celluloid

my morning uniform is a light blue shirt, navy blue slacks, a brown leather belt, pointed toe black leather shoes, a whiff of cologne, hair gel and a smile. a cup of coffee, perhaps. stained socks -generally orange or neon yellow. it is a cavalier decorative. does the deed of officialness, professionalism and gainsay satisfaction. in the financial services and scientific business, alternating in a battery of operations, blood paneling and disease. a day to day, time to time, routine of a city mayhem celluloid.

you used to be a hardware shop keeper. in 50s Chelsea. a romantic notion, in my mind. and Auden was your customer. in your business of light bulbs. what conversations you may have had. what giggles you may have shared. binds me in a jealousy of effervescence, dizziness and sanity. you are 86 and dead. carbonated in an afterlife, perhaps, i have no belief. chosen to remember in a 20's fidelity, curled and boutiqued, laughed and cherished as a dance figurine, mother of three. and tough.

in circumspect

i was listening to Harry Belafonte when i thought of a glass jug. your exposition of "dealing with my mind." screwy, unnatural and confusing. a kiss from 2 weeks. a hug from last night. olive oil and vermicelli. Victo Ngai and flaming whore shows. that was all.

encounters on a street

blaring overhead, a careful uproar through the microphone: an autistic child is missing, fourteen, barely, imagining a face, motioning along the fundus of an aluminum wrapper, cherry picked, usurped and stowed away. in the investigation of possibilities, a chorionic lurk of motherhood displaced in the foliage of gametes, resuscitated to a living, bellowing alarm. help me, anyone, help me. i am trying to imagine the angularity of your shoulders, what you are thinking about at nine twenty-three, do you cry? do you work at a cafeteria or perhaps, a PA? are you an expat and divorced? are you suicidal with pills? drooling in your sleep? exhausted from the hyper-vigilant demands of an autistic child -conceivably broken, perceptually bloodied, agape in yells, screaming and moaning at the cork windows, pierced to your bone in pain, repentance and the sensibility of loss. AIDS killed your second child and your husband at the cost of acute convulsion -rabid diagnosis, terrified and self-provoked, awake since your sixth miscarriage. i picture you olive, with a satin shawl draped across your breast, smudged iris, bleeding lip cage, crystalloid ribs, petite and waxy, in pastel shoes, pacing about on your terrace, hallucinating, LSD'ed and toxic, drumming your uterus, menstruating in barrels of camphor and gauze. i imagine your arms, outstretched and ribboned, tattooed in marvel a Mexican jesus. praying at the bury beds, leaching to the honeycombs of primal recreation, bawling in streams, humming an elegy; rancorous, sublimate and intangible. a pacifism drivel bandaged to your moldy reflection, luminescence in vacuum, shredding and stripping your maniacal gyri, scalding your eyes, tearing your skin, breaking the silence of your hemi-god mythologies, racing and pacing to the shack sliver trilogies, the rail steel and cream. immersing in acid, the analog of shape, coping with a missing child, a conduit, an embarrassment.

walking in Chelsea, you spotted me from a distance. i closed my eyes, wishing you hadn't noticed, turned around, swung my heels, gasped, continued walking. you yelled my name, twelve times. i counted through my ear phones, and ran towards me. leaving your car by the naked streets, crookedly parked, punctuate and polished. the eighth time and ninth, I smiled. ashamedly, nervously, reminiscing a forgotten existence. the frequency of your shriek grew higher and higher, till you were by my side, holding my head, smiling peevishly, expectant. we hugged. small talk fulfilling the emptiness of air, feign convenience and allowances warbling your speech. what do you want? i asked you. i've been depressed, you said. i killed a toad, a few rats and fucked my nephew. you added, it was consensual, and paused. the height of my neo-liberalism and iconoclasm, revering the complexity of self-hegemony, floated to the machinations of dialogue. i asked, did that make you happy? very much, you said. while we fucked, you continued, i thought of a rendering of a dead President. Ulysses S Grant. They smell alike, look alike and think alike. i could tell you were dizzy, exhausted and unhappy. we decided dinner.

flecking the edges of wheatgrass tips, shaking from heroin withdrawals, you continued. the intensity of your personality leaves you unfulfilled, constantly seeking, mistakenly condemned, frivolously laid. i punish myself for everything. accomplished, unaccomplished and coveted. to a point where i'm tied, whipping my chest; that blood feels good. this is a Times reporter, sexualized and caramelized, misled in psychedelics. remembering the recurrence of pity, examination and devastation, you paused. i blame you. all this while, why now? the revolutionaries have rebelled past, rumbled into the milieu of a sexual philosophy. you cannot fondle on the subway, or mate in the pier. the wheeling of your existentialism, the expanse of your fatalism, the fringe of exculpation sabotaged in the un-sustainability of your voracious subsistence. you chose to be alone, to liberate your desire to the gaping boys, to juggle a life of convenience -and now riddled with pills, maniacal and crippled, you shake and shake and explode in a globule of sorrow. and i say to you, a plume puppet, take all the love you have for me, and spread it to your soul. blossoming, healing and tempestuous. a Manhattan fall. smoking leaves. birds fly away.

a thought

my morning thought, however fleeting, brought back a co-incidence, ella, about our sinister brooding. about the philosophy of tickle. the idea of tickling someone to death. you tried that, you said, to your grandmother in Valhalla, when you were twelve years and two months. spiteful, hustled, a Belgrade resident, and in your outer conscience, a well-meaning serendipity. you pinched my inner soul, allegorically, with asymmetry. and massaged my nose. a piece of fuchsia silk, glistening with mildew. dampened with rust, iron coins, crunching and caressing the latency of your marriage. you never cheated. you defied the clause of your oaths. one by one, in the search of fulfillment, complementary to suppression of your mother's religion. i egged you on, to find yourself. to love your flesh. to explore and promulgate a coy clitoris. to sanctify the literacy of your wet vagina. to squeal in pleasure from defiance. an anti-traditionalist, an iconoclast. to define the meaning of your sexual tenderness. i turned you against the hetero-phile; crowning in structure, demanding from you a unitary committee. but i asked you to flee, to dissolve the opacity of your surrounding cage. to be the anarchist. to be the self-exploratory, admonishing critic of everyday bricks, of religion, sex, and structure. you won yourself, you outlived your culture. you cultist pearl, XX cessation-ist, sensationalist of a queer sartorial. my morning thought, however fleeting, brought back a co-incidence, ella. my life is a mystery. even to myself.   

unusual me

i woke up this morning to the sound of a mandolin, trilling away in a lonesome corner, diffuse, suffuse and disquieted. arching my ankle in a perfect bow, tip-toeing, i walked over to the kitchen, a generous towel carelessly creased on the edge of my elbow, to brew coffee. bold. definite. and defiant. accompanying the stimulus, i peered over to a glaze phenomenon. a criticism of words. to read “My penchant for portraying my dreamlike inner life has rendered everything else inconsequential; my life has atrophied terribly, and does not stop atrophying.”Kafka-esque and vernacular, of '16. scribbled in recess, in the harrow of finesse, generated in the rigor, in the peculiar of a confession. unsettled, depressed and desirous. thinking back on the luminosity of thread loops, of an infinite hyperbole of expression, existentialism and mystery. this is the authorship of imagination. the expanse of the red neurotic muttering to herself, humor me in the vessel of stitch impurity. humor my eccentric, a labile discordance, misunderstood, misinterpreted, compared to a compass of the inanimate, a paragon of the absurd, the liberate, the literate, the psychosis familiar, wriggling in the corner of psychiatry. in the expanse of narcotics, and sexual paramour, i want to tempt the leveler of logic. crawling out of a dermal testimony, this is the other me. this is the me that resides in the pocketbook of hermeneutics, in a pursuit of the sexual, in the cage of secrecy, roiling in the theoretic, the macro-centric meaning of madness and whim, the seventh layer of selfhood, the meaning of i, vaporizing, slipping away from the anatomy of time. to want to squeal to my bones, to the charity of souls, to the desirability of infamy, to liberate a flutter, build and rebuild, rise and resume, and tense and haul and pull and strum the ineffectual, the yearn, the narrow covet of a better mind. to stand on my heart and look at the ceiling of the vascular, lyrical in hormones, baffled with bruise, sense of un-belonging silvering the future of life unlived, anachronistic, odd-spectacles looming on my individual. i am the fragmented, the unusual ova, aging behind curtains, self-deluded, crookedly bovine, swallowing a hysteresis of sexual magnets, undulating in oddity, percussing on asphalt the narrative of onyx, etched in banter and mobilized sleaze, rummaging with winds of temperature frills, shattering and scribbling, scraping and building, jarring and shaking, growing and beating, the spectacle of me. the other i. the unusual me.

virgin Amadeus

the name of today's chaos is a shingle Amadeus. baton-esque, improvised, electric and shuttle. to have heard the melody of the singed oracle, clarinets and blood batons, made me think of the Commons. that one afternoon i held your hand, i am a virgin, you screamed. denying the existence of a bovine cosmos, you prayed to the weeds, and chased the swans, in turrets of smoke and bob-lilies, convulsing, as if in a dream, to the dramatics of German overtures. mozart smelled my piss, you said to me. we laughed, half-flirting, semi-aware of the alarm bells. but why Mozart? i asked. of the alcoholic savage and punishment. on the grounds of the arts, you punished yourself, undulating to the tremolos of the wind orchestra, the resonance of the strings, in denial of a modern death of the caricature of melody. footsteps to freedom, your composition of deaths, laminated in nutmeg, profuse in pebbles, we loved the sound of rain, the history of the dulcimer, the theory of minds. whistling a Paganini caprice, you would say, how's that soul? mourning, i would add -for you to depress into a pit of silence, blackness enmeshed in particles of sound, till you slit your mind, broke your dreams, created sex in photographs of iodine and sulfur, rabid, anthropomorphic and agile, and ran away to the ocean. never returned to collect your keys, petunia and my ring.