Sunday, April 25, 2010

Dear Destiny

 
I understand you have quite the kick, I feel my bones shatter as you speak. I understand you are using my tongue and my eyes to render me so unnaturally weak. I understand you are here to teach. I see you there morphing into my friend wearing the latest trends and smoking down my throat, until the fear and the pain come out shaking, crying, naked. I understand you, so well, my stomach has never felt worse, my brain never so open and lacerated, my heart never so broken into so many pieces, and I understand how well you have understood me, and where I need improvement, where renovation after complete ruin.

I understand your work, and your victory, which lies in my defeat. I understand I must capitulate if I am to be destroyed easier, I should bow my head and never speak. I understand every area where I lack, I see why I am such a worthless quack, and I lie waiting, to be well done, so you may finally turn me on my broken back, and display me to the world, expose my imperfect divinity

I understand finally the odds that are playing between me and my womb, fertile and waiting and alone. I understand my purpose, to stand against the wind, to know it wrong and unwise and unworthy, to know it useless and untried and untamed and completely self-sacrificial, to know it ruthless and waiting and impersonal and lonely, to know it well, to oppose it anyway, always and unwell.

I feel the knowledge that only helplessness can bring, I feel the hatred that only I can conceive, I feel the destruction in these years that I have lived, and the many more I plan to deceive, in the hope of an objective hazy, unknown and grim. I feel these wastes perennially soaking from my skin, I feel the little spark I make with fuel from so many many hours of frightening sin. I feel the enormity of the goodness I lack, like a cloud bearing rain, so close, so huge, I float through feeling nothing but the occasional tendril, of deathly cold, with a shiver and a chill, a shard and a thrill

I feel my mortality, and time, both huge and negligible in each battle. I feel each strength of mine that disarms and debilitates me, I feel the other side, without seeing a thing.

I feel unjust and cynical, lost and lyrical. I feel like music just before it stops, like a mountain of dust that I always carried, and always crossed, I feel a sneeze coming all the time

I want to understand you and I want to leave you. Never as much as now, do I feel how contentious we are, how much at odds with each other, how odd we sound when we fight. I want to believe you exist. Make a Ravana-Hydra effigy of you with ten heads, a fierce, undoubtful villainy, and burn you to the ground, once a year, ten times a day. I want always, to be somewhere else, sometime else, someone else

 
And finally, a footnote to self
To be engrossed by something outside ourselves is a powerful antidote for the rational mind, the mind that so frequently has its head up its own ass - seeing things in such a narrow and darkly narcissistic way that it presents a colo-rectal theology, offering hope to no one - Anne Lamott, in Bird by Bird
 

Monday, April 19, 2010

a chip off the old block

 
And I'm blocked. All symptoms present, the hopelessness, the frustration, the anger, the withdrawal, the whining, the self help books. Not fun when I want to write and I don't want to at the exact same time, like some cosmic joke with a smiley face and a sad face on either side of my tarot card

I feel uninspired, dull and pathetic. And untruthful, lazy, dishonest. My truths are the kind that are never presented with a witness present but now I want to sit out in the sunshine and market my wares, like some plastic dollar store mannequin. I want to sell out, and I have not a damn thing to sell.

So I plan a dramatic death. I will be eighty, or possibly seventy, based on whether I start smoking with stress or not. I will have off-white hair, same shade as a bedroom wall in the old Asian Paints ad.

I will wear a brown shawl with nice elephant-and-chariot embroidery and a fringe. Then I will trip over it and fall down the stairs. Wherever I am, there will be a staircase, after sixty, I will refuse to live in any house without a staircase. I will scream of course, up to down with artistic volume control, and break a few bones. It will be intensely painful, and I will be noble and very brave

Someone will come running, maybe a husband, maybe a kid, maybe a neighbor, maybe a dog or a cat. I will be lying there, very still, very dignified, moaning slightly with pain. Someone will ask if I am okay (or possibly bark or miaow). Then I will sit up and say very clearly "I have something to say to this world"

And then I will close my eyes, smile contentedly and die. That will be my revenge on the human race
 

Thursday, April 15, 2010

dragonchild

 
always dragons at the gate
usually two but for me, a village
rattling inside
a tin pot dictatorship
tourmaline candy, hard and blue
my self image myself
a shoulder bird
digging in settled
with a wince to say
not enough so loud,
be still be heard
can it not flitter off
with every wind that plays
my solution my price
works airbrush in hand
to riot the kinks out
grow the burnt pile down
from fire breathing monster
grand piano to curve scar
where strings used to play
to lemon squash courts
fast not too high
to eye iota with tears
then an atom misplaced
everywhere, everytime
a banked fire waits

 

Monday, April 12, 2010

the woman in the train

 
wasn't quite a woman yet,
dunno if she voted or drank,
too young to push a pram
and she was talking
into her phone
into the train
distracted me from my fears
thank you
looked around quick and wary
anyone watching ...
I obliged her reflection
with music in my head
figure thats okay fair
public place parallel time
didn't want her words anyway
words are my broken edge of impossible
after all else is lost
like footsteps down empty corridors
loud urgent multiplied jarred
I knew he was someone special
her face was tense
her eyes darting
some talk without their bodies knowing
what the hell they want to say
her body was honest angry raw afraid
to herself to the phone to the train
her breath quick and hard
for a while next song
and then she smiled
they'd made up it wasn't war anymore
the train pulled away
the call failed
her breath ran again
did he did he or was it an accident
her hand started rocking the pram
are there no accidents
or are they all
she dialed darted fretted
her smile answered, wasn't me
but it was me, I left her
I do so love a happy ending
 

Monday, April 05, 2010

pollution

 
the breaks in the violin that climb fret over fret to reach the top, they are haunting, they are shrill and bare, needy, not beautiful, no. but why beauty anyway, life is real, life is earnest, life is full and reflected on the broken fields of unrest, they want, they must, they need, they will, march pasts of detonated soldiers ticking along without a care. would you throw in bait into the mix or simply run away run away. when the sun rise shoots up expectantly into an unwary sky, dragging denatured spirits two feet alongside, hauled up, examined and found wanting in every way, but wanted, still wanted, what greater paradox than sunrise and sunset, with all those breaths in between, dispersed evenly on roads, houses, buildings, narcotics and tears. A breath of wind swirls it all up and flings them labors of love around, like poison into eternity, like painting black on black, if you believe in sunrise, you must watch it set every day until it is beaten out of you. some are smart enough to set quietly in a few evenings, some struggle uphill for years swinging from side to side, insensible to the autism that puddles around the arc, searching, foothill to foothold to fool's gold, its midday and getting oh so hot in here, maybe air conditioning is the answer to everything