My dad

My dad died at 745 this morning (Wednesday, 5 of September). Since Monday, we've been sitting with him and waiting.  It finally happened when it was just my mom and my uncle Jerry and my mom's best friend, Ginny. I wasn't there. I wasn't supposed to be there when it happened.  I think he wanted it to be just between him and my mom at the end.

When I walked into the room, I threw myself on him and kissed him everywhere and cried a lot.  

We all express things differently, and I don't know if it matters too much what we do, as long as we're there. When we're there, the energy goes where it is supposed to go, and our small actions don't add or subtract from that energy at all.

I have been thinking about this more and more lately, that these things, or maybe even most things, are guided by an energy that we think is large, but it's larger than we could ever imagine.  And it guides us to do what we are supposed to do.  And plugging in, knowing secrets, and being connected, those things only make it easier to find our own flow within the cycle. But the cycle will go on with or without us, and we're not particularly special, just lucky. 

There was this moment, where my mom was lying over the bed, with her arms around my dad, holding him.  And Heather, the woman I fell in love with in an hour before I went to Berlin, was holding me.  She looked at my mom and my mom looked at her.  She says my mom looked straight into her eyes.

A recognition.  

This thing that happened to me when I met this man, more than fifty years ago, I see it happening to you too.

I can't imagine life being as beautiful as it is. 

I just can't imagine.  

something shiny and new

i haven't written here in so long, i've been writing, but not to you, i've been writing to someone who has been reading what i've been writing and it's just for them.  it's nothing personal against you, it's just how these things happen.  but i want to mark this, this is the last night in this house, the place i lived for a year, and getting ready to move to a new house (one i used to live in a long time ago), and it all feels a little strange.
there are things going on that are making my heart hurt, things i've talked about a lot before, but now they are much more terrible, and all of it will be well and is well and has always been well, but it's going to be a rough time ahead.
there are things going on that are making my heart swell, it's too big for my chest to hold, and if you ask her she would tell you the same story.
and i think i might get a dog, but that doesn't have anything to do with her, except that she'll be around the dog a lot, i think and hope, because she'll be around a lot, and this is why i'm so happy lately, and also why i'm walking with this unbearable grief lately in a way that makes it bearable.
things are being re-arranged, all the male roles have to be reconstructed, i have to learn how to be this thing that i am, but differently than the generations that did it before (and also, exactly the same as they did it before, because repetitions are sometimes part of something larger, and i am born into this world to be a part of that, too).
we get to be the thing that represents our pattern in the fabric, and we are also the thing that makes rips in the fabric for the next generation to jump through.
and love makes us fearless enough to be all of these things at once.
i'm not telling you anything secret, and not telling you anything new.  i miss writing you, but i don't miss that feeling of being lost without a map.  even though i don't know where we are going, and don't have any idea about the destination, the map is on the body, and the marks on my body are made right here, and right now, and this is where i get to live, and it's so nice to see you here, too.  

love/ephemera

installation performance love ephemera
dont forget this

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.  

Nearly as I can reckon

Time is short and all of the work that lies in front of me, papers and videos and planning flats, things I like.  And there are obligations to follow through and I like those too because I love the people involved. And I love the heat of this place when it explodes and I don't know why this is not a volcano. It should be a volcano. And on a night like this when my bones are crackling with marrow that flows but will not crack, there are a hundred unfinished stories of desire spread out on my bed, and nothing has to happen to someone who is so in between. 

In the hostel of liminal travelers, we hardly make eye contact, because we don't want anything impossible to start, because those are the very things that brought us here in the first place.  But when we do connect through the eye, and that silver thread (or gold, it might be gilt, I don't remember), we tell ourselves, we tell each other, no, we're doing things different this time, we decided for ourselves this time we would be different.  And there would be no exceptions. 

So I ask myself why, when it's not even midnight, or it's that time of the morning when the cups and papers are piling themselves on us and getting us heavy enough to leave, before it gets any heavier, I ask myself why I am lighting a yellow candle and asking Her to pay special attention to This One, to bring her closer, because I want to find out things before I have to leave.  

And I tell myself it's just because she reminded me of someone I lost, and I'm just visiting another ghost again, and this is nothing different or new, when I really suspect that this is not the same thing at all.  Despite so much glitter turning out to be nothing more than glitter, there's a suspicion this might not be that, just because it's something I don't want right now.  

The night is not too long, and the heat of the day does not make me shiver later in the dark, because I don't sleep, because I am humbled before these tasks at hand, and there is just enough time, but nothing extra.  So I ask myself why I am asking the manager for an extra pillow, an extra towel, and sleep lightly just in case she comes in with the sea monsters when they enter in between the cracks of one day and the next. 

And I keep thinking about these openings in liminal spaces, the pupil that opens wider when you see someone you think you might want to love, and that space between the muscles on the chest, when the sweat of the day is something you wished did not belong to only you.  And I keep saying things to myself, you, you, you, and wonder if you might be listening, listening to this small and futile prayer, the one that says, I'm not ready for something like this, but tonight there is room for you in between all these spaces.

Under the river

I don't think it was my intention (I don't do things without intention) to close the circle (you can't close a circle all the way something always slips in or out) between that thing (it was a series, or a cycle) and this next thing, this next unknowable thing (you always know some things), but when I walked back in to my empty room, I saw that I was clean and all of that was done and I would miss some of it and I wouldn't remember some of it and that was that.  There was this new thing (there's always a new thing) and I knew it was something that I wanted very much.  That it was something that would happen, something that I wanted to happen very much, but it might not happen in any expected order.  And that it would happen in a way that was like a blip on a radar, with nothing about it getting in the way of these next things, or it would happen in a way that would interrupt everything and turn everything upside down, and either one would be all right, but that wasn't important.  Because what was going to be important already started, that I was at the end of the tunnel and almost out, but I turned my head, and I don't know if its backwards or forwards or if that matters.  These things matter if we are turned sideways and I was sideways, and thinking already about how I would be awake and spending time looking at your pictures and just wondering about all of this (even though it has a very short history). And that was just the distraction I needed to avoid looking at the things that had been laid on the ground in my empty room, and I did not notice that there were spirits flying through the air wondering why I was not praying to the moon, but they don't know it yet, and you don't know it yet, but I am always praying to the moon, only now it's close enough that I can hear her answering back, and she is already saying your name, before I can even open my mouth. 

My big fingers

My eyes are too tired to see anything new, and my heart is a story that I tell to anyone, but it's too far into a different kind of chapter to be playing or hearing any gypsy music, but.  If we find ourselves walking past street names we can't pronounce, and the roaring of the canal is closer than we ever imagined, and you told me the story of your grandparents meeting in France, speaking my first language and second language better than me, I would have no choice but to fall in love with you.