Hannah’s emotional support lizard is trained to see the signs and the symptoms and knows when to comfort Hannah.
Hannah’s lizard will be able to save her life before any human could or would.
Hannah’s lizard is doing better since he broke his back. He is walking around, loving life. Hannah loves life. She loves life and taking care of her lizards. Mister Chievous is joyful and a wonderful pet to have.
Hannah is still upset with her agent for not allowing her to bring her emotional support pet on set.
She can’t get the scripts she needs for her anxiety because they are not free anymore like the meds were in Georgia.
In Los Angeles, Hannah has to pay for everything.
She doesn’t like her agent telling her, no, she can’t bring her lizard to the sets in the Valley.
(Maybe the fluffer on set balked at the presence of the lizard. A risk of salmonella was possibly cited.)
(A rugby player swallowed a snail on a dare and died 7 years later of cerebral parasites.)
All shooting had to be stopped the day Hannah had to go to the E.R. She broke out with a rash that turned into hives.
Caravaggio was bitten by a lizard.
Hannah does not listen to the comments on the internet. Her stepfather is upset she has now engaged in interracial sex in her videos. This has generated rage on the internet. You have to live a happy life. If you don’t then you are sad and lonely.
Stay positive every day. Stay away from negativity.
Her mom was always a mom who cared for her yung’ones.
Hannah never talks dirty. Do not ask her to talk dirty.
Hannah was always (and still is) the wild child in her family.
Every relationship suffers from ups and downs, has highs and lows. Some days she gets paid what she wants to get paid and some days she feels underpaid at her job.
Money was raised through a social funding site so that Hannah could return home to Georgia. Some fans wanted her to stay in LA and shoot and some fans wanted her to return home to her family.
Hannah added the condition on her GoFundMe campaign that she will return home when she decides to return home.
When she went back home Hannah realized that the minimum hourly wage was $7.25 an hour.
Hannah made a decision. The decision was a hard decision to make but she had to make the decision.
Hannah hates doctors and medicine. Her anxiety medicine, she took that once a day. She would take her meds in the morning and the dosage would help her all throughout the day.
She has anxiety attacks to the point where she can’t control them and she does need something there to help her control her anxiety like she has in the past and now she has found another way which does help her.
Her lizard saves her life.
She can tell you from personal experience that a person cannot save her life. A person would actually panic before calling 911 to help her.
Hannah does smoke weed to also help her with her anxiety. She has a legal prescription.
The car accident was something serious, Hannah really thought she was about to lose her life.
Hannah’s mom actually loved her yung’ones more than she loved herself. She took care of all her yung’ones like she was supposed to and loved all of them.
GOOD NEWS! Hannah has a side project, a new business venture which she can’t really talk about until her website is up and operational but her business involves interior decorating.
Her first project was her room, to make her room more livable. Her second project will be her sister’s house back home.
People treat animal and people differently. If she can’t talk to her agent about this problem then she will talk to her fans about this problem on her 2th YouTube video.
Hannah is upset that other people bring their dogs or cats or any other animals on set.
A dog can bite anyone. A lizard will not bite unless you irritate the lizard to the point when the lizard will bite.
Dogs have mood swings. One minute the dog is happy, jumping around, running around. The next minute, the dog can be mean to people, can bite people, can hurt people.
Hannah turns off Mr. Chiveous’ day lamp at night and turns on his night lamp. He is trained to be in bed by 9pm at night. She turns on the day lamp at 8am in the morning.
Hannah’s lizard knows how to comfort her and keep her anxiety from getting worse.
But her agent told her no, she can’t bring her lizard or her pet, whatsoever, on set or to any shoot, not when she needs her pet or when she knows she will need her lizard.
A colleague of mine, a friend I worked with side by side, a person on my periphery of knowledge, on the periphery of things and people I know in this world, died on Friday the day after Thanksgiving. I didn’t find out until cyber Monday, a night when the Houston Texans beat the Tennessee Titans with a forgettable scoreboard, not that anyone will remember, unless one of the players turns out to be a serial killer or murdered by their mistress.
I was sad for exactly however long the elapsed time for me to get drunk drinking Moscow Mules. Then I lived on drunk existential time until the next morning, tomorrow.
DRUNK EXISTENTIAL TIME: I finally feel good about my second divorce. I feel like I loved fully for the only time in my life. Shelby might feel differently.
Moscow Mule: I bought two tin cups, probably larger than what is served at any bar. The recipe is simple- Vodka (I prefer Tito’s Handmade Vodka) mixed with ginger beer and freshly squeezed lime juice, not that I have any limes handy or any lime juice. I mixed in more vodka than ginger beer.
On cyber Monday I bought a mesh ergonomic chair which I hope will help with my back problems.
My colleague who died is the only person I have ever known who had a subscription to Jet Magazine.
“Well,” my mother says on the phone, “at least we are all still alive.” By the ‘we’ she means all our immediate and distant relations in Puerto Rico, they are all still alive. Her older sister and husband, my aunt and uncle, were considered missing for a day or two after the hurricane struck. Luckily they went and stayed with a cousin who didn’t bother contacting anybody right away. Missing in our family means the missing didn’t contact anybody during the ordeal or immediately after. And that being the case, I go ‘missing’ for months at a time when I am incommunicado from my family while living in Los Angeles. “You‘ve gone missing,” my mother chides and reminds me, “you have to call your mother more often.”
“They have a planta,” my mother speaks presently, “C____ (my cousin) turns the planta on for an hour or two during the day to cook.” My aunt sings much too loud in church. My uncle is 91 years old and in better shape than me. A ‘planta’ is a light plant small engine gas generator which can be bought at Home Depot for around three grand during any other time other than during the aftermath of a hurricane. The generators are being sold around ten grand or more now if you can find any on the entire island.
“Y____ went and picked up S____, you know she doesn’t like to fly. She went and picked her up in Mayaguez and flew with her to Ohio. Your cousin got married in Japan but they are having a second ceremony in Cleveland on Saturday. But we are not going because your father can’t drive because he‘s blind in one eye. Your father is having his monthly eye injection next week and we can’t make the wedding. They are already married. Your cousin speaks fluent Japanese. The wedding is merely ceremonial.” My mother sounds proud that somebody in our family is fluent speaking Japanese but the substantive takeaway information is that her other sister is no longer in Mayaguez, Puerto Rico but was flown out to Ohio. My father lost his eye to diabetes. I am slowly losing my feet to the same disease. My mother can drive but would never dream of driving them both exclusively to Ohio from Knoxville, not now, not at her age, and maybe not even when younger because of gender roles, she is of a different generation after all, and also I don‘t think my father would let her drive that distance without taking over the steering wheel, even if he is blind in one eye and going blind in the other.
My mother tells me how my younger sister is hosting her parents-in-law at her house in Ft. Lauderdale and how they have already enrolled three grandkids, my sister’s nieces and nephews, in the local elementary school. They don’t want the kids to fall behind by missing any time in school or by losing the school year. In Puerto Rico, all the schools are closed. Electricity is spotty. Food is scarce. People are fighting over potable water. Looting is prevalent. Back to normalcy feels years away. Families are hunkered down behind ornate iron works at night and venture out scared to get supplies during the day. Most have decided to shut everything down and close everything up and move and stay with relatives in mainland USA until the crisis is past and over, those with the privilege, the Puerto Rican privilege of citizenship, to have relations and friends in America only a flight away. “Your cousin E____, his wife has that terrible disease. She is running out of pills. Hard to find her medicine at any pharmacy. We may have to mail them the medicine she needs.” I rack my brain. I think she suffers from some type of muscular dystrophy. I would have no idea what her medicine regimen might be but I myself am dependent on insulin and I shudder at the thought of not having access to my insulin.
I wonder how the junkies of San Juan are faring. A song intrudes into my thoughts: “Do you like drugs? Yeah? Me too, me too, me too, me too. Oh.”
“The ocean surged in Ponce and has reached the plaza. The plaza is under water.” My mother drones on the phone. Any town plaza under water means that daily life in that town has definitely been disrupted. “The statue of Diplo in Naguabo was torn down by the winds.” Diplo, from Naguabo, was a famous comedian in the 50’s. He was like the Jerry Lewis of Puerto Rico with his own variety television show. A myth abounds that Diplo died of a heart attack while having sex with a tranny whore. Diplo is not the famous DJ which the kids love nowadays. No relation between names, Diplo, the DJ from Los Angeles, has no idea that Diplo, the Puerto Rican comic, ever existed or that the statue of Diplo blew away during hurricane Maria three weeks ago. “I used to walk to that plaza every day when I was a young girl.” My mother is now referencing the plaza in Naguabo where the statue of Diplo once stood. All the trees of that plaza have been destroyed meaning that daily life in Naguabo has been destroyed. The plazas of the towns and neighborhoods in Puerto Rico regulate culture and daily life on the island and if the plazas are under water or inaccessible because of blighted parks, broken trees not cleared, or corporeal danger at night then daily life has definitely been disrupted and destroyed. More so than the disintegrated roads and the obliterated highways, the shattered bridges, none of the infrastructure which was devastated has been fixed either.
President Trump, the conversation eventually turns to talk about President Trump’s response to the disaster. The conversation is inevitable. Every Puerto Rican family has to talk about how this administration is handling the disaster, how we are being treated as citizens of the United States, if we are being acknowledged as such or forgotten as such, recognized as working citizens contributing to our country. “El Presidente…” my mother refers to Trump as El Presidente, “…. El Presidente said that we should all be glad that we didn’t have hundreds of deaths like during Katrina. But Katrina only glanced Puerto Rico and didn’t hit the island full force like Maria.” I had to backtrack a bit. I forgot that Katrina also ravaged Puerto Rico before she went and drowned New Orleans. I have no idea how many people died on the island at that time because of hurricane Katrina. I can’t remember and have no recollection. I have to remind my mother, “The President is talking about the thousands who died in Louisiana when the hurricane hit the Gulf Coast. Do you remember the dead floating in the flooded streets of New Orleans? All the people stuck and dying in the Superdome?” She doesn’t know what the Superdome is but she remembers the horrible images of that time. She is quiet for a few seconds. “Yes. More people died during hurricane Katrina than now after Maria, the President is correct about that.” She says this like a person resigned to a faraway meaningless fact which has no bearing to the topic of what is happening in Puerto Rico at the moment. Almost as if she is stating, “many people died in Viet-Nam, the President is correct in saying that more people died in Viet-Nam than during hurricane Maria.” The fact means nothing. The fact has no relation to the reality that one of my cousins just had a baby this past summer and that her life is at risk every time she hazards out to find an open store to try and buy overpriced formula.
As always happens when the topic of Trump rears its ugly cobra head, I get tired and all the joy has been sucked out of the conversation. My mother senses this and attempts to steer the talk back to myself and my life. I don’t tell her that I want to spend the rest of the day sleeping in bed. Instead I tell her that I will wash the car and go to the grocery store and buy some jasmine rice and black beans and coconut milk and ginger and a clove of garlic and a chicken breast and make some yellow curry chicken over rice with juicy garlic beans from a recipe. We bond over food and cooking and dieting and health. And after re-establishing our happy bond and the tenuousness of love and affection, we say our goodbyes. But when I try to relax afterwards, I can see in my mind’s eye Trump chucking paper towels at my fellow Puerto Ricans in need like he is shooting t-shirts in Madison Square Garden during one of his political rallies and every one of my nerve endings burns with a tiny pinprick of resentment and I do not believe I will ever overcome my impacted animus for the man.
I guess I better get off this couch and go wash my car. The car will not wash itself and I do not think the world owes me anything no matter who I am. And if you should think of me as selfish and bereft of empathy then I change my plea to guilty.
We all grow nostalgic of a simpler past, of when life was not as complicated. I am a bit nostalgic of my childhood when I didn’t have the pressing concerns and anxieties and responsibilities of adulthood. An angle on this nostalgia is that women sometimes are nostalgic about their virginal past, life before sex complicated living. A good example of this nostalgia is allegorized in the following poem by Kelli Alexander. Enjoy.
THE VERDANT HEART
As I slept
The gentle press of his lips
Upon my forehead
Youthful affections
Unsophisticated, unsullied
The days when we were green
Long before jaded
A precious indiscretion
Locked in the treasure chest
Of my heart
The remembrance of which
Causes an ache
A little pang of loss
Of the long distant smitten
A little twinge of desire
To again be a girl unassuming
Untried, unguarded
To once more garner
The cherished honor
Of virtuous affections
I attended an excellent Tanka workshop with Genie Nakano and I fell in love with the Tanka format. I adore Tankas. My new writing thrill. I am having fun with them. To that end, I asked a few choice friends and poets to send me any Tankas they have to spare.
As introduction, here is a link to a good explanation of Tanka and the different techniques, from the Aha Poetry site:
Since 1970 John Yamrus has published 2 novels and 25 volumes of poetry. He has also had more than 1,800 poems published in print magazines around the world. His work is taught in a number of colleges and universities.
this chair
where i sit
and write my poems
is beat up and scratched,
held together with wire, tape and hope.
you figure it out.
————————————————————-
*Editor’s note
The symbolic art of “less is more” can be a tricky device. To truly achieve this the reader must be primed for the intellectual indulgence. The poem as a whole must be an universal metaphor. The parts which make the whole build understanding, like deciphering the layers of a particular rich but bite sized piece of delicious pastry. Probably the most famous of these types of poems is “The Red Wheelbarrow” by William Carlos Williams. Volumes of analysis have been written on this Imagist little gem, each analysis as germane and valid as the next, but with an overall consensus that the poem delivers a powerful statement on the nature of existence and the human condition.
Likewise, John Yamrus’ poem here, delivers an exclamation mark in clear concise language. The poem begins with a declaration of an object, “this chair.” Now, is the chair the subject, the title? The chair is declared. Then the reader is given the state of the chair and why. Of course, the state of the chair is also the state of the poet. Indeed, the state of all poets. The state of all poets who surrender to the discipline of symbols, objects, and image.
The last line is the wink and a nod. For you, dear readers, you will figure it out.
When I was younger, for a while, for a few years,
all I did was mow our yard. We owned 5 acres.
5 acres which had to be mown. I mowed them,
the 5 acres. But, silly boy, you will say, how lucky
of you to have lived in a house with 5 acres.
Trust me, when you have to mow 5 acres of brush
and rock and ditches with a push mower, you
will wish your yard was smaller.
I once asked my dad, could we PLEASE
get a riding mower. My dad said no.
My father said, you want a riding mower,
you want to sit on a mower
and drive while mowing the yard,
you want to mow like a NASCAR driver,
work for the privilege. Work. Work hard.
So I worked hard. I mowed that yard, hard.
I became my own hard mowing machine.
I pushed that mower and, by the time
I finished one side of the yard, the other side
had already grown out. And I had to start,
to start again, my life was an infinite loop
with no recursion, my summer life,
my autumn life, an endless loop,
:A
goto :A
Fall brought out the colors and the leaves.
I saw none of the beauty. I saw leaves to rake
and a yard to mow. Spring.
Spring bred the lilacs out of the dead ground.
Spring also bred a tan. A glorious,
beautiful tan, and another year when I begged
for a lawn tractor.
Nobody owes you a thing, my father taught me,
And you will learn to protect and maintain
every speck of dirt you can call your own.
You will feel the fear in a handful of dust.
I think I will, I think I shall
write entire verses
of the time I went to Sears
to buy a cheap Craftsman riding mower
and of the time I damaged the blade deck
with the first rock I hit.
Necessity breeds ambition
as well as invention. I became an expert
lawn tractor mechanic. Harsh lessons
needed with the purchase
of my first used car.
Oh my glorious tan, my tanned shoulders,
the lean frame of my body in those days,
my body which wooed the girls
when they would touch my flat stomach
and look up into my eyes at night,
a night following a day
of mowing my yard all day,
every day.
I hear the whiners,
the complainers,
The Kvetchers kvetching
and bitching about whiteness
and how the white man holds them down.
I love being white.
I love being fat.
I have earned that pride
and privilege.
The body is not even cold and the opportunistic, profiteering vultures have swooped in to pick at his corpse. Almost as if this is their mentality: Bowie is dead so now how can I exploit this opportunity for my gain? How can I make Bowie’s death further my social justice agenda? This is their mentality. The social justice warriors with their social justice con artistry, they paint the town dead with nauseous gasses emanating from their open craws, Agent Orange you glad I came along to tell you what to think and how to think and how to grieve. Whom is worthy of mourning? Not White privileged rock stars who may or may not had sex with underage groupies back in the 60’s and 70’s. Not them. Not those white people. And Bowie was so painfully pale to these jackals. He even named one of his personae the Thin White Duke. How dare he?
No. I will not link to the webpage of the ridiculous Social Justice Warrior. I will not give her the added web traffic she craves. I will state that she calls herself “an expert” in her field though she is not even 30, maybe not even 25, and she has not finished her Master’s. Her field is “activism and presentation.” Her big brush with fame was once appearing on the Laura Ingraham Show for a debate “and surviving.” This is a Conservative radio show. Of course, the SJW has a face for radio.
So how does this SJW begin her smear on David Bowie? She begins her rant by talking first about herself: “Every other week, I co-lead an all-gender process and support group.” Oh what a good person. What a righteous gal. She co-leads and supports an all-gender process. If you need a more clear explication of what that means then my guess would be that she has a “gather around the circle” coffee and donuts get together to let people transitioning from one gender to another know how wonderful they are and how they should feel good about themselves. So the fact that she co-leads this group makes her an authority to wax self-righteously on Bowie’s shortcomings as a horrible pedophile and White privileged rapist.
But she doesn’t stop talking about herself at this point. In fact, she never stops talking about herself throughout her entire rant. “… yesterday is also when I found out about the rape allegations against him, that were cleared by a jury, but I also know that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen, and the facts of his statutory rape of a 14/15-year-old. And so my feed has also been ripe with explosive anger as well as nuanced discomfort, frustration, and exhaustion.”
So in her worldwide-gathered expertise, she knows better than a jury and is all so willing to believe the allegations of a washed up Hollywood 70’s groupie now in her mid-50’s whom, to hear the tell all, lost her virginity to Bowie at age 14, was more promiscuous than Sweet Connie, better looking than Pamela Des Barre, sultrier than Michele Overman. The groupie even has pictures of herself with Jimmy Page to prove her allegations. (Wait, is that the same outfit and even the same angle of the pic of Page with Des Barre?) I saw the documentary “Let’s Spend the Night Together” on VH-1 (since they have the documentary on constant repeat.) This underage groupie was never mentioned once. But never mind ALL THAT. The important part of the rant is the tone and attitude that Bowie has already been convicted as a child rapist in this “expert’s” fantastical mind and her “feed”- let me repeat- her “feed” not “her“- has been “ripe” with “explosive anger, nuanced discomfort, frustration, and exhaustion.” Yes, this SJW is exhausted from thinking about all those underage groupies who flung themselves at Bowie and Jagger and Page and were found naked and waiting in their beds possibly already spread-legged and wet. The SJW is totally exhausted thinking about this. Picturing underage girls all naked and fucking rock stars, this exhausts her, these thoughts, so she has to write about it and tell us how exhausted she feels.
“So what am I, a gender/queer Latinx, supposed to feel and do about this cultural icon?” ANSWER: Stick the allegations up your ass. Have you ever heard of due process? Even the dead are innocent until proven guilty. Whatever can be conjured up in your deluded mind without evidence can be equally dismissed prima facie without evidence.
Latinx? Where have I heard this term before? Oh from our illustrious and fully venerated Los Angeles Poet Laureate, Luis J. Rodriguez: “I am using the term Latinx to cover both male and female genders (Latinos and Latinas), but also the shifting non-binary transgender, transsexual, and other manifestations of our human existence. Unfortunately, a significant section of our society is still kicking and screaming to understand how fluid and marvelous our full humanity really is. Latinx are no exception. I personally don’t use terms like “Hispanic” and rarely Latino. They only describe the colonial/conquests aspects of history. Since the 60s, I’ve called myself Xicano, U.S. born, politically active and arts engaged, whose parents were born and raised in Mexico. But this term doesn’t resonate with many of my own background. As for native tribes, I’m Mexika/Raramuri (my father born in a traditionally Nahuatl-speaking area of Guerrero, and my mother from the Raramuri-area of Chihuahua). But, of course, I also have Spanish and whatever African my Guerrero roots draw from (many African slaves were brought into the state; Guerrero was named after the first African-descended president, in 1829, of Mexico). If this sounds complicated, it is. Latinx cannot be boxed into any old demographic.”
How
Very
Fucking
Special.
Latinx. “… I’m no homogenized, non-historical, non-political or non-cultural person. I’m actively involved in environmental justice, social justice, economic justice, and peace in the world as well as home.”
Fuck me. Bad writers of the world unite! Forget literary quality, fuck that noise! Let all our mindless diarrhea prove how non-homogenized, non-historical, and non-cultural we are not! Look at all my activities! This proves how great a writer I am and, by extension, a great person!
As a bad writer myself and a Latin-o, I am so inspired I think I will write a poem:
How can a very special snowflake
break away from all other special snowflakes
and prove that this special snowflake
is more special
than any other special snowflake?
Oh I know. Latinx.
Now if only I could figure out
how I can prove that this Latinx
is more special
than all other Latinxers?
Oh I know. Fuck Bowie.
To quote Bowie right back them: “Is it any wonder I reject you first?”
Ok. I’m done. The rest of the rant is not even worth mentioning. The SJW thinks that by stoking controversy she will create discussion on her pet social justice projects. Throughout her rant she sprinkles key terms which mean nothing such as “intersectionality” and “in this space” and “White supremacy.” She thinks these terms, which she learned at Brown University diversity courses, have any link to Bowie’s death. This quote made laugh: “Are we critiquing how, due to ignorance and White supremacy, many mourn the loss of a White star and ignore the losses of countless people of color at the hands of police brutality?” Key words. Key words clanging written only to bring the mindless Pavlovian social justice dogs a-salivating.
What the fuck does police brutality have to do with the fact that Bowie died of liver cancer is fuck all to me. Makes no sense. This is the social justice scam, the con game, say and do anything to bring attention to yourself and your self-righteous agenda, all in the name of money. Yes, money. Did I tell you this person has a press and media page? To wit: “Have an inquiry, want to do an interview, and/or need someone with expertise? Contact me!” Some of the topics this person is an expert on is “polyamory, kink and BDSM, use of technology and social media for activism,” (watch out! She might hash tag the internet outrage robot army and send them out after you!) and, last but not least, “sexual pleasure.” I shit you not. Sexual pleasure. She will speak on sexual pleasure for a fee. Chew on that vomit you just regurgitated up for a moment.
Meanwhile, Bowie is dead and we are sadder by the day. The Social Justice Warriors dance in glee all around his coffin. They dance in glee in the name of their social justice agendas and they fuck up everything they touch. They touch something and it goes to fuck. They just love putting their finger of fuck on anything and everything. They don’t give a fuck. They see people enjoying something good and pure and they have to put their finger of fuck-this on it. They have to ruin everything for everybody. This is the only way they know how to be heard, fucking things up, so they will try, as hard as they might, to fuck everything up. Don’t let them fuck up your grief at Bowie’s passing. Don’t let them fuck with your memories and your love for the music that David Bowie left behind. Don’t let them fuck up Bowie’s legacy.
The cover for today is the band Passenger doing a cover of David Bowie’s first hit song, “Space Oddity.” Enjoy and remember.
Drama in the church parking lot, one man woke another sleeping in a car, and then they got into an argument. You’d think the man sleeping in the car would be a kid or a teenager but this was a grown man, balding, sweating,
arguing with an elderly man, his father, yes, his father woke him up from a deep sleep inside a black Lincoln Town Car large enough to be a limousine. The limousine was parked next to a double deck motor coach which never moves, a fixture in the church parking lot.
Sorry, not a limousine, the Town Car always parks right next to the elongated bus, in the shadow of the bus, to take advantage of the shadow cast by the tall bus. Almost everyone else parks out front. The vast parking lot is perfect for practice and skateboarding.
The old man throws up his hands and walks away but now two women get a hold of the man, by both arms, the two women on either side of the man lead him away by the arms towards the middle of the otherwise empty parking lot.
His sister, yes, his sister wears a big black angular hat on the side of her head, like a flying saucer landed on the side of her head. The hat has attached a small white mesh veil about the size of a lunch pail napkin, waves slightly in the breeze,
and because of the angle of the hat, waves about a half inch above her forehead, in the breeze. The hat also has what looks like green grapes attached to the crown, and ivy, and a band like a roller coaster circumvents the hat.
She pulls the man towards one side of the parking lot, “what’s wrong, Howard?” She pulls. “Why won’t you tell us what’s wrong?” Howard’s mom, yes, his mother tugs Howard the other way, “You shouldn’t talk to your father that way,
Howie, your father only wants what’s best for you.” Howie stumbles along between them, stammering, stuttering, “Mother! I was having a nervous breakdown inside the car, Mother! But I was having a nervous breakdown in my dream! In my dream,
I completely broke down and I was crying. The whole thing is very nerve wracking!” “In your dream?” The mother scoffs, “well, I’ve never!” Howie stops and points directly at her double row of pearls, “No Mother, you’ve never! And you know why?
Because you are a Jew and a jewel. You’ve always had good work as a jeweler!” Extra disdain in his voice, his mother’s panty hose seem to wrinkle up more at the ankles. I peek to confirm we were indeed all standing at the First United Methodist Church of North Hollywood
in the parking lot off Tujunga. Howard crying, he sobs with his face in his hands. His sister holds on to her hat with her free hand and leans on him. “That’s ridiculous, Howard, you can’t physically have a nervous breakdown while sleeping.”
Howard drops his arms and screams towards the sky, “I’m fully awake now!” Awake and hiding, I climbed inside the cubby space of their lime green vintage ‘76 Volkswagen, I offer no explanation.
Well, okay, Ben and Emanuel are gay. Gay and live in the condominium right next to mine and are always making my life a living hell. They complain about everything. I need to water my plants on the balcony because they wither
and look brown, an eyesore. Move the grill to the other side of the patio, they are vegan, and the smell of meat is nauseating. Their latest grouse is the oil stain on our shared driveway. They told our HOA that I need to clean out the hoarded junk in my garage
because my car leaks and the oil has created a huge stain on my side of the driveway, an eyesore, and in any case, they are certain I am the one feeding the stray cats. I am now stuck with the cost of resurfacing over the stain and I am pissed off so
where do they go every night? I know they do something nefarious every night. Gay bars or sucking dicks somewhere, faggots piss me off so much, I can’t sleep at night thinking about them and their petty complaints. Two buck fifty per square foot, the resurfacing,
so tonight when I saw they left their car door open, while both went briefly back inside their condo, I climbed into the back of their oh-so-cute vintage lime green piece of shit VW Beetle and hid under a blanket. One of them, Ben I believe, bitches with a lisp
about kids and an ex-wife. I didn’t know he’d been married. And Emanuel encourages Ben to reread some passage in the Bible. Their conversation is very strange and almost normal. We bump over some train tracks, probably the orange line on Chandler, and I
scrunch myself smaller under the blanket and begin wondering what the hell was I thinking? What if I get caught? These impulses I get. Once I broke back into a mall and urinated into a fountain after hours because a security guard gave me grief about taking quarters
to play arcade games, “hey, those are people’s wishes,” the guard said and chased me and I hid between some cars in the parking lot and the guard stood at the entrance of J.C. Penney’s and yelled out to nobody, “if I see you inside the mall again I will handcuff you,”
he yelled and rattled the cuffs on his belt, “don’t you walk in here again, don’t you dare walk back into the James Cash Penney store,” he pronounced each word, “James,” “Cash,” and “Penney” and that was how I found out what the J.C. in J.C. Penney meant.
These two dickheads will certainly arrest me. I might lose my job if I get caught, fucking morals clause. I make up my mind to try to slip out quietly first opportunity I get and find my way back home no matter where I end up in the city. They parallel park
and the driver slams his door. The car sits idling. I can hear the other one texting in the driver’s seat. He makes a call, “I saw you on Grindr.” Pause. “Bi-curious my ass. That one is about as gay as Stephen Fry and probably smells like he looks.” Pause.
“Don’t get involved, he works six floors below me in the commissary, I think.” Pause. “In H.R.? Really? Even worse. I’m telling you, I saw your sexy little avatar moving around on Grindr.” Pause. “Nope. Just doing the daily run with the kids. In fact,
here he comes, I gotta go.” The road is bumpy, we pass over the train tracks again. Ben lisps something about carpet runners, fussy, and something about a heavy marble table. Emanuel wants to eat somewhere, oysters, “the white solé fillet plate
at the Oyster House Saloon sounds good, no?” He pronounces solé like Cirque Du Soleil. He rhymes solé and fillet. “With their house Sauvignon, no?” Ben calls Emanuel a gourmand, a “goor mantht,” lisping out the “ntht.” Somebody’s phone rings,
nobody answers, somebody swipes off the ringing phone and then silence, chilled silence. Second stop, car idles again, the passenger click-clacks on his phone. What feels like a ton of kids pile into the backseat but I know, from eavesdropping, only three kids. They throw
inflatable and foamy things on top of me or, rather, on top of my cowering blanket. I smell chlorine. “Did Nana let you swim?” The kids squeal “yes, she did.” The older kid, a boy, offers up this gem, “Pop-up shit his diaper and shit squirted all out the side of his wheelchair.”
“Really stinky in the kitchen when we tried to eat fish sticks, so we got to eat in the TV room,” says the girl. “We could still smell Pop-up when we tried to watch Sam and Cat!” added the boy. The kids laugh. “Really stinky” says the girl. “That’s cool,”
said Ben, “Did Lydia talk?” “Lydia doesn’t talk” one said with an echo after the other and the girl repeats softly, “Lydia never talks.” I can smell the faint odor of shit under the chlorine. “Lydia, did you smell Pop-up’s shit?” asks Ben with a chuckle and
this made Emanuel say, “stop it.” One of the kids or all of them kick around, the backseat shakes, I have to readjust myself and the blanket slips down a bit, my hair exposed. “Is mom at the gym?” asks the girl. “Yes, I’m dropping you off at the gym.”
“I hate the gym, we have to wait in the lobby and the magazines suck.” The kids kick around and were jumping or something. “The gym sucks ass.” Ben laughs but chides them, “Language! People! I just heard you guys say shit and ass, what’s going on?!”
I felt a small hand grabbing at my hair, feeling my hair. “You just said shit, you said shit!” said one and the other chimes in, “Yeah, you said shit. You said shit just now and ass!” The little hand is now pulling at my hair, smacking me on top of the head.
“Don’t get them worked up,” says Emanuel, “we still need to drop them off.” “Fuck her,” lisps Ben over his kids‘ increasing volume, “Let them get worked up. Hilarious. Serves her right.” In his excitement or residual anger, Ben “thts” his “esses.”
“Drama in the parking lot. Avoid at all costs.” Emanuel sounds like a lawyer with his sensible counsel. I am convinced I will be going to jail. My head is being pummeled by what feels like a foam pool noodle. The kids are shrill, screeching, jumping, they
ricochet all over the back seat. The bug swerves. I bury myself under the moving bedlam, close my eyes, forget myself, forget my sins. My prate is over. I am spent. I’ve been disavowed of all rectitude of judgment. I’ve ruminated on the Pater Noster and prayed
for the Noblesse Oblige. I see the young dissidents laughing. They pass each other on their skateboards, high-five in greeting and oblivious, prodomal to the vacuities of life. Some will become homeless, live out of backpacks and sleeping bags, cluster and
obstruct handicap access ramps, panhandling. Some will turn into rent boys and work out of a proscribed hierarchy: Top boys to jockeys to bottom dwellers to diseased junkies. And still others will move beyond the gestalt, survive being Monday’s child,
graduate into the parallax, afford to pay the mill rate. Their Selfies and Instagrams are modern digital carte-de-visite with perfect smiles. Their shame unknown with no endless pain. Their cabinets varnished and protected. I see them now in slow motion as they seek their place,
traversing asphalt and the painted lines on parking lots. I consider them by most accounts. I take advise. I speak my mind. I feel the slaughter and the consumption and all I ask of the weaving spiders is that they don’t scratch my Town Car nor follow me to my fallout shelter.
Tuesday, dark before dawn, September,
Rachel left her essence on my bed. Shoes,
my shoe size has not changed, St. Agnes.
This morning I sat on the side of my bed
scratching my Tycho Brahe nose, sniffling
and shaking after sex, white powder, snake
demon, my body stuffed with newspapers.
This particular morning fetes coffee,
my first sounds pentagraph, phlegm
and phlegmon exposed en plein air,
all primrose & purl before my drive to work.
OPERA
The bull-baiters sat or stood in their spaces,
reading magazines, water cooler, copier,
fax machines. The AM news crew, West Coast,
interlocutors of bad weather & slow traffic,
Bocca Baciata, await further banalities.
Some bull-dogs boarded their flights in Boston.
Boston likewise harnessed some of the others.
A third pack snapped at their leashes dully
at Dulles, vellicating, the final dog pack on
their haunches in Newark, pari passu.
Pis, the Manneken Pis today wore a taqiyah,
was attired in a kufi blowing in the breeze.
The bull-dogs wore light sweaters draped
over ironed button-up shirts, pastel colors.
Who would suspect atavism from cretins
wearing light pink over baby blue? Who?
When the images began to filter in
they were inaccrochable.
I can’t hang these monitors up on my wall!
Look at what they show: A baize rip
in the fabric of time and space. The façade
of a horrified opera frozen in a rictus
of heads and faces. Melpomene.
TENET
Actuality film: 9/11.
The first plane fumes inside.
The din of the newsroom, telephones.
The assignment desk calling everyone.
Gary Oldman. Bring me everyone.
Crack your neck. What do you mean everyone? I MEAN EVERYONE!
All telephone lines ringing.
DVCPRO tapes flying across the room,
no time to hand off tapes civilly,
no courtesy. Curses and fuck yous
and do your damn job for once, asshole,
editors actually getting out of their edit bays
and picking up their tapes in shock, disbelief. What is going on? Two PAs assigned only
to label tapes correctly, to write timecode
on the labels. Telephone keeps ringing.
When the second plane struck, the explosion
roared in the middle of our newsroom.
My vision became hieratic.
I could not comprehend what I was seeing,
hieroglyphics.
I had a sinking feeling I wanted to be doing
anything else, be anywhere else,
Eisteddfod. The Buttermilks.
My job, watching the news wires, I saw
everything, every angle,
the airplane flying over the firefighters,
the direct hit, the camera panning
then running, Moloch.
Averroes, I have read, was banished
and all his books burnt. His rationality
was condemned by the Fuqaha of his time.
Fuqaha. Fuck you. Fuqaha. Fakir. Faker.
Actuality film: 9/11.
The Twin Towers fell in silence.
The first one fell. My nose bled.
I had to staunch the flow at my work station.
I used my shirt, I didn’t care. Epistaxis.
The second tower fell. I’d shut down
my ears by then, worked by rote.
The phone lines died down.
An eerie quiet, a shroud, covered us
like ash, the drifting ash
emanating from the monitors.
A swordsman swinging wildly,
whistling air and snow blind,
palliated and forced to listen
to the distant random thuds
of landing bodies, his comrades.
Fade to black: Calumet Farms.
AREPO
One camera fixed on a gaping hole,
deep smoldering embers, fire eyes.
Thirty-six months or more, fixed lens,
a chasmal gorge, engorged catastrophe,
the Ground Zero update became staple
at the bottom of the first block, 11:08 pm
approximate. By that time of night,
lights and smoke, lights on smoke,
a spotlight on an accidental crossbeam cross
delineating new battle lines, the crescent
and star against the cross, jamais vu.
I reinforced my lack of belief in God.
A Mosque proposed at 51 Park Place,
never finished. A war, invasions,
shoe bombers, fuses in underwear,
full body scanners in all airports,
Guantanamo, Afghanistan, cartoons
of the prophet, piss be upon him,
the rising death toll, never finished.
The World Trade Center memorial & museum
finished on that same Arab Spring.
SATOR
Pis, the Manneken Pis in Brussels
dressed like a sailor, I check the statue
online at least once a week. I wonder
if this means some seafaring calamity.
I shave and I look in the mirror and I
shake with some kind of Capgras delusion.
My peripherals are all water blurred,
I perceive cascades sliding down my walls.
I walk on tenterhooks floating, syncope
barely held at bay. I’m dying. I’m dying
and I’m blasé. Rachel, she married
and moved away. I’m too old now
for palimpsest, too fat to be a man
of active virtue.
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