Singing from the Cellar Door

…is an open throat

littletroublegrrl — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 08:04:59 +0000

Seventeen dollars dropped, I watch in awe as it spins. On the hand-made table with the built-in ashtray, the turn-table completes the (w)holy hyphenated trinity, the good times rolling on just as god, John Darnelle, and a cheap bottle of Cook’s California Champagne intended.

I don’t intend to think of any moment but, but here in this beautiful living room it happens anyhow –

those old lines like threads braiding themselves reflexively through the dreaded knots of my dark curls — the objects in the rearview both closer and farther than anyone ever promised; lovely, ugly, all the way around incomprehensible … here and yet … (k)not.

What happens next is anyone’s guess. Static, then another track: memories to fill the gaps… transparency over transparency…nothing begetting its eventual nothing. Everything off-kilter, unnervingly centered — delicious is the mystery that makes itself seem so painfully obvious I say.

Probably.

short story long…

littletroublegrrl — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 05:16:16 +0000

he ran for the hills;
I built a barricade beneath one.

From Open Window

littletroublegrrl — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 04:47:53 +0000

We’re sitting at the open window when you had me the pistol and say
“pick one.”

By the cold twilight of your eyes, my own doe-like morning dews focus hawk-like on the whites of my thighs
less dimpled and hideous in the amber light than I remember,
..’ruebenesque’ I recall somebody saying,
proof once of wealth…

“There’s plenty of women in this world with tits and ass” you tell me,
coaxing my fingers around your cold metal
“it’s up to you to choose to be more.”

I can tell by the tattoos on your wrist that you’re serious.

Below us on Broadway the flood’s begun its retreat,
Piercings and leggings washing out into the Sound
as if as pulled by the moon as the hammer in my hand:
idle seeds inside my gut.

From above
she’s easy to spot -
Face down on the ground and wailing contritions;
cursing a name in the same breath that asks for its forgiveness,
short skirt riding just below her cresting wave.

Making whimsical excuse for a cold calculation,
Her slim figure kicks pirouettes across the sidewalk;
A tantalizing tantrum that entrances even me.

I want to go to her,

And I turn to you to say as much.

         In the pale blue of our reflection, we’re celestial:
features blurred and overlapping,
       swirling gasses,
          dead light:

“That’s good,” you say,

“now let’s work on your aim.”

littletroublegrrl — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 05:57:56 +0000

Rock, Paper, Scissors

littletroublegrrl — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 09:27:28 +0000

Before the razor, came the rope, became the pills…
Or wait, maybe, was it? the other way around? You can’t remember now,
Your full moon face casting shadows on the worn brick,
slender hands working frantically as if threading knots in the wrought iron;
Scrambling the combination to see what it will unlock.

Lit red by the neon from the burlesque bar across the street, my own bare hands appear to me to be too stout, clutching tightly to a book on essence and resting on drawn knees: desperate, ugly, weakling things,
And I think to myself (and myself alone) that the sequence doesn’t matter much…

But then again, in my case anyway, It was ALWAYS jagged glass –
All those Little ditches dug with a juvenile exaggeration,
The tender insides of a forearm hidden easily in sleeves,
Nothing so extravagant, understand,
The blood sometimes drawn where our similarities begin to end,
No big deal really, not the same thing at all.

Watching as you watch your own ghost dance on the wall, I feel
ashamed for never having had the guts to truly wish I weren’t;
all those mythic moments of murderous sacrifice exposed at last for the fleeting forgetfulness to insist on gratitude that they were, momentary deaths to your total and complete need for…

Yes, that’s right, that’s it. Neck over wrist, wrist over pumped stomach,
That’s how it happened, best two out of three:
“Ro! Cham! Beau!”
and that dark companion of yours shifting with you as you do from one foot to another, as if in finding balance you will also find the answer,
And my ass growing cold on the fire escape grate, as I listen and recall How all those old selves tried to die.

The Bold and the Bilious (this is not)

littletroublegrrl — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 05:07:37 +0000

With a Vanilla Milk Stout and the same blanketing blankness that has come to dominate my autumn days, I sit myself down and prepare to lose another staring match to the wide un-blinking eye of yet another empty, open page. Amazingly enough, I manage to hammer out two full lengths of complaints and confessions: asinine yes, but none-the-less gratifying knowing now as I do that no words could be worse than the absence that’s become of them.
Pressing so hard that it hurts my arm to compensate for the lack of their impact, I take pleasure in the dismal act of describing the nauseating task that I find in trying to write them; trying to remember how I once believed it could lead elsewhere.
When I finally get sick of looking at my own slick vomit on the page, I go in search of a place to one day place my fabled poems, another act of faith, another game of make believe — only by now I’ve really starting getting into the role, going so far as to get genuinely upset when I discover that SoftSkull no longer accepts submissions of chapbook manuscripts, not even the pretend kind, nor the kind with just a title and a frame with fresh stretched canvas.
Despite the underwhelming feel of futility in the event that is this Monday evening, I have to admit I sense a suffocating spark somewhere deep within my pudgy gut; a fragile thing at best, but still present, not dead, at least not yet…. Goddamnit.

Practicing the art of staying stuck

littletroublegrrl — Sat, 24 Sep 2011 08:50:55 +0000

12 am and another update:
Ubiquitous blues; not much new to report.

They can’t all be haikus Robinson

littletroublegrrl — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 05:16:38 +0000

No words today, and no want of, but still.
Every line I write seems to want to stand alone, or at the very most, join Warhol’s three person party (and even then they suggest they’re more inclined to call the company a crowd). And it seems sensible to me that the process would be as stubborn as its instrument,…. but still.
I suppose at this very moment in some other dimension there is a more prolific me who is bemoaning her fate and complaining that she’d rather have the time to sqeeze in a few more episodes of Weeds or sleep an extra 4 hours, right? But what I can’t decide is which of us (if either) should be considered the bigger idiot, or whether or not I honestly care. Whatever the answers, I wouldn’t be quick to call this resignation, though I have to admit, it isn’t dissatisfaction either, or even a close cousin (read, “I think I feel nothing, nothing a ‘tall bout it baby”).
No words today, and who gives a damn really? One can always write about not writing, or watch an episode of weeds, or fall asleep…I mean Jesus! really! The options are just endless I tell ya…
(And creativity’s overrated anyway).
Right? Right? Right?

["and bruno said what anders said some producer said to young lennon
"they can't all be ballads julian"]

My own polite dance song

littletroublegrrl — Sun, 11 Sep 2011 08:51:07 +0000

What story would I tell, I wonder, were I to wander into a camp and be demanded of a poignant one? And though I yearn to be a muse, is it,? would it be? even better yet to be inspired? Memories are imminent, threatening; things that warm and warn and wear me down. In the dark of middle night I try to think a truth to tell, some thing to be captured, some thing to bring release:
come up empty to overfilling.
Somewhere between the things I’ve seen and done and loved lives a poignant inspiration afraid to death of its maker and the power she possesses to diminish its meaning. Only the strum of an electric acoustic and a room lit with candles could make this terrorist moment seem so soft.

And it does.

Wish I was the moon….(TONIGHT)

littletroublegrrl — Sun, 11 Sep 2011 05:45:31 +0000

You take the first drink forgetting what it is to bring the ugly front and center.
Caught in the clutches, you might try to summarize, to tell a lover what it is that can’t be touched; but it is useless, and you know this, no matter how much else you might forget…
And the ellipsis doesn’t do for you these days what it once did. The trailing off is a failure you don’t want to confront, just like your luck, or your own dumb blindness to it…

whatever the process, you are lost,

and the losing’s never been so sore.