The Mad Scientist.

Our eyes have never locked, my own and this mad scientist I know, but I’ve created a whole world for him.  Three grown children, two boys, a girl, and a long-dead wife who had pearl teeth and silver curls around her ears.  A titanium hip plate, sunken eyes and memories of war. 

I pass him every morning while I smoke my first cigarette and he’s on his third.  Him, waiting for the train, me in my white Lincoln with the burnt leather seats.  The ice in my coffee rattles against the plastic cup, the loose change in his pocket shakes.  He’ll drop each coin into the company vending machine around three-o’clock, a Twix candy bar and a Diet Coke.  His teeth are no good.

He fiddles wires around in an air-conditioned server room, red and blue crossing over yellow.  He mumbles when he answers the phone.  His name is Steven, or Charles, but his young co-workers have deemed him Gus and he can’t shake it.  It’s the hair sticking straight up above his head like an electric shock, a little shooting out of his ears and he knows he looks like a Gus.  His mother had high hopes.

It’s frozen dinners in front of the evening news team after that.  He pushes the peas to the side, figures them still frozen in the center anyhow.  He hangs his short-sleeved button shirts on the shower rod before he’ll sleep.  The steam does enough justice.  He counts out $1.50 in quarters and packs his Kents into the top pocket of the shirt.  He sleeps with the lights on, my mad scientist does.  It’s not fear, it’s an invitation.

He’ll die alone, his children taking three days to notice the strange empty weight in their stomachs.  And I’d warn him, let him know, but we’d have to make eye contact first and at the speed of morning traffic, I’m not sure he’d catch my message.

Forget It, Just Go Back To Bed.

“Good morning to you Boston, Massachusetts! Flash flood warnings are in effect for the northern portion of your state of mind! We hope you’ll find the right tools to stay afloat until tomorrow! From News Center 5, this is your wake-up call.”

And ready or not it’s a Sunday afternoon and I’ve got myself a deadline or two that I can’t be sure if I’ve missed, a date with no one and a coupon for FroYo that expires at sundown.

If you read Boston and immediately thought of Kerouac, you’re typical. If you read Massachusetts and pictured the inside of a dim-lit bedroom with four tall walls and a splattered paint job, you’re me. Or you’re you and our versions of life are eerily similar and dismal.

At nearly 1pm I’m emptying my purse onto my unmade twin bed searching for an unused train ticket that happens to be not only unused but apparently un-purchased as I come up empty handed, headed into yet another week with no way out. I’ve got those deadlines I mentioned and nowhere to hide from them. It isn’t that publishers are banging down my door, but they sure are doing a number on the bulkhead to my subconscious.

My blackberry buzzes under a flurry of cigarette and coffee receipts and it’s another automatic-reply rejection notice from some low-grade literary joint. We’re so sorry but this thing you call a manuscript, well it just isn’t right for us, or so our computer-program sources tell us. Too many uses of the word “and”, we suppose. Good luck placing this piece elsewhere. We look forward to never hearing from you again.

I find a genius napkin among the junk on my bed. I was on that night, the night with the napkin. I remember I’d been sitting alone on a stool in a pub called The Worthen House, where it’s rumored Edgar Allan Poe penned The Raven. And so alone, with the spirit of Poe hovering somewhere over by the restrooms, I had been struck with overwhelming inspiration that I let flow onto a cocktail napkin and stuffed to the bottom of my bag before finishing one or a few more shots of tequila and taking the cobblestone streets home.

Now, as I read this wit back, aloud in the middle of those four walls that you conjured up back when I said “Massachusetts”, I recognize them as far more than genius. I’d drunkenly scrawled the combined words of Dylan and Waits, claimed it as my own and had fallen asleep that night with a false feeling of pride and woke with the nausea of it the next day. The drunken poet sleeps well. The fraud wakes alarmed and alone.

I have tentatively called myself a writer when I’ve found myself in the mixed type of company who may be either impressed with this sort of self-acclamation, or scoff at it. I like a little trouble, a mental scuffle with an opponent I’ve already sized up and come to terms with from the sidelines. However, on most quiet Sundays, as I sit in a cafe on the outskirts of Boston, I avoid trouble, avoid conversation at all, really, and watch from a swirling counter stool, as the townie naysayers create their own versions of Hell on earth.

Everything moves real simple, real slow, like a dream because that’s all it is, all it’s ever been. The buildings around me are as tall as the plans I make every night from my bed. They stand straight and hard and proud, I paint them gold and carve my name into the sides of them, until morning when erosion shakes everything just a little and the foundations of it all are beginning to crumble.

“You ain’t getting any younger, ain’t no prettier either” said one townie. And he’s right but I’d never tell him so.

I check my phone one more time, read two more rejections, and count the blocks back to bed.

I dated a girl who didn’t know what love was.  She thought it lived on her tongue and so when I asked for it, she’d kiss me hard.  Hard enough to stop my breath, pause my heart, crack orange seeds, if she tried.

I found her one night, drunk and humming sleepy songs in our bathtub.  I watched her through the space between the arch and the rusted door hinge.  She played with her hair.  She constructed beautiful rainbow mountains of soapy bubbles up around her breasts. 

That night, her hair still damp at the ends, smelling like vanilla, smooth, silk-spun skin, she lay beside me while I pretended to sleep.  She pressed her tongue, that tongue, against my salty shoulder.  I knew, in the morning, what she had meant, because she’d left a tiny bruise there, a purple star-burst swirled with red and deep, deep blue.

And I loved her, too.

my fingers crave constant little bits of you
your paperdoll papercuts
and your porcelain doll skin
embedded with its porcelain splinters
until i am scar tissue all over
until i am healed but still so sore
to the touch

The Tattoo Artist

good rainy morning
to the poetic painter,
the fading moon,
the melancholy mothers
whose babes lay fidgeting in fits all night,
good rainy morning
to the tattoo artist and his pup
who is now licking his face
and waking him with a curly smile
good rainy morning
to the tear-drop puddles
of silver and mud
good rainy morning
to the love
that i haven’t given up on
even in the dusty grey
of a rainy morning

what’s behind my eyes that keeps you all away?
it isn’t an emptiness,
i can feel the well of tiny oceans there
the emerald buoys, the red spider leg veins
creeping toward the shores of my cheekbones
what do you see that i don’t?
i watched a boy in the sand
toe-ing over hard-shelled beetles
that buzzed loud circles on their backs
and i keep that memory,
so i wonder if you’re feeling the lonely heat of it
like acidic radiation,
and if it pushes you all away

promises.

for every line
in which i have previously promised myself,
the world,
and the page,
“never will i write of you again”
i will swallow one shot,
of “whatever you’ve got, make it cheap, keep it cold”
and by the time, drunk as i am, that i fasten my tips
to the keyboard,
i’ll make that promise again

strip.

he frequented strip joints
his friends and him
and their crush-proof cigarette boxes,
their money sliced into ones
friday nights after steak dinners
or saturdays after shots of whiskey-lime 
and the next morning
on top of cotton sheets,
bloody mary’s and
blood-shot eye-whites, 
“chandeliers”, he’d say 
“and gold, like a palace. 
everything caked in gold”
so i followed, in lace and liner
they taught me to fold bills
into miniature paper tents
place them on the stage and
“now wait,” he said
and i waited, pressed my thighs down
into my seat
thought, my breasts are too small,
my hair is a wire nest, a haystack
fake diamonds in my ears
while she crawled, took the money with her teeth
flung her curls across my skin like soft wind
“you like her?” he asked, and i did
“who wouldn’t?” and i did
he slipped a wad of cash into her glitter-palm
she looked touched by glitter, soaked in glitter
i saw wings where there weren’t wings
i remember the star-stab of it when she took my hand
and led me behind a curtain,
raspberry sorbet twinkling with pin-hole lights
there was the wind again,
cocoa powder on her skin, honey-veins
and then the glitter like the moon
there was a cliff past the curtain
and for the number of ones still stuck between her fingers,
we leaped, we lost our breath, we flew

My dresses and my skirts are structured around my hips like cotton floral bone-hugs.  But the twist of my words cannot be structured.  Ivy-whirl wrapping flesh-kisses around major muscles.  Veins tied off into electric-blue bundles.  No direction of flow, only the incessant need to string words together like salted popcorn onto a string of gold with shaking sticky fingers and ‘I hope you like it, I wrote it for you’. 

We tilt back our seats in your car and peer up through the moon roof.  Neon-navy speckled with sparkling stars and wisps of bright white clouds and you tell me that the city-smog leaves barely a diamond drop for us to wish on.  They’re all hidden behind a chemical curtain and I hold onto my breath for fear of growing infected.  I imagine the burn of stardust in my lungs mixed with toxic smog and purple-haze smoke.  Eventually I push the air from my belly and let it filter through the tiny gaps in my teeth and pierce the smoke that hangs there with my tongue to create crystallized rings like halos that we can hang around the rear-view mirror, so boldly-bright we let it light our way in lieu of headlights.

Nothing structured will you find in my journals or my blood or the way I wear my hair.  But I’ll pick those little electric rose bundles from under my skin and I’ll tied them off with silk ribbon.  My gift to you, for reading my rushing river of moments I feel suited to pen.  A thanks and a bone-hug, a flesh-kiss.

Over Coffee.

Your eyes, chocolate eyes, take up the whole room.  Your lashes bust the windows.  Your eyes inside the coffee shop walls.  The smell of sugar and the trail of cinnamon swirling along the counter top.  A powder map of New York and long dusty dirt roads that lead to me.  And my paper cup filled with hot water and tea.  And my lungs.  And your eyes, chocolate eyes, take up all of the air.  They shiver with thought.  They well with water and salt.  I am sucked up into them.  They leave no room here for my lips or the swell of emotion in my belly.  I don’t speak.  Your eyes, your enormous eyes and their flecks of gold.  The skin around my finger bones pick up the fragmenting light that bouncing from those specks and there’s an arch and there’s a diamond shine and there’s a spinning loop, round and round. 

And your eyes, your chocolate eyes and this coffee shop and the time you spilled your drink and it formed a little caramel river and it picked up the grime from the floor.  Your eyes, so large that I am no longer breathing, there’s just your gaze and you’re waiting on my tongue, but there’s no room for its movement.  There’s no room for my voice.  And I can watch the streetcars sparkling in there, all of Manhattan.  A whole city in your eyes, without so much as a whisper from me.

Engineering

You’ve really only ever been good at two things as far as I could tell.  Engineering and breaking my heart.  I don’t know too much about the prior even though I spend my eight-to-five’s fingering through blueprints with papercut tips and mailing sealed proposals to small-city big-wigs with dollar amounts printed on them that seem something of a fairy tale exaggeration.  And I’ve always admired the way the indigo ink dusts almost every wall in the office.  But I know a lot about my heart and the condition you left it in.  It’s mostly because you looked me in the eye while you fucked me.  My heart had been broken a million times (this isn’t so much fairy tale exaggeration as it is nightmarish truth) before I ever took this job but come to find out, eye contact during sex has a lot more significance in the moving on process than I had known. 

 Your shoulders haunch forward while you work and it looks mystical but all I can think of is the spot on your desk where I’d sit with my legs opened slightly.  You got really good at working the mouse with one hand but I don’t consider that to be number three.  That was still only a part of the second thing you’ve master.  The breaking of my heart.  And you know this just as well as I do.  And so do they; our wild-eyed coworkers with their wispy puffs of gossip over sugar with coffee from paper cups.  They know it all.  The couch in the ladies room, the desk and the dummy cameras that they so desperate wish were real.  They’d all love their own copy of our tape, I’m sure of it.  I’ve heard it whispered by the heavy-set girl who sits out back. 

 “Can you imagine?” she says.  And I can imagine.  I bet you can too.  All of their eyes on us, their mouths agape just a bit while a grainy black and white flickering fuck-film plays out before them in the computer room.  It’s what you always wanted.  Attention and recognition.  The pride of corruption. 

I’m willing to bet that if I cared to ask, you’d say that you’ve really thrown yourself into your work lately.  Your Engineering degree has really been doing you and your wallet well, you’d say.  And I’d feign happiness, as I always did.  I guess that’s one of the things I’ve always been good at. 

I hear there’s a big job coming up in downtown Boston.  A high school that could really use a reworking.  If you need me to handle any of the blueprints, just let me know.  I’d be more than happy to help you out. 

But if you’re not interested, that’s just fine.  I suggest you may want a hobby to occupy your time though.  There’s a whole world out there filled with things you could be good at.  I think it may be time you expand your horizons.  So to speak.

Outbreaks

I don’t write stories.  My head just won’t support the spine of them.  But I write tiny poems all day with the tips of my fingers on walls and skin and on the dirty windows of parking lot Jeeps.  I have thoughts like little outbreaks.  Bright pink and white polyps all over my tongue that make it hard to speak.  When I bite down, cherry juice and a hardened pit of muscle.  They come in rushes like orgasm but then they go and I come down with clean lips.  Sometimes they don’t plague me again for days.  There was a whole year once, where my tongue was free from the swell and I was left to bake sugar cookies at Christmas without carving flowery lines into the dough. 

I had an outbreak last night.  I wrote a letter for a girl I know in the soap scum on the shower wall.  Finished it on the steamed up mirror and then signed my name in lipstick on my grandmother’s antique vanity glass.  When it was gone my mouth tasted sweet and I drank coffee to forget the flavor of her.  I’m hoping for another swell soon.  I’ve got so much more to say.

I’m so tired of performing magic spells with my mascara wand.  Ribbon curling my lashes and lining them in gold pollen powder.  I’m tired of dusty pink petal polish on my lips.  Pinched cheeks and diamond drops dripping from my ears.  I’m tired and for once I want to look that way and have it be okay.  The birth canal punctured blood vessels under my eyes and left twilight moons there.  The color is beautiful.  It’s natural.  It’s black-hole-lovely.  It’s a hand painted masterpiece that I blot with cream-covered sponges in the morning.  I’m freckled.  I’m tired.  And if the drugstore is closed and my potion bottles are scraped bare, I lock the doors.  I sleep to change my complexion.  I cover the mirrors and draw the shades.  I am tired, and I want that to be enough.

The Heating Bill

I keep the heat cranked and gladly pay the bills.  I love the way the roses I bought myself this week are already weeping over their glass vase.  Their stems turn to rubber.  I feed them crushed aspirin dust and pick off their leaves but they stay soft and bent.  I think they look lovely that way.  Visitors ask why I don’t toss them away, then politely ask if we can lower the temperature.  I’m wrapped in down and flannel and goosebumps.  They flick sweat beads from their wrists and sneak stares at the thermostat.  I love the music that bubbles up from the baseboards.  The banging and clinking of pipes and rushing water.  The way the windows fog and the cool wet dew that I trail my fingertips through while I scrawl seven-word poems onto the glass.  Without you, there is only my breath. 

Loved ones don’t stay long when they come around.  They are smoked out, drawn to the cold air seeping in through the cracks between the door and the walls.  They kiss my cheeks and I feel them like fever.  I long for it to last.  My lips touch their skin, blue and icy.  They’re always surprised and then, I’m left alone.  But alone isn’t lonely.  I have my radiator percussion and my sleepy floral bunches.  My poetry on the windowpane.  And if the world wants to know what I see, they must only learn to read backwards.