Power Outage

You are more than your blOUse
your delicate cuRves
so unlike those idealized pear shaped
breasts I always brewed for
burned over
and they don't even compare to yours.

I am more than my words
These LETTERS I tangle like eXpReSSioNS over my face
and write on your back with a finger
wet with white body lotion
spelling
"Once: Upon a time..."

Futural preposition.
NOT past tense narrative.
Time in a glass bottle.
SEE the DIFFerence when the bottle is Open
and the B u b B l e s
rise up.

What will happen
could.
What could happen
did not.

And new stories are more than old stories
because we Tell them in New ways.
In the Basement, near the building's Center oF Gravity,
next to the green generator
during a storm
an Old Story told with that kind of detail
comes to life!

Now I am 18. Now I am 20.
Now you are 21. Now we are older.
Now mIrrOrs devote thEmsElvEs
to past reflections.
Now our old stories mEAn Nothing.
They are more
because they are happening Now.

HEAR the boring music WAIL?
SEE the toilet seat left UP
and those bills for the manicurist left to panic on the counter?
I am more than irritated
and this is not what I bargained for.
It is more. It is better it is mine it is now.

Light a cAndlE
with a mAtch.
TRANSFER FLaMe to wick
and light fills room
with things that were not there.
Watch the Dark Room Come to Life
It's comforting,
when the power is out
to remind ourselves
of how this all began.
And tell all the old stories
Anew.

Radiant Apples and Infernal Cigarette

Her racing pulse pounding hot summerblood, the clunker sings down a dark highway in the middle of the night. The sky is black, the road is grey and the embankment is green, a forbidding jungle. Teeming with life, a radiant of bugs chart their courses through the charging highbeam as the road sluices through life amidst the darkness, radio blaring cheers and beats, a stolen tape from an underground concert long ago. Rock and Roll is about getting it wrong.

Mistakes aren't worth anything unless you learn from them.

Laying upside down on my bed I am reminded of mistakes in summers past. She packs her suitcase and I watch the ceiling of the world sweep the dust clouds away into the candy apple sun, left out all day and now melting into a caramelized sky.

When we were really young Nigel and I used to play a game called Greek Gods where we would take turns finding new ways to destroy each others worlds. "I'll blanket your tall grass with winter!"
"Loathesome demon, your snow cannot rest on a surface of Vulcan's fire. I command the sun to burn away that boulder where you stand. Flow lava!"

She wraps up my present in her sock, my world again slipping away now and suddenly I am reminded of 10 years before. The afternoon mom and dad had left and taken our sister with them. She and I were sitting in her room while she packed and I loitered idly, afraid to be left alone with Nigel for the weekend, and I came across my journal.

"I've heard this story," she says.
"About how we are all insignificant?"
"You told it to me when we first me."
"I did?"
"Yes."

Another mistake. I was high when we first met. Everything made sense to me then. I'll tell the story again anyway. But first the party:

The house to ourselves, that night, Nigel had called everyone he knew and I called a few friends too. The house was throbbing. Bill and Eddie built a fire around back and grilled hotdogs. Somebody kept the music going strong. More and more cars piled into the drive, the street, the field, encroaching on the neighbors'. Nameless faces most of them, but when she showed up Nigel and I took notice.

"Can I get you a drink?" Nigel asked. Rare, his courtesy and attentions. One knew he wanted something.
"Got any beer?" There was a keg inside.
"Follow me," he said, taking her by the arm. I doubt she even noticed I was there.

My best friend, she'd taken to seeing Nigel more and more. The greedy God intent on siezing the best offerings his underlings had to offer. She was my pretty friend and as soon as he noticed, he took her. The night grew dark and the party quavered with castaways and adolescents. Boys leaking in and out of the house with balls in their hands. Beating them around and laughing. The atmosphere was like a static charge, everything happening all at once and you find your own happy wavelength and try to ride through it as best you can.

"Hey man," she said. Nigel was conspicuously absent.
"He let go of you for a minute?" She laughed. That faraway in-love look in her eye, staring at the idea of Nigel in her hot pubescent mind.
"Oh your brother. Boy he sure is crazy. He's showing the guys how to play some song. Just thought I'd check and see how you were doing."

My chance.
"How about some solitude?" I say. To my surprise she takes my hand and we briskwalk back behind the house, past the apple trees and into the tall grass of the field. Idly now, the music dulls and is distant, and is gone. Lightning bugs spark and fly their aldis lamp languages and somewhere someone in the sky hits a switch and we are awash in a blue sea of stars.

"Where are your parents?" she asks, gripping my hand tightly and looking sublime. Her hair shining like moonlight. Her skin radiant and aglow. I should have told her right then and there.
"Gone." I say. "They only took our sister this time because last time they took just us boys."

The story. The same story I'd told my sister that afternoon. The same story I tell her now, the one packing to go with my present tucked away in a bundle. The story I told in that field filled with glitter and doom.

"We went to Zion. Nigel was intent on getting his Junior Ranger badge before I could and so he was running all around, collecting rock samples and pinecones and animal footprints to draw. Mom was buying trinkets and Dad was gone and I got stranded all alone. I was lost for a day out there. Those red sandstone cliffs towering above me on all sides and the green valley floor below, such a slim and delicate sliver of life, and then the sun went down and it was just me. Me all alone, sitting upright in the darkness, with those towers of rock piling up so huge and domineering, holding me in place as much out of fear as geography. And seeing the heavens open up high in the sky I had an epiphany. When they found me, hours later, my Dad will tell you all I kept repeating was 'we are all so insignificant. We are all so insignificant.'"

"Yeah. You told me that story when we first met."
"I don't remember."
"That figures," she zips up her bag and puts on her coat to go.

And I told the story then, on a summer night 10 years ago, to that other girl, my friend, just before Nigel lashed out at the calm, evaporating our oasis. She let go of my hand. Ran off with my brother, giggling at his promise of sweet nothings. I followed slowly, letting the scent of burning meat fill my nostrils. I could see them go back in the house, up to his room. Could see silhouettes in there, taking hits.

The night spun and I lost my control. The music rocked the house to a magnitude unheard of. Bill and Eddie started taking shots and burning oil. Some of the older guys started burning books, burning unattended shoes, burning their minds. The fire erupted in spurts and some trees caught fire. The lights in the house went out. Someone ran to get a hose. A massive effort launched and luckily only a few low branches were singed but they put them out before the fire spread and slowly it dawned on everyone that it was time to start winding down. I just sat and watched. I'd lost her. The light was still off in Nigel's room. There was no sign of either of them anywhere.

"I smell smoke," Bill said, and Eddie slapped him and laughed. They were taking turns finishing abandoned beers. "No, I mean smoke smoke, not our fire. Different smoke." Suddenly this observation became the overview of the scene. I could see a light up in Nigel's room. Flickering fumic red and toxic. We ran into the house. Up the stairs. Caught her topless on the bed, Nigel naked on top, the room enveloped in smoke and a corner filled with flames and the two of them wasted and oblivious.
Nigel screamed. "Get the fuck off me you cockblocker! Just cause you can't make a move yourself doesn't mean you have to ruin it for me too!" Bill and Eddie poured beer on the flames and stomped on a blanket that they threw to cover the bong on the carpet in the corner. Laughing until the passed out.

Somebody drove her home. The corner of Nigel's room was blackcharred. The whole house stunk of smoke, and when we woke to disarray in the morning, nothing was said. Nigel and I didn't speak again until Mom and Dad returned a few days later. Brother Gods silent, in the force of truce.

Everything is a self portrait.
Mistakes aren't worth anything unless you learn from them.

I pull myself tentatively upright on the end of the bed while she turns, finally to go. The sky through the window is cautious, hesitant to begin the checklist of night, and I think of all the things I can say as she slams the door behind me and is gone without a word.

And so I wait. I wait until I cry, and I cry until the sky is black and I see the stolen tape of rock, rolling promises in song of getting it wrong. Mistakes aren't worth anything.

Get in the old clunker and race down the dark highway into the forbiddenness of jungle. Her racing pulse pounding hot summerblood to the barren underground beats of long-ago time. The pavement is gray and the line down the middle is yellow and the road sluices through all this life amidst the darkness where somewhere out there someone is getting it right tonight. Maybe it'll be me. Maybe I'm not too late to find her.

I roll the window down. The wind rushes through my hair.

This is what I do, & not meeting in the middle

Tell me a story.
Commensurate with the falderal I've been feeding you all of late.
Keep your private parts mostly hidden.
And don't make it a love story.
That's for damn sure.

Gather ye rosebuds, while ye may

We could gorge ourselves on clever distractions,
since that's what I'm going to do one way or another.
I don't reform. It's better if I don't understand things.
But I mask it well, right?

Old Bull Lee had ADHD
And couldn't write shit compared to me
all this online Blogetry
pastichin' his way from Tangiers to the Sea
(the city beneath) where they pay you in tea
Save me the trouble,
I'll write it for free

Maybe God is homesick. He doesn't know where heaven is, buried in a million pieces, places he never wanted to go, hoping to find a way back.
Maybe that's why we find beauty in the small things. Just forgetting our past makes you sexy.
Makes my cheeks whet with curiosity. Speaking of, tongues. Lashing out towards a culmination, with the lay of home.  Some sort of promise, not a compromise of consumer electronics. I don't even have a TV anymore.  Let that be your ray of hope.

Tell me a story?
See what happens.

River glideth at his own sweet will:
Dear God! the very houses [...]sleep;
And all that mighty heart is lying still!

End it real cute.
But don't make it a love story.
That's for damn sure.
That's for damn sure.

Hotel Lobby

We agreed to meet in a hotel lobby where only I had been before. I arrived head first, heart second, early. Everyone was wearing drab disapointment, dragging grey baggage around the disinfectant-smelling corridors.

I stood on the moment and waited, feeling dizzy like a Florida lilac in the storm, knowing when the wind and rain passes within the day some old coot will have died from the shock of it all and I'll be picked and scattered in dour bereavement.

Pellucid. That was the word I was thinking of. That and a litany of "we met on a cloudy day in April" over and over again.

Trying my best to look like I'm Not There in that circumference of gelid sounds. She's late and the crystal chandeliers splay their light casts everywhichway, saying "nevermind". If my decisions were colors they would be green. A green that is in love with blue. Turquoise? What color is that?

If only dreams were our rights. If only desire bred power. I am powerless. Pellucid. April. Pellucid. Cloudy. Pellucid. April.

She's hardly ever here. I wake up sore from fights we have in my sleep. The pangs of longing, cluttered in sleepy girl dust from her last visit. We both love her. Only I love her now and then, present and past. She's in love with a version of herself who hasn't arrived yet. She's late.

The names of hurricanes, like mega-pop stars, are never mundane enough. They are what they are, lets not romanticize. Why not name them like streets? Mulholland. Oak. 45.

There's a lot you can see when there's nothing to do. That was when I ate a candy bar that was terrible and drank a coke that wasn't bad. I said a little prayer to Jesus Christ and imagined him as a bird with scorched wings, Dionysus on a feathery crucifx, falling to earth like a comet into the long grass. Kill me now, he thinks. I think.

Pieces of seconds. Strangers clad in let down. White noise. Waiting. Invisible. Pellucid-- Apri-- and there she is!

She gives me a look like I'm a sheep about to go to slaughter, and I brace, and kiss her tight-lipped pale face and spring up & go. Terrified.

We walked out of the lobby where only I had been before. She told me where we were going. August clouds perked up and shivvered. Her hands were electric and deadly in mine.

Strangers burn and embody smoke, prayers jettisoned and vanishing everywhichway. Every skinny body in the world rustled out of my perception like leaves on a fall day. My focus is a color that is fading. The blood all sank out of my head.

I thought I was ready for anything, but that just proves how very little I ever know.

Bursal Bruit

SliceOGringo: iF you Destroy something your left with something Beautiful.
DMsqdMn17: If you destroy, you're left with nothing
SliceOGringo: There is Beauty IN the Abyss

this from a conversation a few weeks ago.
Back before the lights dimmed
and the radiance of college-bound boys practiced their disquisitions and quarterly algorithms in the corner. 
Back before a symphony of sabotage eclipsed all else solid and I'm left
looking at things I can't see. 
Seeing things I can't touch,
little soaps in the hotel bathroom,
trees in the laurel park, 
murders out in Webster chronicled with painfully accrued detail next to
Dilbert and Doonesbury and
my breakfast Koran.

And indeed,
We will make that which is upon it
[into] a barren ground.
Surah al-Kahf

Drunk.
I am, again.  Because I don't have to work tomorrow.
Because she left like a reflex and I couldn't look at myself in the mirror
Unless everybody else could do the same
SuppleCinStringSextus: TO the Bar it IS!
DMsqdMn17: What is life, if not Reality TV?

On the TV, PBS Kids swims through my milky grapenuts.  A purple monster.  A sandblown montage of fish.  There are dolphins swimming in my brain and when the tuna nets of thoughts cast out and kill them they will make no sound.  No sound at all.

Drive. Again.
I have decided.
Numb on numberless steering roads.
Because you choose despair when all is echoed in shadows,
and the chosen veer
could disquiet the fragmented spirits of God in your ear
saying "Take the next left, right" now
take a sandwich.  Some green for later. 

Afterward, in the big room
Under the bats incising angles in their grand cathedral sky
I will smoke fumes
and flare diamond will be me.

No sound at all.
Back to the dark garden, the well springs
back to the sea
Seeing things I cannot touch
and moaning in solitude at the shimmered tapestry of vision
which is longing and emptiness and nothing.

Ulterior

To Start Over

Home. Again.
I am nothing if not starting over.
My rhythm is wonder and sorrow
and sometimes it bothers me that we have to hit rock bottom
Before we can quit and start swimming up
with class
starting tomorrow

DMsqdMn17: I'm more likely to have my words burnt than printed.
VTumor13all: THen BURN.
DMsqdMn17: Where?
VTumor13all: the'res smoke thers fire. whrver there is hunger, be there...
VTumor13all: wth austere thnks to God upon ur lips
VTumor13all: and no more fears or questions, but smiling
VTumor13all: So God can bent his head and kiss you
DMsqdMn17: You're nuts.
VTumor13all: iam to please