quips and social etiquette

There is nothing that gets me down anymore-he says.
I don't really believe you-I say.
Well you should. Because well, its true-He says.
What do you mean? I bus full of kids that you happen to run into and kill all of them wouldn't get you down?- i say
Shut up. Of course it would.- He says
Im a bitch- I say
Yeah, you are- He says.

Hes been kissing this girl downtown, claiming that he doesn't feel any remorse any longer.
My self, the cripple, can't believe it.
I apply lipstick with my good hand, and i don't bother kissing anyone any longer.
He used to kiss me, but i wouldn't compare it to Archaic gods or linen sheets or central park. I wouldn't attempt it.

How are you-he says.
Nothing new- i say.
Good i hope?- He says.
Fine- I say.


I attempt to not squander his lovesick heir with my unearthly sickness.
The world opened up, when i lost my fingers, limbs and its steam.
It was more powerful than drugs or sex.
Suddenly my own memories were no longer mine.

So- this downtown girl- I say.
Shes really good- he says.
Good- I say.
Good kisser?- I say.
Yes. Very- He says.
Good- I say

I re birthed myself, on my own, i don't even own a cat.
I wrote songs and recorded my little voice into my computer.
I read nothing.
I ate nothing.
I just sat, listened and opened my mouth when i wanted to.
I can't say anything glorious came from it.
In fact, i most certainly know that nothing DID come from it.
Just a beautiful computer jam packed with one woman's coping method.

i like this- he says.
I realize- i say

he is gripping my good hand in his.
my hand is sweating.
The late august wind had the slightest hint of autumn, my pace slowed to an awkward dull.
In my mouth, chewing on my bubble mint gum.
My throat stings from talking, because i have been talking too much in a very long time.
My mono syllabic responses cough up the backed up flem in my esophagus.
I no longer smoke, but i did that day.

My bad hand is wrapped in a bandage, it is like a sculpture, erupted into bubbling skin, and twisted flesh and bones.
He doesn't acknowledge im sick, or deformed.
I don't either.

Stop!- i say.
Are you okay?- he says.
Yes, i need a cigarette- i say.
I'll buy you some- he says.
Really?!- I say.
Yes, do you still smoke camel lights?- He says
No, i say. I smoke whatever you're smoking- I say.
Oh i don't anymore, ms. downtown doesn't like kissing me when i do.- He says.
oh- i say- camel lights are fine- I say.

In a matter of seconds i get a pack of cigarettes, and tell him to open it for me.
Its in my lips lit, fresh and deadly.
In my virgin lungs again, i feel like my old self again and suddenly my memories are mine again.
He walks past me to through away the plastic off the cigarette pack.
His back looks the same, like when i used to kiss him, and when we'd lie in bed pretending
what we had just done was far more astounding than it was.
I remember the child i took care off after school in college, that is now fourteen.
Anton, he had corn silk hair, he liked Jacques Cousteau.
We made up songs and we went to the movies together.
These two moments, relinked from the dark organ tissue lost from a month of pity.

I open my mouth, and nothing comes out but smoke.

A hurricane is gonna hit New Orleans- He says
I just read it in the New York Times- He says
Right there- He says

I open my mouth, spread my lips and tongue to attempt audible sound.

Shame it is- He says.
Awful news- he says.


i remember the dim lights of parties.
And the one man i loved to kiss at parties.
I remember the books i read.
Whitman, walden, camus.
I remember the incense at college i would burn when i was depressed or high.
I remember the dress of gingham i would wear on dates.

it is- I say
it really is- I say.

I wrap myself in my shawl and begin to cry in my head. a deep cry. inaudible, reverberating in my skull.
deep belly sounds only slightly shaking the tissue of my brain.
The cry transfers down my throat out my nose.
floating down my nostrils, dripping onto my upper lips.
He wipes it for me.
i show him my hand.
we don't kiss.
but i sleep easy that night.

Lemme Show You A Couple Of Tricks

You say it's your first time around these parts?

Well welcome in, buddy, let me show you around.

I'll say hello and high five your belly

Send that putty-stomach operating

     with delight.

Once you see these sights

The truthfulness of All Time

Will make your cranium shake,

Send your brain syrup squirting around

To a thoughtful funk rhythm.

     This is it.

Don't show me that side of your life,

I don't wanna see shadow on that jaw,

     wisps of foam on your upper lip,

      eyes glossed over with a

         thin mist of soul.

I'll hit you hard on the back

And you'll fly-

Landing straight & tall in a 

          cosmic inn

Then you can order up all the...adoration you need,

Suck it all up

With one Hungry proboscis.

The swallows have come back.

Its isn't fair I scream to Guadelupe.
She is easy on the eye- i think.
She gives me options of destruction- cocaine-a hammer-a clogged artery.
I take the cocaine.
But stow it away in the bottom of my stomach hoping the green balloon doesn't pop in the lining of tissue inside me.
And then I met you, had a fit of it all trying to cheat Guadelupe's request.
i read Cotazar, ate pudding, smoked opium, went to paris, kissed women.
The women i kissed you took pictures of naked in college.
Claudia was pretty and had thick legs.
Guadelupe found me in a bordello you left me in, she told me to pop the balloon myself.
But i stabbed her and insisted that I loved you umblasphemously. She writhed in pain as blood cascaded down her leg like a nick when you shave. I thought she was a sissy.
And i ran away. And didn't stay to take pictures of you with the cross dressing prostitue we decided to hideaway with in the Bordello. They would have been nice pictures. Blue, red, negative images of eachother.
I took your old Jesus and Mary Chain albums on the plane back with me. I also took your gray coat.
I will send it back to you before winter comes.
Gabrielle sent me his worn out horn in the mail this morning. I guess thats a sign. Its quiet beatup for someone heavenly and all, pathched up with sap and spit and chewn up gum wads: chipped to reveal the brass bits under its gold paint.

I got this blood and hair crusted all on my ear, I was cutting my hair with kitchen shears .
It’s boy hair now, boy hair for a long droopy neck and a bloody ear.

You could wrap the world in cellophane we wouldn’t miss a thing.


----Have you ever felt like those pigeons, the ones who sat on their wings, or the bald ones, or the gimpy ones, have you ever felt like they were trying to say something to you? Their iridescent neck feathers flashing and they look you right in the eye.

I ate pigeon the other night in a Chinese restaurant and that didn’t even occur to me then.

My Time Away

The fog is stuck on my eyelids, but what a beautiful city it was, I suppose. My ribs hurts with the thought of home, and coming back made me never want to blink again. Change is a strange animal.

dreamin' on that leather

you know the feeling! i dream about it night and day, about it hugging my sides, whispering tough secrets into my ear if i wear it with a dress and growling hooligan howls into my bones f i wear it with creepy creepers or glittering glamming 70's stripper platforms.

it would lead me to old dives and teach me to dance like a wildcat prowler, hissing and spitting punk lines to a jealous moon.


yes yes yes. yes yes yes. i almost found a perfect one in a seconhand store in either frisco or berkely i dont remember---- it was a bomber, perfectly worn, black, nubbly faux fur on the collar and spangled with zippers. it would have been mine but the armpits were too baggy.i was just short of crestfallen.

This is for Lali.

A black leather bomber jacket. I ain't no 70's punk, but that item of clothing has permeated my dreams for years. The worn-in leather, soft at the touch, streaks of white appearing where the black has faded. The black rubbed away by countless bodies leaning against rough-edged buildings in the middle of the night. My mouth waters at the thought of it. Countless trips have been made to second hand stores and underground lairs, eyes straining to catch sight of the tough holy grail. Hoping to experience the bright light of discovery and the sweet, sweet, oh so sweet feeling of unadulterated power. It has to be perfect. Has to fit right. To hang on the body with ease, not too tight, not too loose. Just with ease. Loose upon the shoulders, thin and subtle. The item that I could pack away in a cardboard box before it was worn to shreds and unpack decades later, bringing out the jacket and the forgotten memories of sordid nights and sordid people. Memories of driving in a car at night and hearing someone utter the words- "We're on Teenage Blvd., heading straight to nowhere." Coins jangling in the pockets, the pockets that were widened as years of hands were shoved inside. Defiantly. Justly. the zipper hanging on by a thread, rust tainting the edges. Sewing up the skin.

In This Place That I Call Home

My brain is a perennial abode, housing Venus flytraps that snap at the frayed edges of phrases and pictures, clutching onto those buzzing sentiments with two dripping incisors. the makeshift gears that calculate numbers are bound with Red Cross gauze, allowing steam and equations to hiss and mingle and slip through spongy crevices.

Ever since I was little I would view the world with a unique scrupulousness, constructing reasons and stories and plans for whatever was in my peripheral vision-

A woman wearing a butterfly print sweater, holding a beige umbrella in the middle of a bright August day: My mind would become a tilt-a-whirl, rolling around my skull, doing ecstatic somersaults as if my eyes were spoon-feeding it some sort of sweet ambrosia.

A young boy staring forlornly at his plate in the midst of other crackerjack kiddies with hedonistic ideals: Me, firmly understanding his disapproval and wants. My brain, floating in a gelatinous pool, soaking in that knowledge with a relaxed grace.

My mind hosts its own recreational picnics. Doo-wop mantras find their way into the stocked shelves of nothingness, stocked to the brim with flea market junk and upper crust marching orders, jumbling it up even more, so that in the middle of the night I awake with a start and feel the blinds behind my eyes go up and down and up and down.

I don't know whether it's honest or whether it's merely a jaded expansion, displaying white cylindrical light fixtures to "mod it up" like a bad film set. I don't know how it functions. Does it use a sparking electrical outlet or a weather-beaten rodent that keeps the excercise going as long as gouda is suspended in view?

I live in my brain. It's philosophically ancient and nebulous and sometimes the A/C goes out, but it's the troglodyte's dream cavern. An instinctual Kangaroo pouch.

My mother jitters as she speaks of Texas Women's Death Row. As she contiuously pours the silver liquid in her gold lined shot glass. She pours the fizzy water into the glass and shoots small sips into the warm pink lining of her mouth. She shows me pictures of the womens family she interviewed, the lesbian murders and the aunts with crunchy hair and honest eyes and teeth. A silence hushes the room and she changes the subject.

Joshua Tree

Assignment: Write a bilingual poem, with the subject matter of your choice.

The desert sands glowed with a dusty light

Gleaming from beneath

The sun only a meek competitor

Against the fire of the earth.

Los guerreros de la arena,

Mi seguridad

Tu seguridad.

We hoist our lives onto our backs

We plunge into another world

Where the earth becomes the sky

And death is a friendly hand

Placed lightly upon your shoulder

El sol te cubre,

Tu sabana de fuego

La luz, y el calor

Te cubren.

The great granite monsters are piled high

One atop another

Broken relics of a lost age

Their jagged silhouettes pierce the dusky moon

As we slap the cold from our fingers

And our breath goes sharp in our throats

Los ojos del desierto nos miran

Con furia, con tristeza, con amor

Y aunque nuestros ojos se cierran

El desierto jamás duerme

Es el vigilante permanente

Con sus ojos

Reflejando el mundo.

moody in june

Sadness, or this dull throbbing
Has rendered me slow and heavy.
Dragging thru the days like a dishrag

Punctuated by real emotion, for no, I am not a zombie! Not the undead. I feel stuffed tho.
Mounted, on a plaque or base.
Posed in my most natural postion in a box, painted to look ike my natural habitat

Where have the days gone?
Me a slow, comatose, cumbersome character.
Unsavory.
Ignoble.

What to say , are there real words?
There is lead
Where my vital organs should be.
I’d love to sleep in the sun, for years, months. Void. But not death, to feel the warmth of the sun.
Just void. Or perhaps to cry.
But not to sit, alone, cracked like dry desert mud, with nothing to expend.
I cant explode, for I am merely smoldering.

Who replaced my eyes with beads?
Who filled my veins with stones?

Who painted my life beige….who.

Sawdust, sand and granite all have more meaning than I.
I would not float in the Dead sea.

My summer soaked rant.

The old leather box containing the 1930's typewriter grazes my knee, as i bang away and the ungrateful pang of these plastic keys. The door to the toliet is open and the resedue of sourdough pretzels lines the pink insides of my mouth. Its a summers day, i am silent because I feel as though there is no noise needed. The sun is shaded by the murky sky outside, toning the ivy behind me in varing layers of illuminated greens. A list of phone numbers lay beside me, next to the krazy Glue i used to glue my bosses broken plate together. Phone numbers range from Pasadena, Van Nuys, New Jersy, West Los Angeles and Brooklyn area codes, beyond the list of estranged numbers associated with my list of friends lies a list of phone numbers of Psychics. That was my job today, psychics, finding ones good enough that would cure a writers block. This hasn't been glanced at yet, which is most of my feats here, only looked upon after the editors meetings, or the soundtrack teastings ecetera. Its nicer that way, because i hate when people read something i wrote infront of me, its the feeling of being mortally naked. As thier faces expand and wither with each word or concept you conveived and the perpetual neuroses of what you THINK they're thinking. I put on a Sylvia Plath outfit today, as i walk around in it i feel uncomparativly fashionably backward than anyone on the streets of Williamsburg. Was Sylvia Plath gone with that Gwenith Paltro film? Must i only wear gladiator sandals and jumpers? It is common in a Plath reader that you take upon her characteristics, I suppose in this moment of noise absence i have. Which is quite funny because im not really all that depressed. So the sun moved lighting this small apartment differently, allowing me to hide from its rays.
Im off to a studio..(i like when brits say with a linering j. Studjio: sort of like that)

anyways.
my rant.
thank you.

A Memoir Class Quick-Write

My mom's neck is not unusual. 

Sometimes I'll lie awake at night and think about African women with those rings around their necks, stretching them so far up that they look like ebony cranes, and I wonder if they work in libraries: the perfect helpers to grab those books at the top of the shelves. 

My mom does not have that neck.

DMV, you a dirty mistreater, a robber, and a cheater

Stepping inside of the DMV is like hurtling into the alternate universe of 1950's futuristic ideals. Lines of people bisect each other and move in diagonal conveyer belt formations, like some sort of avant garde production on the utopian freeways of the Jetsons, people symbolizing the pea pod automobiles. 

And in front of a flickering, 24-inch TV showcasing a plain blue screen with appointment numbers scrawled in block letters are a group of automatons seated row after row, all eyes strained toward their impending turn. I had the feeling that if I put a lighter underneath one of their noses wax would slowly drip off the tip and form a puddle on their lap, proving that I was actually looking at an exhibit in Madame Tussauds.  

The DMV made me inch closer to unlawful driving, if only to spite what I think is a house of horrors. A place filled with salivating teenagers straining against their harnesses to grasp onto a driver's license and shame-faced adults enduring chastisements from bureaucratic evil-doers.

Im far from it.

Last night I was caught in a New york rain storm. My copy of Bell Jar got wet. The black dye from my skirt seeped onto my legs. And I left my journal as i rushed away, in my friends bag. Everything was cinematic then.

Well, what does that mean?

For whatever reason, my recent dreams have been saturated with spit curled suffragettes who lindy hop their way down city streets. The kind of women who gather as many admirers as the number of glass beads that are draped around their necks, keeping those sailors happy with their penetrating, bedroom eyes. Whether these girls are living in the damp underground of the subway station or are playing figure study on a spread polar bear rug, they encapsulate the feminine prowess that all precocious minded little girls dream of attaining as they toss sand in a red-cheeked Junior's face. Already getting ready for the later tarpaulin of makeup with a

smile from grape juice purple lips.

a sodden, heavy pirouette---
An oak leaf falls. You press it into your palm…the spikes make little craters in your hand.
Years pass,
you are crying
so the world will go round,
the craters fill and the Indians grind their hard, purple corn in them.
They scoop out the meal, mix it with your tears
And feed their children

Little estuaries spring up, geysers from the crook of your elbow
The children pinch their noses
Men come
And build boardwalks
you are rubbing dust into your
eyes, you are
folding spores into your skin
your muddy marrow and your salty blood
Your bitter lips and your spiny ribs.

The souvieners of McCollister

Last night i had a dream: it depicted my dead grandmother, whom which i share the same German legs as her. In the dream she was resurrected.

A few weeks ago my family's hometown of Louisiana Missouri was choked under the muddy waters of a Mississippi flood. The ghost like town inhabited by my family for generations, floating under murky waters. So, alone in a search for something tangible i find as many things in family lineage dies or gets wet, lost, torn, burned, disintegrated. Today, I found in the crevasses of my fathers oak sock drawer, pictures of a phosphorescent New Orleans, of children with beautifully pure faces mussed up by the bayous heat. I found my grandmothers legs, twine and a winter prayer from a congregation my father seeked in Louisiana for i guess guidance. This is what small towns do, lull you to a Huckleberry coma until something dies, your mother, until the floods hit again and you have to find a sin city to scoop you up, get you melancholy and drunk and parade you into a humid state of loveliness, where nothing has recognition, where everything is blurred by the past, your subconscious and the absinthe you drank, with the reefer you inhaled, with the fat man you took pictures of. Until the loss of your town and your mother doesn't hurt and spirits become steady in your skull.

A summers prayer.

Not My Family

Your sons are spoiled rotten. Their blond heads are matted with tears, running and dribbling over their eyelashes to come and rest in the dimples on their cheeks. Each time you unwrap a shiny new plastic toy, all you will be rewarded with is gnashing teeth and flailing limbs, kicking, beating, biting, filling the air with electricity and panic. How dare you let me into your house? Each time they call you, "Mommy, Mommy!," your jaw clenches in fear, screaming back at them. You look at me apologetically, gently nudging them from the room. The finger paint coats us thinly, in my nose, my mouth, my eyes. They have become smudges in my eyes, little dark whorls on the lawn. Your husband tries to keep them out of the laundry chute.







"Great, I'll be back Saturday, Mrs. ______"

declarations----spring of last year

you used to wade in the brackish estuaries

you used to lick the resin from the trees

you used to be the desert

you used to jump and the milk in your belly became butter

you used to sing a song over and over

you used to have bark and branches

you used to perform for the wild animals underground

you used to feed the roots

you used to cull the fools gold from all the mountain streams

you used to fuzz all the newborn peaches

you slept in the hoof-prints in the snow