"We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are." - Anais Nin

i should wash my face. its been a slow, grimy day. a clock tapping day, a day spent in the surreal motion of underwater. i tripped, my heels caught on a crack in the pavement; my papers burst out of my arms into the wind. they fluttered down and away from me like seagulls flocking to the beach. the day clung like familiar perfume that's name escapes you, the day hung around my head and brushed past my cheek like a lover's second-hand smoke. the day worked its way into every crack of my skin and settled. i wasn't wearing my glasses. i wanted someone to kiss me like i was their dream. tomorrow i'll wake up stale and notice the brown specks in the burbur carpet again. i'll sit with my coffee at a glass top table smeared with weeks' fingerprints and filmed in another night's coat of dust. tomorrow will be cold toast reality. today was smudged and huge and smelled like incense. today i cannot type with lazy fingers. today i am an inky octopus settled on the bottom of a vast and muffled sea.

Posted by: jackman at 00:31 | link | comments (1)

i had this thought once and re-reading these old words i still see the echo in my current life:

 'being pitied alleviates you from responsibility. it easy to shirk blame if you are pathetic enough.'

more than once my glass mind has shattered. how many times? i don't know, in the multiplied infinity of a broken mirror numbers lose their meaning, words become the twisted branches of a forest canopy that lets in only shadow light, voices are sounds without origin.  this is all grey to me now-the worries of another life that lingers like a wallflower beside my own.  i listened to listeners and talked with preachers and confered with sinners and they all told me to put these red eyes in a box. in a box with a lock. and to throw that box over a cliff. i was to visualize this.

stuffing my box was harder than i thought.  the branches were tangled up in vines and roots grew around my feet. feelings ran wild and barefoot. the others told me it couldn't be done.

"we are all you have" they said.  "you can't tear us out from your ears. we are you and you are we. empty, thats what you'll be."

they tried to confound me and tried to sway me with sweet tempations and big rosy lips.  but i stole away at dawn after the fog rolled out, after the voices' nightly chorus, and snuck bits of fuzz and twine and velet curtains into my safe.

one night they started jabbering about so and so and such and such, mean and hurtful things they said.  but i did not understand. i had put those words away already and locked my lockbox.  i read a book instead and learned new words.    

the voices still get roused when the world grows endless and cruel and hungry. they scratch at the insides of my box like criminals buried alive. "escape, escape, escape!" they cry.  "do you remember the days when you were mad and lost your mind to us?"

scratch, scratch, scratch.....

"do you remember how the world fell away and you floated through the haze like a ghost? a ghost without a home. a ghost without a friend. a ghost without a choice." 

"do you remember how it feels to be pitied? do you remember how it feels to be lost to life?"

at these times,  i close my eyes and see beyond all reason through the darkness of my mind. i curl my fingers and breath deeply. i shout back at the voices calling from the dead.  i scream back at the voices clawing out of disembodiment. i call out to God and love and shade trees in summer and down pillows and dreams and manicured fingers. i cry out to all those thing the voices stole away until all i hear is my own quivering voice coming back to me.

 

Posted by: jackman at 01:07 | link | comments (3)

he smelled like bad soap. that was the sensation that flooded me as he forced  his sqaure hips into mine. i strained to catch a glimpse of my snickering sister over his stiff shoulder, only to be foiled by his head which appeared to be coated in a thick oil slick more than anything resemling hair. he winked at me knowingly. i smiled back with my lips closed. letting my teethloose might mean he'd leave the dance floor without a nose. i restrained myself.

pursing my lips to avoid  primal feminine instincts to snap at threatening predators, his pervading scent of perverse cleanliness attacked olfactorally.  i stared at his starchy white suit, unable to wash from my head the image of minature him pinned up to a clothesline by his epualetted shoulderpads.  frsh industrial detergents dripping from his patented shoes as he hung out to dry. i grimaced as his hips crashed into my side. he winked again and grabbed my waist with over-experienced engineer's hands. i wrapped an arm lightly around his shoulder and, hidden behind his eager head,  flicked off my sister with a finger filled with as much repugnance as any finger has ever been filled.

i hate being the thrid wheel-a single girl with an unintentionaly inviting smile a weakness for free cocktails.  is it fair that my little sister, at 22, was married with diamonds to a husband who loves her cats like they were his own spawn and i am stuck dancing to Prince with a Greek cruise ship engineer wreaking of lye? ah, what choice do i have? i am a magnet for vagabond medditeraneans and reformed eastern europeans.

when i studied russian in college, i dreamed of being wisked away by a disenfranchised slavic prince in a horse drawn phaeton to an aristocratic life of bursting caviar on my tongue and swilling chilled vodka in a dacha on the black sea. maybe with palm trees. my girlfriends also imagined a russian mate: a dark and mysterious ex-KGB who would train me in the arts of assasination. we would travel to all the sweaty arm-pits of the world, drinking the local libations, making druken love on jewel-toned pillows before sneaking away to decapitate a dissenting minister with a clean shot to the head. my friend  ended up at the cia, i ended up at an venerated accounting firm.

in school, i was deluded and sympathized with nixon.  people called me Red, insinuating that i was a communist.  i was offended. but they kept on because i am one of those people must perpetualy agiatated so others can have a good laugh . i've surrendered to the fact that i'll live my life with other peoples' fingers stuck in my side.

now i find myself in a sad, nick-nameless no-man's-land, longing for those days when someone would shout "Hey Red!" down the Lawn and instinctually, drone-like, i would turn around and flick them off with a finger filled with as much repugnance as any finger has ever been filled.

i guess some things never change.

Posted by: jackman at 19:40 | link | comments (2)

I cannot speak to your eyes

My voice burns up in their wild blackness

And for an eternal second I am set free

On your breath

As you whisper back to me

All the words of my world

Posted by: jackman at 00:04 | link | comments

i'm feedimg a sense of hopelessness, a preonition that i will always be stuck in this white room. i wish i could think of it as alabaster, but my stifling grey-haired future has wiped that word away. maybe i'm being gloomy and frivolous, but this confluence of conversations and sad movies and self-doubt has scattered the rosy sand of uninterupted bliss in which i try to bury my head. i don't ask a lot of my world- just little cocoons big enough to keep out the chills.

i think too much so i get twisted around like an old cypress tree. how much taller would i be if i just grew straight up?  i'm feeling rooted, a state i try helplessly to avoid. i'm addicted to starting anew- whitewashing my memories and dancing in the rain. i was temped by the idea of being a prostitute once. of course, my imagination does not know pain. i am always disappointed when fanatsy and reality shake  hard  to exist twice simultaneously. if my heart were my friend i would smack her around and tell her to come to her senses. if my head were my friend i would cry for her tell her to read books about love. i'm stuck somewhere between my ears and my shoulerblades, looking out of unfamiliar eyes, constantly surprised by the presence of my nose.

i wish i had more eyes-all the better to see with. my heart beats faster to see into the future, to see into my past, to look around the bend, beyond zippers and buttons, to see that which exists and and that which exists alone. could my chest handle such a burden? there is pain in the world that is born out of not knowing. there is happiness too, out of not knowing and out of knowing. if cypress trees grew straight, and didn't hide bits of wisdom in their skin, would they be such a wonderment? the strength of ages is buried in their deep crust and cries testament  to nature's awesome endurance. it suducing growong up fast and svelt- stretching your head far above your peers and to see over the horizon line. could be lonely too.

i am lonely now, no matter, despite struggling and growing wrinkles and clinging to the ground. it is self-doubt. guts tell me  how, but my will muster the strength to leave my quarentine? to choose not to fight would abrogate all my remaining supprt, it woul be to step into quicksand from the grass.

ah well, at least i feel better talking.

Posted by: jackman at 21:29 | link | comments (1)