speechless

longing to be a visual artist
words so tired, so poor, so arrested.
not sure what being a writer means any more.
without an attention span what's left?
recording for the sake of it
validating the alphabet
creating new syntax
for what?

why not?

there's always this vague suggestion
of meaninglessness masquerading as dependency.
i don't know what to do with it
because of course it's meaningful,
and there's no path, nothing
circumscribed, nothing definitive.
there's now and then there's
nothing and we're supposed to figure
out how to navigate in between.
that thought, that touch, that sound,
that space, that breath. this is it.

the calm...

where is my mother?
backward, forward, that rocking motion.
we become accustomed to it. expect the shift.
a member of the hemlock society in its nascent years,
now she is projectile, a missile with a programmed
target and the ability to forget.

time out

mindlessness
joblessness
wanderlust
all add up to the disappearing act.
the one you long to pull,
to become, to succumb to.

no brainer

what is it like to grow old. old beyond your time. older than you ever thought you were capable of being. so old. how can this be? because it's never in the conventional sense. it's not about growing old, it's about being, believing or not. it's about not being afraid of being alone. it's about losing. all that loss. and then, nothing. is that what we're supposed to become accustomed to? no matter how many times, how many ways, how unspeakable, how unpredictable it may be, we'll never get used to it.

Let's Drop Out, Baby

If ever there was a sign that it's time to make art
the priority, the time is now.

A life inspired.

T'ai Chi, a little contemplation, a spot of tea,
writing, making art, a bit of exercise, an hour to read,
a delightful glass of wine, a cinq a sept, followed by a
delicious culinary adventure and a walk to the beach.

All the days ahead, the rest of our lives,
a love, a life fulfilled.

hospital holiday

always seems those days are the ones in the emergency room. don't feel right. hot. spaced. having a hard time. who is thinking of me? who am I thinking of? who can I, how can I, think?

i keep saying, why am i still here?
what have you been up to?
no. talking makes me feel more relaxed. makes me feel safe.
what do you mean you have to go?
there's a perfectly good bed in the second room.
a TV, a computer, ice cream, vodka.
what else could you want?
i haven't heard from her in a long time. i keep calling. usually she answers.
i thought, no one would know if something happened to her.
how would anyone know? who would tell us?
what? yeah.
we talked yesterday.
i know. i was talking about today?
who would know? who? tell me who?

Long Time No Write

What can I say? Life is an expanding universe that is so hard to keep up with sometimes you just give up. Not give up literally, just figuratively and then
one breath of fresh air, two, three, thirteen. Why is that number so magical?
Do you remember? I do. Everything about that age was transforming. New AWARENESS,
new BODY, new PRESENCE in the WORLD. I sat at a cafe in Nice and ordered
my first drink, a Cinzano. When the waiter returned and saw that I had not diluted the drink with water, he looked disgusted and I finally figured out why it had tasted so bad. The reason I was there was because Bea, the sister of
my foreign exchange sister Suzanne, tried in her very liberated yet respectful way, to say I have to fuck my boyfriend so scram. She was stuck with me in her apartment that summer. So I took to the streets, talking
to hookers. The pressure to wear a bikini was formidable and I painfully marveled over the rocky beaches with their amazing boulders that were so flat, all these sexy French women laid their nearly naked bodies across them to pray to the sun. I wondered why I couldn't be like them. Have their bodies. Know the love. Hunched over, I made my way across the boulevard, thankful to get to the other side, while trying hard not to expose myself too much. I was 13, after all.

Using Our Groovy Minds

What a moving experience it was watching the election unfold and
seeing Jesse Jackson brought to tears, knowing how the years he toiled
to keep civil rights in the spotlight finally paid off. My faith has
been restored.

SAFE HOUSE

A masquerade
a charade
a ball.
You have to have two
Who do you trust?
Not.
To whom do you owe your livelihood?
Paltry, so miniscule, you don’t even count
in the census.
And without a consensus
there is chaos.
I move a few dollars around to iambic pentameter,
in rhythm, to the change, in search of the logic when there is none.
Panic in disguise.
0-0=0, my lover says. Her computations are always right.
And for the first time in our lives, we’re happy to be artists.
If only we could make art during this tumultuous time
when fear Is no longer of death but of the mighty dollar.
Profit, interest, prinicipal, cash, chump change.
Hey baby...happens to the best of us.


Happy New Year!


9/29/08

The End?

In his eighty years Martin Mercier had never experienced anything like this. In his eighty years he had never acquiesced. No matter what came his way he always expected it. “Le jeu, c’est fini,” he muttered to himself but when he looked at his failing wife Narcisse, he thought, les jeux…her life and his. With their fiftieth anniversary imminent he envisioned the waltz, the pirouette dizzying, her body so close it was indistinguishable from his. Unable to imagine life without her he felt the futile quest of the human spirit an absurd necessity he could now relinquish. As he peered into those chestnut eyes through the dark, endless tunnels that turned back on themselves, his fear returned, one he could not subdue through any amount of logic or discourse. The brain, he decided, was a painful organ, thoughts slicing through it like the jagged edge of a knife. Better to get past all this, better to move beyond it. He sipped from the fluted glass, the effervescence a deceptive reminder of what he would leave behind. The tightness in his chest made his breathing labored and the sweat of his palms made the pills soggy. His wife, on the other hand, was feeling no pain. On the morphine drip she’d been hallucinating a hot, white light surrounding her, evaporating like fog, through which swallows arced and banked off cliffs while the sea below crashed against the rocks with a virulence.
Martin twisted the empty packet of Gaulois, threw it on the floor and opened another. Chain smoking was a luxury he could now afford. “Just think, Narcisse…” He was grinning when he said this. “They will have to clean up this mess.” The ashes, the butts, the spilled champagne, the broken glass from the vial he emptied… By they he wasn’t sure who he meant. Who would be the first to find them? He didn’t want to think about it but he hoped it wouldn’t be the kids. He couldn’t imagine; it was too perverse.

Yes, his children would have to forgive but in time they would come to understand what happened. Especially Dylan, the costume designer. He envisioned the folds of Edwardian dress gathered and stitched for the adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Oval Portrait”--a painter so obsessed with the portrait of his wife he literally steals the life from her. Remembering the nature of the work made him shy away from gazing upon his dying wife’s face for fear he would hasten the end. At this point he simply couldn’t bear it.

More Radical Trust

no time

I've been wrestling with tense. Tense about tense. Unintentionally when I started writing September 10th I was working in the present tense then somewhere along the way I realized what I was doing and had to question it. There's a reason for it. Time compressed into a single moment--a metaphor for the compression of Brian's life--how the magnitude of a single event can implode an entire life. In pursuit of anonymity the past doesn't matter anymore and the future doesn't exist.

The mechanics of doing this have been problematic. Like a cinematographer shooting live I was capturing it documentary style yet I (the omniscient narrator) was no longer present. So how can the conjugation change midstream, the tense reverse course? I go back and forth and in the editing find myself constantly adjusting. This is my dilemma. The dilemma of invention, I guess.

Electro Shock

"There’s all this electromagnetic current," Gracie explains. "The kind you can test with devices that make skin contact. You know, like EEGs and EKGs and that sort of thing, but what I want to know is where does all that energy go when a person dies, the field around the body, the one that intersects and surrounds us, the vibrational field…”

She says, "People didn’t vacate lower Manhattan because of the toxic residue. They didn’t vacate out of fear. They vacated because of the massive amount of electromagnetism unleashed into the atmosphere by 3,000 dying and deceased people.”

in my right mind

Blown away by the read through, crippled after sitting for three days at my desk. SEPTEMBER 10TH is everything I hoped for, imagination at work- my raison d'etre, family as unpredictable as it is, love, true love and all its traps and trappings, compassion for our place in the world as precarious as it is, clinging at once to individuality, that thing that defines us and defies genetic imprints and to our collective identity, that singular force that encompasses everything, more than our individual consciousness affords. No escape. It's that big beautiful velvet stew of life on the edge. Of what? Time, meaning, existence. Even history can be false.

weapons of mass construction

i need my gum, my cigaretttes, my bobby pins, my simone de beauvoir,
my selective memory, my rich, dark chocolate, my dreams, every one
of them,and a few more. i need my lover to love me even when she does,
my massive assault on social injustice timed just right to make an impact,
that element of surprise, no backlash just flashbacks, the good ones,
no enemy, just cause and justice. a glass of fine wine or two or three, a friend i
haven't seen in years, and then i don't need much of anything really. just to be.
at home. in love. ya' know?