Tremble

The plane rumbles and my lip is trembling and I wonder why and the wheels leave the ground and my eyes are wet and I can't keep my lip from trembling, there are three people I can see in my head, a father, a daughter, and someone I just started to think about yesterday.

not yet

out the door, these things...3 advices...
sue--put magic in the normal (about my writing), go where the fear is, go where you haven't got a clue, your metaphors are easy habits for you...
steve--the only thing that matters at all, that makes any difference at all, is what we think about ourselves...
dad--the bottom line, make sure you have fun...
x

everything else

if i were going to try to tell you everything at once, it would still be just like that, just like how we are talking, except it would be faster, and except you would hear slips of the tongue that lead places where nothing is supposed to fit, but everything would fit there.  if i were to let everything spill, it would fall in so many directions that there wouldn't be enough flowers to cover over the stains that it would leave on the counter.  but i would try.  i would gather flowers and place them on the counter, in the shape of your body, because i want to cover your body in flowers.  if i ran out of metaphors, the world would open up (like a clam) and there would be that nervous moment in between things, in between flowers falling from our mouths (because in this scene you are saying everything at once as well, of course) and that moment that marks the beginning of solid, shivering, naked things, things that fall out of my mouth onto my chin.  and i would tell you a list of all the "i want to's" and it would begin with "turn you inside out" but that would be wrong.  and it would end with something very close to "i want to put my mouth here, and i want to just wait and see what is going to happen after that."  as if i didn't know.  because i don't know.  because this isn't written anywhere just yet.  and there would be some moments where i would stop doing anything and start to say something, something like, "there were these two worlds and one was leaving and one was coming, and you slipped in between the cracks," but before i could get two words out you would interrupt me and tell me to stop.  and i wouldn't understand why.  i wouldn't understand why i was supposed to stop.  because i would think that i was about to say something important.  something that was more important than what you wanted to interrupt me with.  i wouldn't understand.  because i'm really that stupid.  but then you would convince me.  i think you would convince me.  i think you could convince me to stop.  because there's something in you that hasn't happened before, something that tells me that if i could start by telling you everything at once, everything that happens after that will be things that have never happened before, where no one's been before, and there wouldn't be any stencils to show us where to draw, and there wouldn't be any guides to tell us the way, and there wouldn't be anything on earth that could stop it from happening to us.  

here's a whole play

this is the whole thing.  you can't see the ritual bits because they are in the dark.  the moments when you see dark were when we were all getting possessed by spirits of the dead, moving furniture with our minds, and teaching audience members how to naturally release the opiates in your brain so that you hallucinate, and how to attract sexual partners within 13 minutes.  secrets!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZ0UcegRs2M&feature=c4-overview&list=UUrWDq4gTEeHq7XK13kni3BA

In between lines

Not here nor there, in this land of mothers of an old ghost of an ocean, in that place where my fathers were born, already missing this father, and saying goodbye to the father I am, every piece of cloth on the floor of my crowded room is something that a father used to wear, and nothing that any of us need any more. We all get older, but even ghosts change their minds about the right way to be in the world. These clothes are complicated texts.  

This thread is a line to connect me to the place I was, and I have a means of drawing myself back to the images of all the people I used to be.  My favorite company has always been in the company of exiles, even though I have a home I can point to, and even a house where I grew up discovering that the sight of a woman in tattered clothes could drive me mad as a dog on a night with fireworks.  I have traces of first dates somewhere in a drawer that I'm afraid to mark, just in case I die unexpectedly and my loved ones might find it, and scratch their heads and wonder why I kept such strange souvenirs.

A blue earring, a tag from a pair of underwear, a vial of perfume, and a concert ticket that's curved with sweat. Ones I met when I was in between one thing and another.

If I didn't keep these objects close, I would write about them obsessively, trying to capture them as if my pen could be a decent camera.  What I lack in discretion however I make up in metaphor.  This one thing can stand for a whole I can't put into words.  And the most touching things are the ones I don't even try to capture, they move to extreme close up as soon as I think of the perfect first word, and by then I've forgotten the word.

This is no time for new objects to puzzle over, and after sleeping alone for the better part of a year, I can tell this was the right decision.  Between here and there, you're better off traveling light, with very little that can be lost, and nothing that can't be replaced.  Except.  Except.  Except.