Wednesday, December 28, 2011

references

This is one of those days where there is an endless stream of work.  It starts right when there is no more bed around me, and I'm brushing and scrubbing things and wishing I could remember what I just dreamed about.  It doesn't come back.  There were sea monsters and dogs and someone was trying to tell me something from far away and it doesn't come back.  And then there is an endless stream of work.  And it doesn't even occur to me until the very end, when I'm rubbing my cheek and remembering how it felt like there was a bee there, and that wouldn't make any sense, not with a day that ended like this one where there was nothing to mull over, and no hidden agendas to report.  And there were no impossible desires, unless I look closer, and it could start to look like a day of impossible desires, so I decide not to look.  It should have been a day of cafe writing, trying to decode which ones were supermodels with appointments, which ones were there from time off from their day jobs because of the holidays, and which ones were there to think about alchemy and the moon.  (No one ever comes there to think about alchemy and the moon, or we would certainly recognize the moon on each other's shoulders and recognize the sea monsters coming out of our mouths, and of course we don't)  ((This is the time of year when everyone is wondering who they will kiss at the new year, and I can't wonder because I understand that what I want is impossible, even though it might be easier than breathing, but it's hard to breathe during the dead days))  So I am instead surrounded by older men who work in the back yard of an ex's house while I keep her dog company and work on the endless stream of work.  I am putting together words for money, and it is turning out to be just enough.  Enough so that I could buy the perfect pair of badass boots, if I could find them, but I can't.  To be relentless like the water, and to be able to move around things like water, and to adapt to surfaces and temperatures like water, this is what I see for a year ahead.  I also see a figure just up ahead, someone I can't quite make out, like someone from a dream that I can't remember, and I might know who she is, but I might be wrong, so I decide not to be right or wrong about anything.  And there are older men in the back yard who are telling me about water tables and water management and I am listening instead of getting angry and telling them that they cannot control the water, it is relentless, and it's good that I don't speak because it wouldn't turn out the way any of us wants.  And there is a big cop motorcycle that I am driving because no one knows what's wrong with my real bike but until they do, this is what I am on.  And I move through the streets like I am water.  And I watch Ally Sheedy go down on the blond girl who means well, and they're talking about art and heroin, and it's enough to make me remember that these are things that I would take with me if I could, and I can, because I am becoming water, and I take everything with me in my wake.  In my wake, I carry a thousand kisses and a charm that smells like me.  In my wake, I carry a thousand cures for sleeplessness and a book on how to wake the dead.  In my wake, I carry dogs on motorcycles and yellow beads and a needle that captures things and makes them into what they want to become.  In my wake, I carry the siren's number, so I recognize the call when it comes, and when it comes, we might wake up, and we might wake up beside the mountain, beside the only mountain that knows how to wake us up and show us how to love, because it's not easy and it's not as simple as that but it's written on my veins and it tells the story of the sea, and the c is always me.

Sunday, December 25, 2011

dont start

This is the part of the year where the solar calendar (20 days a month) and the lunar calendar (30) come to a close, ending at a total of 360 days, and the last 5 days are the Dead Days.  It's good news for those of us who spend a lot of time getting news, advice, and especially recipes, from the ones who have gone before.  It's also the time when some of the traditional Mayan people know the gods are out walking, and its their domain now, this surface of the earth, and the best thing to do is stay indoors and eat well.  And also not have sex and not get angry, because those things are too hot for these days.

I'm not Mayan or Mayab and not one of the H-Men in their worlds, so I don't have to worry about following all the prescriptions.  This is also good news, because one of my favorite presents is a mask that covers up my face except for the eyes.  It's white and has roses on the top, and there are so many possibilities. 

I'm a little skittish, though, because every time I try to imagine anything with masks, it starts off very interesting, then somewhere in there, I am asking, "Oh, my gosh, I'm sorry, did that hurt?  We can just go get coffee if this is too weird," and that ends everything for everyone.  I understand all the implications, and the main one is that it's only happening in my head, which should mean something. 

But at the end of a year with so many things that have happened in my head, I'm learning how to listen to it a little more, the things that are true, and separate them from the imagined problems and hurts, and not get so angry at myself for saying and doing things I didn't say or do, and also forgiving anyone else for things they may have said or done, or not done.  What upsets me is only a problem in my own mind, and this is certainly good news.

It's not very easy, though, in the season where Pan walks by my doorway every morning telling me there is something to do out there, and Oshun visits every night with her black birds to tell me that I am supposed to leave it all up to her.  It's not easy.  Not because I am tied to those old definitions of m-f that say I am supposed to be the active principle, and the sun, and the seed, and the aggressive one (these things are true, and they're true for everyone, but the game plays out much better when I take that up, because, I don't know why because, when I want things to happen they tend to work out better when I make them happen, and anything else usually means I've given up).  Not because I am possessed with a life that is full of grieving and loss, although that's true for me as much as anyone (although there are things with me that are connected to the graveyard that make these things more grave with me).  It's not easy because, for all the things that happened in my mind, the ones that took place in the world that other people participate in have made me want to stop and look closer.

Looking closer always gives me a sense of want and longing, and it's impossible to break out of that kind of absinthe spell, and probably because I am not supposed to break free, but figure out the trick of how to live there, or at least visit, or at least open my doors to it.  And I think that saying my door is open is not enough, because it's not true, because it's not really an open door.  I hold it shut even though I think it's open, because the last person to pass through that door made me stop and pay attention, because that's what happens when something important is happening and I am paying attention.  I was.

The best way to put a love spell on someone is to tell them you like them, and the best ritual for opening a door is to open the door.  This is not a good time for starting any new things.  This comes as very good news to anyone who suspects that something is not done.  So I try to smoke a cigar through a mask without a mouth, and sit on a porch in front of a house that isn't mine, and whenever I get an itch to make spells in the kitchen, there are black birds who come to my feet and remind me that I need to leave the spells up to them, and wait for Pan's advice on how to get through another night, and remember that we are not gods, even though there were moments where it certainly seemed as though immortality were immanent.  This is a revolution, after all.  The best thing that could happen is that we don't lose, and that we don't win, but make room for something utterly unexpected.  That's what we are when we're heroes.  Utterly unexpected.

Friday, December 23, 2011

entre los culos, no hay espacio

Meanwhile, she is thinking about cows, and is very much concerned with the one that is certainly about to step out right in front of her.  Only she isn't sure exactly where that might be, because so much of the road is uncertain.  It's that time of the year when there are cracks in the cement, and there are not enough workers coming to repair all of the things that are breaking apart.  It's not crazy, she hopes, but she is certain that she is starting to see glimpses of the dwarves who live beneath the surface of the road coming out to have a look at the world they will inherit.

That's not bad news, not for her, because those very same dwarfs who are making lines in the air with their hands when she is falling asleep are more capable of taking over all of these important operations.  It's obvious to anyone who's paying attention that this isn't working, and these are the ones who can do things right, because they are always so much closer to the sea.  The sea is where you will unlock me, she thinks, and throws the thought out of her mouth through her tongue, because she doesn't trust where it came from.  The dwarfi (the correct plural) have been running things without our knowledge for a very long time, and it's better not to say these things out loud because she starts to think about how she might be sounding like the kinds of people she wants to avoid.  But everything I try to avoid is the very thing that I always end up hitting, and I never do get to hit what I aim for, so maybe I should start playing with the scope of my own life, and learn how to hit without shooting the target. 

It would be better and so much easier if there were not crabs crawling out of the cracks in the road, far too many to avoid certain disasters and tragedies, and she really wishes she could look away from the road because she doesn't want to see what it going to happen to these crabs.

She starts to turn her attention away from the unavoidable horrors that are about to take place by thinking about her daughter, who is becoming a miniature version of her, and getting larger all the time.  Eventually, with the right amount of food and water and sunlight, the daughter will get larger than the mother and if she has the right escape plan, she will have slipped out entirely before she is eaten.  Except for now everything is very much okay, and her life is complete, in its way, in its way.  There are threats of being eaten that also come along with the threat that she will be engulfed, and if she is smaller than the daughter then she might be more aligned with the realm of the dwarfen people, and that's not as unsafe as the rest of this is turning out to be.  There are also three wonderful things to think about that will make this holiday complete, and they all have to do with bachata.  She is bachata, after all, and even though she has never been to the soil, the rhythm is in her bones.  Suddenly, she is becoming aware that the narrator in her head is actually making fun of her, and it's nice to know that someone cares enough to pay attention, but not like this.

"I am more annoyed with you than you will ever know," she says to the narrator, who cannot hear, or it would be written, it would be wood, glass, and stone.

In the end, she hits the cow, trying to avoid the cow she runs straight into it, and hits it so directly that either there is a sudden death or the kind of energy exchange that the souls change place.  She isn't sure what this is, except she is aware that they are both still breathing, and that might or might not be a good thing.  She is only aware that she is even more annoyed with the narrator by now, who she cuts out and cuts out over and over again, but it always comes back.

"Why do you keep coming back?" she says.

And the narrator (which is nothing less than her ego, and nothing more), has this to say.  "I have been watching you do these same things over and over for such a long time that I've learned how to make a rhythm from your repetitions, and I am the song running through the back of your mind, the back of your mind, whenever something is about to start again.  You were praying last night to be more connecting to the things that are, and even though there are no ouija boards in this cafe of your mind, the dead speak through the living, and the living might not be limited to your blood relatives, and might include the plants and the cows.  This is something that I arranged because I love you so very much and you always turn away before the meat starts to turn juicy.  This is the butter sauce of the things you lost, and there are birds flying from your mouth whenever you feel so very much alone.  Pay attention to them."

At this moment, and not uncoincidentally, the flock of birds before her eyes thinned out, and as they thinned and their number turned from a hundred to three, she understood that this was love and that this was war, and that the ones who left the sky were settling in her stomach.  It would not be so bad if they were not trying to peck their way out, but that's what they do.  She doesn't want to think about him, but she does, and she wishes for a revolution as violent as the last one, only this time she hopes that they both get to wake up, in a warm room, with daughters who don't turn into giants, looking at each other through the eyes of cows, who know more, who know so much more, than we like to think, and all of the other things that don't go away even though they might be dead and buried. 

Thursday, December 22, 2011

conversations with broken men

first part

this is true.  i'm sitting outside and smoking hand-rolled cigarettes and starting to feel this burning in my chest start to feel like a cold feels, if i could feel my hands i might know for sure.  but i don't know anything for sure, not at this time of year.  this is the point where the light comes back, but it is also really the second-longest night of the year, and tomorrow is the third-longest, and there are more long nights ahead.  that could be good news.

but this, the true part, this is what i wanted to tell you, that i was thinking this cold was good because it's getting out of the way, and soon the desert will warm up a little, and i think that's a good place to return.  i don't know how long you're here, i don't think i am supposed to ask.

second part

these are conversations around coffee, always coffee, always talking about the same thing.  it would be better, so much more convenient, if all of my friends were in love with the same woman, her name could be sara, and we would all be getting together to talk about how things are with sara, how the revolutionary hero is watching his heart move backwards and forwards while sara gets in and gets out and changes her look, and how the musical wizard is living with sara and how he thinks about her all the time even when she's with him all the time but it's even worse when she's gone, and how the shaman with the broken bike is missing sara and thinking about something beautiful that happened once but it happened for so long that it became a beautiful poem, someone should write that poem someday.

the broken men are complaining about being broken, and the broken men are becoming aware that the thing that is broken is the place where all the healing waters come thru and release, and the broken men are not aware that these healing things also come from them, because they are so concerned that they are broken men.  this is a night of sudden recognitions in the dark.  on the second darkest night of the year, some of the broken men go home to sara, some of the broken men wish they were sara, and some of the broken men are already gone deep into the desert, with the intention of grieving for sara but unaware that they are turning into something else entirely, and this is always the way of broken men.

thirdly

he decides that he is not going to send any hidden messages after this one.  this is the last time he will speak of it, and afterwards he will walk the earth, like caine in kung fu.  he decides that he will take all the love left in his heart, and ask the woman with brooms for hands to sweep his heart out, and after that there will be no more talk of these things, and everything will be what it looks like on the second-darkest day of the year.

but the worst part for him is that as soon as the love is swept from his heart, he looks up and sees a shooting star coming from the cold north, and before he is even aware that his mouth is open and his tongue is moving, he is whispering her name (and it's not sara).

and so fourth and so on

this year wore on the bones like every year, and the bones of the ones who were here at the beginning of the year who are not here at the end, they wear their way into the way that we sleep, and i am dreaming of white cats with grey spots who know the secrets of flight.  this year wore into the organs of the living, and while we were busy trying to build bodies without organs, there was something that was starting to grow, and some of the warrior men were starting to show signs of age that had nothing and everything to do with the war.  the war that wore through our bones was only made worse by the endless promise that it would be over, and every checkpoint i drive through is a little further and a little closer to someone that i almost learned how to forget.  and every checkpoint gets a little more tense, because this is a revolution, and some of us are wizards and some of us are shamans, and all of us are healers, and on some nights it seems possible to re-define god.  they say there are a thousand names and a thousand faces for god, and our 400 gods have a dozen names each, but that's just math.  at every checkpoint, i am leaving a small piece of skin and cloth, parts that don't work any more, and if i leave them scattered they won't have time to gather together again and come back, because things like this might take all the time in the world.  it's taking a lifetime to shed all my skin, and it's taking all my breath to keep myself from folding up like a clam and falling back into the sea, but in the middle of these wars i remember nights when it felt like i was learning how to breathe under water, and how to walk on the floor of the ocean.  beauty is soft when there is a whole morning ahead and every cafe is filled with women playing with their hair, when it comes holding a heart in one hand and a mask in the other it is as brutal as the current and as bright and sharp as coral, but if you look too close at my name it won't take long to understand that i always was a child of the sea.  and if i am broken it is only because i am always breaking, trading my tongue for stones, something that can speak about what it means to redefine god, and fevered like the bones of a soldier, like the eyes of a wild horse, like a diviner looking at the patterns on the sand and finding something in the pieces, like a lover distracted by the glintings of jewels that decorate the faces of the ones who know secrets of how to put things back together in patterns we can use.  like a friend who suddenly recognizes that shooting stars are never seen by those who need too much, or those who grieve too much, or those who believe too much, but by those who are engaged in a life of telling the story of the love triangle between the sky, and the earth, and the bottom of the sea. 

Wednesday, December 21, 2011

turning

The world is turning, apparently, in the way that it can only turn when it's moving from darkness and back into light, but everything is much slower than a movie or a novel even but not one of those French novels where they describe everything, and it's boring because it's the 19th century and there's not enough dance breaks.  (But I know, I knowwww....they danced in France in the 19th century, and that's how I want to dance with you, with all our stylish masks, this could work)...

This is hard right now because I have just been given a new face, one from the bottom of the sea.  But I am stuck in the world of wounded men again, and one of the casualties is my motorcycle.  So I am having long conversations on the phone, where I am saying things like, "Look, I don't care how it gets fixed, just fix it, mister," and, "Look, we can play this two ways, see..." and the men on the other end of the phone are putting up fights, and we are all fighting, fighting over my sweet cherry ride.

If I was like this for just an hour every day it would be all right, I could do it, but I'm not like that, not for long, because these are the kinds of masks that freeze on a person's skull, and I need that because it is doing important things suddenly.  Like turn into something that I thought I couldn't be, that I thought I couldn't have, and suddenly all the big questions are all right, and time is moving in a direction that I like, but I don't know how to manage all the details.

But because I have no other choice, I am stuck buying gas for a very big van and thinking about my motorcycle more than I like to, and wondering about how anything ever really happens for some people, how the deck is certainly stacked.  But I need to remember, this is a revolutionary time, and nothing here is what it seems, and every stone turned or not holds things we can't understand, so, so, so, I focus on the seasalt that sticks to the bottom of my lip, and listen to the blood in my veins, and these old songs that keep coming up to the surface are beautiful songs, and all the lovely mermaids are singing and crashing with the waves, and the small desires that keep us up are the only things worth listening to these days, because they might unlock some of the things that are trying to boil, boiling like a rage in the middle of a storm at sea, and that is where you will unlock me.


Saturday, December 17, 2011

capitulation nombre alla mar

He sat for a long time at the edge of the water.  There was a table in front of him and a chair underneath him and another chair across from him.  There was coffee in a fancy white coffee set in front of him and he was aware that it was getting cold, so he was drinking it himself because he was starting to see that she wasn't going to come.  What was worse is that he hoped she would come.  And what was worse than that was that he forgot to invite her.

Meanwhile, the dead come singing, just long enough to introduce ourselves in the foam on the wave, and when we see things like this, it is always more embarrassing than heartbreaking, really, because we do know some things about moving time and space, but it's up to you to make plans, and you don't know how to make plans that will work. 

At the bottom of the sea, meanwhile, he is talking to her and she is talking to him, and they are doing all the things they like to do with each other, but on the edges of the sea it just feels like they are tapping on walls at each other to let each other know secrets in morse code.  But the code is not the same when it translates from the depths to the surface, and it gets interference, and comes out in numbers, and that's why lovers are so often stuck in each other's company arguing about what these numbers might actually mean.  And they argue about times and dates and numbers of other lovers, codes written in numbers on phones and the number of times they are looking at other people while they are talking, and it is all a boring mess.

Under the sea, however, he is looking at the walls of fire in her eyes, the things that tell the stories of what happened between that last moment and this one, and there are cemeteries and there are dark rooms with neon lights and music, and there is the color behind her eyes when she is alone in her room and thinking about him.  She's learning to speak in other languages, and is trying to play him her music with his eyes.  This makes the birds that live in the back of his throat wake up and sing, and the sounds are words but they don't mean half as much as the drum of the tongue when he sings the words, because the drum in the tongue can only be understood when he plays on her.  So there is always a lot to talk about between them.  And he is wondering how to tell her about the wild horses that live in his veins, and how they have been sleeping, or riding without him, and when she is gone he feels like a wild horse on an empty beach, and he has been there so long that he can't remember being upset, only missing her. 

Children of the sea should meet by the sea, or at the very least think about each other when it is raining.  Rain is more related to mermaids than he ever understood, he wants to tell her, but it's a ridiculous thing to say under the sea, where everything is obvious.  He wants to tell her how he heard her, when she was thinking about him when it was raining, how he always heard her, and he would like to tell her that he thinks this means he always will, but it's too late in the year for promises, and at the start of new years the only thing that a lover needs is a blanket.  He is singing something he heard, about how a woman doesn't need any better covering than a man, something from the sixteenth century, and he is singing about unpacking the complicated text because they are more complicated texts than what is in the cannons of the sixteenth century, they are a different kind of gunpowder altogether, and he is totally unaware that she is surrounded by sisters that are gorgeous monstrosities in between the things of the human race, and the things of the sea, and if she were not so enchanted herself she would realize how enchanting she is, at least to him, at least at this particular moment, when he is still raining, he is raining, because he is swimming in a love spell that never went anywhere, except here, under the sea, to hide from the storms up above that never did have anything to do with them. 

Thursday, December 15, 2011

capitulato nombarrando onsaydos: the very last thing ever

Not really last but last so far up until now.  This morning was another one of those very upsetting mornings that can only come around once in a great while, but they've been coming like waves like waves that come when a baby is trying to come, and impossible to keep up with, and this is like giving birth except nothing is getting born, not another human anyway.  And nothing is really like giving birth except for giving birth, and nothing is like war except for war, and nothing is like performance anxiety except for the anxiety that comes with a performance. 

Perhaps every one of those terms can be held in question, and perhaps it would be good to have a conversation about the words, using other words like "problematic," "complexity," and "situation," but it's that kind of conversation that has lead to a morning as upsetting as this one in the first place.  In the first place, when he woke up and he put his feet onto the cold floor, the first thing and the most difficult thing about the floor was all the sand.

The excavations of the old house and the sand that came back with him from the coast seems to just be building, and it should be thinning out and waning away.  It feels too much like the dust from the moon started to fall to earth and it's hitting here.  It is not his house.  This is not his house.  That seems like an important thing to say.  He had a house once, but not any more, and this is not that house.

He also had a vehicle before, and now the thing he is driving is not his.  There are a lot of borrowed things, and it is starting to feel like nothing can actually be what it is called, and this is kind of exciting, because that also means that everything can be whatever it needs to be.  And by the time the moon dust settles and we need to go back to calling things by names again, these things could be different things entirely and have different names entirely.  Things like girlfriends could be entirely different by the time the next moon comes around, and that's a very interesting idea, but this one is also interesting, and he's fully aware that he's not exactly miserable these days.  But he's not exactly happy.  But not miserable at all, because he heard things that seem true, and the things he heard are not bad things if they are true, and might even verge on being true and beautiful.

But this isn't that kind of  vehicle, and this isn't that kind of moon.  This is the moon in half already, it went away much quicker than it came, that's how they always are, he supposes.  This moon is lighting up the beach, and when his feet his the cold floor, there is sand, and there is beach extending out as far as his feet can reach (and much further because he is tall but not that tall, this is not one of those incredible long-leg man stories).  And every few feet there is a version of her, the Copper one, folded in on herself and sleeping like she were in a cocoon. 

This is entirely alarming because he thought that she had been away long enough that a few thoughts here and there wouldn't bring her back like this, but they always do.  She is like the stations of the cross, and as he walks to each one, she tells him something that she could never say when it really mattered. 

People are like that, he thinks, you never can really know what they're really thinking, but then again I really don't know exactly what I'm thinking.  He walks to each one, and even though he's well aware that he's being watched, he acts like he were so very much alone, because this would all be easier if he weren't being watched. 

But no sooner does that thought come and go (and it could certainly be enough to change a life, because anything that digs into the dirt of liberty can move mountains in a life), when the final version of her comes as a kind of a half-horse, as far as he can tell, and she's being ridden by someone just as interesting as herself, and it's not the most pretty thing he has ever seen, but not so far from it, either.

Someone, he can't tell who, one of the people involved in the scene anyway, someone of those, says, "It does take two to tango, but three is spectacular."

Wednesday, December 14, 2011

capitulato nombero oncei-oncei

I wake up in the cabana again.  It's been a long time, maybe a number of years, at least months.  I am waking up and I feel kind of terrible, one because it's been over for at least a year and I'm still waking up here, and two because I dreamed about this before I even met her and that means I might have made the whole thing up.  I would be okay with having made the whole thing up, except it seems like she's been involved for at least some of it, and that some of it made her life a living hell, because we know too many of the same people, and they talk.  And as time goes by, and more time goes by, she doesn't look so good in the big picture of things, she kind of looks a little bit insane and sad.

It's not like that's anything unusual, though.  In the time that I started chasing after the Eternal Feminine, I have become a little insane and sad myself, and maybe that has something to do with the moon, that my mother the moon takes us all down eventually.  And it just might be that eventually we all become insane and sad at the same time, in one of those ways that everyone wakes up at the same time, and looks at the clock when it's 11:11 at the same time, and it's magic. 

That fortune teller, the one with the barnacles on her clothes at the edges of the beach, I can see her in this dream where everyone wakes up, and she would say to me, "Wake up, it's 11:11," and I would wake up and look out on a beach covered with old lovers, and they would be naked like in a big Spencer Tunik exhibition, and they would be covered in an interesting smelling oil that would look interesting in the sun, and they would be saying interesting things like, "Wow, we are all just talking about how sorry we feel about everything and we would like to help you because we are angels in the flesh," and everything after part gets a little bit blurry and it's hard to think any further than that, and I am starting to have doubts about this 11:11 thing.

But I am having a lot of doubts these days.  My main doubt this morning is that anything good could come from waking up inside this cabana.  It's the one we always rented, La Bruja del Cobre and I, when we were taking our vacations on the beach.  None of this is a fantasy, at the core, it all is really happening in real time, except for the part about the vacations, because most of the time both of us do not have jobs at all. 

My doubt this time is that I can live here in this cabana, even for a little while, without falling backwards and falling in love with the things that are no longer here.  This is really all about falling.

I want to think that she is no longer here, either, but I see her here enough, visiting this same spot where we spent so many of our summer vacations (not really, but that sounds so civilized)  ((and it might make me much more attractive, especially to people who are looking for people with 401k plans, and I'm not saying I don't have one of those, but it was just recently that I found out that you didn't have to run that distance to start collecting money, money is so very interesting, isn't it?)).  And this time, I see her, because she is not here.  There are marks of sand in the shape of feet, like they were prints of feet, or perhaps they are called feetprints.  They look like marks left by the dead, and that makes sense, because we are both very close to the dead and that's why we found each other to begin with, and that's also why we lost each other but that's another story that still makes me very sad and it was my fault even though no one else seems to think so.

So her Muertos are still so very close, and they have her feet, and I miss her feet because they were terribly interesting.  There was a chain around one that could scratch you if it wanted to, and it often did.  And I miss running my hands along that chain.  And she's long gone, and has left with a very obvious trace, and it's sad except when I look outside the cabana, I see her there, standing and looking into the sea. 

I would like to say that I did not run when I saw her, but I always do, and my heart jumps in a way that is unusual for my heart, in that it seems like the murmur that she left me with, except it hurts just a little when it's related to seeing her, and I don't understand what that is about.  I run to her and when I catch up to her she isn't moving, she is stiff and her eyes are wide and she is staring at the sea with a vacant look.  This is a kind of catatonia I have seen before, from other lovers who are a little bit in love with death, and the thing that is the most familiar is that it is fake because I see her blink.  She sees me see her blink and the jig is up.  And the news is out.

And she says, "I want you to take me to the top of the stairs, but turn around before you get there."

"Why?" is the most reasonable question here so this is what I do say, in the form of a question.

"Because if you turn around, then I will freeze, I will turn into a pillar of salt, and then I can finally rest." 

This is very hard to hear, because I can see her face in another world, one that is not this one, where she is crying, but she can't allow herself to do that in this one because, because I don't know why because really.  Someone once did something that disappointed her, and she made a decision is because, I guess, but how should I know.  It's also very hard to hear because I know she is tired, and she should be tired, because things are a little harder for her than they need to be, but that's sometimes the way it is with the children of the graveyard.  It is also very hard to hear because it's the wrong story, she's not turning into a pillar of salt, this is the story where she gets lost in the underworld, and can never see Orpheus again and he doesn't get to see her, and it's very sad.  It's sad because she has the stories confused, and I can't correct her, not here, because that would be rude, and she would think I think she is a little bit stupid.  It's also sad because I turned around a long time ago and lost her a long time ago and I never would stop missing her, even though it was a long time ago.

And what's even sadder is that by now she has started to notice that I have a face painted on my back, and it's not her face, it's someone else's face altogether.  I feel like I have to explain, and because this could very well be a dream, there is also an equal chance that it is not, and that's the best place for me to try to explain things. 

The face, I explain, in this dream, is only appearing on my back because it is what I have been thinking about lately, and I think it's very good, because it makes me feel good to think about.  There was this moment when I lost things and then I found something, and it wasn't until it was a gorgeous storm for a few months and then the storm moved somewhere else (somewhere north, I think, a little north), and it wasn't until later that I realized this important thing.  And this important thing, I explained to the Bruja who wasn't made of salt even though she really wished she were, was this: I had been falling backwards into the world that looks very much like this one, courting and being courted by the Eternal Feminine, and this was suddenly one of her aspects that made questions out of her titles, because she was Temporary, and sometimes Feminine, and sometimes many other things besides, and even though I'd heard about this, I had never met anyone who could do it. 

Like anyone who has spent any time at the bottom of the sea, she was many of the things that she appeared to be, and many of the things that no one else could see, and by the time that I noticed that the sea monsters that were coming from out of her skirt and coat meant that she was as deep as the ocean, I had already started falling backwards, and that made me sad, because I lose everything that I fall for, at least up until right now.  There were also other things that I adored about her: that she had a collection of faces that matched my collection, and she also had so many more that I had not seen, and that meant that if we were ever trapped somewhere between time and space, we could be many things to each other and never get old.  I keep explaining these things to the Bruja, and now especially I am trying to explain how this is reminding me of my thumb, that what happened with this sea monster, or mermaid, or same thing, was like my thumb except it happened to my heart, like part of that got taken off, and it wouldn't come back.  But it didn't make me sad, I explain, because I think what happened to me also happened to her, and those parts are finding each other somewhere at the bottom of the sea, and they can speak when we can't find each other, and it's a beautiful story, I think, and this is what I explain.  And I don't know why I'm trying so hard not to cry and failing miserably, and this Bruja is also looking very sad, because, she says, I look like I may have fallen in love and it's not with her this time.  And I explain that, No it's just because there's a tattoo of a mermaid on my back that I look like I'm in love, she's only visible on my back because she is what I think about, and that doesn't mean anything.

It's not been the easiest morning, not by far, and I am more and more upset now when the Bruja is wiping the salt from her face, and is seated on a series of nine rocks, and she's seating me before her, and looking into my hands.

This Bruja, I wanted to be her lost lover forever, but before my eyes she has turned into something else altogether, and change is always hard.  She isn't reading the lines on my palm, she is lifting the skin off my bones like it were the skin of a piano on a beach, and she is reading the blood running through the veins.

La Bruja del Cobre is complaining about the cold, and wishing we had more of that soup I made for her a long time ago, and she is reading the blood running parallel to the bones in my hands.  "Everyone has their own alchemy, art, love, or money," she says, "and yours is love.  But you knew that already.  For other people it's art."  She is looking at my forehead and remembering something.  "For other people, maybe, there's a difference." 

Monday, December 12, 2011

orpheus descending

The scene begins with the daughter, at the foot of the stairs to the ocean, and she turns and she looks at the father and she says, "We have to go down, Daddy."
This ocean, this stair, this entry point is loaded, it's a loaded gun, a crossroads marked with white chalk and gunpowder, and to cross over means to be blown in a thousand directions at once.  I am terribly nervous about writing this scene, even now, or especially now, now that we're in the middle of it.  Because this point is a threshold that got crossed on a night that was too late and too cold to be naked, naked as children playing in the forest.  This point is a threshold, a place that got crossed on a day when things needed uncrossing, first at the river and then here, on this space, to get clean of all the thousand kisses in the depths of something that didn't know how to sustain itself.
Before we went down, I saw myself making the same masks of her face, papier mache masks that reflected every one of her nine images, I wanted to keep it holy, I wanted to keep it sacred, I wanted to keep it somewhere near the door to my place in the world, somewhere between desire and ecstasy, but something shifted on the way.  I found the masks I had made had all come to gather in front of my hands, like a ghost, like a sad and lonely ghost, and I never know what to do with these phantoms except to pull them close and try to kiss them, kiss the ghost, whisper hello and goodbye and hello, across lifetimes I recognize you.  Only this time the paper was growing thin and dry, and when I went to kiss the ghost, she crumbled in a thousand pieces and blew away like ash, and that was the only thing that I held that was worth keeping, the ashes of something that I would never really understand.
And I also understood that these things that I was holding from another lifetime ago, they were separating themselves by themselves, the dross from the gold, and my daughter was leading me into the underworld this time, because this time needed a child and not a lover to be the guide.
I watched her descend, she hadn't been here before, but she was Persephone hungry for pomegranite seeds, like the bee always knows exactly where to land (on the center of my head).  There's too much water here to see clearly, so I am just trying to remember these things when I remember them.  And when she got closer, and I could see that the waves were getting furious, the rocks begin to look like the bones of the dead.  We always get more afraid of death when we're close to coming back to life.
Now there are clouds and now there is rain and now there is a light flickering in the parking lot in the middle of a morning where I'm here and not there, and there is nothing that needs to be born in words, because it's in the middle of its own birth, and it's so close to death that it seems important to pay attention to everything.
The round crossing guard is wearing black and red, and there's something about to identify itself, where the breath on the neck is going to announce itself with a voice.
I know some things.  Some things about this place, some things about how I can watch the daughter playing on the lap of the sea, and I want to help her find shells that look like bones, but I'm stuck on the edges of the waves, eating sea foam and painting sea monsters with my hands.
That one, half this and half that but neither and both all at once, the one that shifts, is leaving traces and marks on every edge of every precipice, and I don't know if it's something I recognize across lifetimes or across oceans, because I am starting to suspect that this lifetime is the first time this has ever happened, and it catches us both by surprise. 
I left a part of myself, the ashes from my hands, at the edges of the doorway to the underworld, and now my hands leave marks that are from the living blood of this body, this body right now, the one that wants and the one that remembers and the one that doesn't know where all these parts are supposed to go.  The foam that runs through my blood is raining over my head, the foam that takes apart the things that are no longer necessary, and leaves the bones on the doorstep for another reconstruction, this foam is whirling at a thousand miles an hour, and there's no place to stand that feels like I won't be sucked under.  But I'm already under.  The feeling of falling comes strongest when I wake up, when I first wake up, because it takes that long for this body right now to remember that anything that feels like falling for that long is worth the time and attention.
And at the edges of the ocean, from the mouth of a cave, there's a boy that just left the center of the earth, and I remember her because I didn't ever stop thinking about her, and I don't know who she's supposed to be, and the same thing could be said for myself, except I think it might be whoever we want to be, as much as identities can create themselves in the middle of a storm on a winter night like this with the moon like this with the sea monsters gathering like waves like this, and I think I like it like this. 

Friday, December 9, 2011

driven

the skin of the car is shedding between here and there, and now i'm here, and the skin is gone, and all i can see is the shine of the car.  these things, the ones that were buried in the rocks and came to life, are still here, rising underneath my fingerprints like there were bones there singing songs, and the one song that i always heard is also still here, cinnamon stones telling the stories of the people who were here, and everything that was true is lit up by the moon, and everything that was not true is lit up by the moon, and it's bright enough to hear, and i'm almost drowned out by the ocean in my ears, relentless moon and ocean in my ears, and i think this place between places, i think i can call this home.

Wednesday, December 7, 2011

notes from the field

the writer reports in from real time:
the kind of night where i am finding myself trying to eat more than i did the meal before this one, feeling too much like a ghost and thinking it would be heavier if i were heavier, like i might not float away.  riding through cold streets, taking my little girl to a school concert - she's in concert black and wishing she could wear boots instead of velvet shoes, and the wind blows against her legs.  she is thin as a faerie on a night like this, but just enough to keep us all on the ground, riding into the wind and hoping we don't pick up the wrong kind of speed that could take us up.  it's not a good night for flying.  these last moons building up to this next one, coincidences and second chances are in the air, but i can't count them on my fingers, they float away with the tip of my thumb from another time altogether.  and if it weren't for her, i think i would float, that i would find myself floating, if i didn't have this spiral going through my lip.  it's a staple over my mouth, and i'm not sure what else is holding me together, but it might be that, with all of its multiple meanings, hooks and mermaids and locks on secrets, closets that hold more flesh than bone, and it doesn't matter if i am trying to fall apart, because this is keeping things together, just enough to remember how to do these things, with cold hands and a heart that wants to be anything but heavy on a night like this, weighing down and waiting and making things with my cold hands, watching for signs of what designs this moon is trying to call up from the depths of the ocean. 

it's important to keep in mind

This story is a love story.  It's a love story that looks like it's about someone you don't know, but it's about you, and that's why it's always so uncomfortable to be writing this in public.  There are things that I won't say in public, so the story won't have everything, but there are enough spaces between words, and fragments that are left out, so that you would recognize those spaces and fill them with the same things I'm leaving out, so that we're still talking here, and we're talking about the same things here, because we're always talking about the very same thing. 

Tuesday, December 6, 2011

the last thing i will ever say about that

the first part can't matter because origins and beginnings never end because they never really start because they are always already, and the middle part was not for anyone else to know, and the ending was so much in public that it took a lot more water than we had to get our hands clean.  so i would live in the middle if i could but i'm supposed to be somewhere over here in the river of time, and i suppose i am way over here, but we don't live in one time or one place ever, unless we are very very dense, and that's never been true for us.  except in one degree.  maybe two, or a few more, but not in the usual way. 

so at the end of the day it doesn't matter what they said, and it doesn't matter what i hear, and it shouldn't matter what you hear because the only thing that was really true about any of this was what you heard from me and what i heard from your mouth, and if i could have your words over me like a blanket then maybe just maybe your meaning would keep me warm, and it's what i would do for you on the rainiest days, or the ones where there are no wolves knocking at your door and all the foxes are keeping themselves well hid.

i won't speak about it again. 

Monday, December 5, 2011

tres dos ambos mundos y te por tres or quatro o algo diferente

A deep breath at the place in the cafe where she can't see him.  They were sitting in the same booth and talking and while they were talking they were moving closer, first he comes around to sit on her side of the booth, because she wanted him to see something on her phone, and it was the perfect way to get to the side where she was, and the very good thing about it is that when he moved to her side she didn't move to his side, not away from him, and they were on the same side and she wasn't running and neither was he.  Next was that moment when she was asking him to see the picture on his phone, and it was maybe a dog, or maybe a baby, something very cute for sure, something terribly cute  like a dog or a baby, and she moved a little and he moved a little and the tops of their legs were touching and it was interesting, because there was a point when he was trying to hold his leg still and that was a mistake because of a certain nervous condition that made his leg shake whenever he tried to hold it still, and that was sort of bad, except it moved further on, the way of all flesh pulled by gravity, and that was inward here, where she was on his lap and he was wrapping himself around her by the legs and nothing was shaking but everything was moving back and forth, just like that, and it was that very certain point where the flesh starts to hum and so were they, humming in the cafe of the world before god and everybody.

It was a little too much for him so he said, "Excuse me (and note to self note to editor, first thing we will need to do is look at past and present and future tense and first second third person oh this is terribly inconsistent but it's always what you think it's about so it might be ok, no we need to fix this I will get my people on it)."  And he went to the place where she was not, and that place was on the rooftop, where she couldn't get to, because he was a little taller than her.  And even though he was much older than her he was also much more limber and he could jump, hahaha, now let's see who's really old, eh eh eh????!!! 

I worry just a little bit that I am getting older and weirder, and it's going to be going like that for a very long time.



So he was on the roof and she was inside, or maybe she was gone, he did not know because he could not see her, because he cannot see through walls, what does he look like some kind of a wizard?  And he was smoking even though it bothered her because it made her feel like he was doing it because he was frustrated with her and that meant that she was accidentally slowly killing him even though that was her wish every now and then (we're all human, and we need a break from things that don't stop moving).  But he was not smoking because it bothered her, but because it was so very cinematic, and he felt that it would be terribly ironic to be doing something cinematic in a novel, and yes, goddammit he was there on the roof smoking at the sky, and he made his confession> 

"OK, so this is all I can say, it's all I can say, 'I love you, but it's not you, it's me.'  The way you sit in my memory, I want to carry it like a child in my arms, everywhere I go, and everywhere I go people will see the weight that I carry, just so I can tell them, 'It's not that heavy, it's really not that heavy.'  Because we all carry our lovers in our arms and on our backs like a coat, like a perfect coat that doesn't fit anyone else but us, and at the end of the day, we're all in this together, we all wear the same coats, and they all have their own peculiar themes and variations, and maybe, just maybe, just maybe, there's a saturation point where the number of lovers ceases to matter, more numbers won't keep us warm, but like the elders seem to understand, it's the quality of love that makes us perfect and light and hungry for the things that wake us up.'  And if I can say that just once but say it right, then I won't have to keep saying that, and suddenly I am light I am light I am light."

And that was that.  And the world got very bright and grey all at the same time.  And no moon revealed itself, and no shooting stars fell from the morning sky.  And when he went back down, he fell on the way, and he fell on his coat of lovers, and they all began to complain that he was incredibly clumsy and needed to focus, they all told him he needed to focus, and it was a complaint that was so powerful and so echo-ey that it felt just like being married. 

At the same time, on the other hand, on the brighter side.  He didn't realize that this was an act of surrender and it was a marriage, but marrying a destiny of a sort, one where coats and permutations and subtle and radical changes in the design and the method of weaving the cloth became something like a process, like giving in to a process over which he had no control, and you would think that would unlock things and make things perfect and right.

She was still sitting in the booth, still a little bothered from what they were doing before he left, and a little flustered by the smell of the smoke on his clothes, and a little upset that he was still carrying an effigy of her in his arms, because that meant to her that she was sort of dead to him, or at least, what he carried that was her to him was not really her at all but something else, and it looked like her and it talked like her and it wanted the same things she wanted, and he loved her double more than he loved her, because it was something he could carry and she understood that she was not that at all.  And she wanted to be carried, for a little while, she wanted that very much.  We like to be carried, and no one is worse off by being remembered, because being remembered is like reproducing without having to take all that time and energy to sleep with people. 

He felt a little bit odd to be talking to her there on the other side and holding her there in his arms all at the same time, and it didn't take long before he understood that she would not be able to sit on his lap even if they both wanted it badly because her double was already there, and he was wondering if this living in metaphors might not be all it's cracked up to be.  Her metaphor was feeling heavy in his arms, but it also protected him from all kinds of unwanted solicitations.  Her metaphor was feeling as unbearably light as anything he could exhale, and he wanted to exhale more wishes.  Her metaphor was becoming very much like that hungry shaking bird that already lived in his stomach, the one that stammers and shudders and bleeds because love is impossible and necessary all at the same moment.  Her metaphor would grow, until it could wrap herself around him, and hold him still and silent for three days, or months, or years, and when she unwrapped him, he knew he would be born into something else, and he would be like a small bird that would eventually learn to move freely in the world, like a wizard, like a sorcerer, like any bird worth its weight in salt.  Her metaphor would tear him open again and again, and when he was open and bleeding he would find his way to the rooftops and register all his complaints and confessions and wishes, and he would be almost completely unaware that he was being put back together as something he never suspected, and it would be longer than a lifetime to decode those taps on the back of his neck.  Her metaphor would turn him terribly terribly bright, filling every room with wishes as elusive as any shooting star, born with one foot in the middle of a grave and one foot in the middle of another transatlantic flight.  Her metaphor would be like a hungry child in his arms, and he would learn to love her like a hungry child, even when she was asleep, and even when she couldn't hear anything else but the sound of the ocean in her ears, her head a seashell, her body a cave for the waves to come and go.

And she felt herself becoming heavy with salt, and he felt himself being torn apart from the inside, and everyone in the cafe became exhausted from trying to turn back to flesh from stone. 

"This is why lovers can't be friends," he said, even though he knew it wasn't true.

She, meanwhile, became too dry for this part of the world, and felt herself rescinding herself back to the sea.  He was whispering her name, and it was no longer so sweet, but a little spooky.  And she, meanwhile, turned herself into a particular kind of sea monster with a particular kind of tail, and she began to make her way to the sea, and when she got to the foot of the mountain that separated the desert from the ocean, like the desert were him, and the ocean were her, and they could fall in love again if that mountain moved out of the way, she felt the winds whipping her in all directions and she thought, "I didn't know it was like this, every time, to see me it is like this every time," and while she was being blown in all directions, she started to blow in all directions, and she became wind, and he became mountain, carrying versions of things in his arms, and those things turned to shapes and formations that every other lover would see when they were on their way, desert lovers on their way to be with the ocean, like two pieces of cloth that can't ever clasp, like two pieces of cloth forever trying to clasp. 

Sunday, December 4, 2011

ambo's mundos (next) ((not last just next))

This is already well-established, then.  What this is, then.  This story, told from the other side of the grass, from my point of view (one of the dead ones), and told all over the heads and hearts of these few people that I have decided are important enough to me to pay attention to, and there is a complex web of relationships that might not be altogether related very much at all altogether told, but if they do all have one thing in common, it's that they have not forgotten how to talk to the dead.

That is exactly what makes this a love story, then, not because those who don't believe in ghosts can't love, they can, but it's entirely different, and a different kind of passion, then the kind that builds with intensity, intensities based sure on friction and physics, repetitions of movements of the flesh that wake it up and make it hungry, but also here for the necromantics it's that these movements also wake up the cells of the ones who passed on, and they want to come back, and their only chance is through trances or trance dances or occasionally through another birth.  But no one is getting pregnant in this story yet, it's not another human birth that I want, that would be another story altogether.

But it is a love story, it's always a love story, the pilgrim who progresses through sloughs and things isn't interesting me these days, because he ends up pure in god's love and light, like all pilgrims do, and that's one reason among many that I can't stand pilgrims.

The reason we're still in the Mundos shop is because it's not done yet, and in truth it will never be, because everything in the world/s happens here.  And the best things that happened here are things that haven't even happened yet, so while he is trying to think about what to draw on her napkin to let her know something important, there are other things at work, things that have nothing to do with who he or she might be right now.  On certain nights of the year, lovers are stuck in time, stuck in spaces they once were and never could leave, because they left pieces of their hearts there.  Out in the back, where no one who is of a pilgrim lineage ever dares to go, there are a hundred pancakes, half-eaten, left in the dirt by the lover who chose the object of her affection over the butter, and if she were ever to come back, she would see a hundred versions of herself, looking for traces of half-finished meals, wondering if she hadn't made a bad decision.

It's not a story about bad decisions, though, because all decisions are right if they are made, and if she were to look around long enough, she would find the signs he left for her on the wall that sealed him to her for a time longer than she imagined would be something he wanted.  If he were to visit, and stay well past dark, in an abandoned house that no one ever lived in, he would see the things she drew on his chest with her nails, and he would also see the marks of the other lovers that marked him even long after he was convinced her marks were the last.

All to say, they continue, this genetic material continues to take root and form, and tries to find the right path, when sometimes the only right thing to do in the dark is to say happy birthday and wait for more light to come, when the morning seems to be refusing to turn, but it always relents, because it is being pushed by the ocean.

He is in the shop, then, drawing something on her napkin, and wishing that she would turn into a mermaid so they would never have to worry about having to pretend they were perfectly happy being mortals, with court cases and circumstances and desires that come to make spirits feel less than light, and chained to the bones that don't want to know who they are. 

(and more)

Don't forget

This is a love story.

Thursday, December 1, 2011

la parte arriba de la linea entre ambos mundos

I was on the road trip that could only take place in between time and space, and this was the one where I was visiting old friends.  First I would see my tongue, and then I would see my heart, and it would make sense if both of them were living with her, but they were not.  In fact, the her with whom I assumed they would be living was not one but a number, that is, a number higher than one, and so it was becoming very necessary to try to keep track of the pieces of things.  She was pieces, and she was many, and there were more hers than I had known about, but it was suddenly important to follow the tracks to all of them.  If I could follow her fractions, then someone might be tracing mine, and this is the way we could keep track of each other and help each other put each other back together each other.  Not that I was falling apart.  Not ever.

The only reason I knew that I was still thinking about her was the fact that the sun on the road in front of me looked more like her face, like I was driving into her mouth (rather than the usual face of the sun, which for me, like most of us, is a Tzotzil Mayan elder, possibly male or possibly not, but probably yes male yes because of the phallus that is hanging by his ear ((left)) ).  This was the funniest thing about it, the most ironic thing, because I understood so very well that I would never actually reach her mouth, that it was always just out of reach, and I was starting to understand what sailors go through when the moon is making them insane, and why they turned manatees into mermaids. 

I was on my way, then, on the road trip, then, and I decided to stop just then and have a snack and look at souvenirs, and I pulled off by a shop, Ambo's Mundos.  The sign outside said that they had pancakes made from dates offered 24 hours a day, and a free butter bar.  Although the idea of the dates never sounded very good to me, the butter sounded so very French that I had to stop, because I was so worldly (am so worldly), and this was between so many mundos that it just made sense.   I turned off the motorcycle and let myself just sit there (stand really because if I sit then the whole thing falls over and it can break your leg because it is so dangerous to be on a motorcycle, even when it is not moving), and I let myself just consider this moon this sun this face of hers that I was chasing and it was always just out of reach.  And that made sense because I don't know why because really but it made sense, and seemed to be perfect, a perfect way to enter into Ambo's Mundos.  In my mind I was thinking about a story where the boy misses the girl, and isn't even aware that he's playing with that idea of the feminine and the lunar, but finds himself buying things in series of 28s, and it doesn't even dawn on him how much he misses her.  Thinking about this story, even more than thinking about the moon, I felt very much whole and well put together, so much better off than the character in the story I was creating.  He was an awful mess.  Just a mess.  Slept with a girl a few times (maybe 56) and still so hung up about it (maybe it was 3) and he can't get over her and thinks he's romantic (3, there was something about 3 that was just insanely crazy and good, so so so very very good) but he's really just insane and not at all well because as long as she's there in his head, no one else will enter, until the next one, except the next one always comes along and enters, and stays, and it's not very easy for him, the character in the story in his head, not like it's easy for him, the character in this story that I''m writing right now, and so he feels so much better than he could have imagined earlier upon waking this morning, with the sun on one side and the moon on the other. 

But the real story, what''s happening right now, is so much more infinitely important, because it is in a cafe and it's really happening at this very moment.  We are crossing the line between art and life, and it's fantastic, and even exihiliariating, because it is so real and visceral.  His hands are cold and his mind is racing, racing, faster than the motorcycle, and all of his life is an attempt to catch those lost moments and still live in the present and still be aware that the road up ahead has a cow in it, and he needs to be careful, because cows are so very important here.  His mind is racing so fast, in fact, that he forgot that this part is told in first person, and once again the "I" became a "he" (resisting readers: resist the text!), but that's something I can fix right now.

I am in a cafe.  My hands are cold.  I am thinking about cows. 

Since it is that kind of cafe, she is sitting across from me, and she is wondering if we should eat the pancake and explore the butter bar, and the answer to these wonderings is always a yes, and the universe is on our side.  And as she's wondering, I'm looking at her, and thinking about the next important thing to say.

She interrupts, however, and she asks me point-blank, "Are you really trying to live through the first conversation again?"

"I'm not," I say.  But I am.  But not again so much, because it's not one that I relive very often.  I am thinking about talking about first dates and making a joke about porn, because it would definitely break the ice, because it would be inappropriate.  She would say something about how she never actually saw porn, anywhere, which is very unlikely, because of the way things are in the world right now.  It would get entirely too complicated after that, so I try to steer away from porn altogether, and try to imagine us making an amateur porn film, except without the porn, with the same natural light and hand-held cameras, and instead of doing those kinds of things to each other, I am imagining how it would look if we set the camera on a high chair and it would film us eating date pancakes with all that butter, and thinking about how filming people eating is the new porn, because porn is what shows what we really do but don't talk about.

In that film about butter, they begin at a table at the cafe, and she is looking at the pancake and she is looking at him, and they start off slow, a dab of butter to begin, and soon enough they are melting the butter and pouring it over each other, and somewhere in this Marlon Brando with white hair comes in and starts to take charge.  The men with the wide jaws are always taking charge in all the best films, and when Brando is in charge of the butter, we are in very experienced hands indeed, and it's electric and visceral and gritty and it's just like goddam life, beautiful and ugly all at the same time. 

In real time, however, she is very upset, because she gets that way whenever she is beckoned from her sleep to participate in this same scene all over again, and I woke her up before there was enough butter to warrant waking her up, and it's not as confusing as it could be.  Because I know why she's mad.

"I'm mad because you keep wanting to relive this," is what she says.

"That's not true, it's not true at all," I say, and I am a liar.

"Then why am I here again?" she says.

"Because I don't know who you are," I say.  "Because I miss you," I say.  "I don't like date pancakes, and I never will, and the idea of a butter bar isn't exciting to me.  I've always liked real butter, all on its own, and at the end of the day, that's all you were and all you'll ever be to me.  Real butter.  You don't need anything else.  But I don't know who you are, and I have no idea where you went, and I am still looking for you, and quizas quizas quizas..."  I trail off, because it drives her crazy when I don't finish my thoughts.

Only it doesn't drive her crazy, she is already not paying any more attention to me.  She is texting someone here at the table, in front of the pancake and everybody, and it's cruel and absurd, and I get terribly angry about all of this. 

I am afraid suddenly that her texting at the table will remind me of the time that woman was texting that cruel little man from the hotel room, in front of him and he pretended he didn't know but he did and that makes her a little dim but I am not bitter, and suddenly I am afraid that every time someone texts anyone from now on, I will feel threatened, and get so unreasonably angry, that I might say angry things, things like, "Please don't text while my tongue is on your heart."  And that will cause no end of trouble. 

She is texting and I am trying not to relive this part of things, but it's too late, I am already stuck here, stuck with the version of her that got so very tiring, the one who couldn't focus, or decide, so entirely unlike me who has a razor-sharp consciousness and never second-guesses.  Except to wonder what it would be like to pick up the threads of her and the threads of the thing that was me, and try to weave them together again, and see if the patterns had numbers that might be worth pursuing.  It would be easier if the idea of her were more stable, but the reality of her were not, because in the mind she becomes mixed into a very large and complicated one, where in the world she keeps breaking up into pieces of the whole, and the whole is the only thing that is worth pursuing and entirely impossible to hold, so much so that at the end of the day, there is only that thing that wants to want, a drumbeat that plays a very particular song, and that song was the one he heard, not for the first time, but it was a very clear time, when he heard it while there was a date pancake and a face of someone that he knew he would love for a very long time.

Fabric breaks open whenever there is a word like love trying to work its way to the front of the tongue, and fabric breaks in spectacular ways, always making room for other ways of covering and other fabrics, it is not jealous, nor greedy, nor gluttonous, broken fabric is the cream of the butter on the pancake of the world.  And in this moment I have never been so far from all the things I care about in the world, and never so close, because it's always blinking back, on the other side of a very thin cloth. 

(more cafe scene coming just you wait)


Wednesday, November 30, 2011

under the line (afterthought)

She, of course, was not who she thought he was.  For that matter, he was not even close to who he thought he was, and everyone is always wrong about all of these things in spectacularly misguided ways.  While he was meeting her in other forms, she was meeting him in other forms, and there were moments when he thought he had gone back in time to her, and times when he thought he had moved forward, and this is what sparked the idea that maybe we don't have to live in the fixed points of the present, but that these things happen simultaneously, and concurrently, and repeat (sometimes for the lessons, but more often than not for the force of the repetition that makes life resemble the drum, the drum of the tongue, the drum of the heart, the drum of the heart on the tongue).  And the trick was to learn how to stay in the present while traveling through time.  As if a life were an act of time-travel, based on repeated patterns and the moments of their recognition.  Like recognizing a matching scar on a lover's body.  This has happened before, and this will happen again, and the meanings of the rhythms will only become clear when the lovers go back to the beach and begin with a conversation about the cold night and the moon waiting underneath the clouds for someone to follow the clues.

the part beneath the line

And another season starts to wind itself into the ground, like it were returning to the center of the world, like the dwarves who are preparing, making careful gnawings on the walls of the world, because that time of reversals is very close, and they do tend to increase in chaotic occasional sporadic bursts on the way from here to there.  However.  It’s not for us to know why we are stuttering and the milk and the blood of another time keep running down the sides of our faces whenever we meet the new and perfect lover.  It’s not for us to know why there are more forces working toward nailing the chains into the wall by the wrists of the living, and why there are fewer and fewer with each passing generation who are willing to speak on behalf of the living.  Fucking phantoms all of them, living a life already in the grave, as if these things were already decided.  Not for me to understand why the living are acting out their version of what they think is death, perhaps capturing something to make it still, a cat playing with a mouse on the edges of the waves of history, and history is always at the center of things.  It’s not for us to know why she can’t wake up, or why she can’t go back to sleep.

This is the exact kind of morning, though, where it’s apparent that there is something about to begin, and if I were in my right mind I would do what I can to warn the living that it can’t be for the best, not in the way that anyone can conceive it, and for those who understand that the underside of things is where the diseases start to grow, and where things begin to decay, and where things are cut away down to the bone, to that point where we are all on the verge of death or birth, that’s when and where the dividing line between the best and the worst makes itself terribly clear, and the dice falls always to one side and not another, but it falls because it is pulled, that is to say, gravity has everything to do with it, and we have moved through time and space to make things fall the way they fall, not that we control gravity, but we affect it. 

Enough so that. 

The verge between this kind of birth and this kind of death is always approached at the same speed as any other verge, and I don’t know if I can speak so clearly about approaching verges, not here, not like this, not with all these people watching. 

Enough so. 

That the things we do in the morning have threads that repeat in the evening.  It’s reaping and sowing, and the lesson is not necessarily one of karma, but more like: you just fucking watch yourself all right.

On this verge between seasons, between creeping and stowing, the insides of all of our jackets are lined with needles, and the blood on our chins is not appropriate for public places.  And it’s at this verge that history herself does become visible, that gray cat made of dust that you see out of the corner of your eye whenever you are in a particular shade of grieving, history is visible, and this is that time of year.

I would give more than these teeth and this marrow to love her again for the space of an afternoon, but here is where I have to remember something entirely important, that is, history is that kind of lover who always has a razor inside her mouth, and stands at the edges of the playground with large eyes that shine like a baby animal, and she shakes like a baby animal, the kind of cold that only the oldest bones know, and she makes you want to hold her and make her feel safe, but before you get there, there is other work to be done.  And the worst of it for her is that every time something starts to turn the insides of her locks upside down, that shining point of slipperiness where one decides to slide down into the world of the senses and surrender to the falling, that’s the very same point when the blood comes trickling down the sides of her mouth.  At that point everyone in the room understands that it is much too late to apologize.  And that this last earthquake has only just started, and the waves that are lining up for the shore are doing so in successively darker shades of red. 

So while on the one hand I understand that it is  kind of comfort and assurance to the living to say kindly things like, “The small things, they don’t really matter,” in truth, they really fucking do matter, and it’s much heavier than that, and entirely worse than anyone could imagine.  At the end of the day, when those men who lived their lives in suits and are now dying so all alone because they behaved like total bastards every day of their existences, when they look upon the one or two people who can still stand to be in the same room with them, and say, with one of their wasted and dying breaths, “I didn’t sweat the small stuff,” that is the very moment when the dead ones come laughing.

For two reasons:  one because their concerns were terribly petty and two because they even missed out on the details there.

It’s not necessarily necessary then to point out that most of the time spent living is an engagement with missed opportunities.  God is in the details, and the small stuff is worth sweating over.

That’s entirely neither there nor here nor anywhere, so beware, while I am entirely morose and loose enough to speak a little too freely this morning, there are entirely important developments, and it’s entirely essential to pay close attention to how and why things are starting to unfold in unfortunate directions. 

Because the story is always a love story, and there’s never any way out of that (hold on for just a moment, because that needs a qualifier, but not an excessive one, any story that is told from the other side of the grass is romantic at its roots)  ((keep in mind, further, that because of my unique position, I can eat the roots whenever I want, so I may not entirely respect the genre, and no one should unless they are trained to be that fucking stupid)  (((I am not unique, only as unique as you, but there will never be another one like you until the end of the world when the dwarf who is your double takes your place, so you just fucking watch yourself))).

All right.

The heart is a drum and the tongue is a drum, and this is a perfect morning for playing on her heart with his tongue, but it’s much too far from that kind of season.  He didn’t expect it nearly so keenly that he would wake up again so very unserenely, where that copper witch seemed as if she were kissing him from the other side of his eyes, from inside his head, like she had worked her way inside his head, and the very terrible thing is that he knew he invited her, and he prayed that she would come.  He always prays and she always comes but neither of them are awake enough to recognize that this is the way things are happening.  It’s often enough that when he thinks of her and she thinks of him there are riptides that make the waves flutter in ways that no one could have ever suspected, and the world turns on an entirely different kind of axis.  Nothing as bold as love, but another kind of lover altogether, this being the dividing line where anything might pop through the surface.  It’s never wrong to hold the tongue (except for when it is absolutely time to play it like a drum, and that time should be clear to anyone with a notion for the motion beneath the belt) and let the moment come and settle, and this is what he’s done, for so long now that his small apartment is entirely flooded over with still water that’s much too cold to live in.

He has been taking to sleeping on a rubber mattress, then, like all people might do when they are living after a flood, and even though he is convinced he slept through it, he can remember very specific things about every scar that came from it.  It’s one of the peculiar things about this generation, having been trained to consider their narrative authority questionable at best.  Their experience denies their perceived unreliability, and very much like the generation they are nipping heels with before and after, it seems to be a part of a very elaborate plot to cheat them out of something valuable. 

Knowing that you’re right about something is a curse to every righteous generation, and wondering if you might be wrong about everything is the curse that’s given to their counterparts, and it does go back and forth every time, in the same, studied measure.  The generations bounce back and forth like a metronome, and although there are some who might think it is modulating, moving faster and faster each time until there is no difference between right and left and life and death, that is not the case at all, it is always the same exact speed and frequency each time, because we are living according to energetic forces that are very very old, and nothing humans can do can change the velocity of the waves.

Except.  Except except except.  The way he thinks about her, and the way she thinks about him.

The truest love the world has ever known has been that one between half-mortals, who do not recognize the forces in each other, and assume only half about the other.  That’s why this story works so well, because of the tension.  Or perhaps it’s better to say that this is why this story is about to work, because we are about to see the tension at play, and it will be so goddam beautiful that your heart will have broken long before your eyes have taken in the words such is the power of the story-telling at work here.  So.  This morning.  He wakes up and she is scraping the insides of his eyes with her imaginary tongue, she, the kind of witch who works long distances (though not always accurately), and she, she is wanting to make his windows clear so that he can see her, and when he wakes up she is the only thing he can think about, it’s his tongue on her heart, his breath on her sternum, he wakes up smelling the smells of her skin and his breath, something unique and impossible to replicate.

So he wakes up in love, and she is gone, and the elders in the land of the living are advising him not to be caught up in any kind of longing, but the youngsters who died before their time are advising him to just love the heart and the chest and the body and the soul of that woman already, even if she is far away, because that’s all there is, and it won’t kill you, necessarily, but it very well could do the opposite, and bring you to life, as if for the very first time in this waking shaking trembling world. 

Thursday, November 24, 2011

thanks for jumping

So this is the scene.  I'm being strapped into this harness thing and there is this teenage boy doing the strapping, and he's looking a little distracted, because, because for one thing I am a little taller than the last person he strapped into this.  I am also a little heavier, but not altogether too much heavier, because children eat a lot more these days in this part of the world, but that brings up the other because, and this is because I am not a kid.  My daughter is on the other side of the room, being strapped into a harness by another teenage boy, and we are about to go flying into the air.  I tell myself that I am doing this for her, so that we could be seeing each other jumping, and although that's nice, certainly nice, I know that I would be doing this anyway, because I cannot resist.

This isn't the first time I've been strapped in to something with my daughter recently.  It was less than a month ago when we were flying across a lot of space on these harnesses that are meant to keep you from falling to the ground because that's what gravity would like to do to you.  This time we're not flying across, though, we're jumping up and down, except jumping very high, as if we were out of reach of the usual laws of physics.  But just like last time, it's something that makes me very happy, as if this were something that I were missing.  On some days, it does feel like flying, but there's not enough real flight in it.  And on some days, there is this wish that I could be escaping from things.

They're not the usual things.  It's not because I need to claw my way out of a circumstance that's unbearable because of the distance that happens between lovers, and it's not because I am growing bored with doing the same things every day.  In truth, my days are all very different, and I am rarely wishing that I could be something else than in this body.  But there are so many things that I would like to change, just a small amount.

Like, the way we can't jump twenty feet in the air when we try.  Like, we can't cross through the rules of geography and time, and visit the ones that we miss the most, and bring back a souvenir from the journey (like a hotel napkin, or a flag from their country, or their smell on the inside of a shirt collar).  Like, we are not entirely immune to this decay thing that happens to everyone, it seems, and for some it moves faster than for others. 

I don't think this is where I see my daughter yet, entering into that river of time where the body decays, but it must be true in some small way.  Very recently I realized that I stopped thinking of her as a likely subject for a sequestration, where spies from the government come to take innocent children into their custody and try to barter for abstract concepts.  She is tall, tall enough to be visible from distances, and loud, loud enough to scream someone's ear to that point where it starts to ring a little bit, and wise, wise enough to know that there are always people around to help if things get uncomfortable.  So even though she is out of that, she must be into that phase that ends in something like adulthood, and there's a decay that comes with every stage, and more decay at the end, but this is still close to the beginning of the chapters that will make up the stories that make her life. 

There's an uneasy feeling I get, though, when she is flying in the air, and I see something on her face that looks like the same relief I feel, so it must be true, then, that sometimes she gets a little bit tired of all of this, in the same way we all do, but I didn't notice it on her before, so she must be changing.  I must be changing somehow too. 

I haven't wanted to freeze anything lately, not the way I used to.  Making this moment last or linger, they're just happening, and I'm participating, and there are things that I can do and things that I cannot do, and the days are rolling into each other like wolves fighting.  I see signs of things getting worse for some people I love, and some of the things I had hopes for, and I see things getting better for other things, and other people, and I would like to say that I'm just letting things happen, but it feels more like I am participating in the world while riding a motorcycle that is taking turns a little too fast.  My teeth are tight and my stomach is stretched back against the bones in my back, and the air tastes like metal, smoke, and blood.  Despite that, watching her jumping into the air is something like a perfect beautiful moment, and something about these moments with her are entirely perfect, and something about that tells me that I can pay attention to the blood in my veins and the wind in my lungs, because there are people aware of my movements, people who depend on what I do, and how I react to things.  And this moment is more important than any other, because this is the place where the dead speak to the living, and when we speak back, it starts to sound like those particular kinds of songs that can stop time.  Tonight, it's the perfect time for the living to stay on their side of the grass and the dead to occupy theirs, and wish that no one enters into the others' realm before it's time, and I'm holding my breath, because time rolls forward, and time comes to visit like gravity or death or the kind of friend who can hold you in the middle of the air with just a thought.  For just long enough to take a few deeper breaths, and let the magic that will be necessary sooner than later start to gather force between the heart and the rib, poised on the edge between falling and weightlessness.

Sunday, November 20, 2011

the operator of my pocket calculator

This is the third time this month that I've decided to start looking like an old man.  It never lasts long, as long as any teenage phase, but always as ridiculous.  For some moments, I am aware that I'm at least seven weeks shy of looking like the hermit in the cartoons, and that gives me a drive that I never felt before.  It always ends the same way, though.  I am at my parents' house visiting, and they're watching television, and we"re not sure whether we should talk or watch tv quietly, so we do both, only halfway, and as a result, we never really get to hear what they're saying on tv, and we never really make out what we might be telling each other.  Someone with an important voice says something about someone important, and one of them takes this as good news, and says, "Things are changing."

"Then why are the police spraying students in the face with pepper spray?" I say.

And it doesn't matter what happens next, because I feel like a dick in a beard, like an old and angry version of Mike from All in the Family, and I have to go home and shave.

So it's inside a head like that where I find myself excavating the bottom of the ocean.  That's where I go when the mystery of the other world seems to be hiding, because usually it's hiding somewhere here, and I can at the very least hide out with the mermaids until the world above gets their magic together. 

Tonight, everyone leaves me alone.  I'm not unfriendly to the things on the bottom of the sea, but I just don't feel like talking. 

"Why don't you feel like talking," she says.

"It's been kind of a dark time," I say, before I even see it's her. If I'd known it was her, I would have tried saying it with a little more grit to my melancholy, because to me that's a little more flirty, although no one else ever sees it that way.  "I didn't think, or I expected I would run into you here,"  I say.

"Which one?" she says.

"Whichever one is more interesting," I say, because I'm not in the mood to make any of these decisions. 

"I'm just looking for a poem," she says. "I didn't mean to interrupt anything.  You look very busy.  And, by the way, you don't look as old as you're trying to look, you need at least seven more weeks."

She always knows how to read me, and that's why I like it when she's in my world somewhere.  I can't hide, and down here, it's not much time before I can decide that I don't really want to hide, but I need more time to think about all these things.

"What poem are you looking for?" I say.  Not that I'd know.

"That one you wrote for me," she says.  "The one you always talk about."

This needs a little explanation.  On the bottom of the sea, there are places where all the things that we write to each other and never send are waiting.  The poem she is talking about, however, is lost as far as I know.  I see places around us where there are many, many unspoken things, and places where there are only short notes with a few words, or maybe a drawing of something good that we wanted to happen.  I try not to spend too much time here, but on some nights, that's all there is.  Tonight, I came down here because there was a sinking sadness that pulled me here, and I didn't want to think it had anything to do with her.  I haven't seen her in a long time.  I came here because I was noticing for the first time that this life is very short, and there are important and beautiful things that happen that have a way of slipping away too soon, so I was looking for something like an anchor I could use later, when I was awake again, and the world was green and blue again, and the magicians were back to work after the holiday.

But she caught me.  Because this is also the place I go to write new poems, and they're not always about her, but she's always somewhere in them, because since I met her I can't put anything into the mouths of sirens that don't have some piece that reflects her.  I'm still not convinced that I came down here to think about her, but she appeared, so I have to take this as something that someone had planned.

"I didn't come down here to see you," she says.  "Don't get any ideas."

"I'm not here to see you, either," I say, because it sounds like it might sound good, even if it's petty, and especially even if by now it's no longer really true.

"You did something new to your tongue," I say.  Because it's only polite to make conversation with people around you.

"You noticed," she says, and when she opens her mouth, there are a thousand worlds that come spilling out.  They all have sounds from a thousand inner voyages, and I can see figures in there that I don't recognize, and a thousand signs of things that I don't understand. 

"It's a very pretty tongue," I say, and that's a little too much, especially considering how much time has passed, and so I start to look for the poem, because it's easier than doing anything else at the moment.  There's a space close by, the spot where we first met each other down here, and it has some of the colors and sounds of falling in love, but I don't want to step there, because if I step there with her, then she might see all my footprints, and she might know that I've spent more nights than I want to admit visiting that spot.  So we're looking. We're both looking, and it's almost nice, because it almost feels like something is happening, and when I turn over a stone, I find a stash of papers with my name written on some of them.

"I don't know who wrote this," I say.

"I wrote those," she says, "and I keep writing those.  I don't know what I'm supposed to do with them."

Tonight, the mermaids know something we don't, and have better ways of dealing with things than we can ever know, and I'm tired of the world up there, and just want to spend more time sleeping, so I can be here, where so many shadows come and go, where there is always a rumbling in the veins, and I don't know if it comes from something that happened a long time ago, or if it's something that's going to happen, and here it's just impossible to know, because the usual rules of time don't apply.  But for some reason, this is the night where I stopped missing the home I never had.  


MANIFESTO OF CROSSED ONTOLOGIES Everybody (and by everybody I don ’ t mean everybody I think I mean one person, and I mean you, in par...