I have a secret.
I hold it, I wait for everyone to come to me.
I wait and I hold it.
Today, like every other day, I’m exhausted from waiting.
It’s gray outside, a sign of February, a reminder I am across the country, two whole driving days away from my mother who’s in bed, from my brothers.
The blood from the source.
I won’t feel better until I’m behind the wheel, my whole life packed into a two seater, my man, and the deserted United States, the rocky mountains and nomanslands where there’s no water and no gasoline.
In a series of fine and good lazy days, I can have one. I get to. I get to be pissed off and wallow and wonder and worry and take all my aggression out on Zuko’s toys that litter the floor and scrub the sink while cussing caffeine and look disgusted out the window at the rain and NOT want to sign a contract and NOT want to go to the audition and NOT want to work or do anything ever. again.
Portland is no good and Charlotte is no good. Neither of them work for my future, but one of them has to work because my future is HAPPENING and I’m too broke and too busy cultivating self-pity to do anything about it.
Thick white snow.
We are all in this together. I am in a whirlpool like Aerial. It’s the most beautiful place I’ve ever been with the world slaughtered and stretched out in front of my hands like webbing- like the cargo net i stuck around my neck. My fingers pick out what I want, I am immortal.
My nails draw the lines on my stomach,
all these nerves where you live.
If we have not struggled
as hard as we can
at our strongest
how will we sense
the shape of our losses
or how what sustains
us longest or name
what change costs us
saying how strange
it is that one sector
of the self can step in
for another in trouble
how loss activates
a latent double how
we can feed
as upon nectar
upon need?
I’ve been caught trying to self-promote that book and run some New Years Resolutions and plan some big exciting plans and quit a couple jobs and start a couple jobs and propose a performance project and read the New York Times daily which, btw , has shone some fantastic perspective into my once dramatic, indulgent, epically challenging life (anyone booked flights to Syria yet?).
I promise to stop dancing with my dog around the house and get to blogging.
Pinkie Sw-izz-are.
Journal, Multimedia, Photocopy, Typed entry, Poem, Memoir business from the year prior to and following my father’s death that includes the death of a relationship, of Chris Wallace, of my Uncle, and an account of one of my three trips to Europe.
Start your new year contributing to my drool-inducing dream of writing, as well as getting a sweet poem-story to read in the mail!!
The guys are roasting coffee, their hands sifting the beans and picking them up and looking at the color. I remember when they had the roaster working at the warehouse in Winston and the smell would overwhelm the patio, over the cigarettes, with Ian behind the counter as convoluted as ever. I miss this part of North Carolina, this one block pocket. That’s why I like Heart Coffee. Even though it always makes me anxious it’s the same kind of anxious that the warehouse made me. Aware of the mood of my own body.
Romance might be dead. I think on days like this with all the darkness and rain with the world tinted in grey tone like a silent film about how distant we are from dark language. I think of the sadness of the internet.
The holidays came and went without incident. I work all up to and in and around the new year. Here’s to working all the time, the coffee shop girl said today. She doesn’t know she’s in my story. Would it be weird if I printed it for her?
Yes. Oh yes. Especially since she takes her clothes off in it, in hysterics.
Romance is dead.
They are filling the buckets full of roasted beans, sealing them, brewing them. The smell is breaking. My eyes are wandering and they think I’m looking at them on purpose, but I am pure.
