Singing from the Cellar Door

Days go by in a blur. Mother’s visit and get so drunk that they get sick in the bushes– You get sick too, but not from booze, and you miss work, and the sunshine outside your sickly house makes you feel sad and fat and lazy and alone — and you feel that way until Wednesday when your boyfriend comes back home and you drink hot toddies together and you realize that a big part of your attraction to him is also the trouble — he is a creative genius and you yourself are in a draught.
You’ve started smoking again and this makes you hopeless. Your dishes need doing again and this makes you tired. Your treadmill has taken up residence indefinately in the middle of your living room. Your treadmill is the devil you fear you’ll fall into total disrepair without. You’re overweight and underpaid. This isn’t new, even if not constant. Everything costs more than it ever has before, you talk to your friends less, and yet you feel more calm. Your job is a trip you sometimes wish you hadn’t taken. You’re often confused — you’re starting more or less to drink less booze….
but not tonight, wondering while you do if its bad to exercise while just a little bit fuzzy. Your brilliant words have up and left you — leaving your “readers” (read: friends) cold without the warmth of their occasional (used to be constant, you remind yourself) fire, which you cannot in this moment claim to feel even a little smoldering in your guts. You’re a mist then, a vapor — a blog already written with a definitive ending. It takes only one toddy to do you in this night, trying to reflect and force a motion on an evening you already know inside your blood will not budge.
You plan valentine’s gifts and a card making party because you remember how much you used to love the holidays and you’re hoping that maybe you’ll love them again. You think you ought to call your father but are afraid to — too many dark shadows lurking too close to the surface, too few productive reports to pass along (too much dissapointment to bestow)…. which only makes you want to more when you really start to think about it. Because, you think, you could use some guidance tonight, in the cruel dead of winter when when you sit down to write, the only story you can think to tell….

is this.

“Twixt and tween some screaming ache of us, we trundle – (tremble?) – tread heavy towards home, my footfall on gravel more soldier than semicolon; nonsense begotten nonsense with a habit hard to kill.
You take the pause in conversation to be anger, my gears grinding out pointless loops of loose feedback…the sloppy internal scrawl of a girl gone mad, made bitter by belonging to a world “no one does more than.”
In explanation I exhale, electrical impulses lording over inhibition even in inebriation, speaking in a language that even i myself don’t understand, a silence rich and thick as white-gold noise…”

Picking up where the journal entry left off, I leave you in the living room, omens like stones dislodging one by one from your throat, everything alchemical…like the gold inside the dark. Forsaking focus for freedom I make music myself on the taut strands inside my neck — macabre chords to the tune of ‘Toccata and Fugue,’ searching for tether where my earth tends to fall.

Too thick and too mixed, just like I like my meals, my poetry approached today.

Feeling in fine form for editing (thanks to the full moon,) I picked up my black pen and drew 6 fat black exes.

~Excerpt from absolutely nothing, by S. Robinson

**********************************************************************
When he paws the index card from off the table into his lap, I know that he’s afraid that he hasn’t done it right.
Swooping in with a ditzy giggle and another good suggestion, the newcomer offers me a chance to re-gather….
They’re good, these kids – reading me much more quickly than the time that it takes to give myself props for calling one good shot…..and its evident at once who the true student is.
Relieved at last of the need to carry the charade any further, I crawl atop the table and start preaching clichés, as the newcomer tries once again to wrap her lips around the term: “alliteration.,” butchering badly and tirelessly the pronunciation of each poetic device one at a time (in alphabetical order no less).
For whatever reason, none of us leaves.

************************************************************************

This afternoon, trying desperately to explain metaphor to two sassy street teens, I stumbled once again quite ineptly into bliss. I couldn’t answer their questions or give them good examples… (and they were teasing me mercilessly: “How are we supposed to know what to do if even you don’t?!”)
but somehow it worked out, and the conversations came…
small, but unarguably sturdy – perfect in that way that’s juuuust better than nothing;
in other words, pretty standard for a good start :: disappointing on the surface, somewhat meaningful beneath.

For what feels like years now, I have been dreaming of doing just this –

and making lists. Fighting demons. Mourning deaths. Seeking marriage.
Tearing paper. Spilling ink. Swilling wine….
Blacking out. Breathing in.
Arriving late, and leaving the same….

And yet in this moment I feel right on time.

*********************************************************************************

”Come away with me today
Everything should be okay
Fill you pockets while you pray
With some to eat and some to save
Nobody has to stay
But we wish they would anyways”
~Mirah

Tonight,

singing up from the cellar door,

there is nothing more,

than too many explanations…..

By the way, that Bright Eyes post makes me wonder if you’re really over the idea of coming home to be a cowboy… and it makes me think about last weekend, laying wasted by the fire at Chris’s place and listening to some guy play bright eyes songs on my old acoustic… and of how freakishly in love I sometimes feel but am afraid to feel all the way because the man I’m imagining is in every way a hot mess…. and how so am I….
and it makes me think about how I’m gonna do it anyway. Jump. Maybe marry a musician. Make babies. Navigate insane dynamics. Work for what i believe in. Be who I am. Write like I mean it (even if for only a minute).

And not just someday…….

But someday soon.

“This is the first day of my life
I swear I was born right in the doorway
I went out in the rain suddenly everything changed
They’re spreading blankets on the beach”

3:23 on a Tuesday afternoon…
….It is not. But I read it in a blog, and I got it in my mind –

….

10:38 on a Saturday night and the sickness seems insatiable, craving disaster the way I once craved a good book (the bastard). What is wrong, I can’t quite say – once upon a time I’d cleverly reply “smart went crazy” and leave it at that… but the depths of my depravity now requires an explanation that ill-adapted plagiarism can simply not supply.

….

In the memo, my voice sounds strange, almost other-worldly …. Sad. Distant; Like a woman calling weakly up a narrow well for help. This isn’t such a stretch I guess, given the grip that my monsters have strengthened…. And yet….

….

I’ve missed those two syllables in my time away from writing. (And yet, And yet).

And I’ve missed mantras, the blankness of waiting, the practice of process…. The satisfaction of the purge. Knowing always that it is time (and none like the present) hasn’t done a damn bit of good for me it seems, because here I am, saying the same things that I have always said, feeling the way the world defeats my capture, my ineptitudes and flailings flagrant — but I’ll be damned if it doesn’t feel good to do so.

….

When all else fails, words for the sake of themselves will swoop in and save me. Devoid of any intelligible meaning though they may be – swoop they do, and saved I am; graced with the gift of another chance to make it different, make it more….

….

“It’s hard to keep your heart hard, when you’re confronted with startling beauty of someone’s fucked up and fragile humanity.”

….

I can hear in the memo the wind from open window – driving west and feeling weightless, blessed at the chance to meet myself in an honest moment, I hit record and I utter these words. It’s just a moment of course. A solitary instant of easy breath in the constrictive web and chain of event,….

….

And yet.

….

As desperate as I become, as deep as I might travel – it is split seconds such as these in which I sense the tether that my existence finds the flame and ache it needs to strive for its continuance.

….

Watching you as you sit now across from me, your fingers working furiously over your own symbolic umbilical chord, I breathe deep and think about what any of this might mean, if anything…

….

And if anything,

….

My heart

….

Feels anything but hard.

My last night in Paris, and I lean out the open window to take in the sleeping street. Before too long, Limonoello and beer will turn to coffee and water – the droning buzz to a hum… and then the light, the morning, the flight, the goodbye, the return…

….

….

Six hours, and no need to hurry, I begin to wonder if the middle of the night is a good time to begin… to begin the unwrapping and unfolding even as the rolling and packing proceeds on the physical plain. Reflection is imminent, if not convenient == ahh, but what am I if not symbolic in my constant exiting?

….

On the street, people still stroll… but few and well spaced enough to notice my light, the figure in the window that watches unabashed, now with nothing to lose, as if ever there was….

….

and I jump ahead in time to make this moment memory.

….

Paris was a whiff of piss, the sound of a sister’s voice, an over-priced drink…

Paris was a dream, a time to re-read “Eleven Minutes…” a street show, a drunken dance, old and lovely, new and chic… Paris was an absence, an abscess, an unknown growth…. And it grows…. It grows…..

….

Paris, Paris, Paris, Marcia, Marcia, Marcia….

….

….

Five hours and 45 minutes and the playlist stumbles to M. Ward and five hours and 45 minutes sounds too long to wait for a taxi. I want to be home, and writing of Paris, I realize, would be a total joke, because it’s home and home alone that concerns me most in this moment,… and every other. I jump ahead in time and…

….

Home. Clicking my dirty, tar-stained heels I think of the open courtyard to take the place of open window… the open palms and eyes of my lover….

Let me close the door on this moment, so I can open unto the next.

….

Don’t get me wrong; I lust to wander with the best of them, but for me the beauty in the leaving will always weigh its heaviest in the return. In every new teaching and intriguing far-flung moment is the reminder of my roots –and these moments only food for the sturdy strength nothing can take the place of. HOME.

….

Here I come….

On its seventh day of death my ipod revives on the original version of Blackbird. I’m in the mood for hip-hop when it happens, but the rules of the game state that the Woo-woo Mama card must always trump the Diva — so I listen. Once, twice… three times a lady and a charm…. ….

And after a hard week of darkness, the symbology of sunken eyes does not escape me, even arrested as I am in the moment by the shallow vision of terror.  ….

 ….

I keep finding on my path the crossing of winged reminders such as these. Last week it was the Queen of Spades… transparent and, as the rules of the game states, worth 13 hearts. I found it on the floor of an apartment I was cleaning while muttering to myself an accidental prayer (which incidentally from my lips sounds an awful lot like cursing). Just that morning I had woken up to a dream that I understood would not be leaving me anytime soon– black leaves and slick, black, sticky webs, = explosive, putrid fears trying to escape through my impossibly tiny but otherwise seemingly healthy looking pores. Desperate to purge the image of that poison, I decided to paint it – But try as I might, I couldn’t capture it to save my life. The black would not get black enough….the webs kept coming out as harmless cartoon flowers (the accidental optimism in this failure of artistic expression not lost on me either)……….

 ….

—-Somewhere between faith and the suspicion of denial, I find a truth that suits me – and as always, it comes to me in symbols dressed cleverly in easy-to-miss skins of coincidence—-….

 ….

 ….

 Fueled by the strength of good sleep and lots o water, I woke up today for once on the right side of the world’s hard on. With curls and curves a’drip and slick with sweat, I wove down the street all sex and salt and mystery: confused at the feeling of unprecedented attention – flushed and pushed forward by a craving for the coolness and well-worn musk of a book I knew somehow, somewhere, should have my name on it. It found me fast and easy – or THEY did I should say. The first I picked up only to have it fall open at once to a name I know well and a startlingly familiar line. The second called out from a more alien landscape, but seemed no less right when its heft hit my palm. ….

 ….

Walking home five pounds heavier and a burdens-worth lighter, I felt once again what I felt at the unexpected opening notes of a blackbird turned phoenix: Well. Right. Alive. FOUND…..

 ….

 ….Reminded of how much I belong,….

 and how very much I want to be here. ….

 ….

 ….

 ….

 ….

Half insane with ache and craving chiropractic cure like crazy, I sumberge myself in a tub full of epson salts and beg the water to get warmer. The crackling that comes from the tennis-ball sized lumps along the blades of my shoulders, I know, is a signal that the time has finally come for some care to be taken….but honestly, my thoughts tend to lend themselves more to the imaginings of cutting off my own head. Reconvening with my current conundrum on the couch, I commence the deconstruction — *drugsmokedrink, drugsmokedrink drugsmokedrink drugsmokedrink* With the chugging inflection of a busted starter, I make my way through the evening like this… trying hard to resurrect my killed concentration by challenging it ruthlessly, as if I could anger it into an awakened state by way of behaving most utterly absurd…

Driving once again headfirst into failure, I remind myself with a bluntness that could just as easily cause trauma that none of what I’ve just done is fueling. Structure, strategy,… spiritual strength…. I do my best with addled brains to take stock of what still functions of these features: scraping the pennies of my potential together in the hopes that I might come up with a fair offering for some repairs…