Clorox.

I’m watching a butterfly dance drunk circles around the porch light, contemplating its markings, sipping beer with ice, chewing hang nails, waiting like a silly young thing for love to come find me, smelling the Clorox scent of the dryer vent, frowning all the while, at the butterfly.  Stupid thing, I think.  Stupid thing, you don’t know how beautiful we all think you are.  You only know nectar and bright spots of light.  Stupid mindless thing, so graceful with painted color, making us all look like bad, big dumb things down here while you drift so carelessly across the shadows the moon makes.  My beer is gone and my fingertips are bleeding.  The dryer has stopped running.  The butterfly nestles under the gutter and disappears leaving me alone again, a silly young thing, waiting for love to come find me.

Laughing Unaware.

She drank strawberry milk, liked the way the pink bubbles looked exploding at the end of her straw when she blew.  And when her mother told her, ‘stop that, silly bear’, she blew harder and the milk would leap from the glass and splatter tiny pink freckles across her nose and her cheeks, catch like blushed dew drops on her lashes.  Laughing with gold sunshine teeth, fake pearls from her mother’s trinket box.  Laughing with her little silver crucifix bouncing around her throat.  Laughing with baby pink bubbles like candy foam on her tongue.  Laughing unaware of the sugar, chewing at her blood. 

white noise.

white noise is ticking clocks on ancient walls
and buzzing traffic 6 miles north
i drove the length of six slow-smoked cigarettes
down a freeway that was one giant crater of tire marks
and city garbage fly-aways
ended up parked crooked on a road on the outskirts of tragedy
in front of tattoo parlor, next to a pub where on tuesday nights
“girls drink 4 free” and the walls are paper wood paneled
white noise is a refrigerator compressor constantly running
and the disembodied cries of a long-dead baby boy
and to run from it
i drove for as long as it takes to play his favorite album all the way through
down an interstate that was four lanes wide and dipped into a valley
paved in loose gravel dyed with coal for color
ended up right back home again
proving the earth is round and my bones are magnetically charged
white noise is light bulb filament and the mewing of kittens
train whistles and foundations settling
humming bird wings rattling, our teeth tapping together when we kiss
white noise is our hearts beating fast and our toenails growing
blossoms opening on trees and car engines overheating
i drove for the length of half a tank of gas
and then stopped behind a mini mart to dig a needle into my arm
and fall asleep in the backseat
underneath the toxic humming of an artificial moon that said,
“regular, $3.49”  that said, “diesel, $3.74”
white noise is
an electric lullaby

Fingers.

My fingers are stained with trace amounts of habit. 

Yellowed with nicotine, reddened with chewed cuticles, bloody.
Ice blue with raised addicts veins, sea-coast grey with scar tissue.

Thick with mildew from clinging to the old floral shower curtain.
Slick with semen webbed between each digit.  Green halos at their bases from fake silver, faker gold.

Purple with fingernail-dug bruises.  Deeper purple from the lack of flowing blood, the cold.

And they’re making it really hard to hold onto much of anything, anymore.

The only way I ever knew my grandmother was perched in a wheelchair, smiling and smelling of sweets.  Sugar and raspberry perfume. Her delicate white skin, pink cheeks that she pinched to keep the blood there.

She sang and hummed.  Always singing, always humming.

Always popping in and out of cafes, buying flowery dresses and silk threads.  Woolen yarn and knitting needles.

Stealing my baby dolls and cradling them, cooing lullabies to them.

Christmas paper and Italian cookies.  Fuchsia lip stain in a silver tube.  Pocket mirrors with jewels.

The only way I ever knew my grandmother was perched on the edge of enchantment.  Romance novels and split pea soup in crock pots, floral house coats and dog hair.  Satin slippers.  She’d pull herself from her chair and hold on to make dinner for us.  Always slipping and singing.

She slipped.  And she sang.

If You Think They’re Laughing At You.

I think myself constantly sad.  Trapped helplessly between the boring, trendy prose on my shelves and the people who write it.  I think myself free as I’ll ever be, and therefore, sad. But then there is the cigarette between my teeth when the sun is out for the first time in days.  Humidity resting on top of bird-shit puddles and sidewalk strangers sneezing in clouds of pollen.  There’s mindless television behind their eyes, a woman walking as if she’s just been fucked, in the best way.  There’s a caricature artist by the pier pointing out the fault lines on every old face.  So I smile, think myself damn lucky really, to laugh so loud out here, at all of them, without catching so much as glance.  I finish my smoke and write some boring prose of my own.

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.

nevada.

I. she has a bad habit of mixing stripes and flower patterns,
of driving drunk on melted sugar and whiskey,
of ignoring the busted lips and headlights

II. he has good intentions to reduce his intake of sweet breads,
to sleep naked in the summertime, windows open,
to kiss the pretty girls before it’s too late

III. they share a one-bedroom apartment overlooking las vegas,
a moldy shower curtain hanging from pink plastic rings,
a window-seat where the tabby cat perches to lick at the sky

IV. she has a bad habit of hiding her secrets under the mattress,
of killing her cigarettes in soda cans and on the covers of glossy magazines,
of disappearing for days and calling from a payphone, “i love you, still”

V. he has good intentions to send flowers back home for mother’s day,
to alphabetize his records and his books,
to smile at strangers down on the street, if they look especially sad

VI. they share a land-line telephone with a tangled curly cord,
a refrigerator scattered with magnetic poetry, “sweet & idle you sit”, he wrote,
a medicine cabinet of vitamins they don’t take, prescription bottles they stole

Bedside

I have jars of beads, tangerine hand lotion, chandelier earrings.
I keep a little ball of violet candle wax, missing the wick, floral chiffon in tattered bunches.  Squares of dark chocolate, lavender bars of soap in the shape of stars, moons, tulip buds. 
I have postcards from Sweden, letters from my grandmother in her tortured script, cocktail napkins with drunkenly scrawled poems and advertisements for beer.
I keep everything close, piled up on a wicker table.  I light hemp incense before I sleep and let the stream of smoke from it trickle over my lips while I try to dream.
I have hope tucked under the mattress, love under my fingernails, and a scar from an ex, just above my hip. 

the love is lava.

Let’s never fully give into love.  Let’s tip-toe ballerina dance around its edges.
Let’s never fully give into love.  Let’s bite lips and taste each other’s salt right out there on the cliff of it.
Let’s fuck at the end of the flat world but never dive out into the unknown atmosphere.

This man I know, he has this terrible habit of popping his shoulders until they crack, skipping lunch, tugging at the bottom of his button down shirt with that smirk on his face.  There’s nothing he cares too much about, unless you count the things he cares about too much.  Waist-lines and how his fashion falls on them.  Reflections and how blurry they appear in his hunger haze. 

This man I know, he has this terrible habit of not noticing how I hang myself on his hipbones, drape myself around his neck, and cling to his ribcage like wet morning petals.

Straight & Out

He left his wife and his daughter standing on a sun porch in moonlight and drove dusty roads straight toward midnight, straight out of Oklahoma.  Straight and out.  He didn’t kiss his daughter’s forehead or check his wife’s eyes for tears.  He kicked his boots on the stairs and sucked on a Marlboro, left a cloud of smoke behind to watch over them.  Straight and out.

He found city lights within the hour and like a man headed for a ledge, he barreled toward them.  A sickening skyline filled with neon and trace amounts of new love.  His steel toe on the accelerator.  One hand on the wheel to hold the whole world steady over the gravel.  The other hand, not as steady, holds a glowing cherry of ash and tobacco to a warped photo tucked up under the visor.  He lets the two meet, burns the image of his past, the past he left standing stunned on the sun porch, in moonlight.  Straight.  And out.

When he can hear the buzz of Corona signs, feel the vibration of heavy-hearts pounding the pavement, he pulls the car over and rubs at what’s left of the picture into his jeans.  His hands come away clean, his thighs an ashy grey.  He thinks, what a great contrast for all of this color.  He leaves the car on the side of the road and follows the scent of stale beer and cologne to the closest door.

Straight and out.  Thrilled to find a spot where the whiskey is cheap and there are ashtrays lining the bar.

Push Through

On the rust-colored shore where the lonely sands have been bind-blown to rippled perfection, he travels slowly, head down and eyes red.  The sun, bloomed full.  The clouds, a stretch of pure white, tight canvas.

The sea laps whispers of tin-salt against his matted ankles where the grey and black of his fur have begun to glow with the bright shades of his bone-chipped blood.  His ears point skyward, his teeth settle like big bricks on gummy foundations and he cries out for a friend.  He cries and cracks at the joints but doesn’t stumble, falter, or fear.

Poppies mirage their way into full brilliance in the path in front of our old friend.  He marvels at the purple, the green of them.  He tries to gnaw at their nectar and wet his flat tongue, prickled with popping buds but comes up with clay between his teeth and a crunching he can feel running its way down his long spine.  Lonely as the boom of fireworks.

He remembers his friend.  The jet black of his hair like nighttime.  The spark of his smile and the way he’d ride upon our friend’s back, fingers tangled up in his mane while they journeyed for miles to nowhere, where there was always water in metal buckets to drink from, grass for miles, sunshine, starlight.

And until he finds his friend again, he will wade through the sands and spit salt back into the sea, crawling along on broken bones toward the promise of his companion.