Spider Web

Life doesn’t happen straight. Life doesn’t happen in a line. Haven’t you noticed you go back to the same shit? You end up in the same relationship, you have the same problems. You run into people from your past at the grocery store. You innocently revisit your old addictions, and the people at rehab start to expect you back in a couple of months. You hit the same walls. You have the same nightmares. You repeat the past. You dream of the future. You reach the future every sixty seconds, every single day, and you never get excited for it. You get depressed every winter. You always go back to the same old brand of shampoo.

Life isn’t a line. Life is more like a spider web. Repeats, rewinds, fast forwards, loops, pauses, full on stops. Plot holes. Traps. Roundabouts. Dead ends.

Life would be like a roller coaster, except you never really get to feel the relief of getting off.

What Love Became

When I fell in love with you, love became so many things that it had not previously been. It came before me as a kind of solid reality that I could touch when I held your hand, or taste in the crevice between your lips and your teeth, or hear in the way my name sounded in your voice with a new tenderness worn by the sandpaper of the years we spent apart, your voice undressing every letter from S to Y and tucking them in and watching them fall asleep. And every day I touch and taste you, listen to husk and affection turn to ice in the knife drawer, watch your face go from clear to cloudy to clear again, try to hold you in one place like the beaver dam holds a river, and I speak your name with an old tenderness worn by the sandpaper of the years I needed you, my voice undressing every letter from J to N and tucking them in and watching them toss and turn, still needing you, still needing you, watching you thumb a ride out of town and then thumb a ride home again. I pace the house that we don’t live in like a ghost that the new tenants try to exorcise, but when I fell in love with you love became the reality, and I became the footnote, the wraith in a hall of flesh and the white lie in a volume of truth, and I burn every day to be truer, to become what love became when you became my love.

The Mindful Submission of Milk and Cereal

I was beaten into the mindful submission of milk and cereal, of bland mornings and alcoholic evenings, and I pretended to be happy and did rather well at it, a stage actress in my own life. I was at loss for reasons and yet stuck firm to my ideals, to my hope, hope for more than this, as I spooned the soggy shredded wheat into the cavern that hadn’t told the truth in years.

The first time he fed me breakfast, it was eggs benedict, and he said he could do better on the hollandaise.

All my walls fell down and then I was home.

And I’ve been home with him ever since.

Where Are You?

I will find you in the morning. I will find you. I will find you. I will find you in the silence. I will look for you on the street. In the faces of my loves and in the eyes of all the strangers, you are there, you are there, I know you are there. You are beating in my emptiness, the sound of my own heart, the sound of a beautiful heart, the sound of the universe humming. I can hear you but I cannot feel you. You are there but I cannot find you.

I want to find you.

I want to find you in the difference between the Called and the Fallen. But I see none. There is hopelessness in the churches like there’s hopelessness in the brothels. Where is your peace in the sanctuary? Where is your peace in those that claim to know you?

Where are you?

Where are you?

I want to find you.

The Artist

She was an artist. She was an artist in the most enticing of forms. She could paint a picture in your mind with her body. She could recall to your chest the feeling of a thousand legions of sex. She was a drug. She was the cruel bite of whiskey on your tongue after you were done with your binge, or were you just taking a breath? She was beautiful. She was an artist. 

In the realm of club dancers and cage dancers and pole dancers and the go-gos in the big boots, the spikes, the glitter, the grotesque mask on the desires of a woman in order to taper to the desires of men, she didn’t wear a mask because she wore nothing. She was honest and so she was an artist.

She could awaken in you the kind of respect for the female form that makes a good man say “Amen.” She was reminiscent of the goddess, or was the goddess reminiscent of her? She had within her, withon her, without her, flaws and scars, marks of beauty and marks of anger, but she drew your eyes to them as though they were brush strokes and not as though they needed to be hidden. 

She was a woman. She was a woman. She was an artist because she was a woman.

She refused to be plated in glass, she refused to be guarded by stern-faced men, she refused to let them take their pictures, she would not let living and breathing reenactment of creation be placed within a museum, and so she ran. 

In her running she found nothing. In her running she found cheap. In her running she tripped over plastic, plastic, paper and plastic, flimsy promises and cheap, cheap sex. 

And no one ever saw that she was an artist. 

So no one ever saw that she was a woman.

Blood-Red Dictionary

Clutching at the dictionary with blood red hands, if you hold me up to the light you see a lot more red these days, more blood, less water, but more blood means more ways to bleed. Holding the dictionary to my chest willing it to transfer over the sentiments to make myself understood, where are my words? I am Queen of Words but my subjects have been rebelling. I am the Marie Antoinette of the Thesaurus and no longer does anyone answer to me, I come up for air from extravagance needing the comfort of spell check, and I hate spell check. I can’t write him a love letter if it doesn’t make sense because I fear more than anything not making any sense to him. 

The dictionary I brought out of a box in order to draw around him more boxes. I keep a lot of things contained, boxes and bags, I pack up and then unpack, when was the last time I could call a place home? 

Blood red hands on a blood-soaked dictionary, God help me make sense, God help us make sense, I can’t lose all my sense anymore, I can’t wander like this anymore.

I unpack and re-pack but unpacking takes less time, pieces of me in boxes, pieces of me in bags. Stories here, scars there, masses of flesh and the bloody heaving past of a girl that never wanted anything except to give everything she had and receive back the same, she read too many books, she broke too many times, she knew God too well. 

Every single fucking piece of me I deliver into his hands every single day. What I have left to clutch I clutch and so I clutch the dictionary. I recite to myself,

“Anticipate. Verb. Regard as probable; expect or predict.

Anticipation: A Carly Simon song too often relevant to my situation.

Reciprocate: Respond to a gesture or action with a corresponding one. Experience the same feeling for one as they feel for the other.

Reciprocation: What we’re all fucking waiting for.”

There are no words to make him understand in this gaddam book. 

But the dictionary says I don’t love him because it’s easy. The dictionary says it’s easy because I love him.