.
It's more than anybody else in that train station would have done.

I came home, and walking through the silent streets of salem, the snow thickly muffled the air, the trees, the buildings, and lay white and unspoiled in the streets.
It let me have a moment of calm in my wretched brain, and it made me glad, that, even though overnight it will be shoveled and plowed and sullied and salted and soiled and irreversibly filthied, for now, in this moment, it is pure, and it made me better.
Like those girls.

St.Francis and Sow

When I was in one of the "famous" poet Wes McNair's poetry workshops, he demanded each of his students commit a number of poems to memory. A long, self gratifying diatribe punctuated by references to feuds, publications and personal accomplishments he attributed solely to his prowess of mastering other master's masterworks was his explanation.
So I leafed through a few books and was struck, for various reasons, by Galway Kinnell's St Francis and the Sow.
I wrote it down a dozen times, each time covering up more of the text so I had to retain the lines. I scrawled it in blue marker on a few giant sheets of paper and pasted them on the door of my closet in my tiny single on the first floor of Stone Hall. At night before I went to sleep, I aligned my body with the last line of the poem:
"the long, perfect loveliness of sow." and read it over and over.
At night, my broken blind allowed the tender glow of the street lamp to lull me into sleep, and in the morning it tore open my dreams with the gyrating, blinding, crackling rays of the rising sun.
Winking furiously after the painfully brief amount of sleep I survived on back then, the first line of text I read every day was Kinnell's praise of the pig.
I never managed to get the whole thing memorized, and muddled through the oration in front of McNair and my classmates without much trouble, knowing, the professor really didn't give a shit about our regurgitation skills. I think he was more concerned with how many, if any, of the students would pick one of his works.
After my cauterized graduation, and skipping the country to find my fortune, however, the last line of Kinnell's poem continued to pop into my head at odd moments of mental quiet.
Especially first thing in the morning.
The other day, while in the shower, pondering nothing in particular, I glanced down at my side, to check if my tattoo had fallen off. This is routine. When I was little my sisters and I compared notes in the bathtub as to whether certain birthmarks, scars or other abrasions were like scabs, and if, after prolonged wear, they just shriveled up and dropped off. After I got my tattoo, I simply totted it into the roster of things to check on, while rinsing soap off.
Anyway, after verifying that yes, my waist does in fact still read disappear here the line from that long ago forgotten poem popped into my head, and I have not been able to shake it ever since.

I am beginning this blog in an attempt to regain my previous literary productivity.
Once upon a time, I wrote all day every day, and itched when I wasn't putting pen to page.
It's been almost a year since I got anything down other than a scritched out journal entry on the fly.
I am aligning myself again with the last line of this poem, putting my faith into its resurfacing in my consciousness as an omen that there is something asleep inside me which needs awakening. A hand needs to touch the forehead of my muse and remind what it is that makes her beautiful.

Here's the inspiration. I hope it helps you as well, solitary reader.

St. Francis and the Sow

The bud
stands for all things,
even those things that don't flower,
for everything flowers, from within, of
self blessing;
though sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on its brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch
it is lovely
until it flowers from within, of self blessing;
as St Francis
put his hand on the creased forehead
of the sow, and told her in words and in touch
blessings of earth on the sow, and the sow
began remembering, all down her thick length,
from the earthen snout all the way
through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl
of
the tail,
from the hard spininess spiked out from the spine
down through the great broken heart
to the blue milken dreaminess spurting and
shuddering
from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths
sucking
and blowing beneath them:
the long, perfect loveliness of sow.

Galway Kinnell