facsimile

Listen: My Funny Valentine
Chet Baker

the indefinable words that make their marks on my skin

I cannot decipher the language but I have a feeling that they are important

just when I think I got it

It’s gone again.

everything that I imagined is nowhere to be found

I inch my way through crowds with a lovely tune playing from the speakers

I bathe my face in the intensely bright light that shines from each side of the bar

I hold myself up with the curving stone walls leading deeper and deeper into anonymous ruins.

I search these faces that pass me

I need some answers and I feel that they have them

I crave definition and I think the random eyes that crawl up and down

my outfit

shoes

hair

my skirt,

know more than I do.

I just want someone to know these things as I do

someone who’ll come to me with answers

or

an acceptable facsimile of

I think what I want is someone to take my frail hand in theirs

hold it tight and gentle

bring me close and just know

and I will know

and they won’t tell me that they do

but I will hear it

 (Read: Buddy Wakefield Live for Living)

Ambition

Is ambition blind?

I feel I’m the blind one when it comes to the elusive thing. I am surrounded by movers and shakers, performers, thinkers, those proud folks that make things happen. It makes me want to find the origin of this thing.Was I ever ambitious? No, I don’t think I was; in fact I believe I’ve spent most of my life running away from it, uncomfortable with the fact that if I’m succeeding than there is a person out there that has been passed over.

That’s when I was younger when all I had to do was wake up and find the new poem festering in my heart or maybe where my next meal was coming from. A time when I felt that there was enough for everybody out there so why the fight? It’s very different today. It feels that I have more at stake these days, more that’s passing me by. So little time so much beauty and pain to endure and experience. Time runs out. Used to be I was the one running things, or so I thought. The folly of youth, the innocence of magical thinking. What now? I’m in this place now where I’ve studied this craft and it just so happens that it is a career that is one of the most competitive.  How did that happen? How did that happen? I guess I must have lost my grip on my tightly prepared plans for the future. They have unraveled. They lay at my feet at the bottom the be. I spent years kicking at it and trying to gather it up at the same time. I was embarrassed of it and the time I spent away from it. I was embarrassed that I made them at all. Now what? I dunno. Break out the booze and let’s have a ball?

evidence

Evidence

Flipping through photographs,  I catch the past

I am enveloped by it

I have bathed in it from time to time in a morbid sense of regret

but 

not like this.

I am joy,

I am nostalgia,

I am memory.

Reminded of weddings  birthdays, vacations, day trips, moving days, performances 
holding tight intense embraces reserved for a rare few 

him, you, us

things I've forgotten then remembered again and again like a goldfish it is  a new scene every time.

I smile, I close my eyes

then like a brick wall I run head first into... 
the smile that I see in all of us, it is part child and part worn out mother of five.

I knew it was coming, it was all a build up to that moment of discovery

It almost always is. 

Flashing through pictures of

her children

me

them

the stages of our lives

her grandchildren

her sisters, brothers

her friends 
in two minutes, faded evidence of a life lived well

and

short

and

hard 
with joy.

Why I Walk Around Listening To Patti Smith In The Loop

(Listen: Patti Smith Gloria)

Why I walk around listening to Patti Smith in the loop.

Today, walking around downtown Chicago, I'm surrounded by cement reminders of my size in the universe.

I am a small, broke woman wandering around meccas of consumerism allowing small pleasures to permeate my experience.

Going to a job I consider a job although I don't get paid; I am satisfied fetching coffee and organizing snack pack treats knowing that the three minutes that I spend dabbling in something that I enjoy makes it worth it. 
Okay, so here I am fishing in my pocket for headphones, I'm walking to the high end Chinese restaurant to pick up some high end lunch for the high end office that doesn't pay me. 

I nestle the earbuds into place, turn my branded music device to ROCK and I follow form. I walk around and past the normal people just barely fitting in but inside my head I am on stage at CBGB's gripping the microphone in my sweaty hands and screaming melodically.

I  bring the audience to it's knees.
I am the goddess of rock.
I am laying it down.
I'm gripping the mike as if I let go at that moment I would fall into something I could never find my way out of. 
I am swaying.
I am swinging my head back and forth, pointing at you and you and you there in the dark when I say "jesus died for somebody's sins..." then curl the smoky punch line around my smiling curling lips until you feel it to your core.
I am spelling rock out in six letters G-L-O-R-I-A!
Girls want me.

Boys want me. 
I want to fuck the audience.
I am a sultry awkward rock maven with an odd but fierce voice and painfully sweet lyrics.

I am this for 5 minutes and 56 seconds and the people passing me are unaware save for the occasional head bop on cue or finger drum on my right leg; a phantom guitar riff that only I can hear.

I feel a bead of sweat form inside the inside of my thigh and I know that it will end soon, I have 30 seconds to bring it on home and there I stand at the entrance of the high end Chinese restaurant. 
I push the revolving door like a heavy piece of playground equipment.
I have to make the decision to crescendo and collapse at the end of the stage or walk briskly up to the carryout counter and give the name for the order for Sweet and Sour chicken with brown rice and sauce on the side.

It is then that the question enters my mind: what would Patti Smith do? 

Would she continue to the end of the song or drag the earphones off and pay for the order?
I know the answer and I keep it runnin'.

mum's the word

Currently listening:

Finally We Are No One

By Mum

Release date: 28 May, 2002

           

mum's the word

The plain truth and the only thing you can count on is that there are absolutely no guarantees.

The only thing you can do is make sure that the people in your life know how much you appreciate and love them.

This is not a hoax!
It really is that simple.

When they die you will have to live with the fact that you were able to show them gratitude and you made the conscious decision not to.
Or the mundane everydays just piled upon each other and there was no other time to spare to call them and thank them for the fifty dollars they sent you for your birthday in September and it is now November.
Hearts are broken.
People are taken away, it is a fact, but if you did all that you could then you can rest easy.
The question is, did you do?

I did not

friday

Currently listening:

The Virginian

By Neko Case & Her Boyfriends

           

friday

all at once you can see what makes up the universe that surrounds you. beauty, art, sadness, love, pain, regret. like a thin, soft sheet it lies between you and reality and it sings so loudly that it drowns out what is really going on around you.

words.

it's words and letters strung along slightly and slowly

someday the words are an albatross, communication the bastard child of reason.
i'd like to be so many things to so many people.

i don't know how to access myself and i know that this is the first step to oblivion but it doesn't seem to phase me, not one little bit. i continue, i perservere and i continue to survive,

the question that i ask myself from time to time and more recently on the train from school to work is, what would i do if i found out that i had a life threatening illness, what would i do the day after?the week after?

i never have an answer, i am paralyzed by the choices.

i guess i would want to feel arms around me and warmth.  i would lament that the only person that i could find comfort in is gone now, i would become briefly resolved with the fact that i have to create the relationships that bring me comfort these days. that resolve would be brief however.
then,  i don't know what i would do.

i suppose this makes me an uninspired.

sunday again

Currently listening:

You Are Free

By Cat Power

Release date: 18 February, 2003

11:09 PM

Monday, February 05, 2007

sunday again

It has come to my attention recently that home is not a place but an experience. Home can be in a house but most likely is a place that is inside of you. I feel I have been searching for it outside and in towns I've never been to, cities that I've lived in before, places that I have visited and long for merely because it isn't the place that I'm living right now.

I used to say that home was where my mom lived, with that not being a reasonable statement these days, I am forced to face other truths about the idea of home. And to be perfectly honest, if I wasn't in the third hour of procrastinating about writing a 3- page- double- spaced- paper on my most memorable experience viewing a work of art, I would not be visiting this dialogue on "HOME".

Memorable art. How do you pick one? That's like being asked what's your favorite movie. How does one answer that and why should it be asked? As if the right answer will get you a reward and the wrong answer will exile you. Of course, if you ever find yourself in filmschool be prepared at every turn, every new class, every introductory "will you work on my movie for free" meeting to be asked what your favorite movie is.

It's such a quick and dirty way of feeling like you know something about someone. I get asked that question in bars, hell, I ask that question in bars; sadly I never get rewarded with the type of prizes one finds in the eyes of interestingly attractive men in bars. Oh, well, I'm young-ish and have many years ahead of me of drinking in bars alone trying to connect with a stranger and have time to come up with the right answer.

What a relief.