Month: November 2016

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Sleep, Lover Lies


You sleep with your mind awake.

I see you twitch and worry as I 

Lie inside your watching, along.

 

Your body tells your story, the 

One about anxious defenses, and

Hilly motoric reflex, fortress wall.

 

A rage induced, childhood fascists,

A jealous brother usurping control,

Lorded over a boyhood’s landscape.

 

And the son who became the man, 

Who took fury to the world, coated

Like enamel, wolfish covetousness.

 

Stuff it all, beers and candy, yearn

To a carefree kid, the promised life

Of firstborn fortune, fiefs forever.

 

Lost, love, in stifled cries un-yelled

Swallow in dragon-ful dreamscapes 

Yawn fire through loins and islands.

 

Bleed worlds inside a wall-safe, keep

Cupped palm close a vampire’d lust.

Despise the rest as marauding cheats.

 

Still I watch, tender-horrified aghast,

Thumb to forefinger circle poked hate

Necessity, wrench-tightens hope-bolt.

 

Awaken yet, chestnut eye transcribes

Silence to story and mawkish, stolen

Laments death, sleep and secrets bare.

 

Sleeping with the enemy, I gaze, boring 

Holes in the skull’s soft, vulnerable hind

Sight, believe too in my own enemy-love.

 

Lovers-valentine-lying: pixabay

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Ten for Today: From Coffee to Beer Life Goes On


A bar. One of a few I frequent to write and imbibe heading into happy hour. During the day I wrote in a Vietnamese gluten-free, vegan make your own design of a meal restaurant around the corner. The owner is friendly and generous. He often gives me a free gluten free basil and chili home baked cookie or a piping hot freshly roasted slice of Kabocha squash, like he did today. I write there for hours, sipping a caffeine-loaded Vietnamese iced coffee, the one with loads of ice and condensed milk to offset the deep, strong coffee shots. He tells me about his mysteriously buckling knee for which no MRI nor doctor can discover let alone cure the ailment.

I wrote about well-being, connection, and compassion in companies–and got paid for it. I actually got paid to write something I believe in, a refreshing change from the usual 20 ways or things listicles that make me want to rip my eyeballs out of their sockets and drop them on the ice of my Vietnamese coffee. But it’s work. I can’t complain too much. Any day writing is better than a day slinging hash or practicing law for that matter. 

And yet, the procrastination…why? It makes my job so much more difficult. I have no real patience for ease, I’m surmising. 

But today at the corner bar, called The Corner, I sat on a stool and wrote my Nanowrimo tortured piece. It’s supposed to be a novel, but it’s a piece of shit, some sort of mosaic of events and dialogue and scenes that make no sense, have no order. It’s worse than last year, which at least had a thread if not grace and a point. This year’s is more than pointless. It’s almost a waste of time unless I can pull something out of it, some conclusion, reflection or resolution of what the hell happened to the world, my world among the larger world.

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Stench Of Discontent


The noise keeps me awake, 

And the static on the TV 

I don’t know how to turn on 

Let alone turn off.

 
The vibrations trip me up,

Topple me as I walk and think,

Make my knuckles swell,

Ache to type the arthritic words.

 
There’s more too, like the faces,

Eyes wrung in red rashes,

Stench like piss and rum from

Dirty denim and leaky shoes.

 
Don’t sit in my breathing space;

You’re money’s no good here.

Turn up the air and open the door.

Nod off your head twisted neck, go.
 

And I cringe and shake in despair,

Fight off the crusts of anger flung

Face off in my corner here, where?

The door, the door, where’s the door?

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Revolution: Ten for Today

Millions will march and fight for freedom, from oppression, from patriarchy, one million women march. I will bring my daughters, and they will know what sacrifice they must make for freedom in this country. Or they will prepare to move out of the country. 

Fight or flight, isn’t that the way of things? After the election, my first instinct was flight. That’s often my way. I never really flee physically, but I leave mentally. I thought about getting my children out of here, college in Canada or France. Thank God for duel citizenship. Just make them grow in a place where women are not objects of hate and self-loathing. Give them promise.

But for me, well, I could close the blinds, darken the room, better to light up my screen to make the words burn into my eyes. Make every word count. Quit my outside job, so I can hole up and never see them, those who ain’t woke, as my daughter would say.

She, one of my two woke daughters, likes San Francisco as a college choice. She wants to be with like-minded folks. We are a bastion of expansive values: free love, not your father’s love, expansion not contraction, possibility not improbability. They would have us roped and tethered to their poles.

I grew up in the shadows of revolution. Missed the big love by a half decade or so. But I have inherited the capital of my foremothers, my powerful free-lovers and Black Power fist pumpers. When love and revolution permeated culture by necessity, a newly emerging consciousness that the status quo needed cracking open–wide. Let the dragons loose.

So many false starts with the Bernie revolution and the 99%’ers before him. So many apathetic revolts that you could hardly classify them as disturbances, more like gastric distress. But the country has turned to the darkness of dictatorial capitalism and extremism. The pussy puppet believes he runs a show. Reality tv via the White House.

And we joke and rage and prod each other with vitriol still. The attacks and protests, where will they collide and start the conflagration. I’ve got my gas can ready. 

Image: tanya-cuba-kgb-revolution (pixabay)

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I am

I am. 

Soh hahm.

Not affirmation.

Confirmation.

Truth.

I shed my skin slowly.

Infinitely slow.

But I discard it nevertheless.

For it serves no longer any purpose.

I change my clothes.

And no one sees me new.

Yet I emerge from the dressing door clothed.

Different shoes than when I went in.

Eternal womb.

Pixabay: butterfly

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Nanowrimo: Day 3

pixabay house

The U.S. Financial Crisis Commission determined the causes of The Great Recession of 2007 and afterward were as follows:

The U.S. Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission reported its findings in January 2011. It concluded that “the crisis was avoidable and was caused by: Widespread failures in financial regulation, including the Federal Reserve’s failure to stem the tide of toxic mortgages; Dramatic breakdowns in corporate governance including too many financial firms acting recklessly and taking on too much risk; An explosive mix of excessive borrowing and risk by households and Wall Street that put the financial system on a collision course with crisis; Key policy makers ill prepared for the crisis, lacking a full understanding of the financial system they oversaw; and systemic breaches in accountability and ethics at all levels.”

Money thugs everywhere like cats breathlessly pouncing on a field full of mice. No regulation, no one watching or understanding what was going on or turning a blind eye, while the wolves salivated and prospered. The huge money grab ended in 2008 officially with the real estate market plummeting and foreclosures skyrocketing.

My 45 year old house was worth over a million dollars in 2006 and by 2008, was worth closer to $450,000.00. Nothing made sense in the seething overground of financial shenanigans and thievery. But at home, there was just us: the kids and me. Frank worked.

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Nonowrimo: Day 2


(Image: Penguin Books)

Betty Friedan wrote The Feminine Mystique in 1963, three years after I was born. The Second Wave of Feminism she helped launch was already under way as my mind was also beginning to take shape. Without a word of hers ingested, I ate her intent, had it coursing through my veins like red blood cells. It produced the iron with which I withstood the world of feminine assault and violent backlash.
 
Women weren’t violent, but the disgust, outrage and horror of becoming aware what men thought of us, the powerlessness to become, to be seen and to be in-possessed razored some hearts, did violence to their peace and potential.

I never read Friedan, not at 12 or 15 or any age. While absorbing home life and culture, I hid. I read. I went away to more frightening places, like Mordor, the harrowing innards of Siddhartha, and the outer limits of my own consciousness. I recreated on a daily diet of pot with occasional leaps into the color zones inside acid, speed and barbiturates. Occasionally. I feared losing my grip more than craved the outer limits of sanity. 

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Nanowrimo Day 1

I was 2 when Kennedy was assassinated. Did I sense the country’s overwhelming grief and fear? Did it stick to my tiny ribs and embed itself inside a pocket of my little brain? We are all vibrations, vibrating strings, emanating frequencies and dust. How could I escape the world that seeped inside my cells?

I couldn’t.

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