Ex Libris

I learned to read very young. It was my mother who refused to read comics to us, and my overwhelming desire for cartoons apparently drove me to achieve literacy well before the expected time. After that, I was insatiable. I devoured books. We would go to the library and leave with our bags full. The summers were one long line of stories. As I grew older, I discovered the deliciousness of staying up, staying still, staying isolated for entire nights to finish a book that was simply impossible to let go of. The calming smell of bookstores where time disappeared.

I loved books.

They were my escape from a confusing reality. They painted the world in colors and curlicues that made sense to me. My brain was bursting with crooked imagination; in my fantasy, the world was a magic place, of unending possibility and madness, and books seemed to speak that same language. I don't know when that started to fade. I don't think adults lose their ability to imagine; I think we just don't let ourselves play like we used to.

We spent the train ride home discussing books in general, and favorite books in particular. And it occurred to me how much I love them, how every book is an undiscovered treasure, waiting to be explored, and how every book spins my inside and never leaves me the same person I was before. Our favorite stories reveal more than we may realize to others. How much I might learn by reading yours.

Eat the cookie. Find the key. Open the door, and the magic is there.

Steady, As She Goes

I cannot tell
if I write this book
to rid myself of the demons that are
or to paint myself the picture
I wish I lived

and sometimes I think
the demons
and the picture
are one and the same.

I am not,
without the other.

Brooklyn Lights

It felt like a Spring Sunday. The sun returned, people were over-dressed. We walked with our coffees to the train and sweated; I stared straight into the sun. How could I not? The Brooklyn apartment was too bright for our advent celebrations, but we made do with good cheer. Hours later, the sun was setting in the west, and the buildings outside our window were sat aflame.

You give me my story without my asking for it. Suddenly my mind rushes, the pages amass beneath my fingers before I can even react. I appreciate the life. I just wish it didn't have to thrash so loudly within my soul. I wish you would catch me, not push me, when I near the edge.

If only I could figure out which one is the third rail.

Deck the Halls

With all guests gone, how quiet the apartment. Little signs of their existance in every room, triggers to remind me of their open hearts and generous souls. Thanksgiving leftovers tirelessly feed me. New shoes gleam by the door; my family can't stand to see me in such poverty, apparently. I would like to tell them one is never poor with family like that, but it seems such a trite observation.

Still, I revel in the quiet. I stay up through the night writing, until my eyelids close and I have to hope my fingers hit the right keys. I walk around in my flannel pyjamas from last year and listen to cheesy Christmas music, stringing up lights and tinsel around the room. I turn on the radiator in my room for a brief instant; it fires up with a crackle and smells of warm dust for a while before it sends hot, dry air into the apartment. I can only leave it on for half a cycle before the room is too warm. I revel in the soft feeling of approaching winter.

Christmas begins today. The magic begins today. My soul decides that any major turmoil must be put aside and dealt with at a later time. Maybe, by then, it will have passed anyways.

Perhaps that is the best magic, of all.

If I Only Had a Heart

The E train wound its way through midtown and along Queens Boulevard. Weary travelers already, we yawned and mourned the end of a not so unusual, and still so pleasant, week. Such is the thing about family, after all. New York was a grey, cold Friday afternoon, and probably best spent in bed. I walked through the transfer center at Jamaica and felt the familiar tingle of travel. Soon I will be there myself. I never tire of the feeling of transit. The elevator smelled of travelers, of airport bathroom soap and expectations. I rode the subway home reluctantly, tempted to stay out there for just a little longer, in the delicious feeling of going.

Back in the Village, the apartment was unusually quiet, and I slept like a baby. My phone kept demanding answers of me, kept tempting me with illicit proposals, and I am torn between what I need to do and that which I desire. The ground has already been spoken for, I remind myself, and pretend to look away. How quickly my heart beats, in all the wrong directions, and sometimes that which is closest is still endlessly far away. I ignore the racing blood and turn to my evening's work. Words get so easily convoluted, and I am grateful for another outlet where they may flow freely.

It occurs to me
that I would follow the yellow brick road
if only I knew where to start.

post script

And
I know it may seem silly
It is hardly a day
when it comes up
(otherwise)
but today
as every day
I am grateful
that when that ledge was close
and the building so tall
I never jumped
I never fell.

I think of you often
of the air on your cheeks
I think of the magic
you could have seen
and I am sorry.

Gratitude, year II

Tonight, I am thankful
for family and friends
for calm West Village streets
for sudden chill and
imminent winter
for the approaching
glitter
and magic

for the break
from myself
and my incessant contemplation

for the promise of
adventure
on the horizon

for enough money
to live
and breathe
and sleep calmly
after all

Tonight
I am thankful
for Life
at all
and this life
in particular

for New York
and for the Word
that burns so brightly
so incessantly
in me

Tonight
I am thankful
For you.

Pause

Sometimes,
there is too much at once.
Too much fun, too much drink,
too much social sparkle,
too much concrete covered.
So that when the evening has settled,
and the world is sleeping,
you still haven't the time to digest
and turn it into words.

Sometimes,
perhaps
that is okay,
too.

The Pitch

Days and nights spent with new acquaintances in the business, I try to keep my head on my shoulders but fail no doubt. These people with their perfectly tense muscles, their perfectly tense teeth. They smile big, slip you their card like it's a five-dollar bill and maybe you can get them in, get them out, get them somewhere they can profit from being. So what do you do? and always ready with their pitch, with their end of it, with their cleverly crafted words and success stories. They sold to a Japanese company; we go nationwide early next year; she signed with that Big Label. So what do you do?

I know this business, and that makes me feel at home. I was raised in this business, but that also makes it so foreign. I have no pitch, I have no cleverly crafted words, when words are all I should have, really. I try to describe my pages, my ambitions, and they fall flat by the wayside.

In somebody else's eyes, how could these words be any good? In somebody else's ears, how could I possibly call myself a writer? I can't take such liberties, and I quietly sink into a corner and smile. I do not write for you, it's true. I write because the alternative would drive me to madness, to a boil, to deflation. I write because I can't not.

But if a tree fell in the forest, and no one was there to see it, would it not have fallen in vain?

I brace myself, I open my book, and I open my voice to the world.

September 6, 2007

The end of America
I ran
the last steps to the Ocean
the West Coast at my feet
and all of America behind me

letting the water wash over my weary feet
my overwhelmed soul
my grimey sweaty heart
elated
and giggling madly

at the Greatness of it all.

The end of the Road is beautiful
and bittersweet
warm in my chest
like the California wind
that dances around me

My head is spinning
the palmtrees sway
but the waves
are comfortingly eternal.

Hey Porter

I miss the South.
I miss the humid greenery, the unending roads of America.
I miss that car, safely carrying us coast to coast.

I miss fried pickles in Natchez, Louisiana, and ribs in Lubbock, Texas.
I miss the soft, singing dialect of Alabama and sunset over the wide Mississippi.
I miss Pie Town, New Mexico, where the apple pie came with real vanilla ice cream and I thought the world existed just for me.
I miss the way the Pacific Ocean seemed to lie in wait for us and only us.

We sat at the White Horse Tavern tonight, and I thought there is so much more to life than whatever we think we deserve to expect.

If I could be satisfied, I know I'd be happy forever.
But I'll never be satisfied with this, with this anything.
That's what keeps me working through the uncertain terrain, through the cold, dry winds of New York. One day I'll be elsewhere, wondering wherein comfort lies, and I'll look to another horizon. Satisfied dangles like an impossible word.

I'd have it no other way.

America, I will come for you yet. Life, I will struggle for you forever.

Fall

Suddenly swamped with work, I barely retain the energy to digest what little life I have. I rise in the morning, spend my days in another language and exhaust my energy playing catch and smoothing out the uneven edges of young souls having just arrived at Battery Park. For a short break, I walk along the water's edge and draw long breaths in confusion, before I return to my small space in the Village to meet a hundred different deadlines. I try to remember to shower, how to make time to smile. Suddenly desperate to learn how to stop time. Reeling from always being so many steps behind.

A story of fiction runs parallel to my life. Too many similarities, I feel trapped by its foreboding future, its inevitably unhappy ending. In my journal, I write, I fear I write my own death sentence. Realities swim sickenly around me; my sleep comes reluctantly and remains restless. I cannot tell myself and my stories apart. I said I'd sacrifice anything to go to New York and write; I sacrificed my health, my happiness, my future. Is this what you wanted, New York? Is this the tab I ran up?

Yesterday when I walked home, the Hudson River fresh air was too overwhelming, too violent, and I crossed over into TriBeCa to walk safely along Greenwich cobblestone home. It is a rough world out there. I needed my New York streets to ground me. In the West Village, the gingko leaves have turned, and on my street is now a long line of bright beacons, every tree a torch toward enlightenment. If I stay here much longer, I will waste away. If I leave, I will surely die.

Already Escaped

Tomorrow I'll throw away
Everything I keep



Tomorrow when you wake
I'll be on my way.

Habits

Years pass; I grow older. My body is weary and will not dance like it used to. I wonder what became of my dreams of mad adventure. The blood in my veins itches again; I suspect beyond the horizon there is a more colorful land. I wonder if I should not take a break, now, return to the safe land where money grows on steady jobs, the air is clean in your lungs, and the trees aren't planted. Regrouping, and opening the door to another adventure.

When I voice this thought, I get resounding applause. I hear sighs of relief in echo; finally, she is coming to her senses. Doesn't that sound like a reasonable plan? I appreciate the support. But when it comes down to basics, is this not the exact same running and packing up and leaving that I always do? Is this not the restless pacings and dreams of brighter futures and greener grass in which I always indulge?

I used to believe there was a Forever. A forever Love, a forever Home, a forever Life.

Years pass. I am not so sure anymore.

The Id

In therapy, we say that talking freely is the gateway to letting those fettered feelings verbalize and slip out, a way to release the words we've tried keeping hidden, perhaps even to ourselves.

I write, and write, and plan, and structure, and write. I decide my characters will travel in these directions and calculate what will be of importance to them.

But as I sit down to write, after a few pages, I forget my plan, and my characters forget my place as their Creator. They run off in other directions, behave against my wishes and feel things I would rather they didn't.

When I pick up my pen, I open the gateway, and though many beautifully crafted words emerge, safely nestled in their defenses and their theatrical makeup, just as many rogues slip out, wreaking havoc with my Piece and with my Peace. They hold up a mirror to my face, and I can no longer hide. I turn the lights off in my room, but my word processor glows.

I run with it now; I can always label it fiction later.

Unpublished Rhyme

Pushing Daisies

The day drags slowly in a cloud of post-intoxication, eating away at my day of making up for lost time. I linger over morning coffee but return to my bed to watch a movie and wait for the shivering to subside.

Some days, the words flow like an uncontrollable river, and I have no choice but to follow the story wherever it goes, only stopping to look back of what has passed upon reaching a slowing in the current. The problem is trying to return to Reality, to a world where I do not feel like those words told me I was feeling, where I did not just experience the picture they painted. It is a tricky escape. It's an exciting world.

It evens out.

W 3rd, Greenwich Village

So tired, and yet the desire to straddle the streets. Tumbling down stairs and ending up on west thirst street with dear friends and dear giggles. Lethal martinis and revisiting the late nineties as though they were ages ago and nowadays, they are. Morton street swims upon returns and how soft the pillows.

There is no moral to this story.

That is the beauty of Friday night.

Excerpt

"Are we ever really integrated into each other's lives? Are human beings able to truly love on another and become more than extras? The thought fascinated me; I did not know what that was like. We are such solitary planets, traversing this earth in our own separate orbits. We may collide, but we never melt into each other until we are to the point of being inseparable, where I cannot tell my mountains, my clouds, my molten core from yours. At some point, perhaps, I believed that. But without this skin to tell me where I end, I will dissolve into the universe. If I melted into you, where would my boundaries be?"

W 27th St

Tonight the winds blow cold over Manhattan. How dark the streets and nightfall caught me by surprise. I walked home through Chelsea, pulling my jacket closer. As I walked, I realized that my shoes had not been their original white in a long time; yesterday they leaked winter rain into my skin. My tights were snagged and treated with nailpolish. The corduroy on my skirt had long since been worn flat, and I could not lift my arm for the risk of showing the ripped seam in my jacket. The rest of me was wrapped in oversize knits sent to me by a doting mother with a hobby.

So that when I walked through the Chelsea Projects, and the shadows I met in the alleys perhaps should have concerned me, I felt my spine stretch, my eyes steady, my walk soften. Somehow I felt like I had found a place to belong, and I wondered how much of my playing poor was still a game.

Changes

We so easily become those we most scorn.

Perhaps that is why we scorn them.

They are who we secretly know we wish we were.

Comforts of Home

...and yet, here's the thing. In the midst of all the madness, the travels, the itching blood in my veins and my desire to always run, run run... When I see those pictures, of people buying houses, trudging around woodsy yards in muddy boots, lighting fires and growing their bellies, I think that must be the meaning of it all. If only I could insert myself into that space, would not my blood flow a little softer, my lungs breathe a little warmer, my heart sleep a litte sounder?

I know this may all be yet another spot of green grass, just out of reach and thus pleasantly possible to idealize. But that doesn't make it burn any less bright, in my imagination.

Grenache

Some days it just hits you. A long day of tedious work, plenty of potential for a Saturday night on the town, but you know all along. Today is the day for it. So you bide your time. You do your work and cancel your plans. You let the feeling of limitless time sink in until your soul melts into the broken places.

So that when the job is done, the food is eaten, the phone calls are made, you can sink into the books, the notepads, the research, the feelings, the word processor.

And you write.

Novel Ideas, Part II

and then again
in the magic of creating your own planet
lies the quiet
but oh-so real boundary
of when the discrepancy
of the reality you are trying to escape
and the beauty you are trying to paint
becomes too immense.

You won't know it until you are there
but then you will tumble across its threshold
and end up with the rude awakening
of bruises on your body
and words in the trash.

Bought

I hear it in his voice, in the melody of his Are you happy with that?, the answer that he isn't. I opened a door, and pushed back poverty for just a little while longer. My body exhales, the jaws I have held clenched for so long slowly soften their grip. Yet somewhere in the back of my ribs, a slow dark cloud meanders, echoing his doubts. As though this were not the preferred outcome. As though I should have amounted to more.

As though desparation should have garnered a more enlightened invention.

On my way home, I flounder, unsure what feeling to experience. Part elation, part concern. I decide that money, this necessary evil, will triumph today. I go to bed smiling.

New York kicks you when you are down. The trick is knowing when to kick back, and knowing when to simply grow a thicker skin. The end goal must always be simply to do whatever it takes to survive.

I Thought You Died Alone

Novel Ideas

The wonderful thing
about writing fiction
is that you can paint your story
in different colors
and edit your endings
and rewrite clever exclamations

until the song rigs beautiful
and you believe your own world
of make believe.

Déjà Vu

You are the one relationship I don't want to bail,
that I don't want to run away from,
that doesn't terrify me.
New York, you are the love of my life.
Can't-live-without-you love.
New York.
Please say it isn't over.

December 17, 2006
NYC, NY

Short Stack

The novocaine wore off quickly, and again a precarious morning of mortality. The reminder of empty wallets but no less of a body that will not last forever. Such a rude awakening.

Such simple things will tip the scales quickly. How dark the future and how impossibly close the end of Things-As-They-Are. Reaching out for some sort of guidance, I get conflicting advice and get nowhere. The newsfeed ticks, unhindered, reminding me of lives joined, new ones sprouting in the bodies of those around me. Sometimes, freedom feels more like floating away into space and having nothing to keep you grounded, and one those days, I mourn my lack of tethers.

Only the next few days are brightly lit and planned for; after this, it is all murk and mist. I suspect that tomorrow my heart will be lighter, my patience and skin thicker, I will scrape the fallen pieces of my future and put them back together again, to endure yet another day, or week, or month in this life. It's just tonight that the galaxy feels so endless.