second draft-poetry

I danced on the door of my own self-conscious

Overflowing the flavor and capacity of my palate for dreaming on those shores where food is love and sex is magic

With smoke stained eyes and drug filled brain

Strewing my beliefs into what ever ear was nearest to my breast

And heartbeats drowned out my desire for connection to only a superficial thud

That was made in the shoulder joint that pushed cunts to oblivion

And heaven dripped from my fingers and chin

Down alleys of discontent where my father lived with a gun on his lips

And said who are you

I strolled down Las Ramblas with gunpowder in my pockets and a knife at my throat urging me forward

My own captive mind screaming for release

From the psychosis

Then blues then flamenco then wedding marches

All feet stomping a cadence familiar flung home

The pith and knot of muscles ripped and blood disgorged

To hear what breath meant to hear those words that are just a symbol

For heaven for peace for all good that means nothing outside

A false sense of understanding

Humans or trust

or the goodness of man

Now dowries

to the man on the hill

whom we were promised to

at birth and follow like voles in light

arm on shoulder, arm on shoulder, arm on shoulder

to death

Souls of this America

lie broken and question what sisterhood

or brother hood can exist without this demon

that led us into traps for

oil fire and death

we carry hope in a knapsack tuckered like children

and reflect on our fore peoples mistrust and embrace

what ever is here now for it cannot be

as bad as it seems as bad as it was as bad as the dreams

that lead us chasing snakes through our sleeping hours

 the forests of grass that blanket our conscious existence

then wake seeking wholesomeness in

a ten dollar tomato on Saturdays and weekends

while chasing all things green and inedible

everyday of our lives

 and lovers kept at arms length

and wives looking for our shoulders

or screaming in the faces of whoever is still paying attention   

Now evil women dying at arms length and fingers stretched as far as I can

 run from our love because its pity

wrapped in guilt

wrapped in hate tied up by a life of lies

 whose ribbon sparkles like the chains of genes

in pretty pictures that remove our “GOD”

because we know something

 if not by touch then by sight

Of mountains and land and farms and farmers

that breath each day and kill to feed our fat bellies

 miles away and sweat and toil not for their own existence

but ours because we’ve grown too tired and far

and simple in our own belief that mind

is represented in paper in transcripts in words

from those we pay to count our worth

Whose families wonder what frames their existence

 all is lost and dream of the people

and lands that have existed

in lives the same for thousands of years

but gadgets make us smart

and money make us whole

and our self-importance makes us worthless

and these words are worthless

worthless as any and every that escape from your lips or my own

for words mean nothing without action and action is an idea that died with our hippy parents ideals that changed into drug riddled bodies to fund wars to divide peoples that mean nothing to us.

Nothing who reside in our parents basements knees bloodied with thanks

Nothing to who live off accounts that fuel and are fueled by a false idea of the worth of things and bring an identity of nothing

No struggle Nothing

who write poems static and undefined

whose unframed perception is crumbling before eyes widened by

an exception to the concrete finished rules

self-imposed ridiculous doubts

and un-composed sense of worth left on a shelf

at the back of a dark and empty closet for years

opens

bursting

blood and cum and snot

disease riddled, once fluid bones on fire!

On Fire!

Built by frozen and crumbling undisturbed dreams

Cast aside in indifference

Whose cracked knuckles and ripped backs jerk

In unison for once. 

a nose taste

Dusty cotton mouth adjectives stick Alia’s tongue to the back of her teeth. The scent swims in her head and she stumbles drunk on it.  Mushrooms and candied apples, warm spice, and iron all familiar, but when combined it dances across the synapses in her brain with feet like hammers.  She buckles from the pleasure of it. 

Alia isn’t unlike every other girl crammed in this bar. She hasn’t bathed for a few days.  She likes the smell of her own sweat. She likes the smell of most things.  Quarters out of the change machine at the laundry mat remind her of her piggy bank when she was a little girl.  The produce section at the grocers always familiar, everything mingles into a crisp sweet then bitter earth crunch her nostrils chew and ready for her brain;  Digest digress, digest digress. All scents attach to memories. This one does not. She lights a cigarette to kill some nose buds and walks to the other end of the bar. The rolodex of images spins through her head. Nothing.  She sips her beer and wipes her lips.  She doesn’t do drugs, she doesn’t need them.  Life is drug enough. Her senses tickle her body and peak its interests. Her memories are as real and present as her breath.  

Questioning my sanity.

Questioning my sanity. 

More than a drop in the bucket,

 something leapt from my fingers 

to drown out what peace was left in this life 

I’m deconstructing. 

I could’ve just said

 “I don’t love you,

 I don’t want you,” 

 but that wasn’t the truth.  

I don’t know what truths there are.  

I’d rather blame another,

 find solace in an idea 

I’m either inventing or destroying. 

 The thing is, 

it’s Friday the 13^th, 

and I’ve torn down ideas 

and help build walls.  

I was very happy there, 

and it didn’t feel like an abstract notion.  

It didn’t feel theoretical. 

I’ve broken many hearts today, 

one being my own, 

for having hurt something 

I love so.

Valentines Day

A little person dressed as a mime with big red hearts drawn on his cheeks, slowly waddles towards our bench.  I want to cry.  Warm pressure builds behind my eyes. He even looks like Blitzen.  Why? Jeff doesn’t know! The little man starts singing something in Spanish to me as another full size mime behind him signs out the words.  My hands are shaking. I run down the stairs to get away from them.  I don’t stop running.  I stumble in the loose rocks near the sidewalk and knock a man off his bike.  Behind me I hear a wave of screams, and then hear the horn of the bus right before it hits me. 

               The sun is high in the sky by the time I make it out of the last terminal on the metro. Barcelona is so beautiful this time of year.  It’s just warm enough to enjoy the sun before tourist season hits and the families drown out the quaintness of the city.  Past all the beach bars with their trellises drenched in vines with lavender colored flowers I walk until I am alone.  My dad always made these treks by himself too.  We’d holiday every spring in Barcelona after mom died.  He said it was a nice change of pace.  I agree, ten years of spring in a different eastern European country every year will wear you out.  My mom loved snow and everything else associated with Christmas, hence my name: Dasher.  Our house was covered floor to ceiling with Father Christmas decor.  One year she bleached dad’s beard white while he was sleeping.  I lost her and my twin brother Blitzen eight years ago on Valentines Day in a car accident.  Blitzen was a little person and a little mental but in a good way.  He was always smiling and taking the piss out of mom.  My dad died on Christmas day, we both knew the cancer would get him eventually, but we planned on Barcelona anyway.  Before he died he made me promise I’d keep up the tradition as long as I could.  I decided to make it permanent.  I moved here the day after his funeral.  

           

            Three days ago I met a guy at the hostel I’m staying at.  His name is Jeff.  I don’t know what to think of him.  He’s American and from Texas, I don’t think I can manage the two but his big blue eyes and black hair make me want to try. He’s very cute and very charming in a silly western movie sort of way.  I’ll let him hang around at least until after tomorrow after all it will be Valentines Day and I don’t want to be alone. 

            On the way back the Metro is more crowded than usual. People carry books and bunches of roses for La Diada de Sant Jordi, the Spanish equivalent of Valentines day.  The streets are unusually clean, the washers must have come out early. Normally everything smells like dogshit and beer by this time of day. 

            After a plate of tapas, a beer and a shower I’m too tired to go dancing and pass out on my bunk in the employee room.  Car horns wake me at 7am.  I put out breakfast, my only job here in exchange for my bed and head to Park Guell to meet Jeff for our date.  He’s sitting on the big mosaic lizard at the top of the stairs.  The bench is very hot from the afternoon sun and scorches my thighs.  He’s smile is beautiful.  I wonder what he has planned.       

a chance of crazy-random

A novelist named Nancy kicks a pretty Siamese kitten across her apartment in downtown Seattle. It is a warm sunny day.  Outside birds are chirping but all she can think of is how pissed she is.  The fucking kitten is so cute!   Since she moved here from Atlanta to write the “great American Novel” she can't get into that Nabacov state of mind.   Nothing is dreary. Cobain even sounds upbeat in this scenery.  The closest she’s gotten to sad was feeling bad for sending that cute, little shit sailing across the room on her way into the kitchen.  He’s a bobtail  she rescued from the alley behind her apartment.  She starts whistling while chopping the carrots for her salad, and cuts her finger on purpose when she catches the tune from Beauty and the Beast coming from her lips.

I’m going to open a fucking vein!  No, I’m going to church! Maybe I could just chew my wrist open in that big pretty Catholic Church on 80^th street!

 She chews her salad with more fervor than necessary. Her teeth grind against one another.  She bites the inside of her cheek and the taste of blood mixes with her fresh, sweet carrot.  Iron and sugar, her nostrils flare.  She thinks or her mothers hands.  Warm and rough from years of working leather.  Nancy remembers her mom’s homemade lemonade.  She scrapes her knife across the surface of the lemon in her mind and sees the little spray of oil and acid glisten in the light.   Running back to the sun soaked desk in front of her window, she kicks the kitten again and falls into her sofa headfirst.  Laughing uncontrollably she cradles Che’ in her lap as she sits back at the laptop and writes about the torture of being a teen.  

            “I was thirteen when it all started leather, lemonade, and chicken blood.”

home was...

Home was a twelve by sixty foot trailer that was made of green and white corrugated aluminum on one end and painted rust red on the other.  It was sitting on its axels; which were half buried in fine black sand that’s typical near the swamps in central Florida.  It’s front and rear steps were made of stacked cinder blocks.  

           

To the right inside the rusty tin framed screen door sat granny staring at the TV.  It was propped amidst piles of paper and whatnots, on what was once meant to be a breakfast nook between the kitchen and living room.  Just inside the door to the left was our fridge.  On the right just past granny’s old worn recliner was a couch with a hide away bed we used for company, but I can’t remember ever having any.  I can’t tell you how many spiders and lizards called it home.  Many times while sitting on the couch one would crawl out and scared me to near tears. 

Mine and my mom’s beds were tucked into the end of the living room.  Mama shared a bed with my little sister.  It ran the width of the trailer and the head of my bed fit in just at the foot of theirs.  When I lay down to sleep at night I would stare up at the old broken air conditioner above me and tell all my teddy bears sitting on top of it good night.  I had little apologetic conversations with them in my head about why I hadn’t chosen them to sleep with that night.  Fred was my favorite and knowing the others felt lonely made me very sad.

At the foot of my bed sat Granny’s doll collection.  Their dead unblinking eyes made me nervous. That combined with the guilt from neglecting my own toys gave me nightmares.  The dolls would march across me in my sleep to creep up on the unsuspecting bears then tear them to shreds.  I would wake and pile the bears around me so that my closeness would protect them. 

Granny’s bedroom was at the opposite end of the trailer from the living room.  She had the biggest bed I’d ever seen.  It was tucked in on the front side near the window and mountains of clothes were piled everywhere you could see.  Across from her bed sat a makeup nook built into the wall near her closet.   The makeup table had a mirror above it.  All her jewelry was scattered into little golden clumps and tangles on the table and everything was covered in a blanket of baby powder.  Diamonds and pearls peeked through the powder snow banks and lured me in to play with them every time I was sent to look for something for her.  I never found what I was sent for and eventually my Mama or Uncle David would be sent in to get it.  On their return from granny’s room they would say “MeLinda if it was a snake it would’ve bit ya.” 

The bathroom sat next to Granny’s room and across the hall from our washer.  Many times while sleep walking to the bathroom in the mornings I would fall asleep on the clothes stacked next to the washing machine and once or twice I mistook a pile of clothes for the toilet and peed there instead. 

The bathroom was a scary movie.

Florida is unlike any other place I’ve ever lived.  The outdoors were constantly in our house.  There were giant wolf spiders that carried their eggs in a sack on their stomach, everywhere.  Granny wouldn’t kill them because they apparently ate the roaches.  I never saw that happen but she swore it did.  Snakes and frogs would swim up through our plumbing.  I can remember at least five times I found something live swimming in the toilet when I went to pee.  The shower was the scariest of all.  There was always a spider near the faucet ready to slip into a stream of water and come flying at you while your eyes were closed.  Because of this I rarely washed my hair without someone in the bathroom with me.

  

Uncle David’s tiny room was crammed between the bathroom and the kitchen.  There were bunk beds stacked against the right wall when you opened the door.  The room was so little that when you opened the door it hit the bunk beds.  The head of the bed sat against hurricane windows that were missing the screen.  I used to tie milk crates full of tangerines over the bars of the window.  When Granny or Mama told me that I’d had enough for the day I would just pull the milk crate up and sneak them in that way. 

The kitchen was one of my favorite parts of the house.  They built me a step so I could help cooking when I wanted to.  I would drag it to the sink and play at washing dishes or pull it over to the stove and stir while granny made homemade pudding.  I felt very important in the kitchen.  It was where I really got to interact with my Granny and Mama the most.  Looking back on them teaching me recipes, thinking I’d remember them is funny now, but then I was important. 

Granny moved to Tennessee about five years ago and lives with my Mama now.  She’s working on a recipe book for my birthday present this year.  Her room is still mountains of clothes and there’s still a layer of baby powder that covers anything she gets near.   

cracking the shell

In 2006 I moved to Barcelona Spain. I got to see what I looked like as a person alone in the world.  I liked myself. I learned really bad and broken Castilian Spanish. I saw what happens when two men try to kill each other. I cleaned their blood up.  I fell in love with an American girl who loved me back for a while.  I left her in Spain. She came to Tennessee to be with me. In 2008 she left and my father died.  I stopped being me. I met a girl in my second round of college. We fell in love and had a marriage ceremony in front of our families.  She never got to see the real me.  We separated the day after Christmas. I want to start over.

I am a writer. This is not an example of my craft. These are just stats, a timeline of five years broken into a paragraph.