In My Room the Women Come and Go

If only they would limit their discussions to art.


Instead, they lament, voices plaintive and thick, slurred with alcohol and death.

Go away, mournful ghosts. I do not want to know the weight of your sad hearts, the texture of your scars.


Why pour your misery into me with such intimate whispering? You have no secrets. You splashed everything out in bright blood blossoms all over your pages for everyone to read, the neglect of parents, the betrayals of husbands and lovers, the abuse and abandonment of your children. You have no secrets left. Your words and memories should be enough to carry all your guilt. Your ghosts should not even exist. And still.



Even when I sleep, your voices drill into my head, mewing complaints forcing me awake. I spend my time in your cigarette garden, whiskey watered guilt-flowers stinking up the landscape.



God, given me back the bachelor butchers: the General, the Surgeon, the bleak and sour-faced soul-reeking priest.

I'm more comfortable with demons bent on destroying me than these mad, mournful ghost-ladies clawing for pity, tearing my heart into strips, swallowing the pieces.

With All Due Respect.

And now a toast to my drunken formothers, Dorothy, Anne, and Sylvia, Virginia, Zelda and poor, sad Vivienne, "Dear Muses, thanks, but no thanks. I will decline your fame and hearbreak and die content in benign obscurity. Take your gin and genius and leave me just my sanity. Amen."

A Reminder

When there is a day or a stretch of days or a year that is so hard that all the sweetness goes out of the sky, when Music is no longer luscious, and food and fabrics and words are leeched of all their precious taste and touch and the lists of life's amazements mock rather than comfort, when someone says, "I love you" and you say, "It doesn't matter," this is as bad as it gets. It isn't a question of pills and razorblades but of walking out of your own life forever and not even stopping to say goodbye.

Walking until you just dissolve, and who knows what's become of you?

Unless someone says, "It matters to me."

It's a pin through the heart and it hurts but it keeps you there. It's a chain of names and faces far too heavy but they anchor you.

You cannot drift; you will not come to nothing.

When it is as bad as it gets, balanced on that edge and about to fall

there is nothing left that can be done, or undone or wished or said except, "I love you, that is all."

Between the Boy and the Bees

1.

Is this going to be one of those days?
Everything reminds me of you,

the Honeybear,
the radio buzzing out of tune,

the cranefly on the windowsill,
back legs crushed:
useless and dangling.


2.

Our Mother's voice,
cracking with static electricity
jolts the sleep right out of me.

Last night it got too hard for you
to breathe,
and they took you in an ambulance.
"Infection. Complications. Tests."
Of what things she said
that's all I heard.

Now my own breath catches
and I wait for words to see,
if, with the coming weeks
you will vanish, like the bees.


3.

On Monday you called to say,
"Melissa,
all the honeybees are leaving."

The use of my true name
sent a shiver straight
through my skin.

In my legs, a hum
like a hundred
thousand pairs
of missing wings.

"Dying," I said,
thick and low, but
"No. Just disappearing."

You told me the mystery.
Abandoned hives, still and empty,
no predators nearby,
no poisons, parasites,
no bodies.
I told you it worried me.

Your reply stretched like golden glass,
a sparkling amber about to smash.
"I'm not worried for the bees,
just for human beings, maybe.
What will we do if they all go?
What do bees know
that we don't?"

Translucent words
too bright with wonder,
so sun-kissed sweet they
made me shudder.
If the bees come back,
will you get better?

4.

The wounded cranefly at the window
dances up the glass,
legs swinging in
a broken jig.

I stir my coffee with cream and honey.
You've been eating Royal Jelly,
pollen, honeycomb and nectar.

It gives you strange dreams
but they say it's good medicine.

I dream of you going away with them.
I dream of your back
split open with wings.


5.

This is one of those days.
Everything reminds me of you.

On my cafe table,
on my lunch break,
an arrangement of sunflowers
poses for a picture.

One droops dying,
seeds swollen,
petals wilted.

The other,
yellow corona bursting in
full bloom,
attracts a dusty bumblebee,

6 legs strong
and fat with pollen.

More in the Jazz Vein

I don't know if it's all the stormy weather, but it seems to suit my mood these days. 

This one I wrote listening to "Lady In Blue" off of Tori Amos's New Album, Abnormally Attracted to Sin.  It's not a bad record. Better, in my opinion, than her last two, as a whole (although if I had my way as an editor I would cut all three to pieces, leave out all the fluff and crap [Tori Amos I will never forgive you or your producers for the abomination that is Posse Bonus. For Shame, Madam.] and make the one bangin', award winning album that exists now in brief diamonds amongst the detritus.) 

Anyway, one such diamond is "Lady In Blue," a haunting torch piece with a surprising (and refreshing) guitar solo that makes up the last 2 minutes of the 7+ minute song. It makes me think of sad old Movie Stars, back when they were Movie Stars and not Celebrities. Some Leggy Dame in Tights from a Noir Picture with a Sinatra soundtrack. 

On a rainy day, with a bottle of wine and a pack of cigarettes, I got this little poem lodged in between my ears and head. Enjoy.

It Girl

Glitter Eyes,

with your head on the table

empty bottle still in your hand.

Don't you know

there's no savior to wait for

only Alexander's Band

playing 'Song d'Automne' 

as the ship sinks down,

playing as the waves come up

to swallow you

in the frozen blue.

They put words

in your mouth like pills.

Don't I know how it goes? 

Yes, I know.

Champagne kisses, 

rings on every finger till

you can't play piano anymore.

And you did it all for love,

a million eyes in the dark.

Did you think there were no consequences for

turning a spotlight

into a star?

Glitter Eyes,

you burn too bright.

Your cigarette tip

is crumbling now,

and when they smoke you down 

to the filter,

toss you into

the rain-choked gutter,

at last 

at least I think 

we all will remember

your face

under water

as you drown.

The 23rd Street Cafe

Although I haven't been to the jazz club in a while, I was thinkin' about it the other day while cleanin' the house...

1. The Big Top

Trumpets stretch long notes

in the blue light. 

Blue smoke 

tears apart as it lifts.

Shadows drape against sound.

In these wires her song hovers.

Conversation suspends 

as she sings.

The slow notes fall up, 

balanced on the pull 

of martinis 

on our senses.

Straining apart, 

we hold our breaths 

to hear the precise spin 

of elevation;

the sequined wink

of the catch in her voice

before the rising refrain.

Smoke and held breaths

are not a net.

Her voice does not fall. 

Torch singer.

Not because

of the smoky burn 

of her songs;

the fire they build 

within 

the frame of our ribs.

It is the weight 

of her brightness,

how it carries

over distance.

2. The Haunted Attic

There are ghosts here;

the world is doubled.

One

stands behind me,

filling the same space

as your right arm

spread across my shoulders.

Another 

in a bowler hat

sprawls sideways

in the lap of our friend

and occasionally sips

his whiskey.

The bar is draped

with ghost women draped

in ghost feathers.

The rising smoke defines them.

Blue light fills their eyes

and the murmur of their laughter bubbles 

under the echoed notes

of a ghost piano and a ghost trombone.

What haunts me 

is the smokey thought 

that one day

I will grace the bar

in dead feathers.

You will disturb the lap

of a teenaged clarinet player

perched on a table's edge,

waiting to play.

Your smile flickers across his face.

With a sudden jerk he spills his gin

and thinks 

it is just nerves.

3. The Cathedral

I could go blind here.

What would it matter?

Bright green bursts

in my mouth: 

gin-soaked olives.

Conversations stained

with sophistication:

lipstick red.

The violet scent of smoke,

pink perfumes,

the orange flick of matches.

This light,

stained glass blue bouncing 

off the amber of the ashtrays,

and halcyon trumpets

in every phrase

she lifts, carries,

and turns.

When I close my eyes

I hear her bending light.

I bow my head and clasp my hands.

I bow my head and give thanks.

In this place,

it doesn’t matter if you are blind.

Why Our Towels at the Marriott Might Smell Like Death

After three weeks of traveling in opposite directions, we arrived again in the same hotel. 

Repeating conversations, we worked in a circle. The maybe-we-shouldn’ts and we-can-start-overs. 

A quick, it-hasn’t-worked-before dismissed by another this-time-will-be-different. 

A bottle of wine, “Do Not Disturb” sign, and once again we were back in bed.

Three days later, between breakfast and the shower, we were arguing again. Signs of dismay were settling in across my forehead and around your mouth. When the shouting ended, you went to brush your teeth, running the water to drown me out. I opened the door for room service breakfast and found Love dead on the doorstep, naked and blue across the Sunday Paper. 

I picked it up, all baby fat and sad feathers, and put it in the bathtub with some ice and cold cokes. I closed the shower curtain. You spat in the sink and rinsed  and sighed. Who knew disappointment could be so minty fresh? We went back to the sitting room, deciding what to do. 

I picked at the breakfast, the grapefruit and toast. Your poured cream into your coffee, watching it star and cloud. We sat in Sunday Edition silence. When I got to the personals, there was a pathetic, watery cough from the bathroom and you looked up in a panic. 

"We shouldn’t try to save it. It will just come back a zombie."

"Yes, and it will eat our brains. The only good bits we have left!" 

There are aching holes where our hearts used to be. We pulled our hotel bathrobes closed and tied the white terry cloth belts in tight knots.

We decided to bury it. You pulled it out of the bathtub, all icy and wet, somehow smaller than before, though pregnant with death. I dried it off with the hotel towels and the feathers started falling out from between the chubby shoulders. We folded it up and wrapped in the used newspaper. You built a little coffin and, fearful of zombification, we dug a deep hole on the county line to make sure it would stay put. 

Crossroads would have been better, sure, but they’re paved over these days, or already filled up. Secure prisons for devils, werewolves, imps, and jinns, rockstars, suicides, and  other wicked creatures.

We chopped off its head and stuffed it with garlic. You drove a spike of oak straight through for good measure. I asked if we should burn it too, and you said no, ashes scatter. 

"The right gust of wind and it could get into our eyes and mouths, good God, and then what?" 

It all went into the box: baby fat and feathered wings and garlic and oak stake and Sunday Edition. The box went into the ground and the ground was laced with salt.  It wouldn’t come back again. There would be no resurrection. No Lazarus tricks.  No fourth, or fifth, or sixteenth coming. 

“Good and dead and put to bed, stake through its heart, garlic in its head!” we said, 3 times, and spat like gypsies. Then we covered it over and patted the dirt down hard and tight.

Now that it’s done, and the knees of our pants are sodden with dew, and our fingers blue with cold and painful with the dirt pinching under our nails, we stand here in Burial silence. You fidget with the loose thread of your sweater, like always, and stupidly, I notice, just like always. You tuck a  loose curl behind my ear, and leave a smudge of dirt down my right cheek. I rock back on my heels and look up at the stars. There is no moon. 

So what next? Being finally rid of it, the world should feel different. Your eyes should become duller. I should notice the ragged stupidity in the strings of your sweater.  But somehow, nothing’s changed at all. Just a small, sad mound of earth raised up on the county line, roughly the size and shape of a lunchbox, and the raw dirt aching under our fingernails.

Little Things

 

 

 

Sciencin' Around

Looking for a way to spend a rainy afternoon, I stumbled upon Carl Sagan's Cosmos in all it's season one splendid entirety on hulu. Even though the show was made in 1979 and first aired in 1980, the science behind it is sound, the visuals are stunning, the soundtrack is epic, and the entire package is delivered in the soothing, dulcet tones and sweeping gestures of a dashing, young, mop-topped Carl Sagan.

He approaches the macro and micro of the cosmos with a delightful sense of awe-filled optimism that is entirely refreshing the the current, cynical, panic-stricken climate of Science for Profit and Evangelical Atheism. It's science without an agenda, other than to explore and better understand our world. 

When I was a kid, I loved science, in large part because of this show. I'm sure I watched it with my dad, along with Nova and National Geographic Presents. I remember the long reclusive hours I spent as a kid making observations and conducting experiments.

Somewhere along the line, my attention turned significantly to language arts. The joys of science became bogged down in the horrors of math, while language led down a slouchy, jazzy path of literature, music, and visual art where it seemed anybody with an idea, even a stupid one, and an elegant or gimicky way to express it, could explode into a happenin' scene of epic proportions. 

Lately tho, I feel kinda done with happenin' scenes of any proportions. At the same time, my fine young nephew has brought the dazzling world of Science back into my center of focus. Ever since our trip to the Franklin Institute, I've been remembering those days of early childhood, and just the shear wonder of everything.

All areas of science have made leaps and bounds in the 20 some years I wasn't really paying attention. Now, hanging out with Matthew, I get to catch up to all the stuff I missed out on AND stay on the cutting edge (Matthew's totally cutting edge. This kid is a natural born quantum physicist. Talk to him about Time Travel. Seriously.)

So now I'm filling in my gaps, devoting my rainy days to Carl Sagan, Kenneth W. Ford, and the Reluctant Mr. Darwin instead of my usual gin and ink and A Perfect Circle records. 

And, in the immortal words of Bill Nye, "Science Rules!"

I Love...

Waking up alone, at dawn in a strange apartment. Watching the light move. The smell of green tea and sandalwood. 

There is no where I have to be, nothing I need to do for hours. It is early April morning, but the city hums with summer: air conditioning and sprinklers. 

I stretch and turn over onto my stomach. I bury my face in the scent of someone else's sheets. I hear kids at a distance. The aching part of the year when it feels like summer but still, there is school. I remember. The countdown days. I am outside of all that now. 

Stretch again and flip again. Reach down and pull on my jeans. I have the intention of going out, for coffee, for juice, for sunshine, but the light moves so softly on the other side of these blinds, illuminates the room inch by soft pink inch, so I lie back down, pull my headphones on, press play, fill my head with sounds.

The Roots and other summer music. K-OS, bouncy hip-hop that makes you think of stacked girls in tank-tops. City walking rhythms. The light reaches me. 

One more stretch and I'm on my feet, wash my face with headphones still on, wash some dishes, make some coffee. Take two shots of last nights rum and I'm open like a morning glory.

Today could turn into anything at all.