"My mistress' eyes are nothing…"
She wrapped me in her quilted smile,
then torched the salty fabric of us, tear stained and aching.
She knees cruel in the balls.
And I love her that way just the same.
She hangs me up to dry,
then cuts me down for air.
The breathing windows of us,
pulsating walls setting chairs rocking, us inside,
lulled in four-arm sleep.
I took a lover once; he sewed me to his spine,
Neither round his girth, nor over his shoulder
Could I see the world he traveled far from me.
His sacred numbers blessed our holy hands,
One cradling his mane, the other locking mine.
Back then…
Lovers and landlords favored rent over poetry,
I, never the sort to drift far, the lair’s lure strong,
Offering dusty shadows beamed in dirty panes,
True love writ on a paw or whisker, soft-shuffled,
Whence the divan bearing swans sunk infinitely.
Image source:
While the pic axe shrinks to an ice pic in my shoulder,
My eyeballs swell to beefsteak tomatoes, plumped tight
Pressuring the sockets to give way or tear up and split.
I’ve tapped as many keys as there are doors in this planet.
Day is done. Pace myself. Leave some pages for tomorrow.
Time to puff a two, loosen my belt and lose the jeans, bra
And throw on a tee-shirt. I’ll keep the panties but not these;
They strangle the creases to dead circulation in my thighs.
I’ve gained weight, and they’ve shrunk. They’re sentimental.
She gave them to me with a gleeful glint, when we were a
Thing. A present. I think it was my birthday or may be just
Because. She loved me then, and maybe she still does.
We’re a distant fragrance of passing perfume in a coat;
It’s winter and the cinnamon leaves crackled and died off.
image source/pixabay
Lunch again. 1:30 pm martinis. For her. My work day doesn’t end until the last word typed before my eyes close. A bit dramatic, yet still, lavender double shot espresso blended iced latte for me. Yeah, I’m needing something lavender. From decay grows the lotus.
“My fantasies were filled with faceless men. No, actually the same man, I think. He never had a face, like any man of your fantasy fill-in. He was the kind of addictive cruel, one part sadist, one part devourer–obsessive and possessive. You know?”
“I know.”
“Any way, I always used him to start me off…like my go-to Playboy centerfold. A pre-pubescent boy’s wrinkled up centerfold he hides under his mattress to jerk off to when the folks are gone. I embarrassed myself with such a cliche fantasy: the cruel lover who made me do things. You know?”
I didn’t want to know. Not on an iced latte. I’d have to switch to martinis. I nodded.
“A writer should be able to masturbate to something less classic, more creative than a faceless fantasy fascist.”
“In your defense, you write feature stories not erotica.”
“Yeah, well…Johnny Depp, even as jackass pirate shows a little more imagination–and taste…
But then after a few years with Vincent, it hit me. The faceless fascist disappeared. And you know what an obsessive-possessive nut job he turned out to be.”
“So, you’re saying you manifested Vincent? What’s the moral of the story here? Was he really that demanding? Or commanding? Or I should say, commandant. Did he totally control your mind and body, violently, if necessary? Maybe just a little bdsm?”
“Yes, all of it. He wasn’t violent. I wouldn’t have stayed. He just…just…I don’t know…owned me. Subtlety. In inches. He crept up on me, and before I knew it, I was not going out with friends, and cutting down my hours at my job, and worrying if someone stopped by to visit and stayed too long, when Vincent would come home and wince at the sight of anyone ‘intruding.’ Well, you know. You called it my ‘leave of absence from myself.’ And it was. But he’s gone, and so are the faceless fascist fantasies. Now I slap a face on my imaginary friends. Like that checker at the food mart. He’s adorable.”
We laughed.
I reflected a second in between chuckles. Some fantasies are fantasies so long as there’s little possibility that they become real. In fact, the more far-fetched, the sexier, more enticing. But when fantasy becomes reality, the thrill is gone. At least I doubt women (or men) slapped faces of Stalin, Mussolini, or Hitler on their fantasy men. But I can’t be sure.
I couldn’t say I’ve ever come across a true love or ever will. I’ve had great love. I’ve had potentially tru-er love–but for the right person showing up under the wrong circumstances or vice versa. At least how I imagine the right person. How could I know without a long, leisurely test drive?
But true love is truly a cultural marketing scam. And it’s not for mere cynicism that I write that. I’ve no complaints about the loving in my life–all shades and degrees of it. I’ve slid in and out of love’s grasp by choice and force both. Yet, true love seems to have eluded me only because it’s been beamed into my brain by invisible designs since birth–without explanation.
Like waking up every day, there’s an impulse to arise and act, get the day started even when you don’t want to or know why you do. We just live as if there’s no choice, most of us. It’s incredibly difficult to kill a healthy human being, more than you’d think. That same blind instinct–get up and live–impels us to find true love without even knowing what the fuck that is.
No one believes Disney, so I’m not referring to that conception–princes and princesses and shit. Chemistry, kindred souls, soulmates, and other hollow terms language has fed us to conceive of the truth in true love make little sense. Like it must be fate. In myth and religion, there is an element of the divine in all truth, in language itself–in the beginning, there was the word.
And yet, all children are indoctrinated in the one true love story, even as they grow up to see the truth in that lie. It lies like death everywhere, not just in movies or television or books. It permeates culture like a dream or a virus, thinly veiled and ever present–potentially lethal.
December 31, 2016
“Write for one reader.” I heard that in a movie. Have a face, a personality, a height, even, but only one, so you can craft your story with a voice directed to someone with a voice too, in a conversation about what you two shared–or never shared.
So here goes:
I couldn’t write about a pure love. There have been many loves. All special loves. I think he insisted I watch this movie (plugged in the headphones, handed them to me, and loaded the movie to the rectangular screen inserted into the back of the seat in front of me) because there are loves that beam a hole in your brain and others in your heart. There is love of the right thing, doing the right thing, even if it is wrong for a part of you, wrong for some wild, abandoned adventure that you’ll never take. The purity lies in never going there. That love is an idea.
Ideas are clean, laser light, perfect, not messy like hunger, sex or anguish. Love as idea. Those abandoned are the purest because they are never lived. Those less glamorous, the responsible kind, the right kind, have their own line of righteous good, a purity of sorts, but not like a diamond (more a ruby). Those are reserved for the love so sublime but impossible.
If I write to you, will you understand? I think we both know how cut-painful words read starkly on a page. But it will bleed us pure. And that’s what you mean when you say you’ll love me to the day you die, visions that will run through your great fantasy-loving, movie mind when you’re rocking grey-silent inside, peering absently through a dirty window obscuring the winter dance of dusk-lit, flaming trees.
And it’s sacred and raw because it’s not messy, not calloused in boredom, sadness, anger, irritation and hate. Fragile love with a tough hide. We carry each other in a deeper pocket. I know you believe. I believe too.
The question never answered, I believe that too. Suspension, free floating purity, I can’t write that.
I’m leaving you soon, a matter of hours,
And before I do, I want you to know that I don’t leave without trepidation.
I’m not one to walk out.
Stand and face–even when the blackest eyes pierce my throat–
That’s been my method, fearless.
No doubt I’m getting older, less reliant on speed and jaw.
Yet, my resolve stands taller, wider, less compromised
By shaky passion and toppling ardor.
I know what’s right for me and mine.
Perhaps the children have made it so, the will,
The mighty outrage and outpour of righteous indignation,
It’s no mere whim or fashion.
I have roots, here in this land, on the soil of my mother.
But they grow wherever my feet touch down,
When blossom and wither beach.
My return, though certain, may not be.
I once traveled far, jungled inside, canopied under
The emergent layer that cocooned and cut me, culled flight.
And I never returned, even as surely as my sandals scraped sand,
The water’s edge of me, the tidal flow of drifting ear deep in water,
Listening to Gods and men groan secrets unheard.
I left then, returned, leaving my image behind me, left to howlers,
Lemurs, quetzals and Monteverde capuchin, who held my breath
In their seams, and still do.
I never came back, and now it’s winter, the summer of then passed,
To retrieve the lost faces, shed skin, the chameleon dreamed,
I’ll need to travel far from you, leave your bigotry and bile.
And when my body drifts inside again, your walls, your fever,
Only vespers’ dusk and smokey dawn, crust of the ague, remains
That travel torn, release us from hate’s grip, my form and fold united.
I will be new, and you will too, when I slip once more inside your border,
Hear the errant’s disbelieving, horrified roar, the be-trodden masses.
I’ll be ready then, to stand erect, balanced, both arms ready.
I hope to say farewell to closed palms, only to be welcomed
In a week or lifetime or two, to open gates, walkways to settle-in wicker
Chairs to my rest, porch to our swings, quieted storms’ memory.
I want you, my beloved, healed and hallowed, churched Christly,
Only the love, only the forgiveness, only the compassion, only the humble,
To fight, to triumph’s return, you, my lover, once more mi patria–free.
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
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)
My skin flicks daggers when they box me in, droves of rolling wind-shielded, multi-tasking dryvexters, head bowed, praying to the light of their battery’d gods.
Then those days of aromas, perfumes and incense, like silken smokey kisses, nibblers at my tongue and ear, lean heavy, move me, like longing in a store front window.
Our emanations, I believe, send some forest denizen half way round the world toppling hoof over antler, for the sheer shot-stream blast crumpling poise and balance.
Imagine anger and love, thrust to the sky, cannoned from skulls, like New Year’s pistols shot to heaven on midnight’s stroke, only to meet drop-down death in upturned eyes.
And so I say to fresh-plucked sprigs of another’s birthing, my charges today, “Be careful of how you speak, your intentions, jealousy and greed, for they bite hard from behind.”
In the gaze of the other 