Words in her/my mouth

She was angry at the world on her mother’s behalf. That is to say, I was, if you believe in all this post-modern tooth fairy stuff about the speaker and the subject being the same person and the use of third person just being an artificial way of creating distance from an already fragmented self. But I is such an inelegant and self-absorbed way to start a story, a narrative, or whatever it is called these days, whatever it is that I am writing, just a way of drawing attention to oneself and saying look at me, look at me, and all of my deep thoughts that everyone else has had at one time or another, except that we don’t believe in the universal any more and so I is a way not of saying that but of saying look at me, I’m a writer who wants credit for stringing together all of these words.

And so we, which is to say I, will start again. You can read she when I say I or I if I should forget and lapse into third person because I might need the critical difference distance.

I am bitter on my mother’s behalf and I become more so the longer she is gone. Every relative who ever slighted her without apology, every prophecy she ever made that went fulfilled about someone or other pulling away from her, leaving her for dead.

Every airplane trip evokes every tragedy. Flight numbers given out over the years: Lockerbie 103, American Airlines flights 77, 93 and 11 on a September day, United Airlines 175, Malaysian flight MH17 . . and so on. Do they retire flight numbers like old sports players? With every landing I become the pope all over again.

Every family member now leaves us before their time has come, going to other families, leaving me/her for holidays only, relegated to the adults table, a child of my mother, forgotten except for Christmas cards and empty birthday wishes, my mother calling me, daily telepathy my thoughts I can’t distinguish from hers, my wishes from her voice, so different from mine and yet I put words in her shadow mouth ghost mind. Now she is all smiles and days off from school to take me shopping. Her spectre laughs with me, has no voice to yell with, to scream at me any more. I do not cannot remember her voice raised in my direction, only the sweetness of her dance. I do remember to place in her exquisite corpse mouth drinking the new communion wine.

Landings are easy, welcomed. Better to drop from the sky on purpose, to be headed that way anyway, to be headed anyway that way, to have meant to have done that, than to fall unexpectedly.

I wonder if it is hard now for my father when I come for a visit. My friends say I/she looks exactly like my mother, aunts say that I laugh like her. I hear her living words come out of my mouth. Am I just a painful reminder of all the good and the bad he holds in his memory?

Every flight evoke/invokes/provokes the memory of every other flight. A late night through the dark equals the redeye flight to New York, to LaGuardia, when I/she was five. An attempted landing evokes the time I was flying to Minneapolis and as the landing gear came down, the plane shot back up in the air at a 90 degree angle, near-miss unreported but felt, nonetheless. A slight turbulence is the dreadful flight home from Las Vegas in storms, the sounds of the engines roaring like the set of a disaster movie, wherein I/she had become a nun frantically saying hail marys with her/my eyes closed through the whole flight.

Autobiography is the new big thing. Everything is autobiography. Creative nonfiction, which admits that biography is incomplete and that fiction is really all there is, even when it seems autobiographical. All is creative. Some imagining of who our fragmented selves want to project, to have you believe that we are. We don’t know anyone else. How can we/you know themselves?

My mother once said I still don’t know what I want to do with my life (when I grow up) and now it’s almost over. I can hear the words in my ears, and yet don’t remember now that I/she is writing it down, exactly how it was said. Is that (auto)biography?

I have no alter-ego. This is it. The auto-ego, the author-ego, although I am not much of an author. I start things and then meander around and get bored, never finishing them. No one lives in a book. Books are not “life only better.” They are too disjointed and unruly and the ending is unclear and I never seem to figure out the plot.

What is the thread of our lives so that we know that we are ourselves? Through operations and changed and removed organs, through people forgotten and dead and cut off from us, lives we may never return to, yet something holds us in, keeps everything from falling out in a big mess on the floor in front of us. But what was the moral of the story? How do you know that you/I are still you?

So say it again. I have no alter ego. I/she was never curious about what it was like to be a man, to move through this world as a man with man parts. (Even though he will probably never read this, I feel my father/dad is looking over my shoulder might someday read this. You never know. And now that my mother is not here, I have reverted to my 13 year-old self, embarrassed about certain words.)

I/she was never curious about what it was like to be anyone else but me/her in different situations, some better, some worse, to imagine myself/herself in situations that I/she saw on the news, but to be a third-person she. I realize suddenly that when I talk about my mom, she is a her and not a me and so when I say she/I or me/her, you/the reader might think that I am conflating she and I, rather than just cleverly messing with pronouns, losing my authorial voice, or that I am trying to that part of my authorial voice is hers . Autobiography and creative (non) fiction are suddenly very complicated in this web of fractured identities in which she and I are separate and I start writing about her but as usual end up talking about me.

Besides, she never cared to write, was never compelled to, as the words moved her hand almost involuntarily, illegibly, and so this is me, with my authorial voice.

But to tell you memories her story, I have to is necessarily to tell my memories of her my story/her story but not our story. As one of the letters of the Apostle Paul, that great postmodernist, says, “we know in part and we prophesy in part.” So how can I/she say anything authoritatively with about my mother? To tell you stories about my mother. But everyone tells stories about their mothers. The internet is full of them. Aren’t you/the reader (as) sick of them (as I am). This is the day of telling our stories, not of listening to other people’s stories. Who has time for (this) that (nonsense)?

My mother was ahead of her time, had dozens, maybe hundreds, of pictures of cats and dogs, even before the internet. I have been accused of writing poems with no people in them. (Silly thought process: are there cats because there are no people. Does the absence of people = cats?)

But I am not really all that curious, for a writer, about what it is to be another person. I/she doesn’t even have herself figured out, have the world/word figured out, am/is more interest in the large authorial voice, in the fragmented universal, in the big picture, than she is in pronouns, even though she keeps saying I all the time. How does a culture function without I's, she wonders.

I should tell a story now, perhaps about the way I collect airsickness bags and bus transfers, thinking I will use them, together or separately, in a performance piece or in a work of art, rather than actually having them contribute to my presence on an episode of Hoarders.

Or maybe I should tell you about my mother, before all of this descends into me gazing at her navel, being a narcissus. Perhaps about the time she (my mother, not she/I) drove 25 miles to make sure that the skating rink would be safe for her/her epileptic daughter to go to a birthday party, because that is one of the primary memories of her now that she is gone. I can only remember her in small kindnesses, like pulling me out of school occasionally to go shopping. The skating rink had disco balls and she had to make sure there were no strobe lights. This part is (auto)biography. No creative details were used in this story, just facts from my/her/our lives. Still, as an omniscient author, I cannot actually tell you everything that was in her mind. As her daughter, one who carries her words in my mouth at times, but not every word exact, can only approximate the range of her motivations, which touch me/her more than ever.

The weight of objects from my father’s house on my soul. This was once my mother’s ____________. I lust for every object I need (or not) that was once hers. Threadbare towels, plates I ate from as a child. I want anything she once had. My/her memories are mine/hers.

I am artless. All of this post-modernism leaves me with a headache self-conscious. I just come out and say things. That girl couldn’t find a metaphor with a (map)(compass) anymore. She has lost her way. What right does she have to poetry? She has no authority.

As we land, we become giants among doll houses and toy cars, until like Alice, we consume the cake that makes us smaller, makes other objects larger, and we are back in the real world.

Losing Words

Losing Words


I hate losing things. You would think I'd be used to it after all these years, but it never gets easier. I try to be philosophical, to be anarchic and anti-materialistic and shrug it off. I focus on how little it would cost to replace the lost object, if it even needs to be replaced at all. or I treat it like a dying acquaintance, grateful for the short time we've had together. Misplaced, stolen, permanent loan, left in a hotel dresser or on a restaurant table--makes no difference. Keys, jackets, cassette tapes, purses, words . . .

I hate losing words most of all. It's not a problem of losing objects full of words. I keep my notebooks and scribbles closer to me than my wallet. Money can be earned or borrowed. Every dollar bill is interchangeable-- crisp or wrinkled, ripped, laundered in a jeans pocket, with a love note or government conspiracy theory scribbled on the front. I'm no robber baron, industrialist, or fledgling shopkeeper, and one dollar is the same as another, not suitable for framing.

But a lost word is a tragedy. It's a tender moment with a lover that you'll never have again the same way. You'll never get the exact color and combination of touches and whispers. Losing words is worse than having to climb through the back bedroom window without your keys. And most words are lost to sheer callousness, not innocent forgetfulness. They are lost because I am unwilling to stop in my tracks, pull out my notebook and scribble in the middle of the sidewalk. I don't want to be inconvenienced.

I watch parents in Burger King with their five year-olds. The child wanders around, exploring the concept of orange plastic & vinyl furniture, which clearly does not exist at home. She looks out the window, slowly pulling individual french fries out of their small paper sacks, discussing the color of birds, while mom or dad admonish her to "hurry up. We've got to get to the mall."

I never wanted to be that kind of parent. But I am. I won't give my words the time to make mistakes, to take in everything around them. Instead, I drag them down the street without looking behind me to notice that their feet are barely touching the ground. When they run away, I run around looking for them, call the authorities, worry promiscuously, and promise each thought, each infant word, that I will eat more slowly, contemplate orange plastic seats and small brown birds and give them time to nourish themselves. Next time.

Break up cliches

A little something I dashed off today:



These are the Days of the Last Straw, when the weight of the world, our destinies, rest upon every single repetition of every fight over the years Every bottle, every wrapper left open, every toilet seat left up, one wrong move could set the whole thing off, trigger the end of the world. An exaggeration, but definitely the end of worlds that we know, the end of a way of life, sending each of us off in a different direction, paths potentially parallel for a while, only to wildly diverge, to wildly wander, to deviate at some future unnamed point in time.

Is there a mechanism to have this break and not repeat every break that every one else has ever had through time? Is it possible to have a break that is not the same as every other break that I have had? Is it possible to do it all originally, without the use of a thesaurus to try to avoid the break up clichés? Can one stay with someone long enough to discover the originality in breakups, or are we doomed to repeat them, performatively, performing the exact same phrases that came before us, as in a ritual, as in an un-marriage.

And so in our grief, even then, we are modern, worried about how to have an original thought, an original feeling. Perhaps this is what gets us through the process, distracts us from what matters or makes us see that in our clichés, this is what happens to everyone and it isn’t as tragic as we had originally thought.

I felt briefly sad this morning, set aside my anger as I imagined you afraid. Remembered when you called every minute, we couldn’t get enough of each other. It’s sad not to love you anymore.

You said I said you did you said you said you would you didn’t i did not i never you said.

I wish I knew how to leave without pronouncements.

When I think of you I want to go to New York
Paris
Chicago
somewhere large and exotic and far away

You do not listen and you do not speak
I cannot know you nor become known

When I’m lonely I got to public places to call you
(empty house)
To be angry with you is to be mad at the world.

I dreamed of a widow with five beds.
I dreamed of a woman with 5 beds.
I dreamed of a woman with two heads.
(spinster)
I dreamed of a widow with five

In love with the light brown boys

I wait for fate to take me away from him. The though of giving him up hurts too much. I lack
time
distance
the will

to walk away. I don’t want to walk away. I can’t make it better and I can’t walk away. I will say something that I cannot take back.

It’s not like a gunshot or a disease. Always we try to pinpoint “the thing” that hurts us the most, but unlike physical death, it’s a lot of different causes, indications.

After a fight, the need to connect with someone else, the desperate need to prove that someone can still love you. That you are still worthy., The fear of losing others, of losing everyone. I want to break up with the whole world at once.

She wandered the streets wondering if she had more crying to do.

She went to the movies every day for nine days. Permission to cry without having to know why, without summoning logic and analyzing feelings and understanding and explaining herself.

To lose what sustains you is to lose everything.

She sat alone, seeing a strong man walk by who might be menacing, who might look safe but prove otherwise, lurching toward her. Sometimes she wondered if she would resist the rape. The murder. She could look at a man and feel his thumbs at her voice box, his big fingers straddling her throat and in her wondering, closed her eyes to surrender like a drowning, flailing her arms involuntarily but sinking into the earth accepting her body as a grave being dug a coffin being built, to surrender and be quiet.

We’re all afraid that our detractors are right about us. We want to be worthy of our eulogies but we fear it will be our enemies critics who will have the last word instead.


I need to go where there is no music.

Maybe we need love because we need god. We see the divinity in other people and desire communion, transmission.

All the great mystics were epileptic. Is god a disease? Or are we pre-wired, hotwired with the commission?


Love is radioactive. It dies in half-lives and never fully extinguishes.

Forgetting

When a building breaks open, a weighty air rushes out, settles like soot on the living bodies around it, perhaps small bits left behind of every other spirit that walked entered passed through traversed, bits of each one of us undusted fingerprints left behind, suddenly shaken from the surface.

Downtown silent downward faces. Quick glances away from eye contact, the silent bus ride getting there. When the bustle of the farmer's market at noon gets quiet you can hear the helicopters in the dances one short city mile away. All the cliches rush out -- heavy hert, the brick on the chest. My insides are full of cement limestone seeming to harden and weigh down my steps. I feel my legs move disconnected from my torso in some kind of cast.

No one mentions the people who lived under the bridge. They were not supposed to exist, so their disappearance is just another wish fulfillment self-fulfilling prophecy. You were never here (anyway). I pray too that you never existed in that moment that you (re) appear now Houdini of the under/overpass, uncensused neighbors.

Street preacher shouting "thou shalts" adds to my headache, piercing through several blocks of sound barrier. At least say something consoling I shout to him in a footstep, in a breath(er). At least put your arms around someone, move away some stones, show yourself (to be) a miracle not a menacing voice another layer of soot settling in an aftermath.

To forget even a moment seems a sin.

How long is the right amount of time for forgetting?

Ecstasism

What do people want to be?

I wonder as a I look at them walk down the street in their clothes, women mannish preppy frumpy. What are they putting on? What does it make them?

Me, I want to be quiet, still. But I still want to be heard. Want to shut down the to-do lists and shoulds and tv shows and news and bombings and mother’s voice, lover’s voice. I want to be heard from the silence without speaking or even having to think a single word. To radiate meaning.

That I may seek not so much to be understood as to understand, to be loved as to love, to be consoled as to console.

Words and moments linger, an afterburn, a sunspot. Desire & regret; self-satisfaction & replay. It’s never really that we want to live forever or remain in a single moment of former glory, but for every moment forward to be like our best, for every minute to be worthy of a replay, so splendid and full of affirmation that it pushes us forward and forward until looking back, remembering, remains an act reserved for our eulogizers.

I’m getting overstimulated again, when it’s quiet that I said I wanted, isn’t it?

You’ll have to excuse me. I’m prone to ecstasy. Ecstacism. Outbursts. Exuberance. Protuberance. Tubers. Goobers. Gompers. (Samuel. Union leader.) I get giddy.

The bus is so jarring I can’t read my own writing. Where are the socialists now when we need public works. Who will step forward with their uncashed taxed refunds and say this pothole is mine! Stand back while I fill it in!

An old woman with a shopping cart.

A young woman, vibrant on the outside, secretly afraid of everything. Afraid of the phone. Afraid of men. Afraid of ridicule.

A bodacious middle aged woman. Young face. Varicose veins. Learning self-possession. Unlearning fear.

So many things to become. So many clothes to put on.

As I write this under white puffy clouds, fathers in Iraq are stocking up on nerve gas antidotes.

Such things will never touch me unless I dwell on it. Remind myself. I need to be reminded.

I don’t want to put on camouflage and a long face. Everywhere it should be sunny and even dark clouds in the distance should mean only rain and not fear.

Annunciation.

Glad tidings.

Does every story need a point?

A plot? A moral? A narrative arc? What is the thread of our lives so that we know that we are ourselves? Through operations and changed and removed organs, through people forgotten and dead and cut off from us, lives we may never return to, yet something holds us in, keeps everything from falling out in a big mess on the floor in front of us. But what was the moral of the story?

I ramble. I rage. I wonder. I cry. And so I should be still. And radiate. So you can understand me.

Lunge. Lurch.

Perch. Porch. Scorch. Scrounge. Scourge.

Scourge.

Scour. Scowl. Scourge.

With thorns.

Make yourself quiet. So you don’t feel it. Make yourself quiet so your body forgets you. So you forget to feel.

Annunciation.

Announce. Pronounce. Denounce. Renounce. Renown. Redoubt.

All of these things that come spilling out of my head when I’m trying to figure out what to be. When I’m trying to radiate

meaning.

Ruts & ruts & ruts & synapes & moats and potholes & veins & interstates & things that travel the same path forever. Only the river can change its course. I can(not) be silent. Can(not) quiet the cacophonies symphonies tympanies that accompany me. I am not what I am trying to be.

What do people want to be?

Life, Only Better

This was something I found in a journal that I had written a few years ago and found recently. This will be my last post for a while. I would love to know what you think.



Life, Only Better
(Tentative title for now)

Sometimes I need to just look out the window and think.

Sometimes I need to write something down and not develop it with examples, anecdotes, lists in 3s, with a thesis and a conclusion.

The thing about writers is that they can’t just have a thought. Everything has to become something. Thought is pressure to write. Not writing is guilt. Blasphemy. Squandered. What if the words (The Word) never comes back? What if in the course of remembering and recording you lose the beautiful phrase? Does the composer lose the melody sitting at the piano thye way I drop words at the keyboard? Is it not enough to have one thought? one beautiful moment? Must every note lead to a symphony, an opus? Each word the voice of a single angel raised to a cacophony?

“The problem with being a genius is that you spend a lot of time sitting around doing nothing.” --Gertrude Stein

A year ago I was looking for you.

I don’t want to write a whole book about you. My life is not a book. Too disjointed and unruly and the ending is unclear and I never seem to figure out the plot.

My mind is not a book.

No one lives in a book. Books are not “life only better”. Only anal retentives think that.

I want to write and live movie trailers, with all the good stuff pulled into split-second cutaways, glimpses of the beautiful, explosions, and a great soundtrack.

And here you are.

I was wandering the streets in the snow wondering your name.

Every day I wait for you to leave.

I wanted you to make me feel better. To love you . . . was going to make me better.

Curving back on itself . . . what is the term? Concave? Elliptical? In the story it always curves back on itself, ties everything together even when it looked like nothing fit.

Novels imply there’s a grand design to life, a plan, a plot, a logic, an author.

A reason.

I am more random than that.

Switching from story to living (life) changes the words the cadence the way you live them the experience of your palate. Do you write to live on your mind or do you write to say things outloud?

Do you want to be read or to be heard? Do you write to say everything at once, or do you write to focus?

I thought of you as a reader.

The cafe is an oasis from life. Here is the desert island you are stranded on with only 3 possessions, only the items in your purse . . . a desert island with music and tv and sofas and lattes. But only a bit of yourself.

People resent artists for wanting what they themselves are not allowed to have either.

I envy the mad addicts, so lost in themselves that they have no room for the details of daily life, have faith that their muse will provide and someone will look out for them. I with no siblings, no dowry, no spouse, must fend for myself, straddling, required to feed myself, keep a roof over my own head in a world that is increasingly harsh, that gives no quarter to those who are different, those who desire anything more than the creature comforts craved by those who resent me. My wants are not so different--a roof over my head, money for going out, a doctor when I am sick, the occasional trip to see friends or family, to be be inspired by a new city. But the audacity of expecting such things in return for my mere art, my innermost, without sanction for my labor, a CEO to sign my check, an incorporation to keep the books . . .

Nothing in my home is fixed until it affects someone else.

When the war comes I will be free of responsibility, when the creditor/landlord/collector finally has other concerns.

Is there an understanding that never fades? Even Dresden was rebuilt. The shadows of Nagasaki are monuments now. Art. Memory. Museum. All knowledge becomes memory eventually.

How will I become a stranger for 40 days?

On Tuesdays the Somalian women go to English class. They get on the bus bringing with them the smell of Sandalwood.

On Tuesday I get on the bus with my hair wild, disoriented after a night of poetry and war reports.

You make me want to write
you make me want to write
you down.

I could never write on the bus. Not because of motion sickness, but because I cannot stop looking out the window, watching moments pass and time pass in marvels. Once I was [there] and now I am [here], minutes across a city, hours across a state/country/continent.

It’s sad when you can’t [don’t][don’t want to] love someone anymore. When you feel sorry to remember. Now that the daydream is over, this is not your story anymore. It’s just something I’ve written
remembered
lived

and I watch for you at the window mechanically, without desire
Miss you with annoyance

One year later, like always, I sit in the cafe watching for you outside the window. I have your phone number committed to memory [permission to speak] have seen your house walked your dog hugged your lover. I try to remember your mysteries. What it was to want you.

Anticipation.

Familiar.
Like always I watch for you.
I forget what it was to be strange
etranger
(e)strange(d)

What is the shelf-life of grief?
Anniversaries give us permission.

You are a conversation with myself.

I wrote you a letter by committee.

Is God a narcissist? to require us to love him?

Maybe god’s infinity comes from us. If god is love, and that love is unrequited, does god become finite, diminish? in existentialism, maybe god is not really dead, just burning himself up like the sun. Love is finite only when nothing comes back to you in return. It makes you stingy.

Unrequited love’s a bore--Jack Kerouac

At one I time I wanted to give you things. Take you places. Show you.

At one time.

Which is to say, not anymore.

Memoir of my mother

I am teaching a class on writing, specifically on memoir writing, through community ed at Minneapolis Public Schools this summer and so this is something that I started writing in my head as I was thinking about the class. It doesn't have a title yet. I suck at titles. And who knows if I will go anywhere with it. But this is the beginning, a kind of tribute.


This is what I remember. My mother died 2 ½ years ago now, although embarrassingly, I can’t remember the exact date. It was somewhere between her birthday, October 16th, and Thanksgiving. I believe it was around the 13th. It was on a Sunday morning about 9:30 Central Standard Time. Despite my imprecision, I can say that for the first two years at least, time for me, stopped, which is probably why the date is so imprecise. My measurement of time stopped. I didn’t realize it, but the person against whom I measured my sense of time was now gone and so time literally stopped. For the next two years, I couldn’t remember what year it was and so consequently, how old I was. I was perpetually 45 years old, which was the age I was when she died. I even had a hard time remembering how old she was when she died.

She said to me once that she still didn’t know what she wanted to do with her life and that now it was nearly over. This was a few years before she died, before she even got sick.

In response to my requests “Mom, can we go to Disneyworld, New York, California, Fill in the Blank next summer? She would always reply “I don’t know, I could be dead by then.” And she was always around. So I didn’t really take those threats seriously.

I told her she should write her memoirs, her history, in the time she had left. But she said she probably wouldn’t.

This is what I remember of my mother, scattered: and collected from various memories that she told me about her childhood, mixed with memories of my own. Of course now that she’s gone, thankfully, I don’t remember any of the bad parts. Those are intellectual memories now, not emotional ones. I have forgiven her for all of the “bad” memories and they have no hold on me anymore. I have only funny memories, good memories of her now, as saccharine as that may sound. I don’t mean it to. It’s just the way it is.

Sequestered in Dreaming (short story/prose poem)

Sequestered in Dreaming


I.

Do you understand how it is to be unsuited to this world? By temperament, not by skill. To see that you are competent, with skills and talents and fingers that fly over typewriter keys and keypads and a brain that quickly calculates percentages or pushes right buttons on the calculator or designs pretty charts and pictures and brochures and they don’t see you hold your head in your hands when no one is around. There is no excuse for an unfit temperament. Can’t cope. Unstable. There are labels, but no excuse.

II.

Beige. Everything is beige. The walls are beige the elevator beige the carpet beige the bathroom. I am beige. I am not a person “of color”. Beige is a color invented by people with no color to make themselves feel colorful. I sit on the toilet, pants and underwear all the way up as if I am at my desk and shake, try to keep my muscles from bursting out of my beige skin and I talk myself back down.

At 3:00 every day it becomes interminably hot in the subatomic basement. Lower level three. I take off my shirt in the beige room within a beige room and lean against the toilet with a silver pipe for my spine. It is cold enough to hurt even though - because - my flesh is so warm. I put my head in my hands and fight the urge to get up and go back to my desk.

III.

Perhaps I am the Japanese soldier of myth. Stranded in the jungle, no one delivered the news that the war was over. That we lost. That my way of life is over. Think of the old people who talk about the old ways and try to hold us back from progress, from we think, liberation. But I sit in beige walls with my hands over my eyes, trying to remember how I ended up here. What arranged marriage brought me to this place and what keeps me from running away and not looking back. What dowry ties me to this chair, to this keyboard. Concubine. Spoils of victory. I march down the hallway hands over my head in surrender, carrying boxes of files and notebooks and pens. Tools that should be mine, taken away from me, used for purposes not my own.

IV.

I should get another job. A different job. A better job with more money and “benefits” but the only benefits are the ones that allow you to get up and leave when you want to and ride buses when you want to and be on the way to where you need to be going. I am unwilling in spirit. The flesh knows better. The flesh knows what puts a roof over it, what feeds and clothes it. Flesh follows an automatic path to door to bus to keyed entry into the building. To elevator to cubicle and there it sits.

V.

It’s difficult to be an American and behave yourself. Children in the candy store. Everything’s here and when I feel disgusted I also feel pity. Unsupervised we are unable to say no to toys and gadgets and games. It’s all too easy. We use up most of the world’s resources in a heartbeat without even thinking. Everything so easily gotten, so easily tossed away. Even the most careful intent is thwarted. There is little land to go back to, little memory in our flesh of how to live simply. Everything is disposable. Convenient. Complicated. It’s hard to say no.

VI.

From the back of the bus a brown face speaks loudly to everyone and maybe to the person sitting beside him. “You don’t respect me. I know it. Your country. You treat me like a dog. Your country don’t respect me.”

Grandmothers cover young ears beside them and the blonde women in the front exchange a knowing glance. No one dares to look behind them to see the face of the speaker. Goodbye and good riddance the old woman calls after him as she replaces him in his seat.

I think “Amen, Brother” and sneer at the old woman as we both pull our bags closer to ourselves and hunker further into our seats.

VII.

Las Vegas is a city built by a gangster in the middle of a desert, not so very far from a huge hole in the ground. By day it is plain and squat and by air almost all of the houses have red roofs. It is the hugest toy store in the world. It tries to convince you you are everywhere at once. Paris. New York. Las Vegas. Heaven. By day it is ugly and beige the color of sand and at night it is all the stars in every universe condensed into multicolored neon and its powers are irresistible by mortal men. Lions live in the casinos and their trainers stroke them into sleep amid an amazing din not found in nature. Ambulance sirens are everywhere and hoards of people parade up and down the strip all night following the sound of bells at Pavlovian feeding intervals. Las Vegas is a golem.

VIII.

The story of the golem. The Frankenstein. Monster created out of wish, so beautiful in our dreams. Where Zeus dreams of Athena and she is whole and fierce, our mortal dreams turn to monsters. But the golem is built on words and with words can be defeated, talked out of existence. And with the vanity of a writer unfit for this world I wonder if our golems can’t be written out of existence if the Word truly has the power to save anymore. I want to be the antidote.

IX.

The spirit is unwilling. The body drags me down the hallways. I am tired. Sleepy. I cry through lunch and there is nothing inside me. I hold my head in my hands as long as possible, hope that no one notices me, thinks I am sick and turns away from me. I want to turn beige and blend in. I want to disappear and go unnoticed about my own life. Unfit as I am.

Airport Tales - A semi-incoherent reverie

In Atlanta, everybody calls you baby.


Flight numbers freak me out. They’re how they identify your plane for years afterward. I always hear Tom Brokaw’s voice in my head saying my flight number.


My airplane has no row 13.


The hardest thing is re-creating the rhythms of life. The rim shots embedded in family dinner at the dinner table.


(Why) (Do) All airline pilots talk like game show hosts?

I was the passenger singled out for the baggage search. My crimes are multiple:
• Buying my ticket online
• Buying a one-way ticket
• Having a connecting flight

One of my friends has sent me his poetry DVD—An Invitation to the Terrorists Ball. I hold my breath as the Cuban woman in her blue suit looks through my bag.

If we started to crash, would there be time to pull the cushion from below the seat and put on my life jacket? How long does it take to plummet 30,000 feet, anyway? Someone behind me tries to push her way past me getting off the plane. Imagine if we were in a nosedive? No. Don’t imagine it.


Alice Notley – don’t arrive anywhere in your sleep. Don’t mix up night and day. Soul and detective.


Put away all negative thoughts or notes containing therein during takeoff and landing as your negative vibes may interfere with the plane’s equipment.


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