The Crowd

I have had an unusually large amount of red wine this week, and I feel somewhat light...

"'The apparition of these faces in the crowd; petals on a wet black bough.'
Ezra Pound found the formula,
The houses are rectangular,
But life is curved, not angular.
So when things start to strangle you,
Remember:
Rain still falls on the halls of power.
New babies being born every hour.
And the eagle keeps watch on the old clock tower
Over me...

Lord, unchain my hands.
Let me sing inside the crowded trams.
Let me dance among the traffic jams.
We're gonna sleep on the St. Kilda sands.

Lord, unbind my feet.
Let me mingle with the good people we meet.
Water rising up into the street.
Unbind my feet..."


Keepin' it real...

Deeeeeep breaths

The past two and a half months have been mountainous, ups and downs, crevices and chasms, my brain and heart and desires have been opening up and vehemently snapping shut, flying and falling in quick succession. I haven't been able to make sense of any of it.

I'm trying to find a space in my head where I can calm down and consider everything that's happened. There has been pain--so much pain that I haven't figured out what to do with it. I haven't had time to DO anything with it, and the time I have had, I've been so exhausted that I haven't even tried. There's been elation and possibility and hands stretched out to help me up, but the pain bites at my heels so steadily that the elation quickly transforms itself into fear--the synapses get confused and the signals get crossed until all I can feel is stress bearing down. I think I need to clear out some space for myself, just a big expanse in my head, or on the floor at home, to spread it all out like so many magazines and slowly, carefully, quietly, organize and redistribute my impulses until there is a structure to the madness around me. Or at least some kind of integration of it into my self, not my heart or my head alone. I need silence, candle light, solitude.

I don't know how to get that.

Nervous laughter. Nervous laughter. Keep talking to fill the electrified space there over the coffee table, shove words into it and through it to put something up as a shield from that face. These sounds are all apologies for something I have not done, and they are slamming into you, falling back helpless, just piling up at your feet like so many wasted minutes I've spent wondering. All to just teeter on the top of the carcasses of syllables on tip-toe, waving and yelling only slip on the glassy surface of your eyes and tumble back down to where I am, here, yards away, just laughing and chattering and picking at my cuticles. Nervous twitches. Nervous glances. Not a thing.

A Bad Poem About Nothing Much

As March dragged itself along on its sodden belly,
The pricks and pains were first brushed off as weakness,
The psychosomatic results of imagined trauma. Grit your teeth and bear it. It could be much worse.
Rain pounded at the earth, though,
And in the chill weather the mud mixed itself into cement to suction at the wrists.

Aches set in; the pangs of previously ignored injuries returned;
Diseases revealed themselves and with them the anxieties they'd been guarding,
Like dragons with heaps of treasure usually enfolded and protected in leathery wings
But now sparkling clear in the light of the spring sun, covered in mud.

And yet we kept on, the sucking noises turning our stomachs at each forward movement, Crawling through the muck just to get to April.
The creeping pain was increasing, though, and looking down,
There it was, the razor wire hidden in the puddles.
We'd been eviscerating ourselves all along;
the stress and muffled joint pain had been only warning signs of bleeding out.
Now we look back, and there are our guts all spread out behind us like bloody slug trails.
How unappealing.

But here we are at April, and the nadir of mud-puddle infections is behind us,
Somewhere in our small intestines.
We're free now.
No organs to weigh us down and just that spring sunlight to fill us up.
We may not be better or faster or stronger or tougher,
But at least it's warmer now.

Manual Moping: typing up my turpitude

The crush of it all,
the never-ending list of things I must do,
it can't be that bad, really.
I sit all twined up around myself on the subway,
trying to become a singularity but less significant,
just a glob of aching joints that others cannot scrutinize.
But I do not want to blend in.
I can't, anyway, my skin is too shocking, my hair is not dyed that color.
I am out of place.
The stares press into me while I mumble to myself,
repeating the litany of my anxieties, my daily tasks,
so I can forget the gnawing that grief has been doing around my orifices.
I think it's hoping that if it chews away at my ear holes enough,
meanwhile liquifying my insides--grief is an arachnid,
I hope you realize, silently trapping its prey
and holding it motionless for fear of moving forward,
being caught again--while the pressure of stares and tasks and stagnation
continues to mount,
eventually my brains will come squirting out of my ears, nose, mouth.
All over the sleeping man across from me,
if someone gets on at the next stop who looks like her
and catches me unawares.

I am not an artist, it seems,
just a story teller.
There is a difference.

Reaching the End of My Last Nerve: or, child sacrifice at work

From a conversation I had earlier this morning, at work:

*phone rings*
Me: Good morning, ____ Gallery.
*ambient noise on the other end of the line, no voice*
Me: Hello? ...Hello?
Guy: *after more silence* ...Oh, hi.
Me: Can you hear me?
Guy: Yes...
Me: Hello...
Guy: Who is this?
Me: This is Lynsey at the ____ Gallery.
Guy: Oh.
Me: ...can I help you?
Guy: Well somebody called me from there.
Me: Ok, there are about 25 people at this office. Do you have any idea who it might have been?
Guy: Oh!
*silence*
Guy: It might have been M____.
Me: Well, she works at our other location. But I can put your call through from here.
Guy: Ok.
Me: ...can I tell her who's calling?
Guy: Oh, yeah, it's P____.

...now. Who in the HELL calls someone without: A) being prepared for someone to pick up and say hello on the other end, B) considering who it is that they're calling, or C) being prepared to identify him or herself? Obviously this guy, but really, what KIND of person does this?

Am I supposed to telepathically know who you are, what you want, and who you need to talk to? If so, that would be bad for you, because by virtue of knowing telepathically what a douchebag you are, I would also (in my version of an X-Men mutant power world) be able to telekinetically strangle you, thus saving the gene pool from another line of morons.

Yesterday I got so annoyed with the borderline handicapped people calling me every thirty seconds that once as I was picking up the phone, I had to take a moment to remember how to answer, because I almost said: "I will sacrifice your children to my dark god" in a spooky goth voice instead of saying: "Good afternoon, ____ Gallery."

This isn't good. I can't keep up the happy smiley voice much longer.

From round and about

Interesting New York moments of note from the past few weeks:

-In a deli on 137th Street, as I was waiting to pay for my coffee and unhealthy snack, a woman entered and stood directly behind me, not exactly in line but not doing anything else, either. She started singing. Maybe to herself, but her voice was so highly trained and operatic that she was loud enough for everyone to hear. She sang the song Jessica Rabbit sings in Who Framed Roger Rabbit: "Why Don't You Do Right." (Which, as it turns out, was originally written in 1936 by Kansas Joe McCoy and called "The Weed Smoker's Dream," then rewritten and performed first by Lil Green in 1941 and made famous by Peggy Lee the next year... or so says Wikipedia.) It was bizarre. I didn't know anybody else on earth knew that song. I wanted to join her in it, or turn around and smile, but she was singing it in such a vibrato-heavy, show-tunes-with-jazz-hands style that I couldn't get into it. I left the deli singing it quietly to myself, all sultry like it's supposed to be sung.

-This morning, walking to work along 57th Street, a man in front of me was walking with a closed umbrella in his hand. He was wielding it in a very strange fashion. With each step of his right foot, he would put it down as if it were a cane, but when it came back up, rather than swinging it forward to put down again, he would swing it up very fast and hold it out parallel to the ground for a second, then in a jerky motion put it down again and repeat the whole cycle. It was odd. But what was odder was that when he would walk past a plate glass window, he would stare at his own reflection, perhaps mesmerized by his antics with the can. I could only wonder if he saw me behind him, staring at him with a bemused expression.

-Myself, stuck to a wall in a public place, frozen in fear and struck dumb by grief, breaking down for all to see, right there by the door. I do not do these things, I thought even as I crumbled. I wanted to batter down past those arms holding me at a distance, enter them instead and wrap myself inside until that shattered heart let me in to do much needed repair work. My hands are tender and my mortar is strong. But no dice. Instead I watched myself as if from someone else's perspective, hiding in plain sight.

Rainy days

Definitely having another empty kind of day. Lots to do, no time to do it, and lots of thinking. But this about sums it up. Thanks, Townes Van Zandt:

Won't say I love you, babe,
won't say I need you, babe,
but I'm gonna get you babe,
and I will not do you wrong.

Living's mostly wasting time
and I'll waste my share of mine
but it never feels too good,
so let's don't take too long.

You're soft as glass
and I'm a gentle man;
we've got the sky to talk about
and the earth to lie upon.

Days up and down they come,
like rain on a conga drum.
Forget most, remember some,
but don't turn none away.

Everything is not enough
and nothing is to much to bear.
Where you've been is good and gone,
all you keep is the getting there.

To live is to fly,
low and high,
so shake the dust off of your wings
and the sleep out of your eyes.

Goodbye to all my friends
it's time to go again.
Think of all the poetry
and the pickin' down the line.

I'll miss the system here.
The bottom's low
and the treble's clear.
But it don't pay to think too much
on things you leave behind.

I will be gone
but it won't be long.
I will be bringin' back the melodies
and rhythms that I find.

We all got holes to fill;
them holes are all that's real.
Some fall on you like a storm,
sometimes you dig your own.

The choice is yours to make,
time is yours to take;
some sail upon the sea,
some toil upon the stone.

To live is to fly
Low and high,
so shake the dust off of your wings
and the sleep out of your eyes;
shake the dust off of your wings
and the tears out of your eyes.

Helpless

Neil Young will NOT get out of my head. And I just dropped a piece of lettuce from a charity salad down the front of my shirt. I've just been accused of sitting on a FedEx package for two months before sending it, which I did not do because that would be ridiculous. There is a Picasso show coming up and of course that means the WORLD IS ENDING. Ick. I'm in a kind of doldrum-feeling afternoon, where I'm sitting here motionless and inspirationless and with a very distinct treading water kind of inertia setting in. Gotta keep moving, keep working, keep writing. Make some phone calls, maybe. I hate phone calls.

All I really want to do right now is spend some quality alone time with myself, figure some things out about my place in everything that's happening and how I FEEL about it, but there's no time except for these long afternoons at work where I'm not really at any kind of liberty.

So, I've decided to just say fuck it, and start singing the song in my head out loud and screw the clients and art appreciators. I have a good voice; they can deal with it. I will also share it with you, hypothetical reader:

"Blue, blue windows behind the stars,
Yellow moon on the rise,
Big birds flying across the sky,
Throwing shadows in our eyes.
Leave us...
Helpless, helpless, helpless..."

I was trying to raise these plants, see. I've never been much good with plants. I like to think of myself as in tune with nature, and I love trees. They are like godparents, sheltering and shading. And houseplants are like cousins, nephews, nieces. I had a few of them. Started out slow, with a cactus that looked like dragon claws reaching up from the dirt. A succulent--very easy to care for. A few others joined their ranks, more complicated plants with more insistent needs. It felt good, keeping these things alive, these little friends. Watering them, repotting. Caring for them, letting them put themselves under my wing, where there is room enough for anyone.
One day I returned to find my belladonna drooped over and gone. A chill went through me. Pure terror. Premonition. It would all end soon, I thought. All of this illusory power to hold and keep and help the lives of these living, breathing beings. They are not mine, really. They belong to a higher order, that thing that is out there that dictates to us all the spans of lives, the depth of love.
I mourned the belladonna. I mourned the visions I'd have of my abilities. I was distraught.
Today I looked up to see an arm--a whole arm--of the succulent had fallen off sometime during the day. I wasn't there to see it. I couldn't have known how to help it. It looked fine yesterday.
I'm sitting here looking at it. It's falling apart on me and no amount of watering or repotting or turning it to the sun is going to change that. I am helpless. I can fuss over it all I want, click my tongue, touch it lovingly, breathe carbon dioxide onto its leaves, but in a few days time I know it will be gone. Like the other.
It aches. It's a deep down, slow, quiet ache that can be overlooked sometimes, when things get hectic. It doesn't demand much, and it's too steady to cause those jags of heaving pain that can come out as sobs very often. But it does creep up at times like this. An empty kind of longing, as if each breath I take is just echoing around inside, perfectly useless, like I am in such situations. The kind of pain that leaks out from the eyes but despairs too much to be violent.
Well, the cactus is still here, at least, tenacious and joyless on the other dresser.