I'm calling this one done.

LIZA

A wilting white sun bleeds out all his heat over the tranquil black deep

While the moon grins through a cloud, cold and clear, dimpling from ear to ear,

And white crests rise on the smoke colored waters under a slate dark pier.

There Liza sings about drinking Prosecco,

And Liza's voice in the dark leaves an echo;

As her own song sings her to sleep.

Glutted to burst on the sun's dying sighs and dancing like midnight vampires

The moon and the sea spin in lustful distrust, darting drunkenly over the shore.

Their awful push-pull on a lantern (half-full) spreads a horror around like a whore.

While Liza lies with her head next to mine

And Liza's breath keeps the rhythm in time

With my own and the sea's and the fire's.

There's the soft susurrus of lovers like us rustling far off in a rush;

The moon shuts her eyes and feigns to disguise that she chokes on the smoke in a spire

The moon's crying eyes deride and disguise red watery smoke floating higher,

Then Liza bites her lip at the window

And Liza sighs and sits: limbs akimbo

As her own voice laughs in a hush.

He won't come; he won't come! In a fury she hums with her head in a hot-hungry-haze. 

I watch as she stands with her hope in her hands to see smoke spilling into the air

A rat-tat-tat boom! and the pier lights the gloom as she screams her poor sailor’s despair.

My Liza claps and clutches the window

And Liza smiles to weep as a widow

While dark smoke blackens her gaze.

We'll be free; we'll be free! Now it's just you and me til the day you betray me just once.

I smile and recline while inferno flames climb over the mounting hot pyre

One kick and my Liza, my murderous doll, falls fast toward the flames of her fire.

And sweet Liza's screams echo out, 

My Liza's last ear-splitting shout:

A remembrance of lovelier stunts.

The shimmering seawater surges straight up in a blast of sulfurous fury.

The sky’s many eyes blink in surprise as the air sets fire to her hair

And I watch then as Liza, my beautiful darling, vanishes into the air.

Smoke ushers an end to disguise

And spreads Liza's final goodbyes
Just the moon: my judge and my jury.

The Apartment

She began to wake when the rumble of the engine disappeared, subtracting the white noise that had lulled her. The taxi driver was already pulling her bags from the trunk, causing her to scurry all of a sudden to gather her handbag and wallet. Once the cab pulled away, Jessica was left standing outside a moderately tall building with a crumbling facade that vaguely harkened to the regality of the nation's earliest days.

The trouble, as she stood on the too-quiet street surrounded by her smart set of matching luggage, gathering glances from men who loitered to smoke in doorways before and behind her, was that Jess had absolutely no idea of how to move from that spot. There was too much for her to carry in too unfamiliar a place.

She was on the verge of panicked tears when the building's door opened and two young men walked out into the heavy, damp wind. They stopped in front of her, assessing her and her trousseau.

"You going in there?" the taller one asked.

Muddled with apprehension, she took a moment to scan the pollution-stained building, the dented sign on the corner, the address on the torn awning behind the guy's head. Everything pointed to her being at the right address, but she couldn't convince herself now that she was in right place. Still, she'd come this far, and the wind kept slapping her coat collar into her face, so she nodded.

"Want help?" he asked.

This time she nodded without a pause.

The tall man thrust his right hand at her, "Chris, 3C."

"Oh," her hand in his, her feeling of shame at her helplessness, and her new uncertainty about her plans made her oddly shy. "Oh, um, Jessica, 5J."

He smiled. She hadn't let go of his hand. "Damn," he said cheerfully, "I was hoping to avoid the stairs." He pulled his hand free and, with smile still in place, he hefted the garment bag over his shoulder and grabbed the largest suitcase in his right hand. That left the rolling case, overnight bag, and the small case she already clutched next to her purse. The other man grabbed the overnight bag, settled it atop the roller, and pulled a key from his pocket. He used some complicated maneuver to jar the door open then he held it wide.

Chris, 3C, stood near the door, laden with the bags so heavy that Jess hadn't been able to lift them herself at the airport. She stared at him a moment before realizing he was waiting for her. "Ladies first," was implied in the smirk on his face. At that moment, at that smirk, Jessica suddenly saw how uncommonly handsome he was.

She went in. The smell hit her immediately and she halted, nearly causing the two men to tumble in the foyer. The dazzled smile fell from her face. The odors of a dozen decades of cooking, of wretched humanity, of sex, of questionable plumbing, assaulted her. Chris pushed in behind her so the other guy could follow.

"You get used to it." Chris's chin pointed toward the right, "Stairs over there."

She paused yet again. "But where's the elevator?"

The guy with the rolling bag snorted. Chris shouldered past her and shoved the stairway door open with an elbow.

She scurried behind him, afraid to be left alone in the fetid vestibule.

The staircase was narrow and steep. She watched the men ahead of her take the steps two at a time. Her shorter legs and unfamiliarity with close, stuffy staircases left her lagging behind.

The men waited for Jessica to produce the key. She'd received it in a padded envelope the week before when she was still in her parents' home, enjoying her vision of the wild city full of promise and of her mission to live like "regular people." This fantasy was romanticized, and when she opened the door to the furnished flat she'd rented sight-unseen, she realized just how unromantic the reality might turn out to be.

Guess the title of this new poem in a COMMENT.

Warm now.

At first it scalded

Satisfied a deep need.

The burn felt good—

A remembrance of life,

A promise of excitement

And energy,

Until that ambience died

OR WAS DISAPPEARED.

Greedy mouths turn it tepid,

Bitter and dissatisfying

In too short a time.

Still, trapped in its own

Memory, the lingering idea

Of comfort and wonder,

Cling on until the last drop

Turns to ash.

Cold now.

Maintenance

I think I fixed the subscription thing. Try it. --->

I totally have no idea how to fix the subscription thing!

Of Time and Faking It

     Filmmakers are able to capture and convey the illusion of a heart-stopping moment. They can make time stand still by precise placement of light and echo of sound. But you can only appreciate the genius of the scene if you've experienced it in real life and you have some basis for judging the realism of the acting, direction, cinematography, and sound.

     There are, as well, rare moments when the relativity of time is so vivid in real life that one feels that it could be swatted out of the way or dragged into focus with the right amount of concentration. Certain aspects of one’s environment slow down; others blur. Still other things fade out altogether like light left behind by a speeding spacecraft.

     By Sunday, I felt weary from long days of lingering rain and cool air. Heavy fog snuck in my open window and tumbled into bed with me while the sun clawed its way over the horizon. A few optimistic songbirds cheered the rising light, but blanketing clouds and sharp pellets of spring mist soon scattered both the sun and sound. Another day arrived amidst the whispers of wetted leaves.

     The morning fell away, quick and heavy, like wet cardboard left beneath an open window. I felt the tacky, damp uncomfortable scraps of soggy air, and my shoulders shuddered to slough the feeling off as duty set my pace.

     I swallowed pills for my breakfast before heading out in hope that some small sliver of the uninvited feelings might be waylaid and distracted if I could only clear or cloud my mind. I used drugs as a coward uses a blindfold before the firing squad.

     The odd thing about relativity is that it also offers safe harbor.

     I settled into a bizarre routine that day. I felt detached from my surroundings: detached from the ground I walked on, detached from my own skin. And though I was still compelled to greet the same people on the street that I always greeted, half of them looked through me. The other half was yet again divided between those who smiled and said hello (as ever) and those who scowled.

     Throughout, my mind revolved around an ache in my chest while my ears echoed with all my unsaid words, all my unshed scales. I’d hardly ate or paused or slept from the swirl in my brain, but through pain came clarity. I would take it as a lens through which to henceforth examine my life.

     Thus I went about my business examining each action, habit, and process and pushed myself to wonder if I were faking it. Was I faking my way through scant and skimpy meals, through roughshod work, through each very ordinary conversation that punctuated the hours? Did I genuinely care about the health of every person that I how-do-you-do’d? Did that even really matter?

     When I got home again, exhausted, I slept all the rest of the afternoon. Early in the evening, before twilight, I woke heavy and sluggish and absolutely ravenous. I lay suspended outside of time and place for several moments as each sense processed the world around me. The smell of damp air and the familiar musty mattress, the sound of chickadees chasing each other around the feeder- spreading seed on the ground for squirrels to enjoy - and the aches of a weary body too long at rest: stiff neck, slow knees, and a dull need to pee. I felt my sticky tongue drag against my lips as I rolled over onto my back and scratched my stomach.

     Moments later, before I knew I had decided to get up, I found myself in the bathroom with one long narrow window high up on the wall. Through it I could count the tarrying clouds on a single hand. All the pinks and reds and oranges lit them up like neon petals floating across the sky. The light dimmed as evening gathered her skirts for a sweeping exit over the edge of the horizon, ducking out to offer me privacy and stillness.

FYI: I enabled commenting without a log-in.
You're welcome.

Dr. E's Last Stand

The doc turned out to be a bent-over antique of a man with a tidy moustache and pungent aftershave.

Dr. E was about eighty.

I asked if he needed to see a chiropractor because, I swear, his torso was bent at 45 degrees as he shuffled around.

But man, was he cool.

He had that wisdom bred from keen intelligence piled with decades of human experience.

“Back in my real life,” he told me, “I was a cardiologist. I never intended to retire.”

He left it hanging there for me to draw my own conclusion that a man bent at a 45 degree angle wasn’t fit to perform cardio-thoracic surgery for obvious reasons.

He said he’d fallen off a roof fourteen years ago, and his vertebrae from the middle of his back downward were fused together.

No chiropractic work would fix that.

But undaunted by this crippling tragedy, he found a place for himself assessing the general health of patients sent to this little psych hospital.

You didn’t just show up and check in, you had to be admitted. So that was Dr. E’s place now. He worked in the middle of the night in the middle of the week at M---, assessing the craziness of all manner of crazies.

I liked him, liked talking to him. He spoke about “the dark ages when they piped in sunlight” to the lecture halls when he was in med-school. We may have exchanged a comment about Gunsmoke; his moustache was reminiscent of Doc Adams, but his bald head was all Montgomery Burns.

He asked questions to determine the status of my vision, hearing, and olfactory senses:  “Keep your eyes on this.” He moved his pen around my face, back and forth, left and right, up and down. “Can you hear me?” he whispered. “Can you smell my aftershave?”

He asked if I knew who I am and where I was.

“My name is—“

“You don’t have to prove it to me,” he smiled. “Just say yes or no.”

He didn’t hit my knee with a hammer to check my reflexes, but he took out his hearing aids from both ears to put his stethoscope there instead. It was electronic, to amplify the sound, I guessed, to compensate for his poor hearing.

I watched him turn the dial at the joint where the ear thingies were held to the cold thingie.

His face was earnest and wizened as he listened to my heart. I could tell he took hearts seriously. He listened like he was experiencing an echo of Mozart himself at a piano.

That wet thud sploosh of muscle squeezing blood was his music-- his drug, even.

He’d dedicated years of study and a lifetime of experience to this organ that he could no longer touch, no longer hear with his own ears. He had to settle for brief, electronically enhanced refrains of that golden time, in between asking lunatics if they could smell him.

Poor old Dr. E.

I felt so much more comfortable talking to him than I felt the next morning with the psychiatrist.

Liza and Troy

Icy fingers easily find their wet way down the backs of our necks and proceed to reach further in attempt to claw their way under nice, warm flesh. Every shiver reminds me of the way Liza's breath against my ear trips a tremulous thrill along my spine, and I concentrate harder on matching her skipping pace, holding this morning’s Sun Times over her head, since we had ignored its forecast for rain, anyway.

Liza laughs when she tries to leap a puddle and ends up splashing street grime all up my leg, and I can't help but laugh too. She's infectious.

"When we get home, I can show you how to smoke correctly," she offers in half a shout because the sleet it threatening to destroy our newspaper now.

"What the hell is wrong with how I smoke?" I struggle to keep up when the lights of The Industrial finally come into view: the blackened penthouse looms eerily over the colored windows every other floor sports. It's as if the residents there are shouting an affirmation of life by the colors they paint their window glass and the patterns of chintz they drape over the building's vast eyes.

She waited in the doorway while I fumbled with her keys, trying to open that damned vestibule door.

"You smoke that an actor pretending to smoke, sweetie. You ought to do it like you mean it." Her voice was languid but not bored as she explained. It somehow promised patience in the coming lessons.

Yet, even Liza's patience has limits for soon she reached past my hand full of jingling keys and merely gave the entry handle a good swift shove. The door ground its way open under her expert touch and she slipped in under my arm.

But then she froze.

A sound nothing like anything I'd ever known before was tumbling down the concrete staircase. It was the moan of weariness and a growl of hunger all at once, and it ebbed and flowed in a primal rhythm.

Liza stood glued to the tiles of the vestibule, and I could see her reflection in the mirror over the mailboxes; she was transfixed in a type of hypnosis of allure.

The hunger she heard made her hungry, and the primal insistence of the music made her clench her fists and bite her lips in need.

I slammed the door, but not even the noise meant to break her captor's spell had any effect.

I took a deep breath and tugged gently on her elbow. "Liza. Liza, Liza, smoke with me."

Her shining eyes blinked and swiveled to focus on me while she patronized me with half of one of her delicious smiles.

"I have a wonderful ashtray in my room," she said.

I gave half a smile back to her and took her hand. I wondered if two half smiles equaled one whole, or were we both just mocking our own faces?

In her room, Liza kicked off her shoes and picked up a tee-shirt off her floor to dry her feet. I hung my coat on the back of her door and fished my cigarettes out of the pocket, trying not to wonder whose tee-shirt that was.

"Isn't it nice?" she asked. "Scandinavian stone," she held the grayish, dirty ash tray up for me to admire, even though it just looked like a pile of ask that had compounded upon itself for centuries.

"Nice," I said, wishing that closing her door could have closed out that music; if anything, the insidious noise now echoed through my sternum now that I was closer to it. Liza's eyes were bright, and I could tell she felt it, too. She fed on it.

"You make me so happy," Liza sighed.

"I don't make you happy. I make you smile. There's a big difference."

Wishing for Summer: A Fool's Game

One morning soon we will awake to stuck sheets and still air abuzz with cicadas and HVAC engines. The quiet of a summer evening will deafen us.

We'll stand by the windows before sunrise just to luxuriate in the moment of relief that dies bloody red and sweaty at dawn.

We'll have burnt calluses on our fingertips from baked steering wheels and we'll have icy white knuckles when the AC finally blows cold on our hands, direct from the vents.

We'll think back to slow days of ice and snow and sweatshirts and heaters and extra socks.

Misery is so forgiving.

We'll fight the sweat slick skin between our toes where the band aide won't stay and the flip flop thong has flayed our feet.

We'll sit in the cool cinema at noon and squint and blink when we walk back out into the broiling parking lot at three.

It's coming. There's no stopping the endless orange and yellow of weather maps crying with exclamation points about the consecutive days of heat, the fire danger, the drought.

There's no avoiding these inevitable woes, but we have some few days yet.

April is the cruellest month

Reminding us that we will sweat out, the old will die, the young will phase to strange fruit-punch-mouthed ice pop eaters.

Their blue, green, purple, orange tongues a foreshadow to each new disease the artificial dyes, sun lotions, and cold potions will conjure one distant day.

As we squint under a too-bright sun at the harry and hurry of too-bright people, collectively we recall the misery of monochrome months.

We remember gray sweatshirts, gray skies, and slushy gray streets. The cars wore gray coats of grime while out feet stayed in the same gray socks for days because it was just too cold to take them off.

Soon, we become chameleons: orange and brown and red to match the toxic air, the dead land, and the hot blood of scraped knees.

Soon, we shuffle layer upon layer of old skins and see how misshapen we have become.

Soon we will think fondly of those days when we complained and wished for the halcyon days of summer.

We were fools to dream so.

Those days will last too long with junebugs and mosquitoes and where did all the fireflies go?

We'll be so tired before each day has even contemplated folding up her blue blanket and packing it away to wait impatiently, fingers tapping at the horizons (both at once), for the new day.

But the children will play on past dusk and can't we stay up late? But going to bed only means you have to set up the coffee pot and face the rumpled sheets that make you feel dirty right after your third tepid shower.

If only you could stop sweating for five-no-three minutes! My god when did this become the sole desire of a day?

Irritation sets in.

And those people half our age with blue slurpee tongues and vodka breath complain that they don't "git" half the things we say.

So we remember and make note of how much less stupid we were back when, but we can't blame them, considering the way kids are dragged through the world these days instead of brought up in loving homes like we were.

And then I tell you the story we both know by heart about getting in trouble for laughing in the house or screaming in a game outside.

I tell you about the bonfire when I cried and my innocence was exterminated, and you tell me all things change.

I correct you, "Things fall apart."

If only we still had that energy and if the heat didn't make us hurry up the season of death with fervent wishes, and if winter didn't hurt so bad-- deep in the bone hurt... If only, think of what this world COULD be.

It is only meet and right that we blame those who pull the cup from us before our thirsts are quenched, just as our progenitors blamed us.

But that man who blames himself, his generation, for creating this mess you and I inherited: the wold where summer angers killed Jack, Bobby, and Mr. King before my eyes were opened-- One man knows what's what.

Is one enough?

The seasons count off the rampages of civilizations on their fingers.

They're older than we and will still be infants when we are extinct.

Winter snows will cover our graves and spring flowers will bloom from our putrid remains.

Summer will see our mighty works baked to dust, and autumn winds will blow the remains of this world away with the fallen leaves.

Somewhere in the detritus, a human tooth, some wrought metal. Plastic. Only this remains.

We fade but our hubris lingers on, like the mighty warning carved in stone upon the empty desert.

The seasons, the broken trash, and if we are lucky, the words, too, will last to the last spin of this globe.

All of these dreads are in my head as I lie in bed wondering if life might be simpler if I could be dead before April kisses us (wetly) goodbye.

The Grandmothers

I am from home-sewn dresses
From Thanksgiving's spiced pecans
And Sonic's chocolate malts (heavy on the malt).
I am from small, dying towns full of
Elderly people and cemeteries.
I am from old men sitting round the courthouse to gossip
And old women popping by for weak tea and everybody's health.
I am from volunteer flowerbeds.
I am from Wandalene.

I'm from the scent of Winston cigarettes over scrambled eggs and coffee.
I'm from the sound of old house shoes scuffing along dusty floorboards.
I am from Alma Lee.

I'm from mockingbirds scolding young squirrels
And calendars that note the comings and goings of deer.
I am from Georgia Raye.

I'm from longing, pain, and wistfulness
Born of decades of condescension and self-doubt.
I am from Paula Jean.
I'm from the house where daughters are silent,
Laughs are dangerous,
And smiles are suspect.

When Pain Attacks Sleep

This articulated curse holds deep, fast
under the flesh, and stinging hot with such
poison-- spurring pain to radiate past
the places your sweet empathy can touch
and on through sinister recesses hid
by cynicism and a sharp tongue. Heard
wrong, you find me taciturn and tart. Bid 
truth, I claim I brood o'er misremembered
sleights glorified by nostalgia to sin.
These seeds I daily sow will bear no fruit,
but they convolute me outside and in.
Still, I attend these nights' wanton pursuit
of rest, for the day I forfeit the cost
is when my mind or life or both are lost.

Same Pony, Same Trick

You hold a clammy hand against your chest

And mop your dry brow with a handkerchief.

You peer inside your own dull heart without

A scrying glass nor microscope nor book

Of gray anatomy. This lesson needs

One thing: a love, a war, a death, or else

A knife to cut the heart out clean to see

What makes it beat and tick and squelch and squeak.

See the little veins and valves (sticky meat)

And learn one thing: aside from blood and squish

It's an empty thing, bereft of passion

Or love. Our pretty lies are precious things

To us. Yet the tepid heart is hollow

As this poem, your passion, or your phony love.

bottle it.
take my fear and my tears and all the empty years.
bottle it all away.
all those things you never said and the places where we never went,
and all the times it should have been just you and me,
but instead-
you bottled it.
you broke it all; you broke it down; you let me fall.
the truth is that this fear is yours. these tears and all those years are yours.
so take them now and bottle them up.
i can't swallow one more drop.

random poetry

refusal

I decline (again) to attend.

Do not expect me in attendance,
For, my friend, I don't attend.
I do not wait on you, dear doctor.
I will not waste amidst those men
In penguin coats and mirrored shoes
Afire with fake modesty and booze.
I will not wait alongside their wives,
Lovers, sisters, concubines…
I will not smile at the musicians
Or thank the man with the champagne.
I have no desire to stand and listen
To the same stories yet again.
No remembrances of the old glory days
Can tempt me from my cocoon.

Donc, je vous réponds, s'il vous plaît,
As I do every other day
That you've sent an invitation,
Or you've happened to drop in,
Or some lady friend has called
To coax me with her bald
Faced lies about what fun we'd have
And how good it would be
If I would grace poor sir and she
With my presence at the barbeque
Next April, May, or June.

I'm sure I've told her every time
That outdoor cooking gives me hives.
Yes, I know it's wrong to lie,
But would it have been any better
Just to open up and tell her
That she is a horrid, scurvy whore?
I shall never walk through her door.

Put an end to these invasions
And insipid linen invitations.
Cease your sad colligraphications.
(At least spell my name correctly.)
In the name of all that's holy
Let me be.

How often have I bent
Your card into my shredder
And then phoned you just to vent
And remind you that I'll never
In a hundred million years consent
To be companion, wife or lover,
Or subject myself to your intent
That I attend.