Love Song

Like a lighter loves cigarettes. Like cigarettes love lungs. Like words love poets. Like poets love the moon. Like the moon loves the night. Like vodka loves drunkards. Like drunkards love their misery. Like, misery loves misfortune. Like misfortune loves surprise. Like surprise loves an audience. Like an audience loves entertainment. Like entertainment loves money. Like money loves banks. Loved her:

Hair Eyes Lashes Lips Freckles Boobs Belly button Nails Skin Ass Legs Loved her silence, foggy gaze, choppy voice—abrupt as slaps—Ivory Island, clang of anklets— dangling hanging moon, spider, stars, fish, flowers and—Moth's pick + gift—a snake. Loved her hiss, her frown, her odd rare smile, her hair behind her ears, fairy-dust of her walk, her tucked-wing clavicles, how she always used cut-up straws—never bills—for speed smack powdered pills—her choking beauty taking off her clothes, her nauseating beauty working the pole, her sickening beauty dressless, her ass in thongs, her song, how when reading would cock her head indicates: entry elsewhere, the stones of her spine, how she sucks her lower lip in when thinking, her intensity high, her intensity, her knees poking through always second-hand ripped jeans, her secrets hidden in her spleen, her words stabbed into her skin, her sadness: tide out, tide in, her hair swimming dimensions, hair sorcery, hair elegies, the erotic of her smoking, how she ate, her pining neck, her labyrinth heart, her kisses, her misses, her foolish toy-men, amen. Loved her morning mid-night day-break twilight evening dawn small hours brunch-time lunch-time dinner-time snack-time happy-hour-time sleep-time free-time Loved sin-like, child-like, mad-like, bat-like, light-like, stupid-like, fuck-like, touch-like, murmur-like, laugh-like, so-like, all-like all-like all-like all like…

Lemonade Drinking

Lemon carried faith luminescent against olive-oil complexion, giving his face: a battlefield after the battle's over, a scattering of scars brimming secrets, the footprints of acne after it had moved out—endowing that face, faith face, earthshine like siren songs. Outward, just another boy all guitar-strapped and pill-pouched. Zoom-in: an instability arises—restless something mercury-bodied and always shifting in + around him.

Lemon wanted to revive minstrel-hood: "not all that fancy touring bullshit or more songs about love and heart-break and rebellious pariahs calling society all the names it has already been called."

Pauses to take nicotine in like an asthmatic draws breath from an inhaler;

"What I want to be is the minstrel as he was in early history. Like fuse literature and music, you know? Like create new songs and retell old ones. Like ballads and poems and century-old tales, get it? Same as that Homer guy who used to just wander around narrating The Odyssey. And, and like Shakespeare—like imagine the text of his plays sung out."

Yeah he had a tendency to ramble like a lecturer and—though he was by no means adept at explaining the schematics of his brain—he was was a dedicated reader and musician: thick-skinned and resilient—failing once, failing twice, failing again, failing better. And he carried faith in his kitsch leather jacket—faith which was no cheap imitation, faith unrelated to heredity, instead faith thoroughly thought-through. 

Graveyard Gravity, Brothel Poetry

Graveyard Gravity, Brothel Poetry

Tricked

Trick was a box all lined compartments, all secret. Each compartment an entity unto itself. Not meaning multiple personality. No. She was attitudes, altitudes, attributes adaptable adjustable, resonating amiable. Arena of her, arena which is her, arena which is hers is aerial forests—ethereal, impenetrable, soft intimidating.

No. No. Scratch that.

Trick was collages of orphan gestures left out of language in cast offs' infinity acres. Trick leaking purple-iris gazes utter unsettling gut-wrenching as though listening to a stray joke some place and that joke is on you.

Still not it, okay, again…

Trick: closeted diaries where her always masquerade lies confessed, flowing floral patterned cloths too expensive for any hippie yet hippie they're called. Trick: part-time waitress, selling painter, depraved zealous lesbian. Trick: incredibly crafty intelligent, between beige/brown long locks bony beautiful, never letting on, never telling. Trick: electrocuted mind, miswired mind, mind permanent scarred by itself, mind defined by fear of itself, manic. Trick: hospitalization is second home,  convoluted zigzag intriguing, vulture sometimes pecking its own skin. Trick: horrendous mother to two-year-old baby usually abandoned like a used-up doll at her parents' house = only reason baby still alive.

Still incomplete. Let me tell more.

Trick: loved her baby, not his existence, loved one of her brothers, loved art, nothing else. Trick: occasionally pursued by failed male artists rising artists self-proclaimed philosophers, rare species, indefinite, indefinable, selfish beyond even trademark self-obsessed her phylum. Trick: dream-weaving, often junkie. Trick: intoxicated once terrorized fifteen minutes by scratching at hardly covered left breast, punching ribs protruding as though freedom-seeking enough times = fortunate skeleton didn't dent like a beat-up car's limbs. Screamed and screamed straining vox, "take it out of me, someone cut it out of me, take it out." Nobody moving, she grew more frenzied demanding remove that colonizing parasite heart-thing. 

Graveyard Gravity, Brothel Poetry

Remy; Part One

It is Remy and I and we're on one of our Binge & Barf sessions. Let me explain. About a year ago Remy and I were introduced to one another by her anorexic sister Jana, who thought it would be a "magnificent" (Jana had a great passion for speaking in words with more than three syllables) idea. She figured, you see, since we—Remy and I—were both bulimic, we'd surely "have a lot in common" and "hit it off".

Let me back-track further to a day a year and a half ago where I step out of quite a remote toilet stall at university—after an exhausting puking session (fucking pizza)— to find a minuscule girl with an auburn bob and peanut butter colored skin, dressed in what resembles a kimono that ended mid-thigh with ripped leggings underneath, waiting outside. She just stood there, by the left sink leaning against the wall and smoking a slim cigarette, staring at me—her expression a cross between curiosity and smugness. I decided to ignore her. Washed my hands. When I started for the dryer, she followed and leaned against the bathroom door. I was alarmed. Was she trying to block the exit? And did she even think she could? She was practically smaller than my thumb. And then, she spoke: "You were making yourself throw up," she proclaimed.

 "Excuse me," says myself.

"I heard you," she ventured, "besides your face is all red and your eyes are watering," smiles as though she won an important debate.

Then, I recognized her from one of my literature courses; a girl who shows up as often as not and had proudly given Kurt Cobain's lyrics as an example of modern poetry.

"Food poisoning," I glare at her.

She shrugs, "hey, no need to get defensive. I do it too sometimes. Like, when I eat carbs or fats, ye know? I'm more of a part-time mia really. I prefer ana," she blabbed.

I was really irritated now; I hated girls who referred to eating disorders—which are complex and hard to treat—by female names, as though eating disorders were their buddies rather than serious psychological illnesses. Such dumb fuckers were also usually the ones who'd proclaim, "eating disorders are a life-style" and generally wouldn't recognize an ED if it bit them up their rather flabby fucking asses. They were girls who wanted to have an eating disorder, which to me was akin to wanting to live with Bigfoot, or the Loch Ness monster...

I digress. Where did I stop? Ah yes, I was also quiet pissed of that this imbecile was so jovially trespassing on my privacy; but then again it was my fault for purging in a public place. I hated to admit it to myself, but I was the one who gave her the chance.

I took a deep breath. It was my turn to study Jana appraisingly. And ok, aside from the dumb terminology, she was skinny enough to be anorexic. I couldn't decide though if her spontaneity was feigned or if she truly was so awkward and clueless. I couldn't make up my mind whether to respond or just storm out. I wanted to reply with some scathing, witty remark but in the end all I came up with was, "an eating disorder is not a preference."

"Aha!" she yelped like a dog with a bone, a child with a lollipop, "So you admit you were puking and what I meant was like I would rather just live off sugar-free soda and coffee rather than eat and purge, you know? Like, I've been living on Diet Coke—cause Diet Pepsi is like totally yikes—sugar-free popsicles and cucumbers for 6 days now and it totally feels great and cleansing, you know? I love it! Like it makes you feel pure, as if you're moping your insides, right?"

Okay, so I was beginning to notice the blabbing was a constant with her (I was to later discover that calling what she did "blabbing" was a gross understatement). I simply replied,  "I like food." She went on about how she loved the taste of food but that calories were the enemy and how she used to be real fat (humongous was the word she used) and then became "ana and mia" and got skinny. I told her I never fasted but that I binged and purged every day—somewhat glad to finally meet another person with an ED and yet paranoid and wary. Anyway, that's when she told me her sister was just like me.

But I wouldn't meet Remy for another six months. I would be on my second day of my sophomore year and Remy would be a freshman. I'd be reading Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 when Jana would materialize out of thin air, grab my free hand screeching, "Eddie! Come meet my sister!" She would introduce us, give us a wink and vanish—as though she was setting us up on a date; though I don't think even Jana expected the effect Remy and I would have on one another's life for the years to come. Had she known, she probably would've made sure we were never within a 10 mile radius of one another…

At first seeing Remy, I noticed how her features were the antonym of mine. Where I was pale and freckled, she was dark with chiseled cheek-bones. Where I was ice blonde with waves spilling down my back, she had hair so black it was almost blue that ended above her shoulders. Where I was bird bones and soft tissue, she was thick bones and solid muscles. We were the exact same height though and—as luck would have it—the same weight and the same size. That, naturally, produced a competitive edge between us about ten minutes after we met. That edge would survive as long as our relationship. And how long would that be? I wish I could answer.

Where are you now, Remy and are you still working on your paintings with so much figures blended into one another it's like one of those shrink illustrations where they ask you what you see in the image? Remy, do you still arrange your diet pills by color and your uppers and your downers—a rainbow of temporal happiness? Do you still sniff star dust like flower pollen and rise like bread in the oven to melt like smoke from a chimney into the sky? How is that boyfriend of yours and what's it like after you've moved in with him? Are you still managing to convince yourself you love him? I miss you and I wish we could be around each other without destroying one another, without destroying ourselves together and relishing it. We were as addicted to each other as we were, are, will always be to the drugs. I'd love to hate you after all that happened. I'd love to pin all the damage on you since—after all—it was you who gave me that first line (making me swear on your life I would never try it again). I would be a hypocrite if I pegged you as my demon, but you sure did turn the volume up when my demons congregated. Still, when I go through my phone book, your number is still there.

(to be continued)

By Myself, from collection of short stories