untitled (accidentally)

i read my sister's life with envy. i boil endless quantities of water and drink bottomless cups of tea. i watch existential films by Woody Allen and listen to bands i've never heard of from sources i do not remember. i make impromptu man-dates and abstract essays on serialization and feminine narrative forms. i read other people's journals from 1975. i have one.five roommates and wonder if this night might see the breakdown.

how many pajama bottom afternoons does it take,
how many peeking bedroom mornings,
how many open window nights?

what do you do with a dead girl's mail?

biding my time

i'm not to crazy about this night, this show, this week to come.
i hear the sound of a suture closing, but i'm still scratching,
trying to make the trying less trying.

if there were more time - and less words - pehaps i could better impart how it feels to be sitting backstage tonight with the rattling Caribbean sounds of a hundred steel drums colliding into my own stone wall of apathy. nine years ago i walked away from a career that would have sent me to Japan, to Europe, to Buenos Aires - but it would have been the same theater no matter where i went. i've spent the past two years tying up loose ends and frayed knots...

this particular karma, perhaps, is nearly complete.

bruises

i woke last night from a nightmare, mouth stuck open somewhere between gasp and sob. [she] was in the grips of the Rage and the police were coming. i was in my childhood home, up a dirt road, overlooking the Blue Ridge Mountains in late summer. i did not know if the door would hold (but it did) and by the time the officers arrived [she] was catatonic on a mattress in the floor, still not knowing it was over.

i muttered an explanation across the bed and fell back asleep.

i dreamed a penitent dream of the woman i left for [her]. i was a boarder in her mother's house though her mother was (and is) dead. the occupant of the next room told me the woman i left for [her] still owned the house, and i asked if he could pass along a message.
he told me he would.

i woke hopeful.

returning princess incognito

and so this is how it ends, cowboy boots and denim, blond giving way to auburn. all the walls look like a hotel now; the records are gone. two chihuahuas scampered about where once lived a ghost. i asked questions neither of us could answer, and recognized her by the shape of her knees on the beach.

some things are better left unread

there will be no mention of last night except to say that it involved the reading of Rumi, the bedroom glow of indigo, and the gentle whine of Bessie Smith.

the blues never felt so good.

all i wanted was a kiwi

last night i was reading Tom Wolfe and was struck by a powerful mean urge for kiwi. so i took a final sip of my electric kool-aid and headed to the store. i filled my basket with honeyed lemon yellow pineapple and fresh-picked cadmium strawberries and, of course, my precious DayGlo kiwi cloaked in its deceitful muted chestnut.

i made my way to the register and there was a madman in front of me buying brownies and a case of Bud Light. he was wild-eyed and manic, institution green scrub bottoms with the drawstring red, asking the tall Haitian (black as night bag boy) to help him load up his backpack, tipping in daps and snaps, "take the cans out man, take the cans out man..."

he must have heard me watching because he turned his head, looked down at my basket, and said "i used to eat like that and someday i will again." one more soul searching for satori in the faux-autumn Florida night.

i went home and ate my kiwi and finished devouring the book;
what a trip, man.

if you can't say something nice...

suffice to say that last night's show did not meet my preference. but this is beside the point.

the point it that i woke well-rested to a beautiful sunny day. i slept soundly, and reached only twice for my glasses which weren't there. my beloved spectacles were left in another county yesterday morning during a hasty retreat from Oakland Park. the night before was magnificent, and beautiful boys were chased through the homosexual streets of Wilton with a wire hanger while i searched for the American dream and tried to avoid the bats. if i were to diagram the experiment, it would read like:

capital of Texas + 1 year = ~i~ = Faye = Joan

if i = Johnny = Hunter, solve for i.

and this, too, is a ramification of the manifesto.