cellophane perfume and the Shadows

My arm is holding molecules of days.  Last erased by the hotel shower in Glendale or Glenwood, CO, it doesn't much matter which.  My arm carries little pieces of my family home with me.  At the service it was weighted accordingly, it was meant to be happy like, death, oh what, that...But it was weighted happiness like death, there's that.  We cried anyway and it made him feel sadly frustrated so he made the lights shut off.  He never liked crying much.  He hardly ever found any crying he couldn't put on it's back and see a reason why it shouldn't be transformed.  He was gifted that way.  I can smell a couple of my cousins and BBQ.  I can smell the room itself where the service was held and keep thinking of his youngest daughter and Oreo cookies.  Today I am keeping to a strict box-a-wine/coffee ratio, which, if it works will let me sleep.  I can go back to be upset by more worldly things.  Always upset.  The ethereal can just float away, the coffee says.  The ethereal is surrounding you, says the wine.  I am in it and out of it at the same time, so there's still a list of things that need to be done, which keeps one busy so sadness can't creep in and get all over the place like choking smoke.  We will go on.  That's true and real.  We will go on in shadows, the darkness of which could be engulfing, or on sunny days could be a stark partner, walking up the street with us.  Partners in that we are fixed together at the foot, with all our steps.

Portrait of Two in a Silent Decade

If I imagine you, you are wearing simple muslin robes and your skin is more golden than it used to be, though you still tuck your chin under sometimes, the way you do when you're smiling that one way.  And you are in halls of stone, a sort of palace or church with high walls and walled-in, open courtyards, awash in hot Indian sunlight.  You are thin still and your back is straight and moves gently with your breath while you sit in the lotus position, your hands limp on your knees with your palms up at heaven.  Your eyes open and close languidly.  I can't picture the struggle, or the relief.  I can smell the incense that stains the air and fabrics in the halls.  I picture you standing behind the guru, your body close to hers to bolster her tired weight as person after person come to be transfixed, transformed, to be lightened and solved.  I imagine you very often, always in this idyllic way.  No words for a decade have passed between us because of distances.  The distances over land and the distances between open hearts faced away.  When I see myself,  my clothes can't fit right, and I look like cartoon parts, painted in.  The walls are off-white and envelope an edgy chaos that has followed me for so long, I don't remember how it feels to be free from it in the rickety house.  The sun is outside and rarely on me.  I watch the seasons pass through the windows, as time picks itself off of the clock.  I picture myself hungry and woeful, wandering in search.  I can't see it from the outside, where I am vibrant and trying.  Where there is work done and love moving.  When I imagine you, you are sometimes too bright to see clearly.  Your features obscured by the glowing.  I was somehow eaten alive.  Turned away and rusted.  So many things are lost and broken, I don't know how to get back.  I don't know where I'll be when I move away from here, but I move like a ghost ship full of imaginings, all cased in a body still nimble.  A body still with the glimmers of hope at the ends of all the bones.  A body I feed and sleep and wash and take around to people I love, to touch and see and read.  This morning, I painted that golden portrait of you in my mind and it made me feel warm.  Sun on the high cold seas.  In this way, you are not completely lost to me.

AWAD

So, you're supposed to write one song a day for some amount of time.  6 months, or a year or something.  After you do that, there is an album that got born.  Or so the lore would suggest.  I'm not really working in days.  I mean, a day consists of two sometimes.  Sometimes one or none.  Time is tricky for me that way.

I know I have to do this everyday.  So I'll tell a story.  Maybe I'll have more to say because of it.

The first time I ever ate stuffed grape leaves, they were served warm in an Egyptian restaurant in Chicago.  There were four or six of them and the sauce they were served in was the color of fluorescent green in neon signs.  It was oily and I'll never forget how it tasted.  I was with my cousin, Meg.  She always knows about the most delicious things.

I bought some in a can day before yesterday.  Dolmas.  They are a far cry from the first ones i tasted the first time.  They are still almost good.  I wish you could can a day.  I wish you could can a fleeting thing, the color of the hair of the girl on the bus in front of you, the second when your headache lifts off.  There could be cans with big X's on them, when you found out someone you love was going to die, no doubt, for sure.  Or when you got the call that someone you love had died.  I think all the time is in cans, for me.  Looser lids on some.  I can't remember the way it seems like a person should.  Little things open the cans.  The color of the sky.  The way the food tastes, the harmonics in this song or that.  A song, itself.

I'm stuffed and pickled.  I have to make a web around this halo of time.
I have to make a cage so I have some bars to count.
I have to make the colors of before come here and live and dance and breathe, they should be incorporated.
They should be fundamental.

I have to keep stringing words together on lines and not be so scared.

If you don't like it, don't read it.

Pickled Onions

Today is the day I start pickling fish.  I have an extra lime and I am putting shrimp in it with some vinegar and spicy pepper.  It's for tacos.  Yesterday was creole stuffed peppers.  I started to like to cook again, which is a relief.  Everything is starting to move back into me.  Music is wrapping me up instead of suffocating me.  I cleaned the bathroom and sang Billie Holiday songs.  Just like me.  Today will be coffee and tacos and work and I can.  Then I'm going to try to figure out how to make borscht.  Maybe some more pickled fish.  On Friday I am going to take a thermos of lemonade to the beach and read a book.  No reason not to feel good sometimes.  Also tomorrow, there will be more to say.

Sluts named something

When I was little, there were people around all the time.  It wasn't very quiet, between the people who were always around and the people I stayed with. Now when I'm alone and it's quiet, I hate that.  Mostly I let the radio fill up the air, but if the water is running, I will sing.  I don't even think it's much like singing and what's more, It's tonal recitation.  I see people cut their own way along.  I think I can do that.  Then I fall apart and fall around and fall with feet in the river, fall with feet tucked under the fender. \\



For Julian Today.  It's all I got in me.

Old Music

I go only so far before I stop and can’t remember what the next thing is to do.  I can get a third of it sometimes finished.  I can sometimes do half.  Mostly a third.  The time runs out.  Particles float in sun streaks stretching from the window to the floor.  Cat yawns and dog stares plaintively.  Now and then the transparency of marked time lays over all of it.  Anniversary and holiday remnants emerge in the strata.  I pour and sort.  Pile and stack.  Bag and transport.  House a canned buzz.  Here are the papers from a day, months ago that feel restless on my fingertips, still awash in their own day.  Socks and stripes from days in the sun and tossed aside to think about later.  It is later now.  The window is open and old music.  The wind that comes in is gentle and small and not quite warm.  The golden light is enough to make me move more today than usual.  About a third down and I sit and break into skittering.  Trying to rally my thinking, gather my thoughts back into the ant hill.  I wish there was something to eat or smoke or drink that would put me right.  Right side up and moving the right speed.  Right and right as rain.  Nothing I ever ingest seems to steady me on the beam.  I place one foot, one foot and another till there’s no thinking, just walking.  That’s the way to keep on the surface, where the edges are straight and the lines lay in predictable directions.  There is no dipping under where storms brew and repeat themselves, where there are churning gray skies and waves sloshing.  There is no diving under where pain is neatly folded, waiting to be put on.  When I move it all out and everything else finds where it belongs, I wonder how I will remember anything.  Mostly scraps moving agitated by the wind like confetti to a frog. Color and white and color.  Mostly if you do it on purpose or if you don’t or even if you try not to, you are always moving.  Forward and forward.  It doesn’t matter where you try to keep your place.  It doesn’t matter because your toe is swept out of it’s hold and soon back through the strata is how you can know for sure where you were.  If you even want to.