I want to make connections
between the coffee and the sugar
my mouth and your mouth
string our theories along

jesus strung up on the cross
jeremy strung out
with the wash
they're the same, right?

with a want to die
to allow my body to be finally connected with the earth

I wish I were retarded and
could only process certain things
limitations and parameters with which to make connections
instead of this eternal torrent of senselessness
downloading me down
always different, never the same, indifferent
always the same
in its difference

a kiss

underneath the spaghetti sauce

and the chocolate and strawberries,

I can taste penis

still on your breath.

plains

poppies,

poppies,

poppies,

like contours of red velvet cakes.

put some in your purse, honey,

and beware of diabetes.

hold onto nothing as fast as you can

For the first time, I guess in my entire life, I have a place I can call home.

There was my mom's house that I lived in for eighteen years, but it was always just that: my mom's house, with her way of life, her energy pervading every room, a big black negative gas that sifted under every closed door. There were no locks in that house, not even on the bathroom door, so I locked and bolted everything into my head. When the air there became too clouded and toxic to catch even one breath, I left.

I went to a boyfriend's house. He lived in a two-bedroom with his Lebanese grandparents, uncle, and cousin, none of whom spoke a word of English, or pretended they didn't. I had known my boyfriend two weeks when I began living with him. There I traded the repression and suffocation of the senses from my mom's house for a full-out emotional vomit. It was like when you get alcohol poisoning, and you vomit violently until you can't anymore, and then dry heaves, and the only thing you can think about is making your stomach stop convulsing. Everything was allowed to come out and be said, and the hatred was sickening. My boyfriend hated his family. They hated him back. I swiftly began to hate all of them. It was difficult to navigate around all the hatred, lying in stinky pools throughout the small crowded rooms of that house, without accidentally stepping in it.

Then there were the college dorms. I have never been to the Bronx, but in my Hollywood imagination, I imagine it is a lot like my dorm hallway. Beer vomit, used condoms, and greasy du-rags on the floor. A communal bathroom, where more often than not, people had drunkenly mistaken shower stalls for toilet stalls and had shit to their heart's content. Gang-bangs and drug busts in the room adjacent to me were regular. It would have been funny if it was a movie, but it wasn't, knowing that's what I would come back to every night.

Sunday night we moved into our new house. In my head, I call it the Farmhouse, the Farmhouse on Odell. It was a bit of a religious experience. Each box that came up the stairs was like an offering of thanksgiving to whatever god pulled the strings and let this happen.

When everything was moved in, we lit incense and put on recordings of the three songs we have written together: "FAT WHITE MEN," "Do You Feel It?" and "Heroin Song." As the music played, we carried the incense around to each room of the house.

Then grilled chicken breasts , spaghetti with tomatoes and garlic, and wine. And nudity, and Tori Amos. Tori is our patron saint.

There are seven apartments in the house. The first neighbor I met said, "I don't want to freak you out, but there is a spirit that lives in this house. Most of the tenants have had direct communication with him."

There is a large papasan chair on the porch, big enough for two or three people to curl up in, a smoke and coffee nest.

There is a good sized niche with an altar-like step, oddly residing in the bathroom. It has no apparent purpose but to be a shrine, so there across from the toilet will be our shrine to Jesus. Ask, and you shall receive an easy, complication-free shit.

The one remaining task is to find a piano to share the house with us, that can put up with our weird lives, and is not shy about teaching us things.

And I am living with the woman I love most in the world. Last night we wrote a song. Home is where the heart is. I am home.

Stuff on My 2' x 2' Night-stand

1 Ashtray containing)

8 Butts (5 american spirit, 3 djarum black)

3 used Matches

1 joint Roach

6 strands mardi gras Beads (silver, gold, black, purple, green, red)

5 Books)

the amber spyglass, philip pullman

the power of now, eckhart tolle

smoke and mirrors, neil gaiman

the tarot, alfred douglas

tori amos: piece by piece, tori amos & ann powers

when you are engulfed in flames, david sedaris

1 heineken beer Bottle

1 pin-on amanda fucking palmer Button

1 disposable fujifilm Camera

1 st. anthony votive Candle

5 beer Caps (4 pbr, 1 heineken)

10 trojan Condoms

1 square sushi Dish containing)

1 iPhone

1 ring of Keys

1 Wallet

8 Figurines)

1 plastic green Dinosaur

1 plastic Duck

6 metal Gladiators

1 pair Fingernail Cutters

21 black elastic Hair Ties

1 box nag champa Incense

1 bottle wet platinum Lubrication

1 Magic 8 Ball

2 zorro-esque Masks

3 Photographs)

my mother & sister

Britney Spears, from britney album artwork

a row of 8 Toilets

2 dirty Plates)

1 navy blue with honey & breadcrumbs

1 cream with apricot jam

1 large Rock, paperweight containing)

1 handwritten move-in Checklist

1 papa john's Coupon sheet

1 housing Lease

2 rent Receipts

1 joanna newsom & 1 imogen heap concert Ticket

1 Rubik's Cube

1 pair Scissors

1 rider waite Tarot deck

2 dirty Teacups, (1 mustard yellow, 1 cream) containing)

coffee grounds

1 spoon

tea leaves

1 trident gum Wrapper

harlequin

Mutual love is not forever.

Here is a love that lasts forever: the unrequited love, the love with non-closure.

That guy on the street I smiled to, that didn't smile back.

The boy, that when I see his picture, pictures of us, pictures of him and friends, I find myself subconsciously saying "You motherfucker" aloud.

The man that fucks me, but that I make love to.

I am in love with him, and him, and him.

And I can't tell them, because they don't want it. And I hate it.

mafia

It is dusk - almost dark. Three large men dressed casually dressy sit in front of me at a table outside the coffeehouse. They are not nice men. With a nasty feeling down in my stomach, I realize they are speaking Lebanese, with the sporadic English word: "desperate," "half-breed," and once, loudly "...the fuck?"

One of the men, with a shaved head and four gold rings, pulls off both black loafers he is wearing, then peels off both socks, puts his feet up on the table.

A beautiful, dark woman walks by, and another of the men says "Sharmouta." I want to kick him in the teeth.

things only the moon sees

I took a walk around the city last night at 4am, with a cigarette in one hand and cup of strong tea in the other. It was so, so peaceful, everyone sleeping except a mass chorus of birds. It had rained all day; everything was slick and misty.

Something in my brain says that if happiness is to be real, if it is to last, it must grow gradually, not explode onto the scene. I don't know how to believe sudden rays of light. If it feels so good, so sudden, it must be imagination, right?

I like to look at clouds of my cigarette smoke against the glare of streetlights.

I find I am scared of nothing, nothing at all, except not creating to my full potential... and being alone in life.

"His thoughts depressed him."

"It was shameless how life made fun of one; it was a joke, a cause for weeping! Either one lived and let one's senses play, drank full at the primitive mother's breast-- which brought great bliss but was no protection against death; then one lived like a mushroom in the forest, colorful today and rotten tomorrow. Or else one put up a defense, imprisoned oneself for work and tried to build a monument to the fleeting passage of life-- then one renounced life, was nothing but a tool; one enlisted in the service of that which endured, but one dried up in the process and lost one's freedom, scope, lust for life...

"Ach, life made sense only if one achieved both, only if it was not split by this brittle alternative! To create, without sacrificing one's senses for it. To live, without renouncing the nobility of creating. Was that impossible?

"Perhaps there were people for whom this was possible. Perhaps there were husbands and heads of families who did not lose their sensuality by being faithful. Perhaps there were people who, though settled, did not have hearts dried up by lack of freedom and lack of risk. Perhaps. He had never met one.

"All existence seemed to be based on duality, on contrast. Either one was a man or one was a woman, either a a wanderer or a sedentary burgher, either a thinking person or a feeling person-- no one could breathe in at the same time as he breathed out, be a man as well as a woman, experience freedom as well as order, combine instinct and mind. One always had to pay for the one with the loss of the other, and one thing was always just as important and desirable as the other. Perhaps women had it easier in this respect. Nature had created them in such a way that desire bore its fruit automatically, that the bliss of love became a child. For a man, eternal longing replaced this simple fertility. Was the god who had created everything in this manner an evil god, was he hostile, did he laugh ironically at his own creation? No, he could not be evil; he had created the hart and the roebuck, fish and birds, forests, flowers, the seasons. But the split ran through his entire creation. Perhaps it had not turned out right or was incomplete-- or did God intend this lack, this longing in human life for a special purpose? Was this perhaps the seed of the enemy, of original sin? But why should this longing and this lack be sinful? Did not all that was beautiful and holy, all that man created and gave back to God as a sacrifice of thanks spring from this very lack, from this longing?"

--from Narcissus and Goldmund, Hermann Hesse

my left eye has a twitch

This twitch seems to sum up my existence right now.

I am attempting to see all the world through two ridiculously small black holes in my face. They are sometimes smaller, now larger, but always too small to pull everything in. They should be larger, widening, dilating until their enormity generates a gravitational pull, allowing nothing to escape the attraction.

Oh that my eyes were truly Black Holes. They'd vacuum in oceans and suns and x-rays and libraries, and all the intangible things too, and cyclone-like, maybe the occasional cow. And people. Especially people.

Maybe if this were the case though, and my eyes suddenly became all-seeing, that would make me a god. That is something I never wish for... The power / responsibility symbiosis still scares me, a bit.

Something striking me as I read Narcissus and Goldmund is that (albeit I am only 7 chapters in) I feel as if I am Goldmund, noncommittally, and without judgment; but the thought is there, nonetheless. I find myself associating him with the High Priestess and the Empress from the Tarot, whereas Narcissus is The High Priest and the Emperor. And I don't know that I've read of a relationship so passionate and heartbreaking since C.S. Lewis's Till We Have Faces.

But my eye is twitching again, and whether from lack of sleep or caffeine, or a simple rejection of what it is seeing, it is disallowing me to take everything in uninhibited.

balls

i like the kind of man that can sit in a coffeehouse -- in the midst of those drinking their soy lattes and espressos and teas -- and drink his plastic bottle of Tropicana orange juice.

learning to appreciate superficiality

Since January, the second movement of Mozart's a minor sonata K. 310 has been sitting unpleasantly on my face like an Amazonian boar with brillo pad fur. I wish it was sitting on my face like a tall, slim, latino man with wavy hair and a vocabulary containing phrases like "ay, Dios mío" and "bend me over," but alas, no. I get the boar.

This movement's subtitle should be "Tissues and Issues." (Oh wait, coincidentally, that's the title of a Charlotte Church album that failed when she tried to be Lindsay Lohan. Oops.) Click on the link and go listen to it: "Tissues and Issues" really does sum it up: this piece plays out like adolescent girl-or-homosexual-male love drama. Flirtation and wanky infatuation abound. Mostly this music is just frippery and frillery, and it's all so SUPERFICIAL, shallow and surface sweetness. (Here's my little dedication to Wolfie.) The mood changes from second to second, just like Perez Hilton's hair color. In fact, I can imagine him skipping through daisies with this piece playing in the background.

Pardon me, the contents of my stomach are about to eject themselves out of my mouth.........

Ok, better.

***

Today, I asked Salmon, my illustrious piano teacher, to just talk to me about this piece. All I want is to breathe some life into it, I said. To actually appreciate it, I said, and not perform a taffy mass of maple syrup twinkie. And Salmon replied "You know, this piece is so superficial."

O.

We then talked for an hour on how 18th century Viennese' lives were built on superficiality, dressing in satin and lace just for a trip to the Kaffeehaus, and the color and the ritual and the hot male waiters and the haughtiness and the whole charade of it all. "Play it like that. Like you haven't a care in the world, when deep down... you're the most miserable son of a bitch on God's earth. Play it... superficially."

That, ladies and gentleman, I can do.

closure

is a bad word.

doors close, and separate things.

eyes close, in death.

when all is said and done, when pleasantries are exchanged, and business is taken care of,

and all i have left to do is look at you in awe...

when all is said and done, we have openness, not closure, you and me. closure= "the state of being closed; a bringing to an end."

and what we have has no end unless we create one for ourselves.

let's create a story:

the never-ending story.

plus or minus

tonight

i texted you for the first time in such a long time. text messaging: what a joke.

and suddenly i had to change your name in my phone from "my knight in shining armor" to "my knight in distress."

but

you're still my knight.

the films that play in my head

There's a film playing. Something smooth and noirish, filled with suave men, serpentine cigarette smoke.

I see you first, at least I think I do. But I'm pretending I didn't see you first so perhaps you're doing the same. A few seconds pass for you to finish off that vodka, and for me to rake my fingers through my hair, en garde.

Then we both force our gazes to slice through the crowd and make metallic contact.

Ba-boom.

Ba-boom.

You smile. (Thrust. Chink.) I smile. (Parry. Clink.) The crowd subconsciously parts as the knife inside my right boot seeks to fulfill the gravitational pull toward your heart, and we silently, swiftly make our way toward each other.

Ba-boom.

Ba-boom.

Ok. I will speak first. Ahem. "My name....... is Inigo Montoya. You killed my resistance to being jaded, and my porcupine named Fred! Prepare to die. Erm... come to think of it, you might have killed my father too."

Ba-boom.

Ba-boom.

That annoying noise? It's your heart beating loud enough for all the queers in this bar to hear. Hell, Liberace can hear it, six feet under.

And then, I carry things out QUENTIN TARANTINO'S KILL BILL style, ensuring ample blood and animalistic noises and gratuitous dueling showcase both of our really hot, really fit bodies at their supreme.

The gay club we're in eats this shit up.

Ah, but the duel must end, (shorter than expected because you haven't had your RedBull tonight,) and one must win, and that one is me. Nothing personal, really. You killed my porcupine named Fred.

*

Simultaneously, another film is playing.

"Hey you," you say, cocking your head to one side. The summer breeze plays with your hair.

"Hi," I say. And I can't think of anything else to say, because nothing else needs to be said.

Except maybe, "Oh come, dear. Let's just forget all of the really bad shit and be kind to each other and be friends for a good long while!"

And you say "Oh, let's!" and I reply "Oh, let's do!" and you continue with "Oh but it shall be jolly good fun!" and I continue with "Such fun indeed!"

By now we're holding hands, skipping through the poppies with a ping pong of banter such as "Whee!" and "Candyland!" and "We did it!" and "We made it through the scary dark relationship forest, and out into the sunlight of friendship!"

Julie Andrews most likely begins to sing in the background.

*

Now let's watch a real film. A documentary, you might call it. It goes like this. I've been replaying these two fictional films in my head. Over, and over, and over. Oscillating back and forth: ...how will I react when I encounter you?

And the reality is, you could probably be the most ambivalent, uncouth motherfucker on the planet, and I'd keep putting doggie treats to your lips. Because that's just how dogs act and I'm used to it. Can't teach an old dog new tricks and all that jazz.

But as soon as you say something sweet, along the lines of "Hey, I heard you're having a bad day. Let me know if I can help," I am going to sprout platinum blonde hair, begin calling myself Beatrix and

cut

you

to pieces.

Because that's just wrong.

Cheese.

*

Blip. Blip. Blip.

Whirrrrrrzzsxfhsssshhhhhhh...

look and see

Coyote was going along and as he came over the brow of a hill he saw a man taking his eyes out of his head and throwing them up into a cottonwood tree. There they would hang until he cried out "Eyes come back!” Then his eyes would return to his head. Coyote wanted very much to learn this trick and begged and begged until the man taught him. “But be careful, Coyote,” the man said. “Don’t do this more than four times in one day.” “Of course not. Why would I do that?” said Coyote.

When the man left, Coyote took his eyes out and threw them into the cottonwood tree. He could see for miles then, see over the low hills, see where the stream went, see the shape of things. When he had done this four times, he thought, “That man’s rule is made for his country. I don’t think it applies here.This is my country.” For a fifth time he threw his eyes into the tree and for a fifth time he cried “Eyes come back!” But they didn’t come back. Poor Coyote stumbled about the grove, bumping into trees and crying. He couldn’t think what to do, and lay down to sleep. Before too long, some mice came by and, thinking Coyote was dead, began to clip his hair to make a nest. Feeling the mice at work, Coyote let his mouth hang open until he caught one by the tail.

“Look up in that tree, Brother Mouse,”said Coyote, talking from the side of his mouth. “Do you see my eyes up there?” “Yes,” said the mouse. “They are all swollen from the sun. They’re oozing a little. Flies have gathered on them.” The mouse offered to retrieve the eyes, but Coyote didn’t trust him. “Give me one of your eyes,” he said. The mouse did so, and Coyote put the little ball into the back of his eye socket. He could see a little now, but had to hold his head at an odd angle to keep the eye in place. He stumbled from the cotton- wood grove and came upon Buffalo Bull. “What’s the matter, Coyote?” asked the Bull. The Buffalo took pity on him when he heard the story, and offered one of his own eyes. Coyote took it and squeezed it into his left eye socket. Part of it hung out. It bent him down to one side. Thus he went on his way.

-from Trickster MakesThis World: Mischief, Myth, and Art, Lewis Hyde

brown hearted

It was July 2007.

There was a small, beaten up keyboard standing in one of the corners of the gated-in cement area; it stood on a playstage, next to a dilapidated plastic playhouse. The kids put on little shows on the stage, or sat on its edge to be lectured, or used it as a vaulting point to make a slam dunk into the basketball goal.

The kids. Some of them were loud, and talked, filled every space with talking, and screamed with glee when given a gift. They made up new rules to games, and new games, and new ways of playing old games. And though not particularly destructive, toys became worn and broken after only a few hours. Because nothing belonged to any one person. Everything was to be shared among all, and all wanted to get as much use out of whatever they had before someone else got it, and they never saw it again.

That's almost how I was treated. Like I was about to leave any second, never to return again; that it was crucial they get as much from and out of me as quick as possible. And they realized what I wasn't thinking about: that, yes, soon I would be going away forever.

Some of the kids only stared, or acted as if they didn't notice me. Some clutched a solitary doll, stayed in one spot for hours, playing at the rickety dollhouse, never venturing to look up or say a word or call one of the other children.

Everything. All of it to take in. Each child, each life had myriad swirling behaviors, motives and fears, things to forget, things to learn, and it was too much to try to understand, or guess, from faces and tones of voices in a foreign language.

The only feeling -- the only thought and action and reality there -- being engendered by the hugeness, and the littleness of their value of self, was love. It was the only possibility. In their singing of a song for me, or desperately wanting to help with my cleaning, asking repeatedly to be able to hold the hose "only one minute, just one minute," practically prying my camera from my fingers and taking as many photos possible of as many things as possible in as little time as possible, drenching me with the hose ("Mojado!"), forcing me at risk of fist to climb up the air conditioning unit onto the roof to scavenge for a missing ball, (finding four balls, three toy cars, a boomerang...), teaching me hand games, trading vulgar insults in Spanish ... In everything, only love.

The brown-red clay staining the world and the heat and brightness of the sun bleaching the world melted everything into a light brown. Our clothes. The walls and floors. The little keyboard in the corner. Stay there long enough and your heart will turn brown.

I and a few others were painting mint green, a bedroom. Somehow, within the strange meanderings and branches of long conversation, Coldplay came up. That our favorite songs were "The Scientist" and "Yellow". And "Clocks," of course. Maybe it was Amelia that said "One day I want to learn it on piano."

And I saw that keyboard out on the porch-like cement area from the second story window. It was browned and battered, didn't work, maybe never had worked, and was just for kids' imaginations.

I imagined playing "Clocks" on it. Having all the children gathered around it. Teaching them.

But I had to leave them.

I remember... taking reluctantly their sole stuffed animal or plastic-beaded bracelet as a remembrance, only because not doing so would crush hearts. Sally writing her name in red permanent marker on all my team, somewhere on our bodies, so we wouldn't forget her. Marching away as steadily and necessarily as required, but leaving my real self back on the gated cement, the padlocked, chained orphanage. Their house that could never be a home.

Shut myself in the van. As it began down the driveway, took pictures from the rear window. They clung to the fence. None of my team spoke much as the van steadily, steadily distanced itself from the place.

And I. Steadily, steadily had to figure out how to distance my heart and sever the magnetic pull.