Against Erasure - Fiction

The following is a response to the novella The Fifth Child by Doris Lessing.
---
On the third night my daughter snuck out I rearranged her room. She would know when she fell hard back thru the window where the bed should be and I wouldn't say a thing and the next morning I'd make sure she had something nice to eat. She would think she was being smart by bringing it up and then I would turn on her, slowly. My eyes getting big and I would say- well something is probably missing. You should check all of your things carefully so that nothing else dissappears.

And the missing thing would go unnoticed for awhile because it would be something she didn't use very often. But maybe she would see a woman in a coffee shop with a gold bracelet and know it was hers once. Something she wanted back with raw desperation. Something I knew she shoplifted but I'd never said anything about either.
She'd know her mother's power then. And the variable environment of ownership...

The world of the city can be that small. Can teach lessons you didn't know you should learn until you did.

I did it when I was a girl. Shoplifting and smoking and eating cock. But my parents were stupid. They were meaner too. I loved them more than my daughter loves me.

There was never a time she was not at odds with me. I knew this risk from her birth. I had read the books. I chose to love her in spite of the spitefulness of love.

When I learned I was pregnant I sat up straight in bed like it was all mine even though I shared it with my husband, propping the pillows and working my teeth with a wooden pick at 2am. The pick took the place of dark red wine, like blood, and cigarettes with smoke like haunted voices. I would not cripple my enemy before I could befriend her. I began to talk to my stomach. Not out of reason but out of generous disgust. And for fear.

I was up nearly all night with my confession. My lips were chewed and torn.
I remember every word.

My husband is a man who does things differently. He does not politely look away. He's been with a prostitute and I hold more respect toward him for this. Perhaps he was a whore in another life. When I told him I was pregnant he too knew it was a girl, and that she would hate me with a passion cold as November. The ruthless ice storm the month she was born stood as a stark proof.

"Do you want to test your luck?" He leered at me once while he bent to listen to my belly. His voice could wring sense from the animal occasionally. In early October the sounds began keeping me up. She did not kick and turn, only cried out from within me. My repeated confession did no good. He taunted and cooed and I could finally sleep, though my dreams were no better.

She had reached 13. Menstruating for the first time on her birthday. That night I have a dream as soon as I hit the pillow where I remove her left hand by ax. This was also the first night she snuck out. It was as if she knew the scent of her blood could lure her rescuers.

She is a cunt
who deserves to die
but so do I.

So am I.

I Don't Bend That Way - A meditation on BDSM from a reluctant top

Hey.
So, I figured this out quite awhile back.
But I guess I just wanted to say something for the record.
Especially if it helps clarify anything about this business to somebody, anybody, else.

It took me a long time to understand this.
For a long while, most people around me who claimed to have a good handle on it and were "into it" couldn't articulate what it really was...
That this either made them feel ashamed, or gave them a talisman of secret(s) to proport, or both: inconsequential.

Bondage.
Whips. Tape. Chains. Cuffs. Rope. Plastic Wrap. Buttpulgs. Ballgags. Metal. Leather. Vinyl. Etc, etc.
Maybe I'm stupid. But as it turns out, this stuff, stuff, is everything...
Everything BUT Actual Sex.

It is all the titillating foreplay in the world, except actual intercourse.

It could include intercourse too. But really, this crazy kind of kink is concerned lastly and in the most cursory way, with sex.

Does that make sense? I hope so. I'm not sure how to be more devestatingly simple than this.

Maybe all the words in the world won't elucidate it, and you are forced to experience it as I did- confused and angered by the confusion, and sad and sort of hurt and, well, maybe a lot hurt...

But hopefully, in the end, if, like I did, you find out that this stuff isn't really for you- that you really just like the stripped-down plain-old skin-to-skin standard-body contact, no-equipment-required-vanilla (because vanilla is actually a really really good flavor)- then you'll be okay with it. You'll be okay all around.
OK that it's not really your thing. OK that you let yourself get a little used and a little hurt for the education. Ok that other people you love and don't want to see get hurt either, are into it.

Finally getting it, without being into it. And in doing so, being okay with all of it.

Kamikazi Is A Common Cause - Poetry for the Lonely/You

-

If I had slept facing west. My head in the direction of the setting sun. My dreams would have been very different. Or north, or south. Or a Tuesday instead of a Sunday night. Either way at all there is sun trying at the ice in my heart.

There is the other mind growing impatient to broadcast its new imperfect chaos vision. All the leisure between sirens and ice cream trucks is the soundtrack to this new blessed canon.

"Inherit your peace!" it cries, "And in so doing, make us alive! Pull our limbs forth and back into artistic articulations!"

A whistle, a crashing window. The sounds of wheels. Wishes. Wastes.

Pulverize that ice and taste poetry. Tipped and preened and poked…

A loose nail is all inspiration and the messages of dogs. This open box that is not metal is a gentle skylight. A flowers distraction, or the fingernail moon. A knife or a wire to cut food or the sky. Under the bandage of the day is where they all wait. Highless. Trashless. Seeking shape manifest beyond a notch of dirty notes. Where wasps hide, or gnats homes. Mud or gore made up to suit tunneled cranium cravings.

Things pair, of course. Lips and shoes and clover comes twice. One memory always more than one and has couples within it. Sought and discovered neutered of desire goes the design of the chime of the eye.

Leaking pleasure, and with no course except to pull awake some drastic impulse. Some tomorrow thrust to bleed. 

-

masked kiss
of radiation
:a burn
:a beating

the way to
medicine becomes the mind.

composer, chewer of water.
ajar, distraction.

plucked thighs
calling into a basement.

the blood is seen from space.
the sun is a poisonous drink.

erase. erase.

-

ordinary like a roar

the blood tastes like sunshine

and the punch hot the same

no man has come to claim me

women only seek my face to crush it

desert skin as rusty as old tacks

the pitch of the night unyielding to stars

witness the line. the perfume of fighting.

my country evesdropping on my ache

where have the sounds gone wrong,

for now they teethe on rocks.

-

The conundrum of eaten lipstick. Things worn on the inside and saved for last. A mess- junk edges. Too many colors crawling and deep.

Deep like I can't sleep. Six am says 'dreams are over, Lazylush.' And so they are and it seems there's nothing I can do about it.

Their psychological manicures chip like salty dust under the weight of late morning lights,

Untaken pills are like a finger waving in my face. The collected lints of distractions are aggregate palsy. Disquiet me against the rerealized mental landscape comprised entirely of immature trash, minutiae, the details, the moaning edits.

The exits are a big picture burn. A self-immolated double dark meditation- mad either way. Constipated with interactions all tension and resist, strain, push, repeat.

In this way, pure luxury can be defined as a removal of form. The less youre attached and attracted, the freer you are- the more of truth of heart and mind. Less disgust, more gut trust.

Instinct my be the closest to perfect we ever get.

-

I don't associate

I never think its me

i don't like it i look away

it isn't there

it can't touch me now

it won't bother me

i look away

-

you read my palm

it was a promise

you ripped my dress

it was a poem.

you told me off

it was pure genius

you took me home

we make no sense.

-

Always looking for something to give up on,

to give away,

to lovingly destroy.

A slight perfuming of

self for another day.

of abstract decimation.

The recent oft seen presence,

usually by the side of the road,

of broken belts

has made the importance

of any willful act

just that much more clear.

-

this afternoon-

I have a Polish
beer to drink

and stories
to edit.

and thank god

for both of them.

-

2/26/06-

twentieth century life, am i holding you back?

living for the cemetery is a bad thing.

I am trying to pay for cigarettes

passing creative trash.

Let this morning come to you. All bright sunshine and ice.

How the sidewalks glitter with the broken shells of alcohol.

Brilliant untenable remnants.

Call the woman with cancer. ask if she needs help going thru the mail. All those fucking mocking piles of mail.

She'll earn that nap today. Cancer, they say, is caused by unfulfilled dreams.

The view is far, wide.

I don't want to be there when the city gets up and rolls over. Her sleeping glossary is satisfaction, now.

But what else... then I get chills.

greasy chicken wing dried on the bones in the sun where the sidewalk glistens uncovered.

Townhouse ghosts slip into my eyes

and start me crying.

-

brand new blouse

the voyers girlfriend

makes up

brunette in the mirror

like a new doll

a touch french passion

dress and shoes are fashion

ligatures reflected

neither cataracts or character

red chips for buttons off

caramel shoulder at last

natural order

that old boy's world is over.

-

over skins and streets

Simmers hot city rain-

a sweat the world wears

on a weary pubescent spring.

-

tonight we leave for the city
our car spins sound and light
down roads covered in evening
suffering trust like art between us
generous in words. In smoke.

-

couplet-

The bomb will come in the spring.

To not denies the romantic thing.

L O T U S L A N D - Fiction

I was in my office rolling half and halfs. And I'm pretty sure it was a minute past from the tower bells, which tho' they had ceased, were still ringing in tonal echo over my animal brain while the frontal end burned in dull concentration. Fuck it- that's all animal brain.

Which is why I jumped so bad when the fone rang. An interloping tone. Letting it ring out 'til I sparked was a very cherry decision. I was all in the right when Molly produced her voice on the other end near my tepid rainbows almost growing stale-party nausea narratives of exhale. Until she called it was a night full of titles threatening to become writing. Normal dreams, Asterisk nightmares, sub-contracted semi-colon ego-trip chat manic mattress bench warmers. Like that. Terrible.

About to maybe beat-it-but-join-it, finally, when she threatened: "Don't make me hold your hand. I've just cleaned the loo and the ice-bucket is full and I'm a target for a problem night to get worse if I don't see you in thirty."

Yes ma'am, and thank you. Like that I was keys and lights out and off to the 24 hour for liquor and incense.

You won't find her in volume one. Molly is a cat made of sharks. An interior regatta on the lakefront of abstract yet make-out-withable beauty. There is no mirror but those of parked cars to check my nostrils. And that's a bad way to say I have a fear of boogs, but not a paranoia, praise be.

Goddamn. I was about to get out my typewriter too, and you know where that leads. Scotch. Obvs. Like a sapphire leads to diamonds, and so all rivers of time lead to Molly.

I had one of those check-yr-pocket moments on the way to her place too, where I had to double-take where she lived, and had she moved? Couldn't remember but probably not, and yes, thankfully, not. Still the illicit snugglebatch of a 20th floor condo (#2020) that I vaguely remembered from the 'comet' party. A pre-halloween confessional sexless bonding millennial dysfunctioning closet jerk of a suare to which I brought my typewriter. Pfft. Yeah. Fucking people living in the sky.

Not enough debauchery for a singularly sweet and inconspicuous destination by my standards. And by turns, Molly's standards too, for the most part. The clientele manifested monthly yoga passes and no cutting scars. I blame the Israeli she was dating at the time. You can never be too-nice if you're, well, too nice.

She came to the door in just a skirt. "When was the last time you read Anais Nin?" She chuckled and swung her margarita aside for my entrance. I held up the black plastic bag containing more goodies than I anticipated purchasing.

"I want to be her." She swooped a topless snatch of the sundries, spinning on a singular stockinged toe.

"I want to be Henry Miller. But I'll have to settle for Samuel Beckett instead." We didn't just crack smiles at each other then, we cracked full up like mental patients leaning into our own punch lines.

"Ah, Jeremy," She sighed and turned "I missed you. Come see the window."

The view was a favorite game I could tell, even after only being there once. Probably nothing changed. Still, I was jealous. Her closet was most likely bigger than my whole apartment.

When I ignored the double nipple reflection - two Mollys, four tits- and thought of the future, I could catch my breath. When you have to ask yourself if you're still high, then you probably are.

"Saw a car accident there today." She pointed at an indeterminate northeast locale below. Then nodding up at me in the pause as if I didn't believe her. "That's right. I always stand right where you're standing for about fifteen minutes each morning while I break off a piece of the hottest coffee I can possibly drink while watching an interminably slow rush hour."

"Must be nice to get some action for all that loyalty from time to time, right?" I could feel myself turning on the silly smarm and I liked it. She was such a spoiled brat booty-calling me. I couldn't wait to turn on her hi-fi and spank her ass while we danced off the Malort.

Once the surf rock was in swing and all our groovy bad dance moves took full effect, I closed my eyes and had a moment inside myself to enjoy the comedown. I made myself want for nothing. Not even the interpersonal body high that was Molly- free to be and for all four seasons. Molly. By her side was definitely where the party would stay tonight. And it was good to be back in Lotusland. That marvelous repeating scheme of states. A strata of pleasure bending out of the modern age and down toward all edges of life.

A few lights went off. Sirens pleaded pianissimo where the rock eddied.

Molly pulled a loose sweater on. I pulled her single stocking off. We touched foreheads and whispered. The clock struck again but it wasn't an hour worth noting.

"Little Birds." I said, bringing it back to the last I'd encountered Anais Nin. She nodded. It had been ages for me. Too long. Gripping her lemon tea she whispered "Collages. It's so good." I remembered that one too. The trip, all trips perhaps, down MA-mory lane ending like they began. Coffee and the library and never seeing the sunrise until graduation day.

"There's a sticky spot on your foot," I pressed into her size 5 instep. A single mark of red polish left on the big toe near the distal end.

"I'm tracking from the kitchen. Don't know what got spilled."

"Margarita?" I posited "And I love that we're whispering."

"I have to until we put another record on." She fidgeted and smiled and cocked her face so her hair came down and waved just perfectly over half of it. I felt no urge to leave.

"I'm not sorry I haven't called you in a while, Jeremy. But I am a little sorry too. I had to get rid of Rossi." She said, reading my thoughts.

"Rossi was a blank cheque you could cash any time. I don't blame you for that."

"Yeah, but, it gets boring after awhile, you know." She started to use her voice again and it sounded like windchimes drunk on molasses. My legs shifted like a Freudian slip.

"Let's not talk about Rossi. When was the last time you saw Clive?" Her brother, a writer like us. Back and forth to LA. A place neither Molly or I had any interest in visiting.

"A few weeks. But I don't want to talk about him either." We chuffed. "What he's always ever wanted was an honoris causa from UCLA and to find a woman with a series of bad habits to share it all with, and he's discovered minor success in the latter. The struggle, Jeremy. It's the struggle that keeps us interesting."

I nodded with an eyebrow up. "That. And when the last time was that you read Anais Nin." She grinned into her tea and I continued. "If some people can't stay cool because their keys are hanging off the end of the moon, then so be it. At least they can see them. You and me, Molly. We worry about when we cease to be able to hear jazz, if ever. And if the dictionary of the future is just packed with emojii."

This last part didn't make her laugh as much as I wished it would. But she and Clive were simply a year and change apart, and the cross around his neck did not only extend to academia.

"What are you writing about these days?" She inquired innocently enough, but the question let the air out of the balloon filled with whatever energy I had left. My attention's easy focus no more held quorum.

"Molly, I'm just an idiot." I admitted. "I've written and I write and neither gesture defines me except when I am doing it and to know that I've done. I don't miss school." The confession was bringing me back. I took her other foot to rub it. Some sort of action was required. She opened her mouth but I cut her off. "I don't wish I had your life, but I like knowing you. That there are complex and beautiful flowers like Mollys in the world who care to have me around from time to time. Anymore, I consider the wake up call to stay hidden until it sees fit to reveal itself."

I was getting awfully philosophical, but it was night, and all the heat and beauty around were begging to be let out to dreamland's pastures.

This sort of reverence belonged to the late hours, and that's where it most often stayed. Leave Lotusland to the waking world.

"You're growing up." She started. Breaking the long and dreamy silence. "Must be nice. I don't envy your life either, and I'm glad we've never tried to be serious. Honestly I would bore a visionary like you. I don't flatter you by saying this at all. The weight of the world shifts shoulders, but some shoulders are tougher than others."

I kissed her foot and put the unpolished big toe in my mouth. A little gasp, but no pull back. I wanted to suck longer than I should have, but didn't. I'm a gentleman.

"How would you like to die?"

Molly, oh Molly. So ripe and persistent. Out with something else again like god's cure for insecurity or boredom. I started to answer without thinking.

"I don't know. Probably in traffic, or spectacularly somehow. But quick. A bus. A train. Scotch is too slow. You?"

In that moment I looked over and watched her shift her gaze elsewhere to think and realized we have the same eye color. A milky hazel that turns sea-green in the sun.

"I'm with you on the spectacular thing. But it's gotta be for a cause. Like, I would want to go down in a worldwide cataclysm. A battle that wages across seasons and claims countless lives, but still manages to not have occurred in vain. You know? Is that too much to ask?" Her laugh is infectious.

I feel the desperate bubble that is my heart expand wistfully in my chest while I watch her throw her head back. And she keeps laughing because it feels good. Punch drunk tumescence of spirit manipulating my better judgement.

And it's then that I want more drugs, and don't want them. And I almost have to say my name out loud, or do something dumb to solidify this night in my memory, because I've decided right now that I want it there. I want tonight to be forever retrievable in the annals of my reaped reality. My multiplied paradise magic rolodex of what can be relied upon to make me intensely happy.

Not long after this exchange, the stubborn hours shift again and we adopt for recreating with lust instead of talk, but not before I ask for one more thing to indulge my chatty foreplay.

"Can I see the tattoo?"

"... Ok... why?"
"Why are you suddenly suspicious?"

"I'm not, I. Just..."

And she shrugs like a lazy mermaid in her sweater, thinking. Turning the request into something she can submit her gorgeous will to. And when she peels to the skin and that mark I feel my breath change and all else gets dark, and somehow the music has started up again, but different this time. New and better and noted. Unwasted and completely welcome.

Cover Letters To A Petition For A Sunny Day - A Poem / A Short Story

Updates, Ya'll.

This story is now titled "Small World."

And if you do the F-word-book: F-word my band.

I'm gonna be Hostin'!

Lastly, I miss Bethany.

See
you
in
April.

Beauty Tips (for the day after the international day of women)

Altho' the science of mascara's increasing youthful appearance by brightening the sclera of the eye is sound,
Don't use Maybelline's Great Lash. It's like they mixed bacon grease and charcoal and put it in a pink bottle with a green handle and called it mascara. Gross.
Once your mask has been applied, try to avoid sleeping.

Wrinkle diminishing creams have been proven to be efficacious in the long term, especially those containing SPF. Try several and find a few you like for day and night.
Once your mask has been applied, try to avoid touching your face.

Some say Lipstick is best when blended. One color and gloss is usually quite sufficient however.

Once your mask has been applied, try to avoid kissing, or eating.

When applying liner and shadow, start with the eye you usually screw up first. Pulling the upper lid straight will allow for easier line drawing, and a light application in the waterline of the lower lid provides maximum effect.

Once your mask has been applied, try to avoid crying.

Please Tell Me How Much I Am Allowed To Miss You - People

There is a very important lesson,

and it is discovered in the compassionate notion

of separating a bad act

from the person who committed it

and not dismissing the person as bad altogether.

That is love.

That is forgiveness.

Dead Sober The Latter Not The Former

*
I really want to spill this beer.

I am, for some reason, back in my hometown where I also went to school, in the worst college bar on a Friday. And now- I remember I'm with a girlfriend. Obviously dudes approach us.
In order to keep myself interested I start pretending to be as batshit as I wanna. Not spoiling, just a little bit of a nut job.
So, I really want to spill this beer. All over his shoes. (Is he wearing sandals? Don't think so.)
Dirty white tennies, probably.

Maybe we go to certain places on purpose to be bored so we can start a ruckus inside ourselves, and if it tumbles out, so be it.

I engage with this guy on purpose. Standing close and sloshing, tilting the cups contents. He's trying to look and hold my eye contact at the same time. Even tho' he's taller it's not really working. We're pretty packed in at this point with backward-ballcap-wearing juveniles, and I am happy for my mild success, because to deign to drink this beer would be to engage in a form of self-punishment.
I've been back to this just-short-of-a-titty-bar joint a couple times, even before this said beer-spilling, and mostly because they have awesome karaoke.
In addition in the peculiarly connected world of townies, beer-spill victim is probably still around, even if he has finished his 'education'. Those same white sneakers in his mom's basement, or some other relatives- maybe grandmas'- only to get tossed when she croaks and her estate goes to auction, or in the closet with the broken door at his girlfriend's place.

The last time they fuck, which is last Tuesday, the filthy sheet gets pulled away and the blue and pink pattern on sheer mattress fabric is revealed. Her home incarceration black ankle bracelet gets caught somehow on the bed and she howls.
3 more weeks under house arrest. He hasn't been back since. Of course they talk on the phone, and of course he wants to get laid, but he's the whole reason for her trouble in the first place. Might as well compound this with the guilt of cheating.

No, let's hope he's met with a better fate than spilled beer. Dried stinking over abandoned shoes. The good lord knows I have.

How You Know You've Made It:

And not in any particular order:
-Someone buys your book
-Someone reads something you've written to someone else
-You get rejected
-You get accepted
-Someone tattoos a line of your poetry on their body
-You finish a poem/collection of poems
-When someone says "hey I really liked your book."
-When someone cries over something you've written.
-When you get "in trouble" over something you've written.
-People invite you to come read aloud
-People ask you to host a reading/show/performance
-You get good enough at reading aloud to do it on the street without feeling too exposed
-You stop worrying and learn to love the mess
-You fall in love with someone who fell in love with your poetry first

Fiction- The Dead Lover

The kiss. It was when I peeked through the base of my eyelids, past the long lash which so close looked gray and thick like a beaded curtain in a doorway, that I enjoyed the kiss the most. Observing that soft place where his nose fit beside mine. All corner in the cheek. The upsweep of lip illustrating a white even row of top teeth as out they peek. And all the pink rawness behind the supple suckle and pull invested in that fucking great kiss of his, of mine, ours.

It is in my brain and it is all I have. The best thing he did was teach me how to fall.

“I’m a second hand smoke machine.” His voice puffed out in the rest of a cloudy exhale, sounding low and choked and sexy. I was clipping my fingernails beside him on the couch, among the mess. He was slouched like a doll with a broken neck; his overalls hiked up on the leg showing all the laces on both boots with feet turned out and spread wide from each other. Sandy floppy hair draped over his floaty eyes. He was becoming exhausted. It was all in the way he breathed through his mouth.

Hung over the couch were two large white sheets. We had pulled all the furniture to the room center and covered it. Somehow, when collecting all his things from his mother’s house he had come across gallons upon gallons of white paint. She was going to “throw it all out, someday. Your father died and I went thru this cleansing period where I decided that everything must be clean and new and blank and white. So I decided to paint both the interior and exterior of the house. But I got about as far as our bedroom and bathroom and just gave up. I rearranged the kitchen cabinets and bought some new furniture instead.”

Inspired, he decided our living room should be done. I agreed. The walls then were goldish yellow and reminded me of a nursing home. A kind of infected-octogenarian-piss color.

I almost wanted to go for my camera and take a picture, he was so at peace and beautiful. I would have if it hadn’t been for the drying paint on my hand. I wanted to take photographs of his hand – the way it looked was surreal, resting on the milky white sheet, his fingers swathed in paint; the cigarette and the little dim fire it held between leaves and white paper- it looked as if all things white were washing onto his color, ready to change him.

We took our first break with only one wall left to finish and I was admiring our job beside him on the covered sofa, my legs tucked underneath my ass. I brushed off the nail clippings from my belly, pulling two out of my belly button and tossing them to the hardwood floor. He was watching me and laughed lightly. He reached over with his cigarette hand and with free fingers began to pluck flecks of paint from my pubic hair. “Hey, you’re going to ash on me.” I protested. He sat up and quickly took a drag as I picked some of the paint out myself. He proceeded to ash in the soft fur purposefully.

“Asshole!” frightened, I pushed at the ash and my body. He giggled again, butting out on the floor.

“You’re beautiful.” I looked at him past the flat reply. I never knew if it was apology or sarcasm?

I was painting naked because all the clothes that I had brought I didn’t want to see ruined. He really didn’t have any clothes for me to use either. Being naked in such a public part of the house became comfortable fast. I was warm from working so hard and my skin glistened. I thought it better after I had been naked for a time. He went into the bathroom and I got up and shook off. Let down my hair and combed at it with my dried fingers.

Asshole. How unoriginal. And funny, now that I remembered that he had been the one to teach me that word. I used to only swear in Portuguese when something startled me or I became frustrated. I was taught never to lose composure or submit to unproductive behaviors like too much swearing. When I met him, all he was doing was swearing. I had only been in America for a week, knowing near nothing of what he was saying as he was trying to seduce my friend and roommate. We went drinking on a night when just taking a walk down the tree lined avenues and calm orange street lights wouldn’t appease us. My roommate had been flirting back – but I’m not the type for those behaviors so much. Instead I sat back and watched. He was intoxicated by then. When she went home with someone else, I had to walk him home. He didn’t live far from our apartment.

“You’re from Brazil.” he said to me after I got him up to his room.

“Yes.” My voice flat. I swung his legs unto the bed.

He smiled. I’ll never fail to remember this smile he gave me. The stay-with-me-and-talk-to-me-smile without words. All with this stupid innocent charm. I listened to this smile. Somehow he sobered and sat up, telling me all the American English swear words in the dictionary and I was laughing all evening. I fell for him as fast as my shoes fell off my feet. Fell like I was just learning how to do it. I liked men in my country, but the American atmosphere with its unsure, mysterious men like this one- what was it? I tumbled like a child in its first steps. He taught me the words asshole and fornicator and facefuck. He encouraged my falling, but kept catching me. My terrible fall. It hurt like tumbling down a well.

A few more evenings and this American man, hard in his soft ways, offered me a kiss and I accepted. This kiss- it was when I peeked thru the base of my eyelids past the long lash which looked gray, so close like blurry lines, and thick, like a beaded curtain in a gypsy’s doorway- that I observed a place where his nose fit beside mine and I felt that facefucking great kiss the most.

I painted the rooms all day and slept at night. And now each of these motions are in a place that can never come back.

Two years. Now we are engaged. We live together in a newly bought house with new jobs and new intentions. Fresh as the white paint.

I picked up the wet roller in the refilled pan and started in on the wall. High up on the ladder my arm reached for the ceiling, for the floor, then the ceiling again. He came back in from the bathroom. I was concentrating when he ascended the ladder to meet me and pressed his hands full against the flesh of my buttocks. The coolness of them made me jump and I turned slightly so as not to escape but to watch his lips move to kiss the flesh caught between his hands. I made myself still, thinking he might want to stop and make love. He likes to make love, and so do I, but not now. Somehow I was determined to finish this room and maybe start another. This painting felt good, and it looked good. It made my muscles burn with a welcome ache. When I stared down at him, I felt interrupted. He looked up at me with eyes that could make a snake feel sympathy.

“I’m sorry I ashed my cigarette into your hair. I was only playing. Did I hurt you?” His hand moved around for a moment and I thought he meant this as a come-on. I almost removed his fingertips from where they gently rested at my midsection.

“I am fine. Please, let's paint.” I said soft and serious. He smiled that smile that I’ve always known before climbing down to answer the ringing phone. He disappeared for a long time into the study, and I finished the wall alone.

I moved all the supplies into the adjoining room and lay out the sheets. When I turned off the ceiling lights the room glowed with the colored shape of window in streetlamp. Seeming to shimmer when the wind rustled tree limbs the light filtered through, spreading shadow over wet paint.

I watched the room for a moment and a chill came over me: It was now a familiar place made new.

Hearing him talking in the study, I became frustrated at his ease with distraction. I left the hall light on, but didn’t speak to him when I entered the shower. I dressed for bed because it was something put into me to do, and fast went to sleep. I didn’t hear him come in, but in my dreams I could identify his arm wrapped around me. That same cool shudder from watching the room bathed in paleness flow in and through. When he began to cry the tears clung to the skin between my shoulder blades. Frozen in the entryway to the unconscious, I could not awaken. Only without words could I ask the reason.

He had set out his painting clothes on the closet door. Hung there like a defeated hero. I focused on the hung man and came out of sleep. He was in the shower. Impractical- he would only get dirty again. I turned over and kept sleeping. He was putting on a tie in the mirror when I woke again. “What are you doing? Where...? Are you leaving? We have to paint again today.” I sat up to say this and the bedclothes slipped off of me showing off the anti-scars of paint splotch. When he turned his face was a bit awry. “I’ll be back and we can paint later. Maybe tomorrow.”

“I’m sorry you were on the telephone so long.”

He stopped and we looked at each other for a moment. My searchlight glance fell out of me, heady and desperate. I knew I had said the wrong thing, but I couldn't take it back. He countered perfectly: “You’re beautiful.”

He didn’t kiss me. Then he left.

Later I tried, but I could not paint.

POEMS: One Rework, One Video-

No Traffic To Our Kiss -
reworked poem by DRH/DMJ


Food, yes.

Money, yes.

who cooks/who cleans/who pays the rent

ABSOLUTELY

we agree on most things including

ART

and

SEX

the unicorn left no scars on our hearts

and blessed the inevitable gains of our love

which was an epic, mythical journey

in the very truest sense of the legends of love

granted status and authenticity by the Yeti

with joyous revelation

and hit up

road trips

and sunny days

stormy nights

and long, loving gazes:

to do it by.

It's art: it's

no concern for cool

or the glances of others

as we shine in the world.

It's sex: it's

warm and simple magic

delicious and savored, only for we two

this is what the gods experienced

feels like no one else knew how before.

We live this -

more successfully

as the Great Loves of Literature and Film

what grasped their own dreams

for the glorious-encompassing

feel-good-times

never hidden from view

in an eagle's nest for a lion heart

and a plinth to hold honor and honesty for a head

for hands!

feet!

hearts! ALL

intersect with this promise.