What if we started
talking about love as a
humiliation?

Or maybe taking
not now then not ever's as
gun imperatives

Or using that word
as Norwegians do, for
wives, not entire lives

I oppose you, T
S Eliot. L'art can
not be erasure.

Not because it'd kill
you or me or any one
in between, just...

My body requires
photos, in snow, disrobed, all
which needs an artist.

kshhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

If you ever think, "If not now, not ever," then it's probably worth happening never. I stole for the first time in five years two days ago. I stole medicine because the greatest medicine to ever happen to my work, and i think that means me, couldn't afford her own medicine, because she bought me medication. We've been living poor but not impoverished for three years now. It may become both because we're both leaving, unabashedly. The bay is poisoning me, mom.

Are you coming back to Madrid soon? If you don't want to, maybe we can meet in Berlin and live there a while. Would you want me there? Did you like my new piece? I'm going to write you back soon. The new screenplay is about you. Especially the part about never looking in a girl's purse. Thank you for the critiques-- I'm rewriting it right now. Are you coming back to Madrid soon? Are you coming back? Are you coming? Are you?

"I know that it is not necessary to love like this. There are people who do not love like this. He does not love like this. Most people do not love like this. But I love like this, and Shiva loves like this, so I know that I am not entirely alone in my lot, we are just some tribe, some weird archaic tribe, the people who love too much, and save nothing, but nothing, for themselves."

Did you read Sean's new screenplay? Did you like it? Is the part with the girl, with the sensual legs, in bed, about you? What parts are about you? Did he let you read it? Do you miss Madrid? Are you coming back? I thought you couldn't wait to leave. Come back soon. Come back. Are you coming?

I'll let you know. I don't know. I'll see you soon. I'll see you. We'll see.

"Puking up collard greens." "Alabaster." "Problem." "Unwilling." "Making the stone stony." "A good impression" "Don't get up for running"""Run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go go gogogogo chorus

Being on Medication is Disgusting

You first realize this upon loving someone pragmatic, ideally someone more put together than you. Not more beautiful, of course, because these cosmos are fond of the ironic: the beautiful are always rotten fruit, damaged goods, moldy wool left in a monsoon, by careless parents, maybe. No, this pragmatic lover will not be as beautiful as you... but more worthy? Always. They will have this way-- this way of cooking neatly, writing neatly, reading neatly, and fucking like Mussolini intervened in their love life. He made their damn train run on time. They may perform art but they are never artists, never stricken with the impetuous feverish urge to cut open their tongue with a pen, slide a quill along their veins and bleed out on vellum so quiet and picturesque, a mimesis of crying trees. They are skilled and they are brilliant but they are not good, they are not great. But function wins over form, these days.

And you realize that you are not functional, not like them. And they can maybe teach you to be functional. So you watch, and you imitate, and you suppress the urge to gobble down the sticky bits of beauty, hoping to keep your shirtsleeves clean. They take you to a fancy restaurant and tell you to stop yelling fuck, it's embarrassing. And god forbid you should ever fling those skinny arms around their neck and bellow, "I LOVE YOU! I LOVE THE WORLD AROUND YOU! KISS ME! FILL MY WOMB!" And you never thought you yelled with a yearning full of blisters until they stopped letting you. You thought yourself to be regal until encountering them.

The thought will sneak up on you one day, thank god, that you need fixing. A pragmatic lover will never submit to aiding in this endeavor-- it is, after all, an inefficient undertaking-- and so you shall begin alone, with an endless excitement for the day that you can meet them on their own terms. One day, you think, I will be okay with mediocre love. And who does not want this? After all, this tempered romance is the fate of all affairs. Count how many impassioned marriages you know and I'll give you a few bucks for each. Buy yourself something nice. A donut, perhaps. And so off you go, optimistic that the pragmatic in your life will one day love you, because you can finally stop making them so uncomfortable with your goddamn desire, your inappropriate affection, your constant lust, those early morning tears from reading Durrell or remembering how you starved yourself at age 15. Once you're better, the little cuts on your thighs will disappear, shit, you'll even stop having to blow your nose.

The first step, of course, is to get off medication. It always made you uncomfortable, having to sneak off into the bathroom before bedtime, while they're changing into pajamas (the pragmatic do not sleep naked, although you surely do. When sex is over, if it even happened, they shower and put on some sort of cloth barrier. It's bedtime, not touching time). Go underground a few days, detox, sleep for 30 hours straight, shake shake shake it out baaaabyyy, and emerge wan and smiling. A new you! A newly stable and organic you. And you will be better for a few months, because your mind is wrapped in cotton, and the two of you can pretend that their having no heart, and yours being caught in misfiring synapses and then shutting off, is the same thing.

And then they leave and you miss being shit on every day, because damn that smelled nice, and then realize that you can have that without them, because you haven't left bed in days, not even to go to the bathroom. But at least you're off the medication. Fuck the man! Fuck the medical institution! Fuck your parents for not caring, for fucking you up, for shipping you off to a psychiatrist and not dealing themselves! FUCK PROZAC NATION! Pragmatic lover may be gone but at least they left an organic, self-sustaining you in their place. You are their collared chimera but no longer will your love be chimerical.

And then you develop annoying habits. Sure, you'll always be a little neurotic, so these are to be expected: having friends turn the car around so you can check the stove. Never mind that you didn't cook that day. You start to pinch your side-- again, of course you're beautiful, but a little less fat around the middle couldn't hurt. While you're at it, start running and working out once in a while. After all, you're single now, out and upon the meat market ice you go! Better make that a few times a week, or maybe twice a day. For two hours a day, perhaps, until your knees and joints ache and you start tripping, your mother walks like you do, and it's weird because she's 58 and you're 22, but fuck it, right? Nothing tastes as good as thin feels. And you start counting calories and throwing food out and checking your locks several times before bed and smoking a pack a day and eating in a blind howling tunnel at night until your stomach rips with shameful engorgement and you never menstruate and wish you were pregnant because at least there'd be a reason for all this and fuck leaving the bed except if you don't your life will come to a screeching halt and all you've ever ever wanted is that degree from the big pretty school on the hill and ex-pragmatic lover who never thought of you in the first place will find out you failed and you hate all your friends, god they're fucking noisy jabber jabber jabber, and you're not good enough for God and you can even say that you never asked to believe anyway and even more whisperingly, ducking your head under the bathwater, just sometimes you wonder,

is this all there is?

But, again, at least you won over that pill bottle. Mazel tov! You showed them, those money-grubbing fucks.

Deprivation Dinner

I keep our deprivation dinner a secret. I walk home in the rain. I call my mother. I talk to my raving girl. I smoke five cigarettes. I keep our dinner a secret. I restrain my fingers, I throw my phone against the wall. It is raining. My bed is empty. This is nothing new. I miss what I thought you were. I pretend you are a man. I keep my deprivation a secret. A lullaby sung to the betrayal in Spain. Hush.

I look across the table. You are no longer beautiful to me,
but God your wrists have stayed so skinny.
You know I like that.
Closure is so conventional. Here we are, at our restaurant,
I gag it's so trite.
You tear as I'm talking.
It makes sense, because I am saying things like:
"We can talk about things now, like adults. I don't care anymore, after all."
"When you call, and I don't answer at all,
it's because I can't be not cruel. I have so many mean mean things
to say."
"I was so very unhappy with you."
"Why didn't you leave me when I needed you to?"

"My girl, my girl. I wanted to fix things. I loved you."

You answer to that effect.

LOVING IS A VERB LOVING IS A VERB LOVING IS A VERB YOU'VE GOT SOME NERVE LOVING IS A VERB living without you is made of sweet sweet
sweet
verve.

To Poland

When she died, she wanted to look like the city: a sun-bathed mausoleum wrapped in furs, glorious, neck craned at the upside-down bowl of Berlin’s sky, mortal milky clouds and all. The train window framed Kreuzberg in a curator’s dream. Daylight left quickly. She saw some government buildings; someone had told her that, in a symbolic gesture of reassurance and transparency, all buildings related to any part of the government had glass walls. Nice enough for the administration to peer out of, she supposed, but the point was that the public felt like they could peer in and observe at any given moment. These were the things that made her love the Germans. The train cabin, on the other hand, was an American’s bad joke, a kitsch sitcom of some Eastern block train ride. The man across from her ate smelly greenish cheese from a lace handkerchief, staring lustily at the triangular tits of the girl beside her. His face was a leering unbaked pie. Two women jabbered in what she guessed was Polish, laughing often in a sharply hysterical fashion. One of the woman’s hair jutted from her head sharply, stiff tangerine strands.

Her lungs coughed, creating the sound of boots stomping on snail shells. She let herself cough, a voluntary cheese grater, bringing forth mucus she had demurely swallowed while with him. She spit gobs into her jacket sleeve. The blood hid in the crimson wool pattern of her coat; the sweet metallic stench began to mix with that of the goat cheese. Vomit rising to her throat, she slid open the door of the cabin and stepped across the hallway, struggling with and then opening a train window. She closed her eyes and plunged her head out, loose cheeks now peeling back from her skull and mining her closed esophagus. She screamed long. Snot clapped her throat shut and flew onto what she guessed was the cabin window beside hers, because a gaunt man came into the hallway and began to lecture her, irate and incomprehensible. She listened for a few moments and then stepped back, cocking her head coldly, and spit on the floor between them. The man paused, only unfreezing to laugh nasally. Ha. Ha. Ha. Pulling her own cabin door open, she stepped clumsily over the legs of pie-face and collapsed in her chair. Ha.

She slept. The train stopped every couple of hours, sometimes jarring her awake, but her body seemed merciful, seemed to understand that its survival was more insured by keeping her mind cradled in cotton. In Poznan, she considered turning back. Kutno. Warsaw. Especially in Warsaw, with three hours to pass until the connecting train. She had been asleep when they arrived at the station, just running off before the last whistle sounded, only making it because the girl with the triangular tits had poked her head with her stiff chest. A bullet bra? She fuzzily wondered, pulling her backpack from the overhead compartment and running through the hallways. Tripping down the stairs of the train, she landed on the cement platform, catching herself by the wrists. The suspended electronic sign read -5 C. She entered a nearby stairwell and walked down the short flight, entering the long cement tunnel that led to the other platforms. A newspaper stand lined half the cold passageway. The air was hard to breathe, frozen and hardly worth it. She saw pie-face buying a Polish smut magazine, a lollipop stick jutting from the left side of his mouth. Ducking her head, she skirted past him shakily and found the platform for the commuter train to Krakow, climbing the stairs and then tossing her backpack onto the ground. Her stillborn fingers were neglected pomegranates, blue with the cold, little streaks of blood from hangnails running excitedly over the knuckles. A purple palette of winter.

___

He said, “No purple prose.” Admonishing himself.

She looked up from her own writing.

“I do that. Purple prose. When I’m nervous or under deadline.”

He leaned back from the table and threw his pen down on the floor theatrically. She picked up the rusting tin where he kept his tobacco, covered in enthusiastic white advertisements from the 1950’s, and handed it to him. Arching his right eyebrow, he began to roll a seamlessly thin cigarette, looking at her mockingly. She lit it with a match, only slyly watching his movements as he strode to the stove and finished cooking their dinner. When he started pulling plates from the cupboards, she stood up and walked to the full bookshelf, a distraction from staring. Benjamin. Adorno. Some anthology about the Greek and Roman gods. Occult. Occult. A ukulele. A shelf of whiskeys and bourbon. Fleurs du Mal. He had Baudelaire.

He said, “Will you come and eat?” Gallant.

She ate with a leg pulled into her body, head leaning on her right knee, arm weaving around her thigh and gripping the fork. He could cook; he told her that he had worked in a restaurant for months to afford the ticket to Berlin, to live in this little studio, a squashed grandchild of the DDR.

She said, “Thank you for inviting me to dinner. I’m glad to see you again, after Sunday, before tomorrow.”

“What’s tomorrow?”

She said, “I fly back to Madrid. I’m not sure where I’ll be living, of course, but I’m expected nonetheless. And this weather isn’t helping my bronchitis.” Tightly.

“Why don’t you stay? Vagabond around town here, in Berlin?”

Pause. She said, “With you?”

“Well… yes, why not? There’s a certain devil-may-care tinge to it I like.”

“Fuck. I don’t know why I thought you meant I could stay with you. I’m sorry to impose. I’ve made things rather awkward now, haven’t I? I have a return ticket already anyway.”

“No. I have an air mattress. I charge by the towel, of course. I may try to seduce you again. These are the charges for staying in my hostel.”

“Alright. I’ll bring my things tomorrow.”

And they finished dinner and she shyly stood to go, slipping her fingers into creamy suede gloves, quiet and unsure, only looking up when he said,

“Stay. Give me your sickness.”

___

All the loose tobacco kept flying out of the thin white paper, the wind and her swollen fingers resisting dexterity. She left her backpack, quickly reentering the cement passageway and walking toward the newspaper stand. Five zloty for smokes. She resolved to pass the time like a queen in Krakow, an internal dry laugh accompanying this thought. As she dug into the fetid woolen coat pocket, her phone chimed, MoviStar reminding her to buy more saldo. This message reminded her how he hadn’t checked on her, hadn’t asked if she had made it alright. And it was like a slow cruel boot to the chest, realizing that he wouldn’t. She dropped the zloty on the magazines in front of the vendor, her face laced up tight, until she reached her backpack in the stairwell.

The next moments were hideous. Breaths came hard, pulls on arsenic ice cream through a straw, but quiet as a waltz. A ribcage opened with dynamite. She chain-smoked in the stairwell until the train came, sometimes coughing blood into her hand and drawing little pictures with it on the wall next to the stairs. These moments, the bereavement of it all, struck her as eerie.

The commuter train was almost empty when she got on. She half-stood for many minutes, unconsciously deciding whether to run up and down between the chairs, imposing the rotten radish rage she felt upon unsuspecting Poles. A beautiful blonde girl sat down in the aisle across from her, thin and cruel and undeniably Slavic. The Pole stared at her, bemused and seemingly disgusted, until she finally sat down and arranged the dirty backpack next to her, hoping the pretty Polish girl would look away. I looked like that in the States. Clean, maybe even hawkish, she thought. Scrambling for distraction, she pulled out the first book the backpack yielded. Herzog.

That funny etching, an angular man hiding behind brambles, on the yellowing cover. She began to read, an eccentric respite, until she reached the ninth page, when the last paragraph slapped her eye. Tucking the book away in her bag, she curled into the fetal position in her chair and began to pray.

How the fuck does it go? Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name. Thy and she couldn’t finish, because she couldn’t remember, and because the skipping record player that was her worn down scratched mind wouldn’t let any moments of peace get through, and she started again, Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed by Thy name, Thy kingdom come, fuck, please come please come, please God help me please God help me please God please God please God please God please God please God please God where are you? Please please please please please until it all blended with the train wheels and her quieting coughs until her body let her sleep Thank you God.

­____

She picked her way through the pebbled paths of Dorotheenstädtischer, the crumpled map flapping in her hand, coffee-stained and typed in crude English. Hegel, Mann, Fichte. And she finally found it, Brecht. The headstone sat, almost lackadaisical, near one of the skinniest skeleton trees in the graveyard. She looked over the high brick wall into the wan sun, almost gone although it was 2:30 pm. The brothy light shone against the windows of his old study next door. She had gone there yesterday, taking an informal little tour of his dusty and regal final quarters. Although she had gone in loving the playwright, she emerged with an aching love for his torn dedicated wife. Particularly striking was the photograph of the actress beside her bed, standing in the couple’s garden. The guide said Helene was about 45 when the picture was taken— but she looked to be in her eighties, wrinkled and dark, with hardened black eyes of rotting glass. The woman had left her husband’s study untouched after he had died, referring to his rooms as “Brecht’s” until she passed away. Helene Weigel was now buried under the headstone next to her wayward lover, now and always to lie next to the man who told her, in later years, that she was losing her touch on the stage. Insult to a streaming procession of younger ingénue injury.

She left upon twilight, hesitating through the cemetery's heavy iron gates, then making her way to meet him in Kreuzberg. Taking her time getting to the thrift store, she stepped into an antique shop across from the metro exit, black nails fingering old minks and chipped Bohemian tea cups. The mirror across an aisle told her she looked beautiful that day, despite her dancing knotted hair and chapped face. The Turkish owner started to close in with hospitable but claustrophobic offers, so she hastily went back onto Bergmannstraße and turned left, walking toward Colours, where they sold clothes priced by the kilo. A meat market where vintage went into convalescence. He found her there, circling in front of a mirror wearing oversized wool trousers, embarrassed by his sudden appearance.

He said, “Let’s go to some bookstores. You’ll need reading for the train ride."

The first one was for expatriates, stacked to the ceiling and filling two rooms with English books. She found many worth buying, only to find a spidery script reading, “Not For Sale” where the price should have been on the inside cover. Frustrated, she made her way through a kitchen separating the two rooms and found him sitting in a floral armchair in the back room, smoking a cigarette.

He said, “I found a book on the history of Cornish smugglers. Can you believe it?”

Digging some coins out of his trousers, he made his way to the cashier, a burly man donning an unenthusiastic toupee who was watching what seemed to be the German version of American idol. She went outside and waited, clumsily rolling a cigarette and coughing into her sleeve, straightening as he busily left the bookshop.

He said, “You didn’t find anything? There’s another one, more worthwhile, close by.”

She debated touching him as they walked in the street, finally looping her left arm through his crooked elbow, his hand jammed into his coat pocket. It was a constant question she had, his affinity for her, why he chose to call her Meine Leibling. He had taken no other lovers in Berlin, so their friends told her, and his rough animal beauty made this romantic absence altogether baffling. She had outgrown, younger than most women, the over-valorization of being a unique presence in a man’s life. So this knowledge about his isolation meant nothing essential. She wondered how much she had forced herself upon this man, who had joked that he happily barricaded himself in Berlin, choosing to suffer internally the way a good Jewish expat ought to.

The next bookstore had an English section in the back. They grew competitive, informal intellectuals asking whether the other had read this book, knew the background of that author, sometimes detailing the story behind their first encounter with some novel. On the back wall, while looking for Durrell, she found a ratty copy of Herzog by Saul Bellows, a paperback she had seen the day before shoved in among the thousands of Brecht’s books. She scanned it and, showing him the delicate little copy, read:

“He went on taking stock, lying face down on the sofa. Was he a clever man or an idiot? Well, he could not at this time claim to be clever. He might once have had the makings of a clever character, but he had chosen to be dreamy instead, and the sharpies cleaned him out. What more? He was losing his hair.”

She smiled widely and hid her hands in his curly hair, fingers hidden in an unruly field waxed with pomade. He kissed the side of her neck and said,

“I’d like to read that when you’re done. You should get it.”

And she did.

Pre-Poland

It was his apartment but she unlocked the door, leading them inside. While she began to undress he went to the oven, turning the knob to the highest heat and pulling the door open, hoping to warm the little room. He sat down and watched her pull off each layer, staying in his coat and scarf, too trashed to do anything but watch. She stripped off the absurd black wool pants they had bought her yesterday, now only in ripped black tights and a thin lace camisole. He knew she came from money and so her vagabond presence, the neediness of it all, every tear in her clothes, baffled him anew. The Europe winter had bleached her; he had the sense that her skin should be olive but it was an unenthusiastic yellow, a dried lemon, covering her small wrists and bloated stomach. She was a caricature of baroque neglect. Her nails were little black discs she painted every night, with jagged red strips of skin surrounding them like detail on pottery. She would sit with fingers in her mouth and write at the table, unconscious of the blood from the finger in her mouth blossoming through her lips. Avoiding his eyes, she went to the stove and put apple juice in a pot, a makeshift offering of cider she felt made up for her presence. The air was laden with the purposeful attempt to move casually, to dredge up the sensual, to crowd out the sentimental. She filled the two little 1970s tea cups, thin German bone, and brought them to the table where he sat, all heavy glass and dirty smoky breaths.

She spoke more quietly in the apartment, he noticed. Her words creaked with the weight of ornamentation. An impressive woman, he imagined, the sort with an endoskeleton of disappointment. Men do not love the impressive. They tinker with it until the Cartier of a woman resembles a shabby steampunk watch. She was otherwise regal, he was sure. There were glimpses of this quick bitter bite, ringing her spirit like a rind, but only when they weren’t in this little room. Lifting the teacup to his face, he stared at her, hunched over, examining the train ticket. She stared at the thick white slip and only saw red, the crimson walls of the East Berlin nightclub. A silly German man named Johann had pulled her aside in the smoking room, telling her about his trip to Los Angeles. He had seen the Hollywood sign, he had thrown up at magic mountain. Pulling away from Johann eventually, she went back to their group of friends. He was standing there, waiting for her.

He said, “Did you have a nice conversation?”

She smirked, “Jealousy doesn’t look good on you, darling.”

His face contorted into something like injury. They finished their smokes and he led her inside, twirling her in a playful spin. She pulled away and walked ahead, an unnatural construction of cruelty, adrenalizing venom. It didn’t last. Turning around, she grabbed his waist and pulled him against a crimson wall. The following moments were heat. Mouth in the deep grooves of her collarbones, tiny bone hands twisting his black curls, a grating jean zipper. Skinny austere German boys walked by and stared and she laughed at them. He was busy in her hair as she stuck her tongue out at an anorexic industrial girl wandering by. These moments were the shriek of a raped tea kettle. He pulled away and they went back on the dance floor. His pulls on the flask of bourbon came harder after that. At the end of the night, while they waited for the U-Bahn, he jumped onto the tracks and began to walk back and forth. He called at them, “There are enormous rats down here. The government shoves real Berlin between the tracks.”

Now they sat at the table, hit with the smell of burning apples. He rolled her a cigarette and lit it, wanting to see her little hand erect and pinching the long rolled paper between her middle and ring fingers.

He asked, “What would you like to listen to?”

Smoke dribbled from her mouth, her answer made cotton by the thick air.

“Mountain Man.”

Their frames withered with each minute, the deflation of tired roses. She carelessly placed the burning cigarette on the wooden table and climbed into his lap, one leg on each side of his body, facing him. Pulling off her camisole, with a gaze of heavy water, she did the same to his coat, the roughly cut fabric acting as a scarf, the buttons of his cardigan, all of it. All of it.

She said, “I want our chests to be touching.”

A black nail traced it all, the stubble, the rough Neanderthal bones propping the eyes of lazy almonds, pouting witty lips.

She said, “Come with me. Come with me.” Imploring.

“Where?”

“You know. Poland. You know.”

He shook his head no. Wet eyes of lazy almonds. Wet rivulets tracking through black stubble.

“It’s not right to make love right now. It can wait til morning.”

“Okay. Okay.”

He took her to the train station. It was some hours past noon and the city already moved toward darkening. She regretted asking if he was coming, because in that moment she realized there would never be any way to know if he would have of his own accord. This difference seemed to matter. He rolled her a cigarette while she ran around the tracks, asking different personnel in broken German about the train schedule. She strode back him eventually, rage trembling beneath her pale face, tightly wound and yellowing like an old corset. The wet air, hard in the cold, treaded through her hair; the black strands always seemed to crash around her head like cymbals. Tugging on her knots, she lit the cigarette and smoked hurriedly, leaning over the tracks and looking for the train. He waited until she calmed down and told her, knowing she couldn’t read German, that the sign read a 45 minute delay.

She said, “You can leave.” She began to roll the overstuffed backpack between her boots, staring at him insistently.

He looked at his watch, then stepped forward and placed his chin onto her right collarbone. He sang her lullabies and Tom Waits, told her about visiting Munich. And the train came and she got on, and he went down the escalators. And she watched until he disappeared, and turned to find her seat as the train began to move. And he had run up the escalators stairs, backwards, and jumped onto the moving train and kissed her and jumped off and she slumped down in the train hallway arms splayed and withered as angry German mothers strode by with their fat ankles and swinging floral bags hitting her face, a corset completely undone.

She said, "But ______ didn't break you. It didn't fuckin' break you. And you should be proud."

___

I told another she, "It broke me. It broke me. And no one can tell. That's breaking me."

She said, "Well, how can we tell? How could anyone fuckin' tell. You are an onion,

wrapped in concrete,

with a little satin bow on top to boot."

___

She said, "You're so tiny. When I held you, I thought, 'Where is she? Where is she?'"

___

She said, "None of us could approach you. You looked cruel. We thought, 'She will think we're morons if we even try.' And then, you weren't. Cruel. And I thought, okay. And you're just this little sensitive thing, come to find out."

___

So no one will pull me into the bushes, or their car, I walk in the middle of the boulevard in the glowering shimmer of 1:30 am afterdark. Maybe the car that swerves just past my toes thinks I am drunk. And I think of my cruelty and I am glad.

Anatomy of a Writer





























Rightfully blurred

Exorcism at Lethe

At last, my love gave me that scene from a movie;
it was all ugly gasping and absurd fists
pounding on his chest.
Streaming ochre and talc. Screams down a Madrid street:
come back. come back. don't just leave me
standing
here.
don't leave me. just, please.
be just.
Please.

I said, "We are meant to be. This is our lives' great love."

He said, "Meant to be is a continual deciding."

He was not wrong, he was not wrong. What a relief that he was not wrong.

Confrontation Series

Father, I am so sorry your body is failing you.

Father, I am living the way you do.

Your nerve: my heart's fortitude

Shoulder muscle: septic organ.

Etc, etc.

To what extent this is of your choosing is clear and
to what extent I let this moat be built
by drunken architects,
sloppy friends,
teachers forging against
us like Napoleon
is dusty crystal.

Will you still be able to hold a handful
of snapping balloons, for
me,
on birthdays?
The moon is a balloon, the moon
is
the balloon.

I am writing home to tell you to pay the water bill, I am writing home to tell you the power's out.
I am writing home to tell you I'm scared because you raised a communist who thinks her heart is common ground.
I am the dregs in a jar
of breakfast marmalade,
diluted, mild and
bitter and sour milk and uneatable lemons.

Papa, did you stop having friends for the same reasons
? (See the beautiful form of that question, marked.)

Once, you became jealous of Bear's bike and stole it and biked away so fast down oak MN St.s and pothole became eye bone on sidewalk, mangled Bear's bike, and he drove by with his mom and peeled you off concrete and now you have a scar and he was a friend of yours still).

Once, friends promised that upon my european return they'd puzzle me back together again and I taking this to mean many more things than what's been implemented as factory policy came back all a dreaming and ready to be mended and pothole became my books, their lusty needs, and I am waiting for some balloons no one gave me for my birthday and now I have a scar and love humanity so much still).

The Year of Deprivation

Henceforth how your era shall be known.

Immoveable man, I would rage at you
if you were malleable as seacliffs.
Hell is a pebble
thrown at
the moon, occasionally,
until all its white chalk
breaks off and
floats away.
Powder white, power of
cyclical reflection
joining the dodo bird, the polar bear soon.

This year reduces that rubble
to rubble.

Once, I drank milk.
Mixed with honey,
crouching in your kitchen
until you took the empty carton.
I woke up that night with the vomit of shame
and genealogical punishment in my mouth.
Women don't consume that way,
humans aren't even made to drink milk.

You ran out and in and saved me
scooping my nausea into your hands
the sandy chalk of missing enzymes.
But my deficiency is still
the centerpiece of this story, isn't it? ISN'T IT?

No, it is, and
strange that so much lack
builds such a carnival of artifices.
Fuck you, language, you really fucked me
on this one. I guess I needed you to,
since I wasn't getting fucked in the morning.

Men always told me that the perfect woman
makes love in the morning,
our eyes still sealed
breath hot lashes gums wooly.
I am white satin panties, garters,
boned corsets,
little hands,
disappearing demurity who baked her bones into pie crusts,
the most essential flour for your tongue,
navel flower,
clingy fingernails which burrow into sheets
which you tuck in the sides before we sleep.

I spent half, or more,
of my year of deprivation
in fetal position.

That pull of cello strings is
my vertebrae
snapping into place.

Tugs

If loyalty is all,
I face, roundly,
your effacement of
my standard.

Songfulness enters
it, and love's uselessness
functions like slicing
a mango,
rivulets of a pressed pit
scurrying into my sleeves,

and I am forced to angle
my elbow downward, if
loyalty is all. I can
oh, pardon us.

The redemption of wonder,
for one, that your childish
nostalgia can offer us,
"a school",
seminal saturation,
square quotes proper,
earrings of bike tires.


But more proper
to say the respect for
a possibility! I may not
yell anymore,
my sweet work screams.
I'd like to leave pretty
and soon, even while
you stick around. But oh,

loyalty is all and
possibility, you damn
leathered red floozy.

I think you'd like my small hands, godless man. I would fold unto you like a china doll, and I think you'd read to me at night. And I don't know when I'd sleep again, because I already don't. I'll keep believing in god and strain out the stains in my narrative, I'm a drug addict, I'm so and so's niece, I was to be married once, he left me for spoons and cotton balls. You are Didion and I am Didion. I don't believe it's anything essential, I don't believe that's anything essential. You are a replacement, any man is a replacement, for god in my gut. China doll china doll but only if you ask me. To dinner, to protect my honor, to the front door with a shake and nothing more. My radiator is broken do you know how to fix it, it scares me at night. China doll china doll.

Dare I? I do dare:
Come to me, come to me in spring. Come to me stateside, my side of the states. You bring those lazy almond eyes and I, I will feed you and nourish you with all the rest.
Climb the stairs of my building, across the street from where Ginsberg wrote Howl, up to my room. Come only with the intention of kissing me, kissing me on the mouth and nowhere else, like I was to kiss you and no one else in Berlin. And then thumb through my books, find the one that seals the deal, and undress us because of it, because I have the right book and what that means about me.

Follow me, follow me here in the flesh and to my flesh because you already follow me. I open my schoolbook and the prologue is a quote from Herzog, by Saul Bellows, "For instance? Well, for instance, what it means to be a man. In a city. In a century. In transition. In a mass. Transformed by science. Under organised power. Subject to tremendous controls. In a condition caused by..."

Teach me, teach me again to roll cigarettes, this time with the confetti raspy tomb tobacco stateside. Come to me, come to me in spring because I hardly remember you at all. I am sure I am writing to myself this time and not you. But I want, do I want.

What shall we do? What we shall do, darling. For instance, anything that has a devil may care tinge upon it, teeth marks on it, crushed pomegranate bruises on it, a whip of red horse hair across it, hot apple cider to soothe it.

I resolve, most resolutely, for this new year to never yell.

Your eyes are lazy almonds. I don't remember what your eyelashes are like but i remember the droop of those lazy, lazy almonds.