the flying poem
01-30-2011

First spread the wings
which attach to my rib cage
30 degrees off the
amniotic fluid sac
and flap and breathe
I flap the dust in front of the sun
I fold my calves under less bright stars
I shake my finger at the wild berries
moaning and groaning

I fly

poema de que sempre gostei mas nao escrevi
11-28-2010

Vou-me Embora pra Pasárgada
Manuel Bandeira

Vou-me embora pra Pasárgada
Lá sou amigo do rei
Lá tenho a mulher que eu quero
Na cama que escolherei
Vou-me embora pra Pasárgada
Vou-me embora pra Pasárgada
Aqui eu não sou feliz
Lá a existência é uma aventura
De tal modo inconseqüente
Que Joana a Louca de Espanha
Rainha e falsa demente
Vem a ser contraparente
Da nora que nunca tive
E como farei ginástica
Andarei de bicicleta
Montarei em burro brabo
Subirei no pau-de-sebo
Tomarei banhos de mar!
E quando estiver cansado
Deito na beira do rio
Mando chamar a mãe-d água
Pra me contar as histórias
Que no tempo de eu menino
Rosa vinha me contar
Vou-me embora pra Pasárgada
Em Pasárgada tem tudo
É outra civilização
Tem um processo seguro
De impedir a concepção
Tem telefone automático
Tem alcalóide à vontade
Tem prostitutas bonitas
Para a gente namorar
E quando eu estiver mais triste
Mas triste de não ter jeito
Quando de noite me der
Vontade de me matar
- Lá sou amigo do rei —
Terei a mulher que eu quero
Na cama que escolherei
Vou-me embora pra Pasárgada.

988 words but who is counting
10-23-2010

I didn t have anyone in mind when I shrunk my list of Facebook friends. Don t know if you remember but I sent a “goodbye Facebook” note to everyone on my list, precisely so nobody felt singled out by being “dropped”… There are some that accidentally stayed, either because I had them in sub groups, or some other oversight.
I have added my Brazilian relatives with whom I share a mild interest in my messed up family s genealogy.
I still and forever will consider you my dear friend. I know we had a rough patch and I just am not very good at watching out for where I can be hurting people. The last time we talked I felt that you were still raw, so I just kept my quiet (presence) around.
For me our friendship has always been a comfortable one, we didn’t HAVE to talk every day, or see each other a whole lot, and when we were in closer contact it was always good, even if and when either one of us were not in such good terms with life or our own wounds.
Maybe my silence or apparent distance has more to do with the progression of my therapy than with you and I. It is a painful process, the reconstruction of one’s person, it is hard to be a phoenix, when we are nothing but human, and yet, some people like me, have the drive to phoenix around and keep digging Watson, on order to uncover my good person that hopefully wasn’t so completely damaged after all…

Of course I miss you and Jake, a whole lot. I have always looked forward to your visits – like a mini micro vacation for me, having the two of you here.

I had a couple of emotional debacles with Carole and her family cutting us off after I let her go from the job. It is not too simple, is it? Then there is DJ who with time has become more difficult, or I have gotten older and less indulging. He continues to be in love and wants to marry the girl. Her family is not too enthusiastic and I stand on the side lines and watch him get hurt. Not too simple either. Then there is Don, of course getting older, but kind and gentle even if sometimes irritable and not wanting to take a shower or go to a movie at all, or increasingly more compulsive and I have to carve my own sitting space not to say existential bubble, to manage to stand reality as it is. Again, never quite simple…
So I see my great shrink and she is awesome. I can swear, laugh, cry, be small and petulant without punishment. I can take myself apart and look inside and it is safe. I enjoy that. I work hard, many hours a week. The business is slowly being changed into a real business… and that makes me feel good. I guess I don’t have a whole lot of my old emotional space, like I used to have, because it is filled up by the people who are in my close environment and the little bit that I have left, I HAVE to use for myself, lest I lose my sanity.
Much like my former friend Deborah Shuller, I don t like to talk on the phone. I don t know why but I avoid it, even at work and people who know me, know that. But, I m nice to myself and I keep doing the right things whenever I can. I have been writing some, not painting too much. No time, maybe. Work is hectic but I have a pretty good team. Next step will be to make money hehe..
I haven t talked to father ed much either. It is hard to get pass the secretary and I don t find that to be worth the effort. On Sundays, which is my only day off, Wendy and her family, Karen and her family (her husband the greatest asshole in the world) and Sara and her husband usually come over and we cook and eat, sometimes we play games and laugh a lot, then they leave and the kitchen is a huge mess and I let it sit until monday night. Sometimes I leave work early on Monday to clean up the kitchen.
Wendy had told me that you are having another little fellow in the family. She didn t know much, but I am sure it will be great. Families have a great way of sprouting love. It happens around here. And it should happen around there.
When Carole and her family used to come out to the river, which was not very often, the atmosphere wasn t always pleasant, a lot of tension, jealousies, anger, looks across the room, criticism
all kind of shit, which I do not miss. I guess I thought about this because I remember how it used to be when we were friends at st Thomas and we all used to go out to lunch and how much I enjoyed the fact that we were a dynamic group that was always open to welcome new people. No questions asked. People either fit in or not and it was a natural thing.. I feel that with Carole it was never quite that. That maybe she had expectations that either I didn t know or didn’t have the withal to give it. So it wasn t easy and in an odd way it is better, that is, life without the friction of a very imperfect relationship.
It would be nice to have you live in town so you could waltz in like they do, on Sundays and fall asleep on the couch because everything outside is falling asleep and there is no time to keep,, no clocks to mark it. I guess it is difficult to get all these when we live so far away.
Don will be 80 in February. We are planning to come up for a week to stay with Jake’s family. I would love to have you guys come to the party (I think the plan is to go to a tapas restaurant) and if that were not to be, I would love to see you and just hang out, without hang ups, just like we always did, let life happen at its own pace, in its own way… Yeah, it would be nice to have pics once in a while
love,

As irmas do Homerinho
10-23-2010

Mesmo fazendo um esforco enorme eu nao consigo mais lembrar da primeira vez em que encontrei com o Homerinho. E possivel que tenha side em alguma festa no porao da casa de alguem que eu nao conhecia. No tempo em que eu ainda ia a festas com antecipacao de ver gente, falar com gente, com alguns cigarros sem filtro no bolso, um trocado para o bonde e nenhum desejo de encontrar nem meninos nem meninas, nem uisque, nem guarana. So mesmo aquela fome de discussao intelectual, de escutar um violao talvez mal tocado, de cantar alguns versos de musicas escritas muito antes de eu ter nascido. Era um tempo cheio de surpresas, as historias que de repente circulavam iam devagarinho roubando pedacos de minha inocencia eu ia ficando outra pessoa, bem em cima da miha pessoa. Imagino que o Homerinho deva ter aparecido em alguma dessas festas. Ele tocava violao, mas nao lembro que cantasse muito, ou, se o fazia, cantava mais em ingles o que eu julgava execravel, um assalto a minha cultura tao magnificamente tupiniquim. Como poderia alguem preferir cantar Nina Simone se Noel Rosa nao tinha ainda morrido nas nossas memorias jovens de entao? Bem mais tarde, eu cheguei a me apaixonar profundamente pela voz, pelo reportorio de Nina SImone e chorei sua morte em Paris. Sem consolo, sem luar, sem violao. Mas era assim o Homerinho: fumando muito, como de resto quase todos nos, com uma barba espessa para esconder a mandibula com resquicios de deformidade causada por um acidente na infancia, ele falava e cantava, a voz passando entre o caos de seus dentes desornadamente empilhados. Pois assim foi, ou de repente ou devagar, Homerinho (acho que Homero Duarte Paim Filho) e eu nos tornamos inseparaveis.

Pois entao, na epoca a gente nem pensava na realidade chan que nos rodeava. Tranquilos ficavamos deitados na cama pequena olhando pro teto e falando das nossas fantasias, das frustracoes de adolescentes incompletos, dos desejos mal declarados de vir a ser. Para terror do seu Homero, o pai, que pensava que cometiamos pecados mortais enquanto eles ouviam radio na sala em frente. Para Homerinho ate que era bom, levava fama, ainda que passageira, de garanhao que nao era nem queria ser - mas, na pior das hipoteses, os ataques se tornavam menos brutais.

Homerinho falava com uma voz doce, nao feminina, nao masculina. Uma voz coma docura de uma crianca curiosa que nao se sabe observada e vai mexendo nas coisas em que nao deve. Uma fala macia, o borburinho do seus desecontros e questoes rolando entre nossas cabecas lado a lado, no mesmo travesseiro, sem que jamais sequer pensassemos em olhar um pro outro.

Foi entao que eu soube pela primeira vez o que era sadismo. A Vera, irma mais velha de Homerinho, havia acoplado um pequeno gravador a um cabo bastante longo e de alguma forma simiesca ou milagrosa, alcou o cabo com o bandido gravador de forma que se postasse logo fora da janela dos vizinhos de apartamento de cima. Ela assim o fez por que escutavam varios barulhos suspeitos e julgavam que alguem provavelmente estaria cometendo algum crime de violencia fisica contra outro. Pois nao e que eu chego com Homerinho e estao Vera, Madalena, o menino, e seu Homero ao redor da mesa ouvindo com muita atencao uma gravacao muito cheia de ruidos alienigenos. Mas, e um enorme porem, sem duvida alguma um homem estava batendo numa mulher e a mulher estava gostando muito. Nem Homerinho nem eu entendemos naturalmente porque a mulher estava tao feliz e foi preciso que Seu Homero nos chamasse de burros e explicasse que a mulher so gostava de foder se tomasse pau.

Ficamos chocados. Nossas fantasias relacionais, sexuais, amorosas, sentimentais eram todas coloridas de ambientes vagamente enfumacados, com flores, gim fizz, cigarros, roupas caidas de vagar, viagens a parte alguma, e quase sempre teminavam no que bom se um dia, sem chegarmos a uma conclusao real do que fariamos ou o que deixariamos de fazer.

Assim, de passo a passo, fomos, Homerinho e eu nos despojando de nossas virgindades. Tanto Vera como Madalena eram de certa forma pessoas amargas. Elas trabalhavam duro, apesar de que eu nunca soube fazendo o que, chegavam tarde em casa, cuidavam do seu Homero, de suas roupas e refeicoes, dos seus silencios casmurros, jornais, chimarrao e cafezinhos e cuidavam com muito carinho do menino. O menino, diziam todos era filho temporao do seu Homero. A mulher dele nao vinha a cidade. Ela morava na fazenda e seu Homero voltava a cada duas ou tres semanas. O menino era quieto, bem comportado e so falava quando alguem falava com ele. Nao era particularmente apegado a ninguem na casa, e eu nao me preocupava muito com ele pois na epoca julgava que criancas fossem objetos completamente desprovidos de interesse.

Madalena usava chinelos em casa. Sacudia o pe sem parar, com a perna cruzada sobre a outra, era facil ve-la de olho no menino. Mas tambem nao falava muito. Acho que tinha esperancas de que Homerinho resolvesse virar "homem" pois andava comigo.

Homerinho me contou que o menino era mesmo filho dela.

uma almofada entre os joelhos ou um triste dia
10-19-2010

minha terapista nada tem de minha, mas eu a faco temporariamente dedicada em troca de propria remuneracao. ela se deita no sofa azul ultramarino, poe uma almofada entre os joelhos - como o fazem os americanos, pois julgam que tal acao alivie a pressao sobre a coluna vertebral - bem no brasil a gente mata galinhas e acende velas a deuses africanos importados especialmente para a nacao tupiniquim, assim, por que nao colocar uma almofada entre os joelhos. assim o pensamento dela flui soltamente enquanto eu falo loucamente. e uma troca interessante, as vezes ela nao pode tolerar o meu olhar eu as vezes nao posso tolerar o olhar dela e assim a gente vai trocando informacoes de minha parte, observacoes parcas mas acertadas da parte dela. e hoje eu estava triste. um triste de nao chorar nao, mas um triste de me ver de repente ou gradualmente de novo na ratoeira da eterna companhia daqueles que me precisam. eu nao queria ser precisada, possuida ou mesmo querida. eu queria mesmo era ser convidade, benvinda, acompanhada as vezes, menos vezes do que mais. eu queria uma troca facil e abandonada de intencoes, como as ondas do mar, o movimento dos ramos das arvores. assim, paralelamente, nem bela nem feiamente, sem maos dadas, mas sentindo por vezaes o morno da pele do outro contra a pele minha, acidentalmente, com a mesma falta de consciencia com que respiro, com a mesma tranquilidade.
A consideracao

Mikell
10-08-2010

I hadnt thought about him in a rather long time. Probably something like 6 entire Summers - not an image of his stocky, hirsute legs, generally clad in beige socks and black shoes. It had been a relief to never think about him. Something in the story of Mr. Satch though made the entire picture of Michael slap into my head like lightning. Like in the day I walked into the office and he was sitting on a small stool which made him a couple of inches shorter than the blonde secretary. He had both her feet on his lap, in his hands, and he massaged them, much like one knead a chunky clump of dough. She immediately told me in a melted voice that it felt great and he gave me a self-satisfied chuckle. He never budged, neither did she. Joe and I stood there slightly uncomfortable - like when you accidentally walk into someone taking a crap in a public rest room. Nothing really wrong, but for sure, nothing you want to be looking at. Michael would appear quietly and plant himself very close to you. Close enough for you to feel the heat from his skin next to yours, close enough for you to smell his course soap and new fresh sweat from sometimes mowing the lawn. Well, I actively did not like Michael, he irked me by looking for too long at me, my laughing at his own asinine jokes that always poked fun at midget and other short people. Michael had the thickest eye lashes. They were not long, just thick and grey.They made his eyes look sort of wet all the time and the smiles closed them up, leaving you looking at these two bushy grey spots on his already hairy face. One day he slithered next to me when I was standing at Joe s kitchen and pressed his thigh into mine. We were about the same height which allowed him to couple his thigh exactly with mine. I jumped and between my teeth I told him to never dare that shit again, or I would report him to the police for sexual assault. It was the first time I saw his face turn serious. Just long enough for me to see what was not quite fear, but a short-lived moment of feeling threatened. On his fucking part!! Mind you. After that it was a long time until he slip himself anywhere near me. I remembering talking to Joe about maybe Michael had a reason to be afraid of cops, but we didnt t really think it important. It was then that someone started complaining that money had been disappearing from the Offertory basket.. That was not good for Joe because he had a history of money mismanagement so he took it seriously seriously. He slipped some marked twenty dollar bills into the o.b. and to everyone involved utter surprise, bam, the first Monday morning counting table finds out that the bills were missing. This went on for another 3 Sundays: every time, some of the control bills went missing. So Joe goes and buys one of those clocks that has a secret little camera eye in it, that gets activated when people move in front of the clock. He placed the clock smack in front of the safe and the entire inner circle waited, bated breath, for the next Sunday to roll in. Would you know that after mass a bunch of us were talking in a loose circle formation, saying all of those these and those that people say when they feel holy and shit . Most of us, very catholic, sporting our dead Christs in our pricey gold chains, dangling from our necks, like our barbarian ancestors displayed the teeth of beasts they had slain for dinner or sport. Michael joined the circle and he was standing across from me. I saw him walking towards me but I could not fathom that he would date come anywhere near me, until his finger is actually pressing my christ corpus into my chest and he says to all: look how beautiful her christ is, it looks a lot like Joe s. Shit, he was correct on two counts: my corpus was interesting and it had been made by the same artisan that had made Joe s in Mexico. I shoved his paw away from me and left the circle. On Monday night, when I went to Joe s house for dinner he told me that the sheriff had come to get Michael. They had him on tape, taking money from the Offertory basket. They had found out that he had been busted doing the same thing at another church in a town nearby. Different denomination! That same week, his wife and daughter brought him over to the church to pick up some of his stuff and when they got out of the car, I saw that they were both Filipino dwarfs.

Something-Nash
09-26-2010

I stumbled upon this one poem that she wrote. I read her bio . She clearly had studied a lot poetry and she had a way to dissect verse and split word places in such a way that made you uncomfortable anough to suck you into the poem. I got hooked. I sent her a couple of love notes, minor comments of approval. She never responded. I saw in her blog that she had responded to a bunch of other comments. I also noticed that the comments she responded to were all from people that she obviously knew in real life. So, she avoided pseudo names on the internet. Not a bad idea, I do the same, however I do take care of not completely ignoring those unsolicited comments because an eccho is someting I left behind as a game a very long time ago. Her name was something-Nash. Something short, with a surprising clangor. So I subscribed, in hopes to see more of the same wonderful stuff in future dates. After that, almost every day, the poems would pop into my email - the one that I had given the blog. After about 10 of those, I allowed myself to become disappointed. Ms. something-Nash spoke in the third person about this female who travelled by airplane, who missed a lvoer, who had some alcoholic dude like a father or uncle or something. She also talked about some beaches and some well known (to some) places, maybe in California. I missed the first of her poems that I saw. It was so strong. So kaleydoscope (which happens to be my favorite toy). The later poems, are reak of a forced selection of words, delicately assembled to say that specific thing that something-Nash choses to say. I feel likr a voyeur, without that pay off. Some days I feel embarassed at some poems. Others, I found annoying. The unsubscribe button did come in handy!

Truth in Tinsel
09-19-2010

Mid September, it is still warm enough to live outside if necessary. As I walked to the back of the store I saw a shimmer on the floor. The dude that cleans on Saturdays hasn t come in yet.. It looked like water so I mopped it around with my left righteous MBT. It doesn t dry, despite my smearing action: there it is, a gentle strand, maybe even three intertwined, of the finest tinsel, silver, shining, recoiling as I move my fingers towards it. I grab it and with it, my first married Christmas decorating blobs up to the top. He had been away, in the States, for the usual two weeks. I had been in Brazil, had thus bought the Brazilian Pine (ARAUCARIA ANGUSTIFOLIA) as it customary. Accustomed as I was to the sharp needles, I managed to bring it up the 16 floors to our apartment without significant loss of blood. The tree remained stuck in its original pail, it was the greenest, the scrawniest tree I had ever seen. I don t know how much I paid for the poor bastard, but I was having a tree ready for him when he came home. He had a surprise, he said. I was going to be so happy. I m thinking books, chocolate, jeans, tapes, and I m as anxious to open his suitcases as the little one in the house. He finally hands me two pretty smashed up red and green flat boxes that read: Tinsel, Christmas Decoration. I opened the box and felt the almost warm soft silver shimmering stuff between two fingers. It almost sticks to my skin, but it doesn t. For the life of me, I cannot figure out what to do with it. My thorny Araucaria was already covered with small white cotton balls. The spots covered with the cotton appeared soft, but it was the usual Christmas lie, very much like the tall walls the government built all around the monstrosity that was each plot of slums.. He showed me how to pull one strand at a time, gently, holding it by its very tip allowing the group resolve the pulled piece s travel out of the box. .. It worked great maybe for half of the box, then it started to get tangled. Untangling was not fun. The more Tinsel, Christmas Decoration, I put on the poor Araucaria, the worse it looked. It made my cotton snow look cheap, look barbaric, look so fucking third world. Trying to improve it some, I put as much Tinsel, Christmas Decoration, as I could untangle without losing my mind. Charitably, we never had the 12 frames 400 ASA Kodak film developed. As there are no witnesses, you only have my word as to the horrible look of my Christmas Araucaria covered in Tinsel, Christmas Decoration, wisps of Johnson & Johnson brand cotton balls. He said it looked beautiful, the kindness of a lie retracted with venom at the time we divorced.

missing out
09-19-2010

Today, after a few years of being and not beeing in Facebook, I have found out that there is a thing called NOTES and that people had been leaving notes in the NOTE partition. It was like finding a old music score inside the mother s recipe book. You can hum the tune, provided you can ready music, you can guess at their state fo mind, you relaize that you are brought close to them, to their souls, something like 11 months after they experienced the moment... Dang, talk about missed encounters of the facebook kind!!!!! At any rate, for those of you who know NOTES, who posted notes intended to my person, who shared intense thoughts and yearnings to find an apparent indifferent silence, just know, now, however later this may be, that it was not indifference, it was ignorance, of the very innocent type... because I do love you guys

I wanted to live east of the Ashley river
09-15-2010

We were now ready to make the move: we would get an apartment in town. The beauty of it, was that it was exactly one building away from the front door of my office. The river house with all its enchanted hours, visions, wild life, was exactly one hour: from my back steps to my office door. The four-color-process aluminum sign read "excellent apartments 1 and 2 bedrooms for immediate occupancy". The building looked good, the heave glass front door locked away the noisy street. A few days after the decision and the fruitless phone calls we got tough and walked right up to the front door. A smiling lady was inside, I opened the door and asked her if she worked there. She seemed amused by my question and told me that she Lived there. My hopeless cheerful self immediately wants to play: Great! Do you want a couple of nice old people to join your building? She points to another woman seated with her side towards us and the door and the happy tennant, with a small cell phone stuck to her face. We walked in and stopped somewhere around her field of vision but didn t manage to catch her eyes. She talks for quite a while and after hanging up, she looks not at us, but at the tennant with a chin up questioning look: the tennant says we want to see her. Now she looks at us, slowly, from our shoes, golf pants, polo shirts, grey hairs, and then she goes down again, from our grey heads to our lose shirts, to our pants, wrinkled from driving and the Summer humid heat and to our shoes, my MBTs, his buffalo caramel colored moccasins. I couldn t believe it, but she managed to never make eye contact with us. So I retrieve my cheerfulness partly spent ont he tennant at the door and tell her too, that we want to live with them, becuase we live in the jungle and work right next door to them. The light skin, the corpulent bult, the house dress draped over her portly legs - no eyes to look at us, she says into the air and more towards the happy tennant "No we don t have any room, not here. No." I insist and she says, I have to call a Ms. Gloria to inquire about the building they have West of the Ashley and I insist that I don t want to live West of the Ashley, I want to live east of the Ashley, where the roads go places and I can ride my bike all the way to Harris Teeter and the square and sit by the waterfall, and watch the horse drawn carriages full of tourists who look so overheated and eager to hear something about our quaint town, and the sidewalks, oh the sidewalks, there is nothing like a walk - step down onto the street, cross it, step up onto the sidewalk, step down onto the street, cross it, step up onto the sidewalk. step down onto the street, cross it, step up onto the sidewalk, step down onto the street, cross it, step up onto the sidewalk, step down onto the street, cross it, step up onto the sidewalk and bam, here I am at an art gallery, the main library where they actually have a shitload of great books and not just the latest mistery-shit-murder-hard-fucking-cover.. Oh yeah, the sidewalks of the town, I miss these guys! Although they are not the sidewalks of Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro or Porto Alegre which cover the entire cities where they were made much like the building blocks cities I built when I was small and played on the floor of the apartment in Curitiba, starting with symmetry permitted by the abundance of form to end with semi imaginary rooms, roofs, parks, people and even animals, made up with whatever random piece came into my grasp, accepting even dried up discarded popsicle sticks, match boxes, empty medicine bottles, jar caps... all in the name of progress. So were those wide sidewalks, each following the mind, the vision, and the materials list of quite different humans to make up the grid of safer walking. The day-manager, the happy tennant called her, dismisses us with her silence and we leave quietly. If we were not so full of confidence we might have felt humiliated. I am not sure that we understood what had just happened to us, but we felt it enough to remain quiet until we were properly seated and seat-belted in our fully paid two-year old automobile. He then says "Well, that went well" which was nothing but an invitation for me to bring the experience into comprehensible discourse. I didn t know how, so I looked busy with the traffic and told him I had to get back to work.
Well, this morning my good friend Nancy stops by to see me. She is already walking a few steps without her cane but the therapist wants her to bend the bionic knee something like 120 degrees. What if she had never done that like in ten years? Maybe her tendons and other similar parts have atrophied or mutated into straight leg, right? It could happen. So I told her I wanted to live on the corner building but the fat lady int he house dress had glanced at me and my shoes and clothes without ever looking into my eyes and had told me there were no vacancies. Oh, Nancy, saint adorable Nancy, she boiled over, I tell you that. On the spot, she said what? I saw their sign! I m going there right now and see if they don t have an opening. Just like that. So I asked her why and she looks at me for a while longer than usual and she says "You re white". I said "I m Brazilian". "She can t see past your skin" She mumbles a bunch of stuff about getting me into the building despite the day-manager, about talking to Rev. Dungee who is the President of the North Area, east of the Ashely where I want to live because it is oh so city, so right around the corner of my office, and the Reverend is going to get in that building and have a word with the day-manager whoever she is. That s when I began to grock the sixties, the marches, the murders, the lies, the deceits, the rapes, the humiliating sppech, the abuse, the loneliness, the despair, the ignorance, the violence, the hatred, the desire to kill and to never, ever forgive those that made it necessary to President Johnson to sign the Civil Rights Act of 1968, prohibiting discrimination in the sale, rental, and financing of housing. I understood the sideways looks, the indiference to my foreign smile and to my foreign touch, to the suspicion with which my words are received. I understood why some of the people I work with, blatantly vouch for me, "she is a good woman" with a look of understanding. When that happens I get a look of cautious acceptance. So I tell him, now you know what it is like to be discriminated. He looks confused, humbled, and almost innocent of any past crimes.

Spider vs writer/Dreams never cease to die
09-13-2010

I had seen him before at the plant. He had come to the HR department looking very unemployed and asked me if I wanted to see his portfolio. I didnt because I didnt have any openings and didnt expect to have any openings any time soon, for a pencil drawing artist. His hair was sparse at the top, in a disorganized sort of way. He seemed to have started a beard at some point but neglect and aging perhaps had halted its progress. Spots on, spots off, one could say he had a beard, sort of, anyway. The eyes smiled with humility making it difficult to lie to him. I dispatched with him, as I had done with so many others before him and would probably be doing to so many since him. It was a couple of years hence that he came in again. He had put some meat on his bones, not much, just enough to wear an L tee-shirt with room to spare. There was a girl with him. Maybe a woman, I wasnt sure. She didnt speak much and when she did it was difficult to understand her. A cloud would come over her eyes and she would mumble something like "can I have it in red" but it didnt come out as a question, it was more of a statement, as if she had wanted to say "Red is a lovely color this time of the year". They didnt touch each other at all. He spoke into her, though, each word an invitation for her to be, to exert, to author, to prefer, to pleasure, to realise, to opine, to permit. He would look at her and lower his voice. Ms. Gladden? I asked. "Its Mrs. Richardson" - there! He Johns Richardson, the pencil artist, the cleaning company con, the car detailing middle man, had gone and married the little thing. She wasnt even used to it yet. I looked closer: her facial piercings were all vacant. Each darker area around the holes told me she had a nostril piercing, a left brow, one half way between her chin and the lower lip. I lost count of the ones on her ear, the one that was turned towards me and wondered if she had nipple or genital piercings, as I thought "she had run out of places on her poor young, young face". She listened as I talked expertly with her Mr. Richardson, she laughed when I told him that an L shirt would show his awesome body which was a pathetic statement. I imagine that it took them to their recent marital bliss so they laughed with discreet enthusiasm and looks of common mysteries and revelations. I closed my mind so as not to enter theirs and I endured them as I endure a bunch of other shit that happens in front of me. so, "can I have it in red". By now I tell her that she can have it in any color she wants, since her business card is bright red and a very serious black. None of it had much to do with her business, or mine. The next time I saw them, he told me that he had been to my office before and that he had applied for a job and that the other lady told him to come back with his portfolio but he just never did. "Why not" . "I didnt". Well, I knew that, since I had been the one to talk to him back then. He added that he wanted to publish a magazine. "What kind?" - "Stories, with pictures" "Neat, what about" - "Well the things that you feel, that I feel, I write them down and I draw things to go with them for people to read and look at the pictures." I looked at him, Im searching for signs of insanity or greed and all I see is humility and hope. I give up and ask him what kind of market does he write for? Blank. Is it stuff for children? .. no .. Is it for teens?.. no .. it could be.. Is it sacred or sacrilegious? Or maybe something in between? He smiles I can see that he is getting nervous. So I say, think about this: the New Yorker is one kind of magazine, People Magazine is another kind of magazine, right? There is comprehension in his eyes, or so I think:"I can bring the level down, so everybody can understand what I feel, how I feel" I tell them both that we need to meet somewhere else, outside my office, because I have a ton of stuff to do today and I really want to hook him up with a magazine...I want to hook him up with die roten punkte and cause him to dream and to laugh without care, I want to hook him up with a new house to clean... i want to hook him up with classes in the community college...i want to hook him up with anything that will cushion the fall from her bed, from her breast, from her lips, from her eyes, from her makeup, from her hands, from her clean skirts, from her spent body, from her soft voice, from her vinyl purse, from her acrylic finger nails... from her Volvo.

The jealous cowboy
09-13-2010

every time he passes by my desk, he asks the same question, from about 10 feet away: are you done yet? ready for the weekend? At first I actually considered that there was something of mine that needed to be readied for the weekend, then at second, I considered that maybe I had started some project and left it mid spot in the air to never look at it again. But the number of times he passed by my desk and asked the same two questions increased, like fifty times, over the last 60 days straight, subtracting of course Sundays, Saturdays and days that he has classes, and days that I am not at my desk when he walks by it, and days that I come into the office after 10 because I stay up really late when in doing so, I miss the window of opportunity to sleep, only thinking about it when it is too late to reclaim the sleep, how then I close my eyes and put one hand over the other under my pillow, forcing my legs against the mattress, flexing my ass cheeks together until my toes almost cramp but dont, I fall asleep into that continuous kaleidoscope, part gyroscope, part periscope, part microscope, part telescope,my own full 4" diameter magnifying glass, personal and private facets of my universal prism, that are my dreams..
Eliminating the two: first and second possibilities I wondered if he were not secretly a king of some small island of universal knowledge, misplaced inside someones desk drawer, or in the abyss that is the ocean, and that he would be granted something like a bathroom pass, approximately once a day to wake up the awareness of the sleep deprived. I was beginning to think so.
After a while I started looking forward to hearing his raspy voice, behind the quick glance he would throw my way: are you done yet? ready for the weekend? At this point I do not feel the need to respond, and I find that my head is drifting after his corpulent majesty. He wipes the sweat off his forehead, the curly dark hair disorderly framing his wide round face. From the back he has this stupid military cut. What a contrast, maybe it is a regal thing and I dont get it.As I drift my skirt catches a plastic hook on the higher shelf in the storage room and I deposit myself in the wider corridor. Am I done yet? Probably not. In order to know I would have to set a starting point. Does drifting have a starting point? Or is it more like slipping out of immobility, out of paralysis... I wouldnt know since I am in it. As a bystander in someone elses story I would be quick to know. But here, it is not worth my effort. So I drift, I snag, I deposit, I ponder and I listen to the next question: Am I ready for the weekend? Who wouldnt be? What is there to do? Does anyone fucking prepare for a weekend? Like I have to ease myself into rest. I dont think so... Thats when I realized what the shit-head king was doing. Drift fence, the bastard.

The Distand Cousin
09-12-2010

Claude frequently thought about walking the distance between the mail box and the Baptist church. The one that every so often, announces: angel food. Angels probably dont eat anything unless it is wisps of clouds, or rain drops shining with sunrays, or the filth that jets spew in the air, he suspects. The Baptist church, a very large building spread out about one hundred yards from the Old Beech Hill road, with parking for maybe, maybe three, four hundred cars, has every Sunday no more than eight to ten pick up trucks and the like, scattered on the parking lot. Must be the Sunday services. The stretch of road is pretty plain and Claude figures that he would turn right, into the churches long driveway which would lead into the wide parking lot, cross the length of the parking lot and come out at the other arm of the driveway. Needs to pay attention to fox-like dog who sleeps in the very middle of parking lot. You come upon an animal in surprise, and youre asking for a bite or two. This is the day that Claude chose. He goes in the closet and surveys his shoes: brown shoes, leather, black shoes, leather, fancy sandals for feet to breathe in the summer, furry lining pale yellow sleepers, high top black sneakers, very old white Adidas tennis shoes, never worn no longer remembered other shoes in boxes, all number 11B, neatly piled on his side of the closet. He chooses the Adidas and marches back into the bathroom: white socks, old white Adidas , double knot useless anyway on these goddamed silky shoelaces, sweats on, I am Claude, hear me roar..
He sits down by the window, and sees the river, lower now, despite the rains. Very light brown, like spots of caramel, when more of the sand is visible than river itself. His eyes follow an egret that seems to have come out of nowhere. It follows the river towards the east. I doubt it will go all the way to the ocean, but it could happen. He moves his socked toes inside the Adidas , smoothes down the sweats, thinned by time, by wear, by repeated washes, drying cycle after drying cycle, a spot of coffee, a spot of Madagascar blue on the thigh, he picks at it but no, it is part of the fabric now and he feels the warmth of his thigh in the palm of his hand. Wonder if the hand is the lessor or the lessee and he blows into his palms softly, one eye on the sand bar, one eye on his soft palm.
The trees are now moving in the breeze and Claude thinks rain. He could bring the umbrella. That would make him the only walker in the town, who uses an umbrella. Not having much to choose from, he picked the green golf one, wih the broken tips. How do unbrellas get tips broken, he didnt know. He would remember it, the first time he opened the umbrella and awkwardly shook it in the air, if and when one of the tips were broken. They should make umbrellas better. Sooner or later, the handle detaches from the central rod, the silk rots at the first row of angled humps, and as he sees now, tips are damaged and nobody knows the when or how. Claude lifts his left hand and with the middle finger, hetraces the letter C on the window pane. C is for Cat, C is for Cancer, C is for Claude and Charlie and cunt and coverlet, cream and cherries, cucumbers, cold and craft, and more than anything for crime and chastisement. Now he can see through the roundness of the C that the grass is very green,much greener than when he was seeing it through the fogged up glass. Maybe it is hot after all, this green looks like Summer green. He feels his eyes leaving the C roundness to focus on the tip of the canoe outside. It is also green - deep. rich, flat, Old Towne green and he likes it. He rests his eyes on that small piece of green to empty his mind. Thats how he forgets all his intentions. He rests so deeply onto small scenes of the front yard, that he forgets the walk, forgets the mail, forgets the coffee, forgets the car running outside, forgets his pills, forgets to feed the dog, forgets to bathe, forgets to read the papers, even the art section he forgets, as he forgets to remember anything at all.

we played spoons
09-12-2010

at last sunday arrived, all twenty-four hours of it, nothing missing, nothing undelivered. Claude had worked hard all week. So hard he couldnt even remember when it was the last time he had not worked that hard. It had been hot, it had been dusty, it had been colorful hand shaking times, it had been counting and re-counting and now Sunday had arrived. He had slept long enough, even though his legs ached from standing up for so long, his right ear hurt when laying down, his head hurt on the right side. He still rolled over and let himself sleep. It didnt matter what time he got up. He knew they wouldnt let him sleep past mealtime. God, no. Missing a meal for sleep was completely tantamount to a capital offense: disallowed. So he slept until he woke up, popped two headache pills and one prozac. That would take care of the aches and pains and curb the appetite of his disordered brain for catastrophic events of the imaginary kind. Most unkind, mind you, because exploding power posts that careen into your windshield to cleanly slice off your head are not very kind at all, albeit imaginary. He knew he needed to take care of some routine business around the house before the visitors arrived. So he did. He avoided talking too much, avoided putting on his sleepers, avoided picking up a book, avoided the newspaper, he avoided the peanut butter jar and the xylophone, he avoided the crossword puzzle, he even avoided picking up the cats, lest he become distracted and fail to take care of the small business tasks already on his plate.
When they arrived Claude was happy that he wasnt sitting on his big chair, doing nothing. He had managed to stay busy and hadnt even thought much about the visitors. The thought of the spoons game had helped. He knew he would laugh and he was ready for it. He looked at his reflection on the mirror while he cleaned the bathroom and practically laughed without a sound. Then he almost laughed with the eyes only. While nearly laughing from both sides of his mouth, Claude smelled the bleach and dropped the near-laugh rehearsal. No real big deal. the vision of the gleaming spoons in the middle of the table lay right beneath the platters of ribs, bowl of sugar plums, terrines of mac and cheese, the frozen pewter salad dish, and the basket of hot french bread. He didnt taste the food and missed entire paragraphs of the conversation around the table, transfixed as he was by the 7 silver spoons reflection underneath all of that table spread made to feed people who dont know each other and must keep company because it is Sunday. At least here he could see the people eating and he knew what they ate because it was the same things he ate, nothing left for angel food, nothing left for angels, nothing left for the fisherman or even the dog.

The accomplices
09-11-2010

the three were seated at different angles in the silver room. silver because of unfinished business, pretty much all around. unfinished might be relative to who would be looking in. for the three of them, it was all immaterial: they could sit and laugh anyprettymuchwhere they chose. This was for now the chosen spot. Little Yellow started it when she said something about shaving the head top for some special event, special olympic affair, if the hair was fair or not it wouldnt matter, if the fight was fair or not, it wouldnt have mattered because in the end he had all left without one shoe on Each foot being the one now, 40 years later, 50 years later that had stepped on the harsh sidewalk with one sock on, one shoe off.. The oracle than holding his head with both hands, cradles it like an overgrown chicken egg, recites in a low monotone: should you remove the top slice of my head. there would be no blood because there is no blood in the realm of hypothesis, nothing but images and possibilities. as i was saying should you remove that slice, i would be attentive as to what part of my brain matter might follow with it, Maybe with it would go the memories of dinners past. Maybe all that was blue, in any variance of the color, would be no longer recognizable: suddenly blue would not exist which would make my son, the one without eyes. Or would I be the only one not to see his eyes? Or would I actually see his eyes but have no idea of what it was insofar as coloring content was concerned But really, no one would know it - not until much later in the process, if dinners and blues would be gone. It is true that something would leave with the topmost slice: maybe the part that concocts eerie splinters of destruction and loss so subtle it doesnt matter, almost. except when it feels the entire top most of the head. and then he was forced to retrieve back to the shrinks office. He never knew their address and every single time he had an appointment he made sure he brought a map with him. The x marking the spot, but without a number. Ten trees past the womens Clinic. What do they only see women, do only women work there, do they teach you how to be a woman, like the tennis clinic, or the soccer coined he had paid a fortune for his kids to attend and they never really gave a shit, scored a goal, carry water, learned how to serve, neither friend, not lord, nor yellow balls.. So thank God for womens clinics and ten tress past the driveway because then he could get to the waiting room on time to pick the germ covered copy of discovery magazine and gain one more once of knowledge. So he is engrossed in the possible pleasure of eliminating that part of the brain by slow seepage... And no more pills. No more small capsules filledof godknowswahtshit, because then, neither blue, not dinners, not mysterious, strange, unexpected
movies of early demise by accident, certain death by poisonous delicacies, guaranteed despair from disparate attacks from unknown gangsters under stairs. No, none of that. The only thing to be concerned about was not how to in the aftermath of the great brain letting, he would close it all up. Then the oracle stops on his tracks: what if with all of it, with all the superfluous image production slice of brain and head top went a few intelligence coefficient points? No, he could not afford that. But then again... what if he were just slightly less intelligent and he could suddenly enjoy just going to a race car event or whatever they call it: he would buy tee shirts that showed faces of race car drivers and their numbers, plus a bunch of other sponsors and he would want to use those products because that would put him on the same bin would the race car drivers and all those other people who came to the races. He would sit in from of a TV set and watch the races when he couldnt take the trip on any given weekend and he would have to avoid contact with other people because the races would be something big, like in really big in his life. He would buy a recliner and put it right there, on the porch, between the table and the spittoon because for sure he would start to chew tobacco, because hell, thats where the fun was. He wondered how many points did he have to lose of his IQ he bought a new bowling ball and made friends with all those people that smoked in the bar of the bowling alley. He wondered if he would know that he had lost the points. He wondered if he would remember being smart. By now Little Yellow and Great Goader had started to smirk: how far would Oracle go with his small rant. Oracle saw the signs, he would lose them as they coalesced into the comforts of their perfect mental health. He then smiled at them and told a story. In a few moments they were laughing - no danger around the immediate corner, no real slicing of topmost parts of his head, only the smell of Windex without ammonia and the hissing of the wet mop in the background linked him to the reality of the silver room. He crossed his hands behind his head, stretching his legs as far as he could and squeezed his buttocks together. The thick socks mesh rubbed against his calf and he smiled blissfully at Little Yellow and Big Goader. They smiled back, accomplices at last.

Independence Day
09-07-2010

today it is brazils independence day. somehow independence day does not do justice to my memories of military and school parades with which we use to celebrate independence day. at home it was always a reason to talk about the cry of the independence: Independencia ou Morte! and I thought for a long time that this was the greatest cry for something ever. Years later I came to find out that many other desperate sovereigns have cried the same cry. Pretty much equivalent to “leave me the fuck alone”, except on a much ampler circle – of a nation that is. The fact remains however that September 7th was a date to look forward to. At the time one did not move the holidays around to award the citizenry more leisure time, so you could very well have Thursday off for the parades, and Friday you went back to work or school. It seems to me that if generally rained on 7 de setembro. The wind blew with enthusiasm and skirts flew up for the embarrassment of girls and boys alike. I love the bands! I mean I really loved the drums and the strident clarinets. I could watch that forever. when i was allowed in the band at our school, I was assigned a snare drum. I learned the part, learned that one has to march and play at the same, learned that one has to buy a really expensive outfit even though you dont have the money at all. So, I figure I would master 2 out of 3, and so I did, I played the snare drum well, I marched perfectly in synchrony with my mates but for the life of me, i could not afford the uniform. Nobody knew but i couldnt afford shoes either so the shoes I wore were too big for my small feet. After a few rounds of the gym, playing with all my small heart, I had blisters on my feet. They hurt like hell, but the love I had for that tinny drum, made it all worthwhile. I wonder now if it was the catholic culture that expected pain, sacrifice, even death with the sublime, the salvation, attaining something as incredible as heaven, or playing the drum at the parades. So I bled for my country in my small feet inside my big tennis shoes. And I didnt care – it was only difficult to remove my socks -my enormous white scabs: to pick a sock off of a dried bloodied blister is not too simple.. a sudden pull and you want to die, a slow pull and you wanna kill someone. It never occurred to me to soak my feet. Maybe because we didnt really have a bathroom or a tub that could hold water. or a mother that could or would assist us in overcoming these sorts of youthful wounds. Fact is, by no revealing the wounds, I could stay in the band.
That is also the time when I learned that there are powers that be, behind the scene actors, people who watch and know and make decisions, and they never would even say anything to us. Because Laisha also was in the band. Same situation. Dont remember her blisters because it is hard to remember your sisters wounds when your own are bleeding, especially when you are no more than 12 years old and the beatles are just starting to make noise.
So the great day comes, Friday, September 7, 1962. My instructions were to get off the bus at the park where the band would meet. Mind you, you either were part of the band, or you have to march – so, everyone was there. So I did and I could see from a distance the bunch of kids dressed up in royal blue outfits with tall royal blue and silver hats with their silvery instruments. So Laisha and I walk slowly towards them, pretty much ready to accept our fate – we would have to march with the rest of the girls – no drums for us… Lo and behold, great balls of fire… wouldnt you know that the p.e. teacher greets us with her stern germanic look and hurries us to get our drums and get into position! The two in white uniforms in the very middle of our royal blue guard!
Happy 7th of September

telephone avoidance
09-07-2010

she didnt know for how long she had been sitting out on the porch. the heat inside had pushed her to that particular spot, because there a hint of a breeze. Gathering the skirt and making a ball under her leg made her feel better too. The hope was that she wouldnt hear the phone if it rang. It is bound to, though. People have all kinds of reasons to ring others. None of which sits very high on her list. The phone company had insisted that she take all 3 extensions - one for each floor and it was difficult to argue with someone who looks so fucking capable and in charge of her own briefcase. She could swear she saw lights blinking inside the briefcase, more really like a suitcase with wheels. The rep had parked it between the two of them pulling out this really sleek laptop. more like a composition book, really. the company pays for it, might as well use it. She couldnt see the logic of such dumb thing. So she had been force-fed 3 fucking extensions. Each one, glossy grey, two of them resting in undersized nests with very thin cords, one of them with regal airs, orange night lights, looking like a real fucking telephone of any age prior. She had put the main one with the orange lights at the bottom floor for a good reason: if you had the other two, which were really cordless, you COULD, not saying you would,m but you could be distracted in your mind, and walk right out to the porch with it in your hand or even in a big pocket. Well then, should this happen, you would be absolutely forced to answer the phone when and if it rang. Even outside on the porch. Because from where she stood or rather sat, right now, right with this light warm breeze on the skin of her thighs, she couldnt find one single reason in the world to say she had to answer the phone. The main one that sat tattered to the Queen Anne second or third hand side table where Bob left his fucking martini round stains, one over the other, until you could not see where the first martini had started. Maybe that his liver would look something like that too and he would be sick sometime in the future from all of those martinis that he had ingested for good reasons, or bad reasons, or no reasons at all, or just because it was really cheap in Buenos Aires, even for the best of brands, what he didnt know was that it was all fake shit made right there in the micro-industries of good solid Argentinian citizens and what was the difference, right? So she closes her eyes and everything would be completely peaceful if it werent for the wait: will it ring? It wasnt even that she didnt want to talk to the people. It didnt get that far. Like tonight when she saw the voice message file in her email - oh yeah - she could use this shit well, having the phone ring on king street and go all the way to Givahns to be confronted with the greatest of all questions: check or not check the message? So she would stand uncomfortable in front of the screen, too much white, too many tidbits of information that she didnt care to have, ever really, and there it is THE MESSAGE, it is a wav file of sorts. she knows that all she has to do is click on it and provided that the sound is on, the damned thing will play itself. without regards to her being away office. without regards for her having this one fucking sneeze stuck in her left nostril. without regard to the fact that Ben the geriatric canine has just farted and me her want to vomit, without regards to the fact that she could almost get a headache, like that, just at the thought, mind you, at the though of having to hear the message. Definitely, messages are the shit of all shits and she knows it. So she asks herself softly: are you afraid of it? NO are you afraid it will bad news? NO are you afraid it will be someone wanting you to do something? NO is it anything at all? I dont think so. Well the simplicity of her dialogue which exposes the extent of her condition of abnormal-sea, makes her stop. Quieting herself to take in this thing, which is the abnormal-sea. It is big. It is not controllable. It has its own power. Its own dynamics. It is contained inside her chest and her head. She does not believe it is in her arms or legs. So she sits there with the abnormal-sea. And she starts thinking about seashells, conchs that make you hear something like a wind, fiddler crabs, shoe crab left overs, sea oats, pebbles, seagull voices, flapping of wings, the dive of a pelican that never seems to come up for air soon enough, footprints, partially washed and filled with sand, the desire to bend down and play. Holding the sand in her hand she can pour it back onto the ground forming these round mounds, endlessly, until her nose starts running in the wind and she does not want to lose sight of it, and the crashing of the waves that she could never stand when she was trying to sleep, out here the fill up the whole picture with goodness. for this whole moment she didnt think about the phone. So the clicked on the file and after a few satellite volleying, she heard the distinct voice of that asshole, William Jones, call me at xxx xxxx, xxx xxxx call me, someone, he repeated it about 4 times, just that, called me someone and the number. She noticed that the number did not match the recorded number from where he had placed the call. She muttered fucker under her breath and wrote herself a note to call the asshole in the morning.

Etude #12 A Fantasy Conversation
09-06-2010

no problem, I will get it for you
i dont want you take too long after dark
itssalright, i can take care of myself
you wanna take the charged flashlight?
sure, put it by my stuff

what did you drop?
itwasnothing, M"tilda
what do you mean nothing
like in nada, niente, rien
dont get smart with me, i dont feel so great
sorry, I didnt mean anything by it, didyousee my green sweater?
you left it on the washer last night it didnt smell right
its all that fish you feed me, im growing gills already
its good for you and less risky: you dont have to be out at all hours to catch fish

Etude # 13 or titles of things I will never write
09-06-2010

101 ways to cook your steak

There he is! - An abridged commentary of the KJV of the holy bible.

I love My Country

Clealingness is next to Godliness

how to get your man, how to keep your man, how to groom your man, how to feed your man, how to entertain your man

Nina, an autobiography

Etude #14 or Something else
09-06-2010

one look at the book and she was hooked. the old pleasure inside her chest thumping calm breezes and winter storms, how much did you pay for it? 290.00 crazy ass bastards, the book doesnt have any price printed on it. she read chapter one. they started the course from chapter nine. she never understood that much but she figured that if you are passionate enought you will read chapters one through 8 way before the teacher says hello. The cover glistens. Yeah it fucking glistens! she is so excited she doesnt see the pictures on the front of the book. she just wanted to go inside and fast. she did skip the authors introduction. these are hard to put up with. like you have to always say drive carefully when some is leaving late or a stretch of 2-3 days at your house. like your word, in the last moments, or hers, at the opening of the book, would erase all doubts, correct all mistakes..block all kharma. riiight. she learned a new word: GROK and already feels in love with it. She wants to wear on a tee shirt so the like minded wont feel so lonely. But first she wants to read the book, lest it be a totally stupid thing, but she guesses that the word is what the word says: grok, and guess what, she fucking get it!!! But of course you do, he says and i can smell his shirt, a soft cologne, or maybe bath soap, underneath the starch. the sweet smell of starch and black, stiffened fingers erasing every wrinkle on the ironing board, like the opening chapter of the book. So, I drive carefully.

The homework
09-06-2010

As you and I know, Karen is my good friend. She is adorable except that shehas been trying to get revenge over her new husband which I find to be an extreme waste of loving opportunity, or for nothing else, a great waste of laughing time. Karen and I laugh a lot. She can laugh at me and I can laugh at her. I do not believe that I have ever really hurt her, or offended her, I may have pissed her off, as one to do with friends once in a while, lest one become the owner of the other. Once, I was briefly upset because when I put my sunglasses on - the ones that you get for like 40 bucks on line, and put them over your regular prescription eye glasses, we were in the car and she bursted out laughing her head off. I wanted to laugh with her but I couldnt understand the funny, until she said it was like I had become old in one fucking second - the second I put the big sunglasses on... What the fuck, right, I am old, because she doesnt see it all the time, I didnt think it was funny, like reality is funny. No, I think reality is funny perfect in its own tumorous way. Like the cancerous tumors on the mouth and snout of the Tazmanian devil... they dont belong and yet they do and it all becomes part of one complex system of gains and losses, of beauty realized abd wasted, of devils attacked by cancer, and if that wasnt justice, what would be, right? Anyway, I wasnt really hurt or offended, by I told her it wasnt funny because old is not funny it is just old. Anyway, Karen has a very unique way of thinking and processing information, or better than that, her learning process is rather unique. She has intelligence astigmatism, I say. Like her brain inbox is askewed, so she needs to knead the information in a very unique way in order to put it inside. So I know that when I help her with homewrok, it can a 4 day ordeal, sometimes a whole week... she doesnt give up, which is great. She has developed enormously since she re started her college studies. So the lattest assignment was to write a sonnet. A fucking sonnet, mind you. Personally I do not like sonnets, I not want to read sonnets, I do not want to hear a sonnet. Even Fernando Pessoa whom I adored more than I adore myself, I found his fucking sonnets really irritantingly measured, contrived even. It is like shiting cubes of pooh, you know..

here is a forinstance:

Whether we write or speak or do but look
We are ever unapparent. What we are
Cannot be transfused into word or book.
Our soul from us is infinitely far.
However much we give our thoughts the will
To be our soul and gesture it abroad,
Our hearts are incommunicable still.
In what we show ourselves we are ignored.
The abyss from soul to soul cannot be bridged
By any skill of thought or trick of seeming.
Unto our very selves we are abridged
When we would utter to our thought our being.
We are our dreams of ourselves, souls by gleams,
And each to each other dreams of others" dreams.

of course it is good and it is right, and it is fucking Fernando for chrissake, but I still dont like it.

Poets are fakers
and their faking is so real
that they even fake the pain,

the pain that they really feel.


and here is Pessoa again talking like I do:
I like everything that’s real

and everything that’s right;
And I like it because it would be so,

whether or not I liked it.

And so, if I die now, I die a happy man,

Because everything is real and everything is right

At any fucking rate, Karen has to write a sonnet. I never wrote one, on account of how I feel about them, so what do I do, I copy and paste a Petrarch sonnet and add one extra space in between each verse. Karen and I then start adding the lines. Any length, any rhyme we didnt case, as lng as there was a line, we got it. And laugh we did. She had wanted to write about this child brith shit, focusing on the pain which I found so bad i couldnt hold my opinion from her. I mean it was worse than bad. She had used the word SHE at least once in every verse - of which there were eight and she introduced two characters in the eight verses,w ithout telling the reader that she was talking about two different shes. I mean, it was worse than awful.
So, among endless laughter spells where she sounded like a chicken that just laid a few too many eggs, and I sounded like the base drum on a tired high school parade band, we managed to come with this sonnet - properly measured, poorly rhymed:

An Irreverent Sonnet
The pain is too much, it tears her apart
Wreathing and crying, she is lain awake
In the late night hours, she misses her cake
Her vanity thrown out with a loud fart
Withered sunflower: she blinks with a start
Lost in the agony she sees heartbreak
With hopes gathered up into a wee place
For this pain, for this joy are nought for tart
Propelling her, Pandora, she desires
A whore no more, now a brand new hour
She might, laying in the shade of dower
With the visions of the sweetest enquire
Having sightings of a mother"s power
The midwife screams: push damned spitfire

We hardly wait for our grade

Pessoa, at his death bed
09-06-2010

I made of myself something beyond my knowledge,
And what I could make of myself I failed to do.
The domino costume that I wore was all wrong.
They immediately took me for someone I was not
and I didn t deny it, and I was lost. When I tried to take off the mask,
It was stuck to my face.
When I took it off and looked in the mirror,
I had grown old,
I was drunk, and I didn t know how to put on
the costume that I had not taken off.
I threw the mask away and slept
in the dressing room
As a dog tolerated by the management
because he’s harmless.
And I"m going to write this story to prove
that I"m sublime. (7)

Of Lard and Honey
09-06-2010

of the hill, about the Japanese people who now owned the supermarket and let her get two loaves of bread and pay for only one, and Ms. Assumption seemed to have the exact measure of conversation she was willing to trade for the meal that would follow defined in her head. Or it might have been a sense of charity an effort to preserve our pride, although we didn t have any because price and hunger do not a shake make. At the chosen moment, she would get up and make the coffee. she made straight in the small teapot looking thing. Aluminum, shone into silver tones by her red hands, it had a few dings here and there. You could hear the urinating song of the hot water poured into the dark brown flannel filter: when the sound stopped, it was half way full and we knew that she would bring out the fresh bread already sliced in anticipation of our visit. She insisted, soft lard and honey were the best thing to put some meat on our bones. And even though lard felt coarse onto our tongues, we tried, dutifully and hoped with children s hearts that the honey would cover all the lard and that at no time, we would taste the awful thing. When you did, you could gulp down the golden black coffee and it erase any lard from our palates. Two slices of soft white bread and a cup of black coffee. Not bad after an afternoon hike up the hill in a summer day with all your brothers and sisters and mother at different stages of melancholy and growing disarray of the hill, about the Japanese people who now owned the supermarket and let her get two loaves of bread and pay for only one, and Ms. Assumption seemed to have the exact measure of conversation she was willing to trade for the meal that would follow defined in her head. Or it might have been a sense of charity an effort to preserve our pride, although we didn t have any because price and hunger do not a shake make. At the chosen moment, she would get up and make the coffee. she made straight in the small teapot looking thing. Aluminum, shone into silver tones by her red hands, it had a few dings here and there. You could hear the urinating song of the hot water poured into the dark brown flannel filter: when the sound stopped, it was half way full and we knew that she would bring out the fresh bread already sliced in anticipation of our visit. She insisted, soft lard and honey were the best thing to put some meat on our bones. And even though lard felt coarse onto our tongues, we tried, dutifully and hoped with children s hearts that the honey would cover all the lard and that at no time, we would taste the awful thing. When you did, you could gulp down the golden black coffee and it erase any lard from our palates. Two slices of soft white bread and a cup of black coffee. Not bad after an afternoon hike up the hill in a summer day with all your brothers and sisters and mother at different stages of melancholy and growing disarray

PEQUENO CONTO TRISTE
09-06-2010

Parte Unica: Um fim de tarde que se confunde com poema

Fui caminhando com vontade de estar parada. Com vontade de torpor. Tudo que queriamos... Tudo que eu queria, era poder dizere: "Eu quero" nun tom choroso de entre-saias maternas. Isso nao era tudo.
Crisantemos - colhida ao acaso, a palavra, como flor que se oferece gentil e azul em campo de trigo...
Flor nunca vista ou cheirada.
Ha pouco interesse no colher da flor, e os olhos do padre dentro dos meus.
Era rosa e era um rosto.
Unissono.
A flor desconhcida, inviolada, e os olhos do padre dentro dos meus.
Era perfume, era, era palavra, era olhar de sorriso... Era eu.
Era vontade pura e simples de amar a flor, por puro e simples pudor de amar o padre.
Langorosa, clamorosa, sanguessuga, numerario. Sonrisal, estomago insensivel com nome frances de beleza chaa. No tinteiro brilha o begro, que quer o poeta seja a cor da noite, se nao os sentires... Martelam os sapos esverdeando ras.
Deuses do Egito. Coracao pequeno em peito de crianca.
Copo vazio querendo aparentar uisque quando e agua virgem, cheia de verde cloro e verdade - responsabilizar prefeito e DMAE pelo anti-lirismo imposto ao copo, a agua.
Garrafa de lixo furtivo e sonso. Porque ele povoa a mae das mesas e dos profetas, deserto de paixoes? Vontade de palavrao e de onomatopeia. Consciencia feliz de ignorancia quase absoluta, e o olhar do padre dentro do meu. Perfume das maos do padre dentro das minhas.
Aperto de mao serene o triste.
- Felicidades... (nao ha forca para exclamar)
Profundo e quente, triste tristeza, triste...
Morreu-te o pai
E bom ter pai?
Palavras do drama velho de criancas crescidas. Olhar azul-verde do padre dentro do meu, confuso e molhado, triste e perdoado. Encontra o padre a menina: E nom ter pai? - a palavra nao falada, bendita sejas, que morre na boca por repulsa a labios.
Morde o cao novo a perna do pai e morde o jaboti de elevada estatura a perna do pijama do menininho e filho Joao. A risada se mete entre o muro e a grama. A minhoca existe sob a terra. A agua dorme na mangueira vermelha e feliz. O cao dorme. O caroco cai molhado, intimo, quente e mais um pouco carco.
Revistas abertas, adolescentes fechadas, crancas abertas ainda e vidas fechadas em defese.
Morre a grama sob meus pes e morre o ar fresco sob o automovel.
Conversa o homem sem alianca. O muro large e inutil. Cospe o homen o carco careca. O cao sem cauda. A grama sem cabelos, grisalha no que lhe resta. O homem sem alianca. A casa sem chamine. A menina sem bonecas. A torneira sem funcao. A terra sem minhocas.
A Vida...
A casa branca de porta aberta. Muda televisao em abraco terno e eterno com mesa clara e mulher. Poltronas frias convidam pulmoes enfumacados. Chao branco onde tude o esclarecido e os pes ja nao podem hesitar.
Janela fechada aos olhos abertos e cegos. Morre a vida em comum. vivem atras do aco o homem e a mulher. E atras da casa, vivem mais tres caes de rabos cortados e nomes tolos. Vive o cabelo morno em cabecas de besouros.
Cafe e consciencia, perfume doce, faz dos olhos vermelhor um motivo triste do coracao. Lembranca de um livro que e morte - capa branca assassina de imagens e letras, ex-branca. Eleicoes para capo e vice-capo.
Supersticao abaixo da mesa santa..
Vontade de povoar os horizones e os olhos chorando sozinhos. Consciencia egoista de estar vivendo so, de estar comprando vidros verdes e inuteis. A duvida e a palavra boba flutuam na pobre pia cheia dagua.
Encher e tampar. Tampar e encher. Encher so depois. Construir o barco. Amassar a folha lentamente. Tudo foi levemente amassado e eu esvaziei a pia. Minhas maos molhadas seguraram leve a pedra fria - a pia com jeito de amor de mae irrita as minhas maos tao minhas. Molhadas e tao rosas, molhadas e tao minhas, molhadas, molhadas apenas.
Nao havia nem proposito nem acaso em minha calma infeliz, em meu passo super-rapido que nao faz barulho porque o salto e de borracha de qualidade. Meu inconveniente assobio e feliz e o desviar do meu corpo entre os corpos alheiras e para evitar a derrubada das matas infantis. Lotes e magotes.
De que? Nao, nao posso contar, seria aviltante e hipocrita, meu amigo Carlos... Supresa de depois do muro.
- Vou lhe contar o caso (pausa para fazer nada e parecer o acender de cigarro de palha inexistente e incriado) - poie e o que lhe digo, estando eu sentada e quieta, quieta na cadeira molenga aquela, vi o meio corpo da mulher negrea sobre o muro. Ela andava de tal forma que eu podia adivinhar suas pernas.
A crianca dorme na tarde sem modorra, e o poema nasce triste no coracao virgem de amor. A mulher nao caminha na morrinha e o seu olhar se perde na pequenez do caminh,
As pernas que eu pensei surgiram e com elas um pedaco de humana imundicie em galope curto e poeirente de infra-pes pretos e largos, ja grossos. Crianca negra, por ti nasceu o drama vazio, mao negra por ti choram palavras. Mulher suja, por ti escrevem e matam o tempo os homens ... (tomasses banho e os assassinos das horas seriam extintos).
Nome de doenca e chocolate. Palavra constante que manifesta um temor de desnudar o eu. "-Freud!" -"Presente". Sempre o homunculo seprado na horda incoerente de palavras... condade que sugere o argumento O rolo amarelo na cabeca da minha irma. E doce a palavra e mistica a musica...irmazinha fosses tu. Vontade inutil de ser minuscula, de me assinar nina e de estar em ninho. Lembranca incomoda de terra nos olhos. Lembranca dolorida de ferimento crianca no joelho da praca. Lembranca colorida do olho de padre. Lembranca sonora de disco enorme que e Bach, rodando sempre. Lembranca volumosa de elefante fordo em figura para sempre crianca. Vontade de preencher o vazio para sempre inviolavel.
Contato e o Congo Belga e o Congo Frances. Doce amor que me encanta e transporta. Resto de palavra evidente e sempre viva sem ser flor. Corpo doido de plantas uma tarde todas/ Experience apensas comunicada pela mulher insone. Pele sentida do sol nao pedido e irma tao dos tao forte da tristeza do padre que o futuro proximo se transforma em nada mais que tempo verbal.
A fabulazinha latina e irritante com moral obvia. Vontade de dialogo profundo e humano ou de fala que seja simples. Vontade de contar palavras e de conter os sosns. Vontate de participar de alguem e nao so de alguma coisa.
Vontade de auto-superacao e de auto-destruicao. Vontade de autinho e de roda, e de cair tonta e cansada. Vontade de nao pensar para nao querer matar. A insonia vem devagar e para manter os olhos abertos basta querer fecha-los. Vontade de rezar baixinho. De falar dolente para nao acordas o nosso senhor e os anjos todos. Vontade de nao chorar devagarinho. De ser pequenina. De escrever redondinho e benito. De ter um coelhinho. Vontade de abrir a janela triste para um campo verde.Vontade de escrever os dentes, os cabelos e a japona. De reformular propositos, de enxugar as maoes e de dobrar toalhas cheirando a linho limpo.
Procura calma e ordenada de papel. Remexer de fotografias e de gavetas. Risos de crianca ambivalente. Brinquedos transquilos e batraquios agitaods tudo na mesma lista azul-palida.
Lembranca de menina preta. Lembranca de abraco de crianca, de bola caiada de azul e de janela verdona de mau gosto. Lembranca de ignorancia leve e raramente infiel. Lembranca de banho alheio em tanque de lavar roupas. De balde cheio de agua em carapinha trancada e risonha. Lembranca de negra enorme e grave. lembranca de pera, de quatro gatos sobre o banco estreito. Lembranca de mesa suja e de casas pobre.
Nao mais vontades ou lembrancas. Apenas letras desuniformes sobre papel encontradas... Nao mais um cerebro e sim um estar bovino. Olhos parados. Um ser vaca sem moscas ou sal. Olhos mortos. Um nao ter forcas mole. de desgostar do radio longe. Um querer fraco de nao escutar. Um querer fraco e longe de qualquer coisa muito vaga. Um confuso olhar azul-verde chora dentro do meu. Um ser apenas. Um evitar de palavras para nao ferir a alma que adormece. Um sentor morno de rezar baixo.
E o ressonar silente da crianca culpada.

A escolha
09-06-2010

Ela passeando por entre moitas de paralelepipedos. O dia de sol de nuvens, se extendendo por entre a casa.
Seus olhas sempre de espanto com o sentor tao calmo sobre os seus ombros. Gostava de por la ficar ate que a noite sempre triste chegasse com seus ternos olhos de escuridao.

A lata de sardinhas apresentando-se-lhe como sendo uma das mais fieis donzelas do Snhor. E para o criador ela estava so. Entregara-se a palavra por pertencer a ela o seu desempenho na vida.

Ante a vergonha de nao negar a vida a menininha descobre um mundo em cada folha muda/ Ela e no mundo, como e fome constante de qualeur coisa que desconhece. Aflige-se por estar sempre longe de estrelas. E quando cre que brilham sempre e que so pode enxerga-las no escuro frio, entao ela teme por sua propria morte e aquela das estrelas.

Depois de estar havia muito em sua casa, ela desfeita foi novamente a rua para que o sol tornasse alados os seus sorrisos agora apagados de tristezas em caixa mofada. Chegou mesmo a pensar que os flacidos transeuntes pudessem ter fim.

Houve um porem que se diluiu nas aguaas do rio proximo, acontecendo um porem de vida de menina. Ate mesmo pode crer em fadas azuis que chegavam dos mais distantes horizontes. Todas azuis, como ja disse, e com poderes irmaos. Fora morta a crenca por motivos muito doloroes. Mas nos sonhozinhos da crianca maior elas sempre voariam, morrendo somente com os irmaos das menininhas de tres anos de idade.

Estava no seu velho entreacaso de vida e nem em laranjas ela encontrava a melodia perdida. Mostrava-se o que se faziua em seus cadernos verdes e acreditaca que a morte seria mais lenta e agradavel se aconecessem como ocorrem com as lampadas. Bem sabia que pouco entenderiam se ela falasse, mas bastava que dissesse asneiras, que ja prestavam atencao. E esta certeza de que ainda a viam e ouviam que a aproximava dos homens.

Estava proxima a hora de acender a lua. Ja soavam os tambores do mar raso. A menina desfeita ainda corria estradas molhadas e queria muito encontrar um corrossel. Procurou gravar seus mortos olhos no sol. Ela de nome com dois esses, tenis nos pes e cancao grande e bonita, quis alcancar com os bracos. mas arvores muito velhas, deviam por dever e destino, salvaguardar as manhas cada vez novas, e assim o fizeram.

E aconteceu no atraves de portas idealmente inuteis. Mas chovia tanto que num pode ouvir a orquestra havia pouco chegada. Como tanto chovera, os violinos molhados, pouco menos do que as maos dos musicos, choravam tempos inteiros.
Agradava-lhe ver este espetaculo pois sabia que os risos, os prantos e as musicas naquela noite nao existiriam. Entretanto, la ela ficaria, por nao saber partir.
Por horas olhou os corpos dos musicos silencioses.
Um velho pacote de milho esquecido por alguem na porta do edificio. Passou alguem por ali e falava acerda da dinamica dos seres mortos.
Os olhos de um antigo homem obrigaram-na a soltar sua triste voz pelas montanhas. Pedia a ele sua pequena verdade, ainda que nada tivesse a ver com adele. Pois foi assim, deste entao, como para muito alem da cidade, das montanhas, estao quase sempre os vales. Mas.

grocking
09-06-2010

To totally get it, gut gills, and gourd

love note to urban dictionary
09-06-2010

Dear Urban, may I call you Urban?
I love you,
Nina

Nina
09-06-2010

you know how sometimes out of boredom or self centered curiosity you might look yourself up somewhere. well there is this really cool dictionary on line, urban dictionary. I love it so much I wrote a love note to it, a few minutes ago. Thats how much I love that dictionary. We re kind of on the same level of language. anyway I was looking up stuff that I needed for a graphics project and I though shit, I will look up nina, right, figuring it would give me back some shit about la pinta and l santa maria, dang, i was totally and nicely surprised, check it out:

nina
probably the coolest person alive. has two of the best friends in the whole world. and everyones jealous of her so they have to make up rumors to get ahead in the social standing at our school. has a [jackass] of an ex bf, and is happy they re not together anymore. in conclusion, shes pretty damn awesome.
We all love Nina because shes an extremely talented person


so... he he of course i have many jackass ex bfs so i could qualify even there... huhhh ive been out of school for a while which probably means that this is not my personal definition of nina, but hey why not, after all there must be some truth in a name...

Another homework not assigned bites the dust
09-06-2010

I am an expert:
at therapy
at laughing
at being funny
at cooking at high on any stove
at making brazilian cake
at talking to people
at organizing thigns and people

I have lost
my eyeglasses when I was eight
my contact lenses when I was fourteen or fifteen
my reading glasses a number of times
my magnetic clipons sunshades in the bathroom of northwoods mall
my friend Tron
a few friends along the way
all my cassette tapes on my trip from the USA to Brazil, in 1974
a pair of shoes at a hotel in florida
my green card with Delta


Signs of winter:
the tree barks turn grey
the humming birds no longer come to our feeders
the river is empty of floaters and other humans in boats
the squirrells get furrier
I start wearing long sleeves and socks
the rain comes around without thunder
there are no flowers in the flower pots
birds of many kinds are gone

what is inside my body
a bunch of blood
some very vital organs
hopefully some good shit
a good amount of piss and vinegar
a well oiled machine
a good heart
an appetite for life
a lot of energy to keep conquering my little everests

things people have said to me:
you are clean
you are smart
you are cool
i like you
i love you
that they ave hhad multiple abortions
that they have had one abortion
that I offend them
That I hurt their feelings

things to take on the journey
coloring pencils
pencil sharpener
exacto knife
a sketch pad
a kneading eraser
some good pens and pencils
a couple of clean underwear, one or two pairs of socks
a windbreaker, a blanket
a water keg
a book to read, it has to be sfot cover and thin but contain a lot of shit, like Pessoa
a back pack
some prozac, if necessary
a watch
a pot, a pan,
a chicken to lay me eggs
a little cow for milk
a basket to gather berries
toilet paper
hand cleaner
a tent
some boots
mosquito repellant
snake repellant
picture of the only 5 poisonous snakes in the state
a small camera
a hankerchief or two
pants with lots of pockets



things i have forgotten
how to sing in the shower
to wait patiently for others to order shit for me
its hard to remember isnt it?
parts of me, maybe it was a good thing
I forgot how to suffer for deep wounds
I forgot the names of many movies and songs that I have loved for a long time

things to make a list of

sometimes I think of making a bucket list
a list of my favorite music
a list of my relatives
a list of my favorite foods
a list of my favorite colors to wear
colors to paint
colors to look at


word: forgotten

The forgotten only exist in the minds of those who have made the choice to forget. They do not choose to be left behind or outside another s awareness, thus to be forgotten is to be victimized by an abandoner, a naysayer, an executioner. A question does come to mind: the forgotten, despite being forgotten still do exist dont they? In a different circle, it is true, but to be forgotten is not to be denied existence, but instead, presence of awareness. The example that comes to mind is the holocaust and its victims. There are some people who actually try to deny the very existence of the worlds most horrendous tragedy. By denying its reality, such people are trying perhaps in the most desperate sense, to FORGET that the holocaust has ever perpetrated. Hence the revolt one feels before those who claim that the holocaust never existed: the attempt to deny it equals an attempt to forget it = causes a reduction of the only honor left to those who perished and or suffered in the hands of the nazi bastards: the truth of the heinous crimes commited against them.


3:
I AM AN EXPERT
WHEN THOSE AROUND ME ARE NOT WILLING TO TAKE THE RESPONSIBILITY OF ORDERING THE SMALL CHAOS OF MY DAILY LIFE, THEN I AM THE EXPERT THAT CRASH LANDS AND WALKS UNSCATHED.

I HAVE LOST
OVER MANY YEARS I HAVE LOST COUNT OF HOW MANY PAIRS OF GLASSES AND LENSES I HAVE MISPLACED. I WONDER IF I WOULD RATHER NOT SEE, AS I AM BLIND AS BAT WITHOUT MY SEEING CONTRAPTIONS.

SIGNS OF WINTER
WHEN I LIVED IN THE CITY I KNEW THE CHANGES IN SEASON BY THE NUMBERS ON MY AC/HEAT THERMOSTAT, IT WAS ONLY AFTER MOVING TO THE COUNTRY SIDE THAT I LEARNED SLOWLY TO SEE THE ANIMALS, PLANTS, WATER AROUND ME AND RECOGNIZE THE SIGNS OF WINTER AS A DIFFERENT LANGUAGE FROM THE SIGNS OF FALL OR SPRING

WHAT IS INSIDE MY BODY
EVERYTHING INSIDE MY BODY IS CONTAINED BY THE MIRACLE OF MY SKIN AND A BUNCH OF CHEMICALS, MAYBE A TOUCH OF THE HEAVENLY FOR GOOD MEASURE

THINGS PEOPLE HAVE SAID TO ME:
THINGS THAT PEOPLE HAVE SAID TO ME HAVE FADED IN IMPORTANCE AS I THE PICTURE I HAVE OF MYSELF HAS BECOME CLEARER

THINGS TO TAKE IN THE JOURNEY
WHAT AN EXCITING THING, TO BE ABLE TO CHOSE THOSE THINGS TO TAKE IN THE JOURNEY, WITH THE THOUGHT THAT BESIDES MY THOUGHTS, THEY WILL KEEP ME COMPANY

THINGS I HAVE FORGOTTEN
AMONG THE THINGS I HAVE FORGOTTEN HERE AND THERE, THE ONES I MISS THE MOST ARE MY DREAMS.

THINGS TO MAKE A LIST:
OF ALL THE THINGS I CAN THINK THAT IT WILL IMPORTANT TO MAKE A LIST OF, I THINK PEOPLE THAT I HAVE LOVED, THAT I LOVE AND THAT I WILL MOST LIKELY LOVE FOR A LONG TIME WOULD BE A GOOD ONE.



1. generate a list from any of the above (CHECK)

2. Pick any one word above and write a paragraph (CHECK)

3. Write a single line about each item

the transgender girlfriend and other maddenings
09-05-2010

it was already around noon and sebastian had stopped by. I wasnt sure that he had meant to because I saw him walking by the front gate and hesitate, pulling the radio flyer wagon. he had added some apps to the wagon. taller sides slightly wider than the original walls. it looked brand new. I saw him stopping and pulling out a heavy short chain and he seemed to be trying to find a way to secure it to the gate. so she gets up and goes to him: wassup? his faded blue shirt is wet with his sweat but his hair looks nice, in between short and not so short. just stopped to see you and i was going to tie the wagon to your gate. well bring it in, what is the big deal. so he does and we stand by the counter, both looking outside. i can smell him. he has a peculiar scent that i can never quite find offensive, nor attractive. maybe it is mental illness. maybe it is diet. it is not bad, it is just his. i wonder if his closet smells like that too. i comment on his tan: he looks like a fresh baked bread from portugal. back yoard shit, he says, dismissing it. I have never found him delicious. still dont. i have a degree of affection for him, and a PHD in acceptance. when i first met him he was pretty stable. he dressed well then and had girlfriends. usually women decades older than him and this was way before the cougar thing became more popular. I met a few. One I swear was a transgender. but he never said anything, neither did i because i figure that once you transform your gender, you dont really want to be talking about what you are not longer, right. the whole point being to become what you now are, and really who goes around talking about what they are not. Maybe poets, maybe criminals on death row. Her neck scarf bothered me. so did her hair style. everything was too much for the time of the day or the type of shit they were doing, or the type of town they lived in, or the type of restaurants they frequented. we were to go on to a picnic once the three of us and she stopped at my office and towering over me, she told me in a deep voice that sebastian didnt feel like picnicking today. and that was that. i thought she looked at me with guys eyes, and i wanted to brush out of the way all the hair she had pulled onto and around her face, covering a good 2/3 of her facial area. The purple gauze scarf tied right over an adams apple. Anyway, it was a brief encounter, a brief conversation; even though they live together, and I have come to the house a few times, like the time when he lost his eyesight to diabetes, it was temporary and he said all he could see was the color red. no pics, no nothing, it was another ten years or so before i saw her again. they were eating at earth fare and she had the same old hairdo, the same scarfed neck. She looked at sebastian with guys eyes. he sat in front of her and looked vulnerable, almost like a little boy behaving himself, when he eats with me he looks hungry and somewhat angry. she had gone to england, he said. for a spell. how long a spell one never knows, but a spell just seems like more than a couple of weeks or even a month. to me it is more like a quarter, or 4 months. so he sometimes feels alone, and on the way to pick water up and Food Lion on his radio flyer wagon, he thought he would stop to see me. thanks man. and then i remembered that we had not parted in the best of terms. he worked for me for a couple or 3 months and eveyday he repeated that he loved his job. but most of the time he was mostly sleeping in the freaking carolina heat, and not doing anything. so i fired him. he cried and said our friendship was more important to him than the job. as i always get when people cry in front of me, i sat and waited for it to be over. one cannot console the guy thats losing his job, especially when one is doing the firing,right? so he finished crying and said that he was going to complete the month. he liked whole things, not unfinished things. Like moving the trophy pieces into their proper bin: if the whole box didnt fit then he would leave it out in receiving. we ended up with an enormous island of boxes, open, unopened, sealed, re-sealed, copious amounts of information written in extra neat handwriting because that was for the world to see, you see. See I did that we eventually had this massive wall of cardbox boxes graffited with neat incomprehensible messages mimicking competence with no access to the inventory. then he had asked me for a meeting: we wanted me to stop buying shit. thats when i really knew that i not only could be his friend for real, nor could i keep him on the payroll. he was bloating out of his personal madness spilling onto mine. not a good combo. so i talked to him for a while and he gave fred some ideas of how to resolve the problems we were having with our phones, because sebastian has everything figured out to its very final possibilities. he told me yesterday that he is going to write a story for me. just for you he said as i failed to see the value of it because i remembered having this same conversation on february 28, 1995.

dumb question, sad answers
09-05-2010

i told sebastian to take a guess and tell me what clintons religion was. he looked baffled. but didnt argue. he half said he didnt think he could guess. so i gave him two guesses, and he says sofly: jewish - jewish, really, why?.he is smart. coming out of his mouth sounding like something in between a strike and a retreat. so i guess he doesnt want to play, but i insist. Budhist. Catholic. Born Again. Hindu. there is nothing else. after a few comeons, he says if he had a white shirt on he would say he was a Mormon. Well, he did. except he was under the glass table right now, out of sight to him and quite visible to me. And he was. Really was. Not any more. Thats when i started wondering if he wore white shirts out of habit, out of Habit like the catholic nuns and friars i had known, or if sebastian the pragmatist was color blind. A piercing sadness entered the office and I walked out, leaving them behind.

writing exercises
09-05-2010

an observation
an overheard conversation
Lists
Longings
Your response to a piece of music
A rough draft of a letter
Names for characters
Quotations from what you are reading
The piece of your mind youd like to give so-and-so
an idea for a story
a memory
a dream
a few lines of a poem
a fantasy conversation
titles of things your are never going to write
Something else

More writing exercises
09-05-2010

things on which I am an expert
things I have lost
Signs of winter
what is inside my body
things people have said to me
what to take on the journey
things i have forgotten
things to make lists of

1. generate a list from any of the above

Pick any one word above and write a paragraph

3. Wrie a single line about each item

Thirds writing execises
09-05-2010

this journal is...
my mother used to have...
there is something about the way he...
the house we lived in....
in this dream i was...
she got out of the car...
the first I want in the morning is...

GROK
09-05-2010

understand in the gut as well as in the head

Etude #1 an overheard conversation
09-05-2010

the young woman raised her voice somewhat and told her to say put. Im standing with my back to the one that wouldnt stay put as i watch the mother walk away. for 6 linear feet she deliberately examined the different packages of macaroni and cheese. from the corner of my right eye i see that the little one is doing her best to stand up. one leg is already out and to extract the other fat little leg, she has to bend over herself. as she does is, i put my hand on her back and give her my best foreign accented cooing which is the only one i know: you dont want to come out now, mommy said to stay put.. she wants to look at me so she stops moving the fat little leg to start moving her very round head. two big black eyes with enormous eyelashes, the wet lips slightly opened around a few little teeth and she is not moving any more. you are so very pretty. the lips part even more. she knows pretty is good. as the mother makes it back to the cart. i smell cigarrettes and perfume. she lets the words thank you squeeze out of her pursed lips and i turn away from them. I have no time to take you to the hospital, she accuses.

Etude #2 - An Observation on flipflops
09-05-2010

I saw him this morning. Unusually early for his drunken sunday mornings, he was lighting up the barbecue pit. Two actually. One significantly older than the other. I stood back, by the brown recliner, so that we wouldnt see me watching. he comes down the steps fast. i figure he is still sober. his green shirt is lose and he has jeans on. nothing unusual about that. thats when i see his feet. Five years and 7 months and this is the first time I spotted Zennys feet. I get closer to the window. He has flipflops on. Never would have guessed. When i saw his house, he showed me pots, pans, bottles, clothes, bathrooms, tools, records, plants, knicknacks, maps, telephones, faucets, wooden floors, rugs, the two bathroom sinks, the double kitchen sinks, you name it, he showed it to me. i wouldnt have missed flipflops... They must be a new thing in his current life. With the new job and all, flipflops can become a sunday cooking attire. Pulled pork a la flipflops. Chicken smothered in flipflop sauce. By two he was no longer walking fast and the old shoes were back on.

Etude #3 - Lists
09-05-2010

I turn the next page of my agenda. it is on the back of a panoramic shot of somewhere in italy, the blue is too blue. so much so that it nearly steals part of my happyness with the nex clean page. Nearly though is far enough right now. I choose my pen carefully. black will do, although i would have preferred and fat writing blue ball point pen. someone walked off with it though. So i make sure that Im not going to cover up any previous engagement. there arent too many. i generally fly by the seat of my pants which are really my husbands shorts. so i start with
1. followup meeting. give it about 30 minutes,
2. estimates for the ship builder in Florida.
3. Place order for the degreaser.
4. call supplier about faulty vinyl rack
5. call nancy
6. call holt
7. think about order flow plan
8. renew drivers license

Etude #4 - Longings
09-05-2010

a quiet room in the morning so that i can ease my soul back into its body without the buttery smell of pancakes and hash browns. an even quieter room in the afternoons, so that i can truly sit myself with ease on the swing under the oldest oak tree in the yard and hope against all hope that today mosquitoes wont bite my hands, bees wont sting me lest I crumble like an old biscuit left in the rain so that i can indulge in idle thinking. a truly dark room for the night. so that i wont be able to tell my floaters from the dark walls. that when i open my eyes at 3:33 am i dont see the chairs, the clothes, the cheap fans and chandeliers, the dusty books, the trees outside outlined by the spot light from hell that someone before me hung on the poor old cypress, every decade a little taller, every decade a little safer, away from my murderous hands. a glass of warm milk with sugar right before bedtime, to make my head all warm and fuzzy inside and out. the possibility to see that last drop of red wine at the bottom of a bottled divided among the four of us, plus my sister.

Etude #5 Response to a piece of music
09-05-2010

i cringed because he was saying it so carefully and yet so hesitantly: dance macabbe. with a very long macaaabbe he totally dropped the r. there was no room to tell him to say it otherwise, because he sound so final: macaaabbe. I shut up and drove on. they played it like any other high school band would have played. nothing to think twice about, but it caught me by surprise. i had this image of a devil character, dressed in red and black, running after the ballerina, his short but sharp horns preceding his every move...sometimes pairing up with his arms that are more like daggers than arms. as the musics pace increased, the devils leaps were higher and more menacing.... i wanted to go see it somewhere, the whole thing, not just the band few lines, right then, right now. Ah the innocent curiosity of the living fool! did you know this piece? Not yet, not yeat darling

Etude #6 - rough draft of a letter
09-05-2010

last night i dreamed of you. it is unclear to me what you were doing or saying but i could see you froma distant point. i woke up with a funny feeling, that maybe i had neglected you for too long. so here i am. naked (not really) to aks you to not hold that against me. you see i have this difficulty of coming out of my head to be with people, even those that i love, like you. so i may think about coming out of my head to talk to you, i imagine you sitting at your dinner table, and imagine that we talk about things that are in your mind and in my mind, but then i settle for the satisfaction of the thought, not the reality of talking to you, telling you how much i really do love you or hearing how much you do really love me. sometimes even, i will start my letters to you, and feel unease about all my nakedness of sould, so i will stop halfway and promise on the last line that i will write some more later on in the week, and i promised myself, knowing that i am lieing, that i will continue the letter. i have a whole file of letters like that. so i can only hope that i will finish this one.l that will put this one in an envelope. that i will buy postage for this letter. that i will bring it to the post office. that i will drop it into the stamped mail slot. that i will make sure that the letter fell inside the box and then i will hope that you will read the letter and that you will not weep for me, for you forgive me yet once again.

Etude #7 - Names for Characters
09-05-2010

Laisha, Eden, Sebastian, Clinton, Jaquie, Londa, Runno, Bij, each one of them and no tonly these started coming up on their one. They somehow do not follow my thoughts or ideas, but flow onto their own. Laisha watches me more than says things, Eden is still in his cocoon. He might be a she. I dont know yet. Sebastian is my poor dear friend who does allow me to bully him somewhat. Clinton is an imaginary reserved, capable, affectionate young man. Jaquie is a lost little soul looking for her place on earth, only she doesnt know she already has it, londa is black and strong and somewhat disrespectful to me,Runno is a clerk at an office but he has aspirations of being a writer - he is thin and particular about a lot of things, Bij, is really someone i know and care about so he is not a real character but i use this nma Bij because i dont want him to want to burn my manuscriots again, or worse yet, erase my hard drive. Uh hum.. it aint easy to live with all this noise

Etude #8 Piece of mind for soandso
09-05-2010

oh yeah. even though i dont hold back a whole lot, there are things id like to tell you, M"tilda on account of you having used a large part of the air that i breathe. so, M"tilda, i dont think you are a piece of shit. a piece of shit is a perfectly fine representation of an excrement. Excrement has its own purpose, mission in excrement life, so to say that you are piece of it, would be demeaning to the excrement life. No you are not a piece of shit, you just act like one. For principles which I am sure you cannot begin to comprehend, because you are so engrossed in your fucking hairy belly button, i did take care of you when you most needed. i dont know that what i did for you was what you wanted from me. But hey, when i was hungry, but i mean fucking hungry like having no food at all to eat, i knew that I wanted FOOD, so Ms. Eve cooked her big soup cauldron in her dark,filthy kitchen, putting all the rotten shit she was given or stolen in it : I ate the fucking soup. Was it good? NO. Was it TASTY? NO Was is nutricious? I doubt it. But it was filling my stomach with something hot in the freezing nights of Porto Alegre. did i ever, but i mean, ever, M"tilda even think about blaming Ms. Eve for the shitty food I gulped down and sometimes vomited back? NO. and why not, M"tilda? Maybe because I knew this little thing called gratitude. Maybe it is not so little afterall like in that one story about the dudes that were cured or helped by Jesus, the main Dude, only one went back to say thanks man, right? I dont wanna get all rpeachy and spiritual on you but the thing is, it is not right for people to receive whats given to them and spit on those that give, because all they got was quasi-rotten soup. Get it? I hope that one day you do, because it sucks man. You have robbed yourself of a very simple, yet difficult thing: love... you ask for it, but you dont take it, because its never large enough for your gargantuan midget appetite. Ive paid my share of your shrink bills and i imagine that you gotta do something for yerself. i like to say yerself M"tilda. So quit your whining (Primal Fear) and I dont mean it in any overly mean way, just really, i mean it man, i have given you everything that i knew to give and all you did over the years was to accuse me of not giving you enough. So, M"tilda, good riddance. Good fucking r-i-d-d-a-n-c-e . Please know that I am happier wihout you hanging around, hoping against hope that something would be different somehow without any effort on your part. Good r-i-d-d-a-n-c-e to your double faced performances around me. Good r-i-d-d-a-n-c-e to your web of lies and shit, that got so complicated you couldnt have the same family under one roof for fear that you would get busted. SO, there, you are so fucking busted now M"tilda, you didnt get what you wanted and now you really cant keep blaming me for not giving it to you, because, quite simply, I aint in giving to you mode no mo
Love,
Martina

Etude # 9 - An Idea for a Story
09-05-2010

actually two:
there this prostitute I forgot her name, but I have some notes on the red composition book, and she has a child, it is a boy. the boy lives with her in the bordello room and either he is curious to identify his father among all her mothers clients, or she is trying to figure out whose child the boy might be. It is about 3/5 done, I think.
Want to find it and clean it up.

the other one, I started writing and the fucking computer blinked, and poof there goes my story.. it is about this dude who wrote a really stupid tacky opening paragraph for a story he wrote it on a piece of toilet paper during a break at his work. He is in love with this paragraph and I was at the point where he had gone home to write the story and quit his job because he knew that this was it..the big story

Etude #10 - A memory
09-05-2010

She had to go to dinner with her father. A doctor of sorts. He didnt want her to be a lesbian, so M"tilda wasnt allowed to go with. It really sucked, because M"tilda had been curious about Doctor Beluga for a while now. He was stern, he was a womanizer, he yelled at people during consultation, he was broken, he didnt have any patients. Too many rumors for M"tilda and she had wanted to see him with her own two myopic brown eyes. Not this time. As things sometimes go, Blitta comes a calling. M"tilda hadnt met her before, but she had heard about her. She had had heart surgery which was unheard of, and had all her teeth removed, surgically. Cruel shit, She found her to be relatively friendly. sure, have a seat. they smoked a few cigarrettes and M"tilda starts to scratch her lumbar spot. Blitta wants to know whats wrong, nothing its some kind of weeping sore that itches like hell when im stresssed and im totally stressed because thats how i stay alive. let me see it. Lay down here. M"tilda does it because when anyone or anything speaks to her with amount of kindness or simply without harshness, she is paralized. a tiny bird before the snake has more will power at such times and you know they always end up in the snakes belly right? M"tilda sees herself down on the couch, over Blittas bony legs and feels Blittas hands lifting her skirt. Oh, M"tilda this must very sore. Nah, its just the itch thats bothersome. Thats when the door opens and she Dr Bekugas daughter crashes in. Man, you know when you drank entirely too much and the vomit comes out of you without you wanting to do it at all? Bam, acid, cutting, burning, rotten, up into the back of your nostrils, killing you, making you cry and shit yourself, thats how she entered the room. M"tilda could hear her own voice thin, almost tinny, i wasnt doing anything. but it was too late for anything. she grabbed her bookbag on the floor on her side of the bed and took a cab with Blitta. Yeah,sure, we can go to your house. And her cigarrettes - she had a whole half carton left she couldnt forget that.

Etude #11 - a Dream
09-05-2010

Woah man, do I have dreams for you. They are fucking crazy, all the time. Like im dropping acid or something. except they happen on their own, you know. I brush my teeth, waterpick the shit out of them, lay me down to sleep, and in no time at all, here we are. The most colorful shit you ever dreamed. Whoa, holy shit! There are enormous portions of red dirt, red ground, there are manatees and rhinocerousses, there are tiny babies, so tiny you can barely seem them, in baby carriages that are so big you can barely push them. and they roll around like a squirrell when it is hit by your car, and you walk with a bunch of people. they neither follow you, nor lead anywhere they just move with you in this noiseless, endless parade of places that I am yet to see and places too well known to me on many levels. some of them i totally grock, man, some i write down and then months later i read the stuff and think i must have really fucking exceeded my daily alotment of prozac. when i wake up I am happy because the dream is funny in its own way, because the colors make me so happy, almost like when im painting a new picture and my fingers rub the pigment into an already there color: I look away for a moment and look again amd there it is, a perfect harmony of tones and undertones and i feel good about it, like i feel good about putting my two feet on the ground, knowing that I have one more day left of sanity.

Etude 12 = A few lines of a poem
09-05-2010

an acorn on the bathroom sink, toilet paper roll emptied, my green throw on the floor.

the guest room has been turned into a fort
and i believe my side lost the war

the bodies of boardgames, books, glitter pens
cover what earlier today had been seashore

a granddaughters visit

dell has had a seizure, Tegretol?
09-03-2010

so, this freaky thing has happened again. im on a roll: the words come together like their own little magic trick going on and i have something like 400 words and bam, the computer winks, blinks, no sounds, just a quick seizurely moment and all the words are gone. Fucking disappeared. Arrow back, arrow forward and nothing.. the small blank squarely faces me: 09 03 2010 MM-DD-YYYY Title: Post..... like it is innocent in any possible way..it happened last week on wordpress when i had written part of story with about 1500 words or so, and i was beginning to find the story entertaining, when all of a sudden the thing disappears in front of my eyes... gone forever.gone without explanation, without appararent glitch.. I just dont feel like telling the story all over again, because i didnt really LIKE the guy that was creating itself. I guess that the only way to avoid my dells little seizures, such minor disasters, is to do the saving private thoughts or ryans, as i go...Genius against electronic device, thats what

comatose into adultform
09-03-2010

i found myself thinking about subjetive time. i was very young when i first heard about it. The idea stayed with me. so i got thinking because this is already September 3, 2010 and it seems like the other day it was christmas and i wasnt going to the midnight mass because i didnt want to drive in the dark roads of my country side area by myself. now it is getting to be even closer to Christmas 2010 than 2009. then i remembered how so very long it took me to turn 10, then 11, then 12, then 13, then 14, then 15, oh my god will i ever grow up and leave, then 16, then 17, then 18, when you are still waiting with the tiny baggage of small freedoms conquered, like going alone to the jazz library, or checking out books at the grown up library, then 19, then 20, and life just seemed to stand still with no plans to get anywhere. the weather changed, the clothes god older, the hair grew or got cut short, but, life just didnt blow out and happen. the endless wait of youth. reams of notebooks half filled. score cards smudged by food or drink. pieces of music scribled on books that didnt belong to me and without knowing im slipping into becoming a parent. The time coma, thats the time when you are growing other people, learning what very real fears are, learning now that crying wont do it at all precisely when you feel that a good cry might be the only solution left. So you learn not to cry anymore and you put yourself in autopilot and you suffer inside and you are brave outside and grow the people like you said you wanted to do and you find out what pain really, really is. each time your heart sinks is just as horrible as the first. it doesnt get any better. only thankfully, youre in a time coma so you are neither in a hurry nor wanting to slow down. this lasts about 15 years, i think. in my case, maybe only 8. i decided to wake up and start fixing the chicken coops, the cats beds, the duck ponds, the suirrel cages, the roach motels. and fix them i did. no hammer, no nails, no super glue, no reading glasses required. just a wake up move and bam, there i was in my coveralls, no socks, a bandana holding back my curly dark hair and started clawing my way our of the suburb. Not an easy task. The commute alone can put you right back in the sleeping bag and you almost miss the fact that youre back in your coma. If not for an eventual foreign movie, one fucking foreign song that godonlyknows got played on the radio by accident or destiny, you step on the coffee table without shoes or socks and you dance. you dance for the first 3 years of your life. then you dance some more, for the next 5 or 7 and take a drink of water to dance for the other 15 years, man... the ones that you missed so many, things and people, words, songs, all of that left outside in the suitcases that never boarded the bus to somehwere far away... So you dance and you laugh and Laish smiles at you and tells you that you could dance in the carnaval parade. and you know that anyone that had decided to wake up from a come would necessarily have a lot of dancing to do, so you smile back but she doesnt know why - you do. After that, what else is there to do, if not go to the small library and research all of the foreign books you can find, and read them. read them in a foreign language. Well put, well put. youre a foreigner, pining for your foreign stories in a foreign country and forced by iron proddings of examples, anxieties and exegesis to drink from the cup of the translated word: sometimes you can almost hear what it would have sounded like. you dont weep because you have learned by now that it does no good to go around with blotched face and red eyes. what is, is. so i read all that i could, borges, marquez, llosa, neruda... later on, saramago... it almost hurt.. and when i traveled back i would visit the second hand book stores and grab all the old favorites i came across. i read them and reread them, and caressed them and organized them with serious economy. no sharing, no lending, no excessive manipulation. and they sat there, in their own little comas, while i sat downstairs, full of private joy for owning them. the view of the bookshelf is comforting. I no longer go there everyday. I look at it from my bedroom door. i see their backsides. they say nothing. they can wait until the moment i decide to go upstairs and pick them up. not now. because right now, time is going so fast that im afraid i wont know until it is too late and i got no more time left to ask and to answer. so i try not to waste time re-reading, re-dacting, responding emails, reassuring friends that need therapy, not reassurance, revisiting my own stories, regurgitating my pecadillos, reforming the sense of guilty, remembering old wants, readjusting needs. Nawhh... That would be entirely too much time... even though it might seem like little time, because i would pass by fast, with the speed of today and not that of my adolescence. So i dont. I laugh when I find it laughable. I cry when I find it cryable. I hug and I kiss black women that smell like the sunshine. I hold the hands of black men who smile down at me with 400 year old eyes, i speak softly to small children telling them how wbeautiful and smart they are - and they are - until they see me and know that i am there - flying by their slow life with only enough time to let them know how great they are, so that they will never go wanting for such.

Cacophanous fifty inch TV no more
09-02-2010

Last night the big TV went kaput. I am so happy it is not drollig. When I grow up I will not a TV in my hous. I am hoping that it will be so expensive to fix it, that we wont do it. I am hoping that it will take so long to fix it that we will forget that we wanted it in the first place. I am hoping that when fixed, it will promptly break down again so that we get upset and refuse to get it fixed ever again. I am hoping and hoping that it will shut up and close its one fifty inch eye of many pictures because when it is blind: I am quiet. I can hear the cat outside on the porch when he jumps from the bench onto the wooden floor. I can hear the small creaking sounds of the house adjusting itself to the temps inside and out. I can hear the soft hum of the air conditioning. I can hear the slightly higher tone of the very quiet two door refrigerator. I can hear the river outside as it pushes things against the dock. I can hear crickets and i know they are outside. I can hear the nails of the next door dog slipping on my back door steps. This wonderful cacophony of my home sounds is exactly peaceful, exactly welcoming, exactly familiar, exactly comforting, exactly wihtout news, exactly in tune with the darkness of the night, exactly in harmony with the defective spot light which turns itself on and off as the light bulb gets too hot and then cools down, it is exact perfection in the room where the fifty inch TV is at lst, very kaput.

I was wrong, or a case of saudades
09-02-2010

i get a sense of good palpable reality when i see the dated spelled out at the top of the WSJ. The fact that this is todays paper somehow and somewhere makes my life somewhat more coherent. then of course i have moved on to the web life with everyone else and i realize that there are no dates stamped on most sites. Dateless pages. I dont know if what I am reading belongs to today. To tomorrow. To several days before, or several days after where I am, but meant for some economic reason, to be seen today.. But I was wrong... I checked back... there it was.. it is indeed September 2, 2010, 81 degrees farenheit.

of circus and rocks
09-02-2010

I got thinking about the circus. thats because don told me about an experiment done with MB car that went upside down through a special tunnel all thanks to the centrifugal force. then we thought about the motorcycles that run inside the big globe. they smell they are loud and the riders seem to spend so much time going up only half way, that by the time they do the whole turn you almost lost interest. I knew it could be done because we used to tie a rope to a zinc bucket half full with water and gyrate it as fast as our little arms would allow and the miracle of the centrifugal force was there in all its simplicity letting us turn the zinc pail on its side and never lose a drop of water. don had turned a glass with a one dollar bill at the bottom, onto a pot with water and found out that the dollar bill would come out dry only if you didnt let the glass burp on the way in. details are hell. so i got thinking about the circus that i liked so much. Not the three ring circus. i never though it was fair to look at all three things at once because you would miss either one, or two or worse yet, all three shows. But they had those, following the parede through the city where you would see the elephant. The elephant looked like a slum person to me. He was not clean, had shabby gear on him I guess to make it look fantastic, but it didnt work out. The size, though was something to behold as he walked down the streets shitting and not mind it at all. The clowns were stupid and i could pretty much tell what they were going to do next, but i liked their colors. lions, bear, tigers, magicians, those would go by and the more you saw the more you wanted to go the circus. We did. My most favorite part was the trapeze. They flew, in the quiet that befell the audience, me included. You knew that they had trained and that they would not miss the other persons hands, but you didnt dare talk. Eyes fixed on their pinkish leotards, I held my breath and imagined that it was me. I could fly, even if it was for a small moment and then hang for another moment, secure in the insecurity of the whole thing. I hated when the band would strike to underline the danger we had just seen. Like it mattered. Like it was necessary... It didnt but i suppose the musicians had to justify their presence there too. I felt that the trapezists were somewhat put down when they came back facing backwards atop a white horse galloping around the ring. That was stupid. No, I couldnt do it. I wouldnt do that, and how could they make the trapeze artists, the best of the whole troupe, ride a horse standing up facing backwards. Plain asinine. Sawdust. Ropes. Patched tarp. Stripes where it ought to be waves. Wet ground. Dark corners. Gasoline. Manure. Makeup. Popcorn. Chocolate covered peanuts. Filthy bathroom. Hard seat. The mother looking up, happy. Iridescent sequins, hologram sequins, satin sequins. Rocaille beads. large ties. red noses. tall hats. midgets with unhappy faces. Feathers lost on the wet floor. Peacock? Ostrich. It didnt matter. The smell is the same. Burned horns. It is good in a small way. I lick the feather and get the look. You dont know where that was. I do, on the wet floor. Urine. Water. Sweat. Beer. Whats the difference. The feather doesnt taste like burned horns. It just smells like it. It feels good on my tongue, like a fictitious comb. I hide it in my pocket. I love pockets. All of them. Cangarous. Fathers. My feather is in my fathers pocket. I can see the white tip of it sticking out. It could break when he sits down in the bus home. I take his hand so that i can watch my feather. he holds it with two fingers. I try to get the rest of the hand but thats all im getting and i know it. Layla doesnt like it either. she would ask me for my whole hand. And I would gladly give it to her. I never gave her a feather. I gave her a box full of rocks and she liked it. I found it under her bed and she told me they were a treasure. I believed because I still remember the color and shape of my treasure rock and that was a very long time ago.

the diet from hell
09-01-2010

so we go out to lunch at michaels tavern and i still miss tron who decided not to have his heart fixed because he was broken hearted beyond hope except that he went to church every morning to pray and pray he did because he wanted to be able to stop looking at young girls with short skirts and go to heaven and i pitied his little spiritual prison but hey, he seemed happy about it. so we get a table in the back which is near the bathroom but not too close and we decide: monday will be the first day of the soup diet. all three of us are convinced we can do it. to make it more desireable, i promise to give them 50 bucks if they stick with it. i have an inordinately strong will power and i know where it comes from. they dont especially not wendy. she knows but she started with us anyway. but after the first miserable day she texted sara and told her she was eating fried shrimp. im glad i didnt know about it because i was having gas pains from too many fruits and the crazy ass soup. well soup is part of my ptsd picture, man, so you know i cant be eating it and feeling alright. but we stuck it out, sara and i. day two was veggies, another bellyache day, but we had a great time expecting - and expecting we were! our baked potato with butter at the end of the day.
Third day and it is fruit and veggies. Shit, the only way i can do this is because sara is doing it too and i dont want to drop her or encourage her to quit. so i have bellyaches again, too much gas, too much fruit, too many veggies in my soup... so, tonight, as it stands i have eaten one can of champignons, one quart of vegetable soup, water, a quarter of a cup of juice, some kiwi, a bunch of grapes and now, to crown my third day: an enormous bowl of spinach. Poopeye is gonna pooh tonight!

her pupils shrunk before my eyes
09-01-2010

she told me her hurt a lot and she got up with difficulty i didnt know what to say so i didnt. just looked at her acknowledging whatever it was she was trying to tell me. an hour or so later she tells me that the pain is too much so she will have to take a relaxant. i look at her hair: it needs it, except that it feels so soft under my palm that it would be a shame to put any shit-chemical on it. after lunch i come back in and i see that she looks different. so you took your drugs right? yeah how do you know. well your eyes are floating in the middle of the whites, like they dont focus very well or like you are happier than you are letting on. when i went to the bathroom because i was having the runs on account of my fucking diet i saw the bottle. she had left it under the hats she was counting so i read the label: ibuprofen, 800 mg. Daaang! Big fucking deal - she looked drugged up and acted drugged up from Ibuprofen, man!! the next day she had the same floating eyes inside her white balls, like they shrunk. I figure shes got something else in that ibuprofen bottle.

If I were a tree
09-01-2010

I told him that if I had a choice in the after, after the after life, like coming back again, I would want to be a tree. Just like that. One fucking awesome, big, tall tree. Planted anywhere. It wouldnt matter what language people spoke around me at all. I wouldnt give a shit, really. If dogs pissed on me, it would be alright. If birds nested on me, it would be OK. if the wind blew my branches around and even were to tear away my leaves, i would be just fine. if ants crawled up my trunk I would be undisturbed. even if fucking roaches chose to make their homes somewhere on my tree body, i would be fine, totally fine. it wouldnt matter if I were to grow straight or gay (ha ha), if my bark were cracked, i would still be beautiful. year after year i would change, i would start going bald in the fall, without chemotherapy, i would see my leaves disappear without trichotillomania, i would not regret the loss at all. I would look dry and appear to be dead for the whole winter and no one would try to sell me miracle lotions to prolong my youth, because a tree does not wish to be young forever. then when spring came along, i would start sprouting thousands of these green and pinkish growths without for a moment fearing melanoma, leprosy, scurvey or falling from high places. and my hair would grow leafy, bold even imense and it would sing into the breeze and swoosh from one side into any other direction, without ryhme or reason: Green, Wide, Unplanned, Unarguably correct.
My best hairdo would be in the summer time: full, denying even my beloved sun, global, round, i would hide birds and bird shit alike, vermin and their possible slime, i would hide the squirrels, nuts. acorns, seeds, sticks, spiders and their webs, centipedes, millipedes and one legged birds. i would glisten after every summer thunderstorms, and i would glisten in the early morning, having given back copious amounts of water to the ground around me and people would pass by me and see the forest, never the tree. and i would be fully cognizant that the forest is because of me and my sisters.

Trichotillomania , revisited
09-01-2010

i guess that i was washing my hair when i remembered her face: she often wore this wide elastic band that held her blond soft fucking silky hair back. I mean BACK! the band covered the tip of her very white ears, evenly
to perf-ect-ion. it covered all the hair at the forehead: not a strand was visible, not a root was permitted out. the forehead was immense! she was pretty, but the forehead was the biggest part of her beauty. it shone a little. unlined. unblemished. a perfect outline of invisible hair and then it dawned on me: Trichotillomania
I finished washing my hair, intact.

the djembe and the pink tambourine
09-01-2010

i felt an enthusiasm: i wanted to learn how to play african drums. that was right after i attended this one concert. it was awesome to me because i love drums of most kinds. kodo, i love it. it is like being drunk a little. drums can take over my awareness and my surroundings. not because they resonate in my chest and i can no longer tell which is the drum and which is the heart and i feel dangerous and brave.. it is more because of the cadence, i believe. it soothes me in a big universal way. you rock a baby to sleep, instinctively. drums rock me to somewhereselse, as sara would say. it is a place that i must have known but i cant really picture. it is complete, without being a memory or having an image to go with it. i suspect it may in the end be nothing romantic, but more primordial, a lot more medula oblongata than pool of universal knowledge. so i love the experience, right. and i ask these people about learning it and i get a name and an address with dates and times and all of that shit. wednesday comes and i am excited about it so i sit and wait for the prince drum to start happening. it turned out they told me a different building, but being me, hey, i found the place in a completely different building and i knew i was right when i heard the deep sound of the djembe and im already loving it. the teacher, the only one who is teaching it right now they told me calls me to a big desk and from his cheap cardboard briefcase he pulls a home made business card that shows a group picture. you cant really see anyone in particular and maybe with some effort, guess the gender of some of them. that was the group but now a lot of the kids went back to college, so we only have 5 people left. he ssems to be apologizing, when i didnt even know there was supposed to be an acceptable number of people. then he tells me he is saving his hands for tomorrow, there will be a presentation somewhere he thinks, or else he would show me how to play the djembe. so i can sell you a good djembe for around 400 dollars and each lesson, i can come to you, you dont have to come to me, you see, is 60 dollars. thats for a whole hour lesson. you can tell me how many lessons you want he says. my love for the djembe has slipped into wane mode and im sadened. sadened because in my mind the people that first played the djembe and other primitive instruments for the love of it. for the love of the transport and they did it naturally and with abandonment. like i do when i sit in front of youtube and play my tiny cat-skinned-out-of-tune tambourine to the sounds of a tinny samba or bolero. i am then happy, my eyes go away from anything and it is just the beat of my fingers following, guessing, knowing the beat of the tune. forgiving every missed top pot top, forgiving the poor sound of the pc, forgiving the foxnews analists in the background who do not know when to shut up, forgiving the neighbours dog who again attacks the cat on the porch, forgiving the noisy jetski in the river, forgiving the sun that blinds my left eye, who needs to see when i can hear the rhythm and my little tambourine... happy i am and i do not understand how so much joy can come up from the skin of a dead cat and the rough job of pulling it tight and unevenly over a strange construct of a bent switch broken off of i dont know what tree or thick grass even who knows, dyed pink. A pink good enough to ward off evil eyes and bad spirits and sometimes play a mismatch role in a small girls outfit in a summer afternoon in brazil

I bark for your life
09-01-2010

Ben knows when it is time for me to go up to my bedroom. He starts to eye me in between a sries of lickings to his paws. It is a compulsion, i know, and if he happens to sleep in my room, I can wake up to his licking sounds, methodical, tireless.. tonight he is not licking his paw, but a spot on his bed, instead. Then he looks at me. when i fall asleep on my chair for more than an hour, he will stand by my side and bark. As loud as it takes to make absolutely certain that I am not dead, I guess.

The commute
09-01-2010

i live very far from my office. By choice, I drive one hour, from the back steps of my house to the parking spot at the office. One hour in the morning, one hour in the evening. i have several ways of going into the city. some i like better than others. i avoid the highway as much as i can as i find little pleasure in the number of cars, the smells, the noise, the fierce competition for a measly one car length. when i do take the highweay I stay a few degrees right outside of pissed and insane. So i avoid it. I can take 61 or 642. the first doesnt have a name, doesnt have shoulders. the trees are beautiful, but when the traffic stops, you can forget about anything, but to sit there or turn back around. 642 is an interminable series of lights at mainly 45 per hour. All three options are full, but I mean, full of cars. You can never see an armadillo, an eagle, a squirrel, a crow, a buzzard, an owl, a dove, a turtle, a snake, an alligator or anything like that. Sure if you are really early, like 3 or 4 in the morning you will see deer grazing along 642. I have once a long time ago spotted a peregrine falcon atop a light pole. That was around 6 oclock in the afternoon, in heavy traffic on 642. On 61 you will encounter deer, but more rarely and later at night you have to work to miss the fat racoons that cross the road. Of course along 26 there is nothing but the occasional prison crew doing cleanups under the armed and bored gaze of a police person.
Now,I have two favorite routes to the office. The first one, when Im feeling ok with the world and safe, i confidently take gator walk, to shoofly, to old beech hill, to sandpit, then 17 north to club house to county line, to 17, to 526 to azalea, to king street extension and baaam... im at the office, in one hour. just to make a point, it is like when you are married and you go to bed with your own husband. you know it works and it is peaceful. I like this way, minus the 17N part because there the pick up trucks coming from Walterboro, are in a dreadful hurry no matter how early in the morning it is. But I get ahead of myself: I enjoy my long driveway with the spots that I filled with gravel which i took from the rooftop of my office building because it was lose anyway, and the crunch scrunch sound is fat, like cafe au lait with petit pain avec du beurre and warms me inside. I watch for the turkey rafters that cross my driveway towards the water, because i dont want to stress them. i stop the jeep as far as i can and i wait. turkeys of all ages, some run, some walk, some take a low flight across the way... they go with such purpose that it would a pity to disturb them. them I turn onto gator walk and every morning i watch the swamp on the left side because depending on the time, you can get lucky and see gators and turtles. Lots of turtles. After last winter which was so absurdly cold, enough to make my Glenn-Beck-loving- husband deny the entire existence of global warming, i think that the bigger gators must have died or moved away, via the river. I dont know, i do know that i found at least 10 dead turtles, big ones, along the river and the swamp, during the winter. I didnt see any dead gators, but i certainly have not seen too many big ones. maybe the summer has been too hot. no word from my Glenn-Beck-loving-husband on global warming this season. When I turn onto Shoofly it is time to watch for the owls and foxes that i feel inclined to call foxen not knowing the reason why. there was a large barred owl that hung around for a while, but i have not for the last couple of summers heard them call the who cooks for you bit, at all..neither have i seen the owls lately. when i get to old beech hill, I just hang a right and watch for the kids waiting for the school buses along the road. one or two every 5 miles or so. white kids on paved beech hill, black kids on the dirt top beech hill. funny, they all seem to live on the right side of the road. then it is sandpit, maybe, maybe i can see one car. it is a winding road and thats where ive met my pride and joy: an armadillo. after years of finding them smashed in the middle of the road i finally spotted a juvie: yellowish overall, as if it lived in some texan desert or something, running along side the road, on the dirt part. so completely armadillo, it was adorable. i heard that they dig up the ground like mad and that they can make it cave in right under your feet, should you wander onto armadillo country.
then it is a left onto 17N, i merge with the traffic coming form Walterboro and set the auto pilot to 55. Fuck the rushing people. They all pass me, it is incredible. Or maybe not, but I hold my jeep ground and watch for the club house sign. club house is a long winding, well paved road. it probably has as many curves as it has straight stretches. i know the trees that flank club house, the spots where an accident happened last year and i saw an overturned pick up truck. it looked so big standing on its front end, like a metal elephant of sorts, curves, signs,grass, houses that are well kept, big lawns, some fields of okra, some bean patches, thats where i see most birds and i love it. this morning i saw a dead squirrels with 3 crows having their breakfast. crows tend to hop hop hop and then fly off, or they fly straight ahead for a few feet and only then make a turn, away from your car. i havent seen too many turkey vultures nor black vultures this year either. Some, for certain, but not the big venues of earlier years. I know the houses that i will see on each the side of the road and there seem to be more houses on the right side here too... of course if i am returning home, most of the houses would be my left, so we are probably even (he he). and i know the men that walk in the morning. mostly without dogs. i wave at them and they wave back. i feel good because we are looking at each other. when you are driving in the midst of fucking hundreds and thousands of cars people dont look at people, but at empty spots on the highway, in order to put or not to put their car in it. thats why i look for the people along club house and i wave. after the big three way stop, which is marked for no one to miss it: it sits right next to the big corn field, by now already harvested, and a little ways down the curve, i take a left onto county line. it was willie who first told me about county line and he was surprised that i had never heard about it. so one night after class i took it. being brave and all, and i made it home and liked the quiet and coolness of the ride. i rarely see people at that hour of the morning on county line. maybe 2 or 3 cars, coming behind me, maybe another couple of cars coming the other way. Once in a while there is excitement whent he electric coop trucks take up one whole lane to work on the tree trimming project. then we slow down almost to a halt and say hello to the workers. they are usually white people and they are not as friendly as the other people that wave at me. when i drive by willies business i know that i am getting close to highway seventeen, it is time to start gearing up for civilization. now they have put a fancy intersection to feed the county line traffic onto 17, with a traffit light and all. They named it after willies dad after he dies on a stroke. this morning it was the first time that i had to wait for the light to change.. it seemed like a long time.. it took the romance out of waiting for a car politely, to make the crossing. or to daringly pull across the highway, avoiding trucks, tractors, and cars alike for the safety of the medium... not any more, this morning i waited then crossed and there were zero cars to dance with me. Once i cross the bridge over the wetlands, then goodbye tranquility. Now in traffic, and the noise is considerable. But, but, but I have only about 15 minutes left of trip to work... It beats 90 minutes sitting in traffic... So I take 526 and go around the ramp, pick up speed, go across the bridge, over the Ashley river which i love to see and I can forgive all the traffic intrusions in my life, for the sight of the water, silver, grey, gold, dynamic, gently rocking the boats at the marina, and the green buoy marking something important, right there, off to the right. I pray no trucks ride along with me to block my view. I get off on Leeds and drive past the jail. It is a sad building. Strange looking people are usually standing in front of the main entrance and I dislike the color they painted the building - a bright sunny cream color, and i remember when i used to bring mrs moncayo to see her weapons dealing money laundering husband and it was she that made me start speaking Spanish because she claimed she could not understand a word of portuguese or english or french. she had the most disgusting fat fleshy toes i have ever seen. she insisted in lounging around without shoes. Go figure. Her husband told her to look out when around me because I was smart. What a crock. What a crook. (he he) i feel relief once I pass the jail building and turn tightly onto azalea. it is an ugly, ugly, poor bastard type of avenue. factories and garages and ugly buildings on both sides of it. RR crossings, bumpy stretches and a lot of police cars. speed limit 45 no more. and that I do, drive by the orphanage and the cemetery. I promise myself that one day I will go volunteer at the orphanage but i dont believe i will then i cross cosgrove and head over to king street extension. There are portions with sidewalks on KSE, I dont know why. There are stretches of the road where they planted 3 palmeto trees and one crepe myrtle, 3 palmeto trees and one crepe myrtle, 3 palmeto trees and one crepe myrtle, 3 palmeto trees and one crepe myrtle, 3 palmeto trees and one crepe myrtle, 3 palmeto trees and one crepe myrtle, and that goes one for something like 3 city blocks, then all of a sudden it stops. it is ugly, mostly, like a house that was abandoned for a long time. The best builing around is the dyalisis clinic with parking in the rear, but the front parking lot is always full. I imagine the kidney function impaired clients know where to park and i drive on, i pass the strip club, painted african tambourine pink, right next to my friends Joseph Singletons shop and he has cards that read where we meet by accident - it is a body shop and i love the way he talks and the way he holds himself up. he has diabetes, he told me and obama has a lot of money to give out, so he wants to open a school to teach people body shop skills. i designed a fancy brochure for him to apply for the obama money and the other day i asked him when he stopped by to bring me some empty boxes how his school was shaping up and he told me that 2 or 3 other people from washington had come down to talk to them. but i saw the confusion and disappointment in his eyes, like he should already have gotten the obama money with all the work he put into it. I invariably get stopped at the corner by the old folks building - im told that it is a halfway housing facility and it is probably the tallest building in the city. it is also ugly with its small windows, no frills, looking out like tiny porcine myopic eyes. no colors. no joy. old brick, rags haging from some windows. mostly closed, some wide open. gated all around. there is a moped behind the fence with several written messages all around it. political stuff, nonsensical criticism of war and money, veiled threads about the apocalipse. I want to see the person that rides it but it hasnt happened yet. it is going on 2 full years now. the rest is just a couple or 4 blocks of inner city stuff. big houses painted in briht colors. some yards filled with concrete statuary and plastic chairs, some yards filled with plants very familiar to me from brazil, some yards fenced all around, some with broken wooden fences. a couple of houses for sale and some for rent completes this stretch of lower king street. one dark green houses with bars on every opening. and im by the mosque. it looks commercial. nothing like the ones i saw in israel. a small sign claims its religion: Islamic and when they have services only men come down the street to attend. there are no adhans, ever. But then again i dont hear the bells calling for mass from Saint Patricks or the little chapel in catholic school one block down. I see the dinky dirty chinese restaurant self proclaimed THE GREAT WALL OF CHINA and i cannot smell the chicken yet because it is too early. It will come though, right around 11 am, but i know it tastes nothing like it smells, so i stick with my home cooked soup.

Magnolias were here before the bees
08-29-2010

the state of magnolia this is. you cant drive very far without meeting up with a large dark Charleston green magnolia tree. 90 plus million years old, the trees non ceremoniously grow in the front yard of small churches, in the barren yards of poor homes, in the parks in the midst of well taken care of lawns, you drive by and there they are: almost majestic, but maybe more so like an old person in a front porch, having earned the repose and the place. Late Spring, and Summer, bam, the super strong flowers dont leave any doubts as to what tree that is. its totally magnolia. then comes the city parks admin and decides to stick a perfectly symetric row of dwarf magnolias along the highway bank. And there the poor bastards stand, without a choice. Imagine that: to be begotten before even the bees and end up in a dried up flank of a southern highway: weakened heartwood, undeserving Charleston green crown, uneven, crooked, bare, every flower the screaming wound of city pollutants.

rattler sighting
08-29-2010

coming home today I drove by a beautiful rattle snake. she was on the black top road, moving slowly. fat in the middle, big head, deep rusty color with lighter markings, the last 10 inches or so towards its tail the rust deepened to almost black, it was so brown. I counted 7 rings on its rattle. I actually drove by and asked sara in the back seat if she had seen it. she hadnt so i turned back around to show her. i could still see its shape on the road in the rear mirror. i stopped the car near it and assured sara the snake wouldnt jump up into the car so she could take pictures with her phone. a beauty she was. she turned around slowly enough for us to watch her with that blend of repulsion and curiority that dangerous men and beasts awaken in us when we feel safe otherwise, and watched her. slither didnt seem right. she slid towards the side of the road and so beautiful, lowered herself carefully into the shallow water on the side of the road. never put her head down and up the other side she went: the body coiling up every 6 inches or so. then she streched herself out, beautiful brown, undisturbed, unthreatening. Two pictures later we turned back towards the river house and told no one about our encounter until after we had eaten dessert.

Bens nightmare
08-29-2010

Ben lays on his oversized cedar twenty dollar pillow in front of my NATGEO oblivious to brown bears and the carnage of spawning salmons. his belly shakes, he yelps and growls and I wonder if he is hunting or beeing hunted in the black and white memo pad of his dog dream. funny how don sometimes does the same thing. He tells me they are nightmares.

the dark side of movies
08-26-2010

as a young child i watched my share of hitchcock stuff. She would bring all five of us to the theatre, bribe the doorman so he would let us in and sh ewould watch the black and white stuff. I watched most of it. Some scenes never left my head and much later on I identified them , here and there: sometimes on the originals sometimes stolen by a younger director/esse, sometimes simply by dipping in the enormous cauldron of common wisdom and knowledge. I dont think that I truly understood the tension between or among the black and white enormous one dimensional men and women. I do think that I understood when someone was driving incredibly fast down a narrow dark road and a heavy downpour. I KNEW there would be an accident. When the screen turned upside down, or so I thought I KNEW I had been right. That took care of my fears for the couple in the car. I know the stories were long and that people were good looking but that they were also very unhappy: to the point of killing other people. I learned also that when people killed other people they suffered even more than before, when they only WANTED to have the people dead. I thought they were pretty stupid. I was a little girl and I KNEW the stuff that made you very unhappy and they were enormous and pretty and drove cars and travelled and still they would go ahead and kill people just to be completely miserable in the end.
Anyway, the genre lost its appeal to me even though I still think Hitchcocks pictures were genious, if not for the intelligent of self restraint of his characters.

Much later, my sister started liking movies that had vampires in them. Or creatures like vampires. More like serial killers. Ze do Caixao or Joe Coffin. This was in Brazil and those movies were made in Brazil. The bad guy was shabbily clad in black rags pursuing relentlessly other shabby looking victims. I was shocked. I hated the stories, the miserability of the actors and the unsofisticated absurdity of the plots, acting... My sister laughed. She thought those movies were funny I couldnt see it - all I saw was the miserable, sordid underdevelopment the inescapable ordinarity of the films and I couldnt watch them.

Later on still, recently married my husband not knowing too much about me took me to see the Exorcist. I stayed scared for about 10 years hence. The green vomit, so very guacamole, came to mind every time I went into a restaurant in America, as they seem to have this strange inclination to serve avocados with salt. I have not eaten guacamole in a while.

Then there was Karen, the betrayer. Lets go see this real cool movie it is about children in the city. Name, Candyman. I wanted to kill her as the so called plot unfolded in front of us.... Awful. Mirrors, dark rooms, lost their calming role for me and now hold the threat of some shit I dont even understand totally because they film everything so dark, I cant really tell what I saw. Still, I fear it. For that very reason: it is not possible to scrutinize it before the sun light.
I would much rather drive by fields of sunflowers in Brazil our South Carolina! Much, much rather....

The Marvelous Misadventures Of Flapjack
08-26-2010

Dear Capn KNuckles:
I love you
Signed: Nina

the dead character that I disliked
08-26-2010

I felt great antipathy for my character. The one that went to the bathroom at work and sat in the stall writing his literary inspired passages on rolled toilet paper using resuscitated sharpies that he stole. Im not sure what, but as he took form, I knew even his pant pockets well. I knew how he walked although that was not important for the story and the more I knew about him, the better I understood him, more aversion I felt for the poor fellow. He lived by a half torn neon sign. A fucking red and blue thing which message I already forgot by now. He used the subway and walked a few steps to his losers apartment. He was so convinced he had the right opening paragraph, he had decided sending his stories into a literary contest. Argh... I couldnt stand him. So in a way I was happy that the glitch erased all 1500 plus words that made him real.
Requiescat in pace, little fella..

his name was lance faircloth
08-25-2010

he said that the folks on the picture were his parents. then he kep saying this folk here, the dad, was a very sickly child so much so that they (who?) were told to take a picture of him. i’m looking into his face, a picture for what. he was going to die soon, all they would have would be the picture. this folk here, he lived to 91. had a wife who passed on due to an aneurism, leaving him with 6 children, 13 on down. he was a farmer you see, so he couldn’t really take care of 6 kids, who were 13 and under, you see. i don’t really but imagine the folk there smelling like the sun sweating under the south carolina sun, walking down rows of corn with 6 children 13 and under after him. she was someone who lived in the neighborhood, you know, like a neighbour. so my dad went to her house and asked her mother if her daughter would marry him, on account of him being a widower with 6 children ages 13 and under. the mother told him that he ought to ask the daughter. so he goes home and writes her a letter: my name is lance faircloth. i’m a farmer and i have 6 children. i want to know if you want to marry me. she said yes. they went on to have another 7 children and stayed together 55 years. he reluctantly told me that her grandmother was a native american. i knew that already because minus the nose which was negroid, she looked exactly like my own mother .

Keith
08-25-2010

verrry, verrry smarrrt yung man!!!!!

a case of love momentarily lost
08-25-2010

i had had ocd for almost 60 years and i didnt know it. that island thing is true, you experience shit all by your lone self and there is no breaking it in for you. especially not the mental shit. repetitious games have been my companion since early, early on. the small memories are very vivid. i can see places, people and smells, faces, for as long as i can remember . and i remember where i lived and father carrying me facing back down the hallway to soothe me. i was 8 months old. you are not much, at 8 months of age but you are something enough to remember because there was shit to make me remember. Laying down with a bottle in my hands. i was expected to feed myself. there were no pictures for me to remember myself. there were just incredibly strong memories of me and my surrounds. dark spaces behind couches were good for me. later on i would count things over an over, because that would keep me from falling off the window. so i tasted the cement and hoped to die. i was barely 6 and i already knew that tongue kissing cement wouldn’t kill you. falling off the window would. so i watched the boys fingering each others anuses and i enjoyed it. i wanted to see and think whatever would keep my mind off the plunge. the fatal final plunge that would crush my head onto the tiled stairs. each boy as he slid down the railing kept me alive for one more minute. it was pure magic. as i waited for the next goosing i got to live another minute. winter was almost unbearable because you couldn’t be at the window and the boys wouldn’t slide down the railing.

so my death would come much closer to me. so i started fearing the roaches, the dark, the mice, the bats, men and women alike, the fumes, the sounds and all that wasnt inside my head. i didnt know then that the only thing that made me afraid was inside my fucking head. in my incredibly intelligent little sick head, i decided to be brave. and brave i would live or die. i didnt care any more. well, i did but it didnt matter because the brave die really well. they are not crushed on tiled stairs, the brave die for a reason, they fight, they lose their life maybe, but they did not lose themselves. brave i lived, brave i read, brave i thought, brave i cried, brave i masturbated, brave i silenced, brave i kept my words to my small self, brave i combed my hair, brave i took showers, brave i hoped i was a woman, brave i discovered every day that a man i was not, brave i heard mothers voice, brave i listened to my sister, brave i called on my portuguese teacher with whom i was desperately in love. she saw me and showed me her house. she had a very small bed – actually twin beds in a spotless bedroom. it was spartan. smelled of bleach, was and sun. and she talked to me with so much charity that I got cured from my love for her. she could truly love the lonely brave child it was only much later that i found out that love is fucking brave and mine was just a case of love temporarily lost among fucked up people.

a volta
08-22-2010

saudades de mim. li os contos quase poemas que escrevi aos vinte anos. vontade de dizer saudades de meus vinte anos. mas nao. saudades de gosto novidade de cigarros sem filtro. acho que nao. acho que sim. cac’o mas nao acho. venho escrevendo em ingles. linguinha pobre. cheia de utlidade. e que mais fazer? pensando e sonhando tomar o aviao em charleston e chegar em sampa. garoando e bem possivel. ou melhor, desaguar no rio. mas o calor de merda nao me atrai. mesmo no verao. moscas. cheiro de guarana e batida de banana com abacate. nao. melhor em poa. com aquele monstrao de aeroporto que fizeram quando mal virei as costas. o que essa gente faz enquanto a gente dorme. enquanto a gente trepa, enquanto a gente trabalha. um gaucho grandao de me dar vergonha me faz saber que estou aqui. mas pra onde vou nao tenho ideia. amigos sempre poucos os tive. amantes sempre rapidos na passagem. talvez ja mortos. seguramente impotentes. ja nem lembro de cada um. e mais uma nuvem assim gordinha de rostos, ventres, maos, sexo. alguns mais competentes que os outros. nenhum merecendo o meu amor.pois se nao for numa dessas, pra onde eu fujo? recife, prefiro o frio. recuso a ter que falar espanhol, ingles. frances. eu quero dizer merda com toda a sabedoria que merda implica. e nunca dizer vai te foder porque nunca disse e nao imagino nada melhor que vaitomarnocu.. mas mesmo assim, serei seguramente quasi-jovem, pois que parti no meio a minha vida. a parte que ficou virou eterna lembranca. a parte que se foi virou eterno vir a ser. e assim fui me chegando na adulteza via maternidade, fornicacao, adulterios, leitura de classicos portugueses em ingles, classicos franceses em portugues. pequeno principe em ingles, portugues e frances num enorme carrossel de pequenos eventos sem importancia que giram devagar mas sem parar ate que tonta eu caia no meio fio sujo e quisera eu pensassem que estou bebaba ou drogada, mais do que caida da roda da minha vida por nao ter maos para segurar os muitos fios que me uniram e desuniram aos filhos, as meninas, aos pia’s, as amadas, as desejadas, as peladas, as machadadas, as omeletes com bacon de merda, as privadas sujas, as janelas entreabertas, aos portoes acorrentados, aos cachorros vizinhos, as xicaras de maionese, ao coco’ no patamar, aos mudos desejos, as malas feitas e desfeitas e os fios se estendem mas nao se partem, se embarac’am. eu os desato e me agarro com toda a vontade de minhas maos cicatrizadas. Assim, sem decisao ou imposicao eu permanec’o responsavel. Sem ter que aprender as conjunc’oes nem as conjuminac’oes sigo em linha reta quase perfeita. Busco com meus olhos miopes coelhos,raposas, veados, cobras, corujas, tatus, urubus. Ja desisti dos sapos e jacares. Estes, gritam alto mas sao minusculos e tao parecidos com as cadeiras ondem se sentam. Quanto aos jacares prefiro ve-los na televisao enquanto o sono nao bate.

the fibbing flyer
08-21-2010

this was possibly only the third time I saw Jay. He seemed even bigger this time. I couldn’t really look at his body with tremendous aversion. The very loose clothes didn’t quite cover up the rolls, enormous rolls that hung down the thighs, down the arms and belly. Oddly enough, his hands are almost slim. Oddly enough his face looks good. He yawns a lot and holds onto to my front counter. I wonder if he could fall over. That wouldn’t be cool. I couldn’t pick him up. Not even roll him over. So I stand to his side and we talk as if his bulky flesh were not all the rolly pollies between us. And we discuss prices and colors and designs as his yawns grow longer, louder. He pulls out his blackberry and shows me some awesome pictures of himself with the wife. They shoot his face with a small part of his chest. It makes him look small , handsome. He knows it. Smiles sheepishly at me. Now we share this fucked up lie. I say I love the flyer he smiles inside another yawn. Fuck, I can see he is pushing 500 lbs. Has to be. He thanks me, not for my prices or my suggestions for his event, or for my contributions to his 50 member church – no alcohol allowed, but for my collaboration.

masters in divinity
08-21-2010

I wanted to tell him that divinity was a bunch of baloney because i didn’t think all of the reading in the world could bring you closer to the truth nor the divine. I shut up because he was so happy: he hung his Masters of Divinity on the wall of his office, for all to see. It bothered me the divine so mundane, so tightly packed in 90 fucking credit hours, for chrissake!… AND, to go out and lead and teach others about life with the divine. What if had been a poor student? A poor student of divinity. Chuckles. Is this worse than a poor student of mathematics. Maybe it is the same, you can still make change at the grocery store. Or does he really know more about god than the little rotund preacher who cooks noon meals in her kitchen and brings it to the temple of creation every Wednesday, sun or shine, to feed the neighbours. Dopers, pimps or Jezebels, she feeds them without thought to the next meal. Now she is fundraising among the poorest of the poor to build a real kitchen where she will cook two meals a day, 7 days a week right there by the temple of creation with the poorly drawing globe and the hands holding it up. Thick laborers’ hands. And feed them she will. No Masters in Divinity for her. She knows her deity and she behaves accordingly Rather than stressing through 90 credit hours of musings, she has taken to action. A master she is to my eyes. A master he wants to be for his father and grandfather, who were preachers before him. May god listen to both their prayers as from where I watch them, they hurt equally.

the church goer
08-19-2010

Tom Byers was a real prick. His wife wasn’t as bad, as the wives of real pricks usually are, self effacing, invariably with a ”pleaseforgivehimheisateddybearreally” look about them, a little lipstick smudge on a front tooth and an over-developed interest in irises or some other shit flower like that. So Maudie tried to avoid him and it proved impossible, She would ignore him while she told her about the garden and the trip to North Carolina or some other inconsequential state like that. He would utter some biting criticism or another : the dog was a bastard, her irises were turning to weed, she was the only one not to see it, those teens were driving too fast what was Maudie going to do about that before some poor bastard got killed or worse got to be in a wheelchair and I’m developing this website and she can add her ministry to it if she wanted to and she would glance at his hands: they were immense! Massive hands with thick fingers. Nothing beefy, just plain big, thick. She is in heat all of a sudden and that’s when she gets it: she is there next to him because of his hands, nothing else. When he shuts up, she has those awesome enormous hands, when he is talking, her mind drifts to the thought of those hands on her body and she hears nothing, sees nothing. Those hands are the masters of her existence and no one is messing with her. She made sure she sat close enough to shake his hand during mass and god that was awesome, if only they were not attached to that piece of shit of a man, So Maudie found herself coming to the early mass just so she could shake hands with Tom Byers right under his wife’s dreamy eyes and she never felt one iota of guilt because he didn’t know and the dreamy wife didn’t know and nobody knew except that for her. This is pretty much like when you become aroused sitting at your desk in the office. nobody will know this, nobody picks up on it and you are fine. Really fine. She knew that things were going to resolve themselves. sooner or later, and they did: Maudie’s crush on his hands waned like any other Summer fling, except it had been Winter time.

pizza boxen
08-19-2010

I left the class abruptly. my knees had begun to bother me every time I kicked the shit out of a kicking bag, or even stomped on the floor. I enjoyed the sweating, the vigor of the stuff and then I had to endure the breaks, the runs to the water fountain, the forced wishes of careful driving like anyone gave a flying fuck about the other. when they kicked you they really did hurt you and I would complain and huff and puff but to no avail they just kicked the shit out of me and once in a while they would apologize. it was mostly stupid shit and i got to the point where i just couldn’t stand to see their threadbare pant legs, their toe nails, their tee shirts against the rules and the yells, the whispered conversations the constant self-satisfied comments about not watching fucking TV and the sweat in the car. when we arrived it was hard to find a spot and when we left it was hard to find a spot filled. I hated the smell of the city in the summer time and the freezing wind in the winter time. so i just stopped showing up i did not call, i did not write. i did not consult. i did not respond i did not even answered the telephone. some of them sent me messages to make sure i wasn’t really coming back, or was I we just needed to know. why the fuck people want to know what is going to happen. it is already happening now so what room is there for what is going to be later on. months later i found out that Jerry had also quit. he had brought pizza to a black belt house party and the people assumed he was the fucking delivery boy. he is 46 years old. he is good-looking and civilized. he is black and he was carrying the pizza box they had told him to bring a dish to share. nobody fucking looked twice at him so he went inside and put the pizza box down. he walked out and someone asked him in passing why so soon he said he was tired and he, like me, never went back again. the instructor sent my son a postcard from London. thinking of you. I suppose they do, think about us on some level I do not grasp. SHUMBEE, my comrades

electra is as electra does
08-19-2010

She generally referred to him as “your father” as if by doing so, she minimized the fact that SHE, not me, had fucked him, the fact that SHE, not me, had put holes in the condoms in order TO get pregnant, even though he had told her that he didn’t want any more little bastards around, the fact that she had chosen three times to abort and five times to let live, the fact that SHE had kept him around and that I had absolutely, and with the greatest finality, no say in what happened between them.

When that “yourfather” rolled out of her lips with the tiny aneurism sitting in the middle of the lower lip, much purplier than the lips, she was ready to launch an attack on my similarities with my pater nusquam. I sat like him. Presumably buttocks on a chair have a very particular way of happening, depending on the person. My childish buttocks therefore touched the chairs as his manly buttocks. Undeniable. So I would stare at the small purple vein. I wondered how come she didn’t bite it in anger when she said “thewayyousitdown” and pressed her lips against her teeth. I was hoping against hope that one day she would bite it and I would then see the trickle of blood before she realized she was bleeding and maybe it would stain her blouse and brassiere, – which were always clean and soft and smelled like her even when they were in her chest of drawers – that when she realized that she was drooling blood, she would either have lost so much blood that she would have to go see a doctor, or that she would figure she could take care of it in her bathroom: either way I would win because I would sit myself down with complete abandonment. Right in his wicker rocker and hold his tea gourd in my hand and feel that I could one day smoke cigarettes like him (which I did, Hollywoods, no filter) and have a penis like he did (which I didn’t, no regrets).

oh, but for love
08-16-2010

i have placed my glass desk at the far end of the room. my feet rest on the computer tower and i slide down my chair. i appear to run the store and i answer the phones, help customer, hug people. so far i have made three people cry, one because she had found out she’s got melanoma and i held her because i couldn’ t do anything else, the other because she wanted to get some plain shirts for her youth and i designed this shit ass awesome thing so the shirts looked like a million dollars and she only had to pay like eighty. so she held me and cried and blessed me till the end of times and she said i am going to have good things happen to me and that they serve meals on Wednesdays but now they are starting a fundraiser to build a kitchen so that they can serve meals seven days a week. i love my neighborhood yesterday chief Polly brown came in and she was young, strong, maybe a little overweight and she stood in front of my glass desk about 4 feet away and says good morning ma’am my name is Polly brown i have just been promoted to chief in the navy and i am calling in the businesses in the area in order to raise funds for our upcoming chief’s graduation. i loved the shpeel. i could see that this was not the first time she got up in front of a glass desk under a glass ceiling and spoke to the one in charge and she stood up with her feet comfortably apart and looked me in the eyes. her own looked to be 8 years old and mine, well i was entertained. when she sat in the sheep skin covered chair next to me just like Bobbie does everyday and like mr Goltz does whenever he comes a-calling with a box of delicious cup cakes, one white , one black, well she looks at me again and says she can’t believe she is a chief now. there were over four hundred candidates two hundred and something passed the test she had been the second one to be picked. and, she says, they pick from records that showed no gender, showed no race so there is a certainty of raw numbers, raw value, raw i made it because i can and not because they think i need special accommodations to join the ranks because I am a 32-year-old black female. and it is nuclear engineering shit, man. so i cry and she sees me crying and she cries with me because it is not every day that you get a naked look at the sense of self-worth of a fellow human. it is in doing so, that i understand why my shrink cried at the end of our last session.

Marina Fedossejeva was not my first love
08-16-2010

i don’t remember why she always brought me and Lhaish together to the ballet classes. Lhaish was enrolled and I had to sit in the dressing room and wait for the entire 2 hours, till they were all finished and dressed again. so i waited the only part that interested me was the music there was a person at a piano. not the greatest, not the worse. sometimes she would play a tape recorder. the volume turned to maximum level made the nutcracker sound a bit like bird shit but hey. there was music, right. so I watched and dreamed a little. sometimes I thought I could do better and one day I didn’t notice and she is next to me with the cigarette dangling from her lips with the right eye scrunched up to avoid the smoke in her eye and I felt aroused. my face was red and i wanted to cry or to have an orgasm whichever came first. this was before i knew much beyond the shame of her plots and plans, so i simply sat there and said yes i would like to dance with them. so she talks to the teacher and i’m. i get the black slippers and I get the pink ones and very quickly I am at the head of the class. it is a struggle because i am totally in love with Marina Fedossejeva. She moves, she smokes she peers at me. she feels the bodies of the male dancers and I pine away with all to the force of my 9 years of age. what do i know, right? what i do know is that I will dance for her with complete perfection, I will know every step and I will faithfully come, sun or shine, so that I can smell the rosin and how it grabs the tip of your tongue when you lick it and you wanted to lick her hands just to check the wrinkles and the cigarette smoke i swore i would start at 18. on the day. I got to wait 9 years though. her daughter was not graceful and she was older and looked unhappy she danced too but she had this really big bottom. it was not a good person to look at and she was indifferent to my love for her mother. so she asks her to return the favor and make the outfits for the recital. oh god i want to die because i am 9 and i already know that she won’t do it. or if she does it, she will fuck it up so badly that I will want to really die. so I try mine on 2, 543 times and it never fits, it doesn’t hold up. it is pale green. I am a fish . I am the leading fish while Lhaish is the other leading fish but our fins keep sliding down our graceful arms and the list goes down from there. it is chaos and someone steps in and fix it all and she is banished from the studio. we have to run in by ourselves and change in front of the nice smelling girls trying to hide the dirty socks and shirts before anyone sees them. Marina Fedossejeva stopped paying attention to me almost completely and Lhaish became angry and disrespectful to her . One day she told us that we had been asked not to go back.

Winds from SE at 3 mph, humid
08-16-2010

he was visiting again, Sunday afternoon as they are trying to start a tradition which i don’t really mind , but it would not have occurred to me. he has this funny habit of crouching behind my chair and saying nothing. i look at him more to check who is behind me and he gives me a cherubic smile which lasts and lasts. i search his face for some unspoken communication and find nothing but the intense smile plastered on his face. he asks about my email, I’m shocked i don’t email people like this in the middle of the room, in the middle of the fucking afternoon, when people are all over the house. and tell him that i write shit. he looks lost and repeats you write shit, why? I tell him it is how i process shit, i write because things have an enormous array of levels and I prefer to not miss them, because it is just too much fun to be in many levels with my fellow humans. he has a friend, who is a professional fisherman, he says, like him, which he is not, he is just serious about how often he fishes and that his friend writes all the details about the level of the water, the weather, the bait, the lines, the temperature, the winds, the time of the day or night, with pencil in hand onto his small notebook he records all variables he can think of, including the outcome, that is, the number of resulting dead fishes, sizes, weight, type and uses afterwards, gifted, sold, eaten, photographed or not.. so I figured the dude needs prozac, right. he is fucking ocd and i try to explain that this is not what I do. I’m not cataloguing shit, I’m telling about intense shit, man – stuff that is really happening while you are not really looking. from the edge like eating really hot champion oatmeal in the winter time in the south of brazil with the fucking wind howling outside the shuttered windows. he looks perplexed and I can see his lips beginning to ask to read the stuff. yes, but you must not judge it. how else can i read it then, did you right about me and Carina? fuck, I’m definitely NOT emailing him the link. It would be less painful to see his blank eyes responding to my reading . I have dropped a lot of good reading in the eyes of others that i wasn’t able to enjoy. with respect, mind you. but dropped nonetheless. Some shit comes to life later on and I keep it in the back of my mind for a long time but I don’ tneed to go back. like the book that Lhaish told me it was awesome and Sarah who bought two of my paintings, also said was her favorite book, so I started reading it but I couldn’t enjoy it. Much like sex without the orgasm, it had this undercurrent of tepid disappointment and boredom going on that I found it too painful to carry on so I marked where I stopped and I put it up having by now forgotten the title. I can’t bring myself to send the link to Pamuka because I know he will not get it and worse of all, he will start asking me to explain my shit to his cherubic face! so it is 80 degrees farenheit winds from SE at 3 mph, humid.. nothing caught, nothing lost, nothing photographed tonight, Pamuka!

silly girls
08-15-2010

fancy souza
fancy pelosi
fancy button
nancing around the soul;
the hairs of the beaver jacket:
four spools in a box

30 words into the eternal
08-15-2010

i like buttons. mother of pearl or otherwise. foreign coins. empty wood sewing thread bobbins. i have a very large one, someone painted one end red and shellacked it. but i still like it. a lot. slippers with upturned toes. the proprioception of my infant children against my chest. i like things that never go way. i like things that happen as if time stood still like yesterday at tbonz a shitt hole of a restaurant that kilie adores because of the fucking quesadillas and the waiter is enormously big and tall and cannot control the blinking on his right eye. so he smiles way down at the four of us in the booth and blink, blink, blink. kilie asks for the children’s menu because she has failure to thrive on account of having williams syndrome and i open the menu and find out that you have thirty blocks to enter words that can be made up by the letters contained in T-bonz restaurant. it is not alice, that’s for sure, but i tell kilie to find the first word and she giggles and bam, star, then Bob he passes because he can stress over nearly every human activity even wiping his ass so he doesn’t so our water bill is rally high because he has to shower every time he shits then Bobbie and he comes up with run , then me and i hold it down to zone and around and around we go. I push the paper towards each one, one at a time and ask the same questions, ok it is your turn and you have to come up with a different word now, that’s just thirty times, minus my turns, when i just say ok it is me now, so what’s thirty times compared to how old the earth and shit are, right? and everyone, even bob gets into the game and we have 30 new words and bob blushes and says butt with a hushed voice so i say breast and he wants to die because his girlfriend is right there with her two breast at the table level. and there are no syndromes, no aches, no sneezing, no alcoholism, no prozac, no panic attacks,, no smelly feet, no dirty pants, no broken nails, only thirty glorious words and an awesome window into the eternal.

african drums and holocaust
08-15-2010

he only agreed to go to the african village show, seven to nine, because Lilly wanted to go with me. she said this meant they could be together longer. now i feared for my sanity but I’m going ahead with it. we drive in the rain and get there about half hour late. I’m talking to a girl at the door for a whole 2 minutes before she finally says it is in there. so I go inside pay the fifteen bucks to get in and join him, Lilly and Farah. we get to the other side of the room by the blue chairs, in rhythm with the powerful sound of african drums. i already want to dance but my mbts are not the most conducive to swaying at my will, but there will. throughout the whole thing he has his arms crossed before him and his large back facing Lilly. she is not happy and starts to mirror me. it is not even irritating because I’m busy trying to get out from behind her big hair. i touch it while she doesn’t know: dry, unyielding. can’t imagine making love to her both their hands are rigid. maybe the hair will be alright.it is already 8:54 and I say let’s go after checking with Farah and she too would leave so we can walk her to her car it is dark leaving is a process, Lilly goes to the bathroom and he goes to the front counter i see him taking his wallet out to show the picture once again i will marry her i’m proposing at Genaro’s on may 11 i don’t know what the man is saying then Lilly comes out and stands at the end of the ballroom looking lost.i shout at him to go fetch her he goes, happy while sticking the picture back in the wallet, the wallet back in his shorts pocket. three steps back to the front of the room and he goes into the men’s room. Lilly, Farah and i gather by the exit the usher in a dark silk suit and bow tie smiles and says already leaving? there will be a lot of foot gesturing to the ballroom dressed up in an enormous food centerpiece and many smaller tables with silver trays the smell is fucking awesome and i touch the silk of the dark sleeve and tell him that i know but my son is on medications and by now he is really tired. he can’t take it any more. he looks over evaluating my story he will be able to see once he gets close to us. he does and the silk sleeve no longer pulls away from me, but rather holds close to my bare arm, i see, i see, you’ll be alright now drive carefully. my son skips out of the room as he has done for the last 34 years, holding Lilly’s stiff fingers in his as he has done for the last two years and now she talks too loud about their undying love I follow them fast hoping that the rain has stopped for the night that i will overtake them and pass them and not hear them any more. we take Farah to her car thank you see you tomorrow and we make it back to our car which is close to the concert building. oddly enough from the outside we cannot hear the drums at all. america makes a point of being so insulated i want to fucking die. in brazil, africa, italy, germany, egypt, Israel you walk by places and you smell the insides. mold, meet, creolin, cigarettes, lipstick, ammonia, piss, vomit: the innards of buildings and lives are completely exposed to the passersby. no dirty secrets. no undue privacy. no one alone for long. no tickets for the drum session no problem, outside it is you, thoughts, feelings and music. i look at them looking on and listening they didn’t move a limb. it was odd for me. the bodies are gyrating, arms flailing heavenwards in prayer, trance, sexual energy and they watch, impassive. how much africa do they have left in them, i wonder. in my eyes the white men has strained out all of the africa, leaving only a fish meal of anger masqueraded as longing. so they sit in their haunches, patent leather shoes, imperfect shadows of african citizens and they watch. much like i watch stuff at the holocaust museum: i can no longer cry i no longer need to scream it is not that I have become numb but the enormity of the wrong sits on my chest as it sits on theirs, it cannot be erased it cannot be conquered it cannot be justified. blues, greens, yellows, reds, hair, bare feet the proof of complete loss keep swaying on the stage to the sound of drums, as dry as Lilly’s hair in my fingers.

meatloaf
08-15-2010

at the time i was volunteering of all things as a fucking youth minister i never figured out how they said ok because my mouth was the filthiest in church and i argued with whoever would take me on about the difference between swearing and vulgarity. i simple liked vulgarity. i am vulgus, so i speak my own fucking language. anyway, we do these trip , go fix roofs for poor people 200 miles away from our parish like there were no poor bastards right there around the church but i don’t call the shots, i just minister which really means drive the little shitheads around, eat pizza with them and listen to awful music with them. on one of these trips i heard this bat out of hell cd in the car. and i fell in love, i fell in anger, i fell in battle, i fell for it and i demanded that no matter where we went we would listen to meat fucking load, man. and the kids obliged and they thought immensely cool and i would hang out till late listening to the meatloaf . it was fucking awesome. kids would ask me how come their parents didn’t like them listening to that shit how come i did. i would explain beautiful is beautiful and this meatloaf dude is absolutely beautiful the sound reminds me of the backgrounds of some of my paintings and i listen then i stop for a while and one day i come across it and i play one song and i finish the whole CD but i don’t do that. i can feel the whole thing welling up and pouring out with the very essence of rebellion and fuck you i ever heard. growing up in the sixties there was a lot of shit that people called that but it really wasn’t all that and i know it because i was there and i had learned to pretend that i thought it was cool and radical when it was just sophomoric shit, except some of the brazilian songs from the time of the vicious military dictatorship, like Calice, and some of the Spanish language shit that went around and I would hear without ever listening to the words because the melodies were so pungent and sad that I would be lullabied all the way to work, via the freeway and one day I accidentally heard the words and I wanted to vomit because they sang about the 5 minutes it took to destroy the life of one campesina because manuel who worked at the factory had gone to not return he had been disappeared just the kids had in brazil and argentina an fucking chile under the maternal eyes of the cia and that fuck pinochet, and how easy it was to numb your mind, your judgement, your decisions, your future and present with a series of mathematically juxtaposed 7 fucking notes. and we sang, and ate, smoked and drank and smoked pot and discussed fucking bunuel until we could not talk any more and it was time to eat again.. and boys and girls kept getting killed in vietnam and we burned flags without any historical perspective, because we could, since it wasn’t our flag so we did and smoked pipes and listened to jazz , once in a while got fondled in the recording room and it really sucked but there was no room for fear for guilty and any of that because life was precarious at best. i had been betrayed by the mathematical perfection of melody and had swallowed a lot of crowords, a whole fucking lot of them. it could be baez, it could be meatloaf, i was always the innocent bystander betrayed by their trickery and quickness of hand. Bamboozled by an apparent beauty which sang the horrors of my times as absent-minded as the kids that got high on the public square would plan to conquer the art world, taking no prisoners.

sua filha de uma serafina
08-15-2010

tem filho do Manuel e filha da Josefina

eu tinha que ser o fruto
de semente do seu Jeronimo

na barriga da Serafina

the pair of us
08-15-2010

having decided that i will not bother changing into the so-called regular people clothing, i have gone to the Calmar store and bought three pairs of pajama pants. they have subtle blues and maroon squares and you can tie them at the belly button. cool, loose, to sell better, one leg is rolled up a few times and held there by a strap that buttons on the outside of the leg. someone thought that this up. all i saw was that they looked like the one pair I have . i have ordered the shirts elsewhere, and i am hoping that i will like them. for someone who is going to be wearing pajamas everywhere, it is really funny how concerned i am about the shirts. they will come in by ups on Tuesday and i am afraid that they will not be very good-looking, but that’s alright because i have other alternatives. i used to think that Sofia dressed oddly. ODDLY. she would put lace collars around her 60-year-old neck and wore red rubber boots, a silk wrap around her high forehead and i dare not try to remember the skirts. it was pathetic and even more when she said that sometimes it would take her three whole hours to get dressed. and I’m thinking, fuck me, and you go out like this. she also top her outfit, on the most dramatic days, by coming to the office wearing her anti bruxism night guard. if was pretty enormous and she would suck the saliva while she talked. the eyes darting cautiously to see if you were being judgemental. shit that was way fucking beyond judging, it was more a matter of respecting the public decomposition of another. in fucking public. and now I decide to wear nothing but pajamas. the funny thing is that Bobbie doesn’t say anything and i am glad but then sometimes I wonder because some people do get annoyed by the idiosyncrasies of the other. i don’t think he does, as long as I let him go around in very dirty clothes and smelly feet, I think I’m safe to wear my cheap pajamas in public, to the office, to the movies, to the stores and around the house. Never, but never, to bed, of course.

Godmother from Polonia
08-15-2010

on the road to Polonia, a town of black birds filled with gentle songs, there was a godmother stitching a quilt of promises with twelve silver needles. in between sitdowns she busied herself by repotting fern-dream hybrids with a cast iron spoon. in the aftermath she brushed away crumbs of trials and tribulations with a folded old apron. in between she retired many glances of hope into parcels of oilcloth and pigskin. she couldn’t before the end hide the pair of ravens from the first female cousin who watched all along from behind a sooty pot and the morning came and went, full of grain, full of husk, the sails of wants pressed and put away, never to be lamented out loud, neither by spinster, nor commandant. The heather bloomed and dried, she dressed her wounds in sage and wondered who had fathered the song she heard: ”I will happily thee wed, before my beauty is all gone” and she tied one more perfect knot to the next thread in line to be cut, she pressed the dark dirt around the hybrids one more time, she threw a crumb to the ravens outside the window and eyeing the parcels of oilcloth and pigskin she undressed and stepped into the tub for her evening bath.

the unsuspected restorative
08-12-2010

another thing he raised were cardinals. there were cages, big ones. with immaculate sheets of newspaper in the morning and shit smelling old papers in the evening. the smell of bird shit is unmistakable: it is dry and thin, never making you think of dirty ass, but certainly, when smears on your fingers it is just as bad. the revulsion of it. when he travelled she would watch the birds for him. i remember about 5 critters. noisy and very much in the room. she more said she would watch them, than she watched them. several days would go pay would old papers on the bottom of the cages: the untouched newspapers next to the cage, covered with empty husks of canaryseed and the occasional bird shit splatter. i eyed the birds from a distance. i didn’t like them and i didn’t dislike them. they were not even interesting to watch because they ate very nervously and never fucked, so what was the point right. almost two weeks after he had left she started behaving preoccupied: the cardinals had some kind of a louse and that meant certain death. they were infested, by the time she realized it. so gets a bucket of water, pours an unmeasured measure of creolin into the bucket and grabs each bird by their feet. they were week and didn’t fight much. so upside they go down into the creolin water which is white and smells almost delicious. i worry about their eyes but she says they are smart enough to close them. one after the other, cardinal in, wet sock out. she positions them back inside their cages and ask what if they die and she says better to die from creolin than from the lice. i couldn’t see how it could be better to die either way, but that was her problem and of course, the cardinals’ fate. on the third week he came back and claimed his cages filled with 5 bristling cardinals. she told him that creolin water was an excellent restorative for birds, didn’t he know. He looked at her like he always did, complete disbelief: my birds don’t need no restorative.

most people can cook
08-12-2010

we had picked up our paper plates from the food line and ended up sitting outside at the cement table under the oak tree. in the tire swing the little one squealed every time the swing got close to the big oak. it was possible to swing into the tree, but not likely. my daughter lowers her voice: they make excellent food. half of my mind on the tree I half heard her without realizing: who are they? the black people, mom. I looked at her for the first time in 31 years: she never had said such shit before. the lowering of her voice, ripped right through me. she said black people like some say mother fucker. in a careful tone. that voice followed by a furtive look around her. lest some “black people” be lurking around. i remember how we never talked like that. how we did things that were color fucking blind. how we didn’t have to ponder IF to invite black people to the house. i couldn’t for the life of me, understand where she had picked up such a fucking tone. her husband, of course, my husband says. but i can’t see that in him. or better, i have not seen that in him. the food was enormously delicious, just the right taste, the right amount of salt, the right amount of fat, if was simply fucking awesome. even the macaroni and cheese which i despise as a form of culinary transformation of pasta and casein, for its plain jane simplicity, was better than average. so i remind them that i can cook as well. they discount my comment as not applicable, i’m a mother and they guess mothers can cook. so many myths in my grown up child’s mind: when did fornication and reproduction result in culinary ability, for god’s sake. i didn’t see it coming. must have been focused on her not having sex, not drinking, not using drugs, not getting raped, not becoming a thief, not watching crap TV, not listening to country music and forgot to see her sinking into an unwarranted racial superiority swamp. I wonder if she will fish herself out, if i can bribe her again with a two hundred dollars gas grill like i did when she wanted to move out at nineteen: it scared the shit out of me. the old horror and shame of not having an intact hymen all coming back and she really didn’t give a shit. i couldn’t imagine her doing it with that boy who smoked cigarettes and wouldn’t look me into the eye. or when he did i could read the most plain, blatant aversion for me. i didn’t know where it came from, but it was very much there: in the booth across from me having his first legal age beer in public which was no big deal because he had been drinking in public for quite a while. and to have my daughter laying with a boy who smokes and drinks beer, and drives a ridiculous car, i just cannot imagine him putting two sentences together or touching her with the tenderness required by young and old girls alike, so as not to break the magic of the unnatural proximity of two. and yet they didn’t take the bride: i gave them the grill anyway and didn’t worry too much about who she was emulating now. until i heard her lowered voice, a self-assured tone that comes from lack of analysis or comprehension, from a view that is shot from one’s asshole: i don’t know her right now and yet i can see she is content. she is superior, even if it is only because she knows something as stupid and untrue as that: black people can cook.

city poetry
08-12-2010

i know the exact spot on rivers avenue when and where i smelled the old church building. it made me want to write a poem. then i turned onto ashley phosphate and almost ran over a brand new shoe: a brilliant patent leather high heel sandal. i had to stop in the median to write the poem in Spanish. go figure. it simply flowed better, even though i didn’t speak spanish at the time. i had read a lot of it, and maybe in writing i was simply reading it, so i didn’ thave any problems… i laugh. the short poem came out smelling of bodies and old smoke, of sunshine on clean shirts and falling stockings. only the shoe stood in its inevitable path o rural simplicity. the whore was a given. the transvestite running across the railroad tracks was a perfect possibility. the beggar. the drugged up young woman. the high school drop out going from cheap motel to the waffle house for coffee and those irritating potatoes they fry or something. once all of that has vanished into the morning light, only the show remained: unashamed, untarnished, intact. The shoe which was foretold by the church

praying mantiss
08-12-2010

she never stopped talking. from 6 AM when she worked out by the radio and looked myopically at a black and white poster behind the living room door, she held the short broomstick and repeated after the trainer: chin up, tuck your tummy…. and her voice was animated, just loud enough for the hour and i listened. the thump of the broomstick on the floor invariably followed by a scrape told me that she wasn’t doing the forms very well. she persisted. she persisted in the work out, morning after morning. alone in front of the closed-door where the poster hung and listened alone to the man on the radio. i don’t imagine anyone else in the whole city did the same. it was the longest 30 minutes of the day. until 6 o’clock at night when she ushered our wet bodies into bed and hushed everyone with a voice that was going away, into her own bedroom. i could hear her talk through the walls. she complained all the time and he didn’t say a word. you fucked the maid again, she would say, and now she doesn’t respect me, she accused. she didn’t cry, she didn’t really shout at night, but her voice was harsh and more than anything interminable. i wouldn’t fall asleep for fear she wouldn’t shut up. when she did, then i imagined i was inside uncle’s pants walking down the mountains without falling, without running without anyone to push me forward or hold me back. and i walked down the mountain that never ended. the silence was complete. like the silence can be on the mountains. because you don’t really listen to the enormous wind. it is bigger than the mountain and bigger than Earth itself . it comes from nowhere and everywhere. so a walk slowly and firmly down no paths. in my uncle’s pants. i don’t say anything and i don’t want to sing or cry or tell stories. i just walk circling down around the mountain. i wait for when the blue buick will appear at the end of the road, over there and then i know i have to sit among them. they all talk quite a bit too . they push each other. i can never understand why, so i vomit. vomiting makes people stay away from you but they still worry enough to buy gaseous water. i get to sit in from so that i can stare onto the road that disappears under the buick. no one else vomits and i am happy. because no one can deny a vomit, you see. you feel sick, you look sick and they see the crap that comes out of you. No denying, like headaches or tummy aches, these are difficult to prove and she won’t stop talking, so there is no point in even saying it out loud. it opens another floodgate of complaints and memories and threats and hopes that cover you in more shit than you can fathom in your young mind. so i vomit. i vomit and i have migraine headaches. they make me lay down in a dark room for three days in a row, sometimes. i wonder now if there were pain killers then, and why i didn’t take anything for the headaches. maybe i don’t want to find out because that will cost me another 100 bucks at the shrinks, although she is fucking awesome. so i don’t have them anymore and i haven’t puked in a very long time. i don’t take her phone calls and throw away her emails. i don’t talk about her much because myths are there to be figured out, or be part of specially low circulation volumes, for sure. i know she still talks because last time i visited i slept with her in the same bed. she was rolled up, tense, almost falling off the bed and she prayed all fucking night long. i asked her for god”s sake to shut up and she said she had to save the fucking world. i understood then what she meant when she said she wanted to see the circus go up in flames: burned down houses one sees on city corners and along country roads are silent.

The Smell of Earth
08-11-2010

when it rained she said it smelled like the earth. that put my mind inside the mass of molten what it is, that i believed to be under my feet, all the way to wherever. i smelled it carefully so as not to miss the earth . all i could smell was dirt. dirt that floated behind the blue bus careening down the bloody sunny roads. the rain trapping dirt particles and i am watching it, my hand bleeding rain into the sleeve of my old sweater. the cold hardware of the umbrella tasted like it looked: nickel. this was way before i knew about money or much anything else. so i licked my fingers slowly, enjoying the coldness of the rain and evaluated the earth smell. the dirt smell. the dust smell. she wasn’t always right, i knew. much later in life i tried to tell Lou about the earth smell and he looked at me as if he was hearing some obscure dialect. in trying to be mean, he didn’t know how right he was. I keep thinking that there had been a whole series of wrongs, of lies, of misfires and miscalculated defeats. not the least of all, not the last of all, the smell of dirt. the smell of earth. the smell of dust. i smelled the same smell many times and I would see in my mind’s color blind eyes, the intensity of her enthusiasm. the high pitch of her sigh and the eyes that saw no one else. and I hoped for the Fall, wanting to weep.

Green mice
08-11-2010

in the box of caran d’ache there was a green pencil that I adored. I held it and caressed it. the very thought of sharpening its narrow green soul pained me. almost enough to color everything anything but that green. Love. Disney used it on the jacket of one of cinderella’s mouse friend. that green was stable, solid, happy, uncomplicated and i loved it. i wanted to marry it. i wanted to have sex with it. i wanted to eat it and put it away, away from my sisters who colored everything with the disrespect of troglodytes. their grubby hands grabbed pencils, any pencils with the authority of slave owners. i cringed and waited my chance to hold the green pencil. i copied the little mouse with tracing paper and it looked exact. i colored it carefully. all inside the lines. taking care not to make the whiskers too thick as this would make the mouse look all wrong. his jacket: i saved for last. i could almost feel it in my body. the anticipation, the growing animation inside, my breathing getting faster and wanting to close my eyes. if only i could color his little jacket with my eyes closed i would totally enjoy my moment. green caran d’ache pencil in my right hand, tracing paper secured by my left fist. i smell the green lead and touch the pencil tip to the paper. i want this to go on forever. if only there were no lines, no mouse, no little jacket and the green could go on forever, covering the papers, table, floor, walls, stairways, trash bins, sidewalks, street corners, sacks of dry goods, bearded men, varicose veins, official papers and unofficial births, falsified records, bribed priests, cheating cooks, careless hands, winter hats, bugs, tossed condoms, swings, carps, rowing boats and the ocean in absolute green.

The very small rhinephant
08-10-2010

on that day I was driving a VW beetle of sorts a bit fast for conditions but i knew the road, right so i go without much concern till i realized that yes i have left the road without meaning to and the road turns more into an embankment of a river much like the inexorable slide into the fiery pit in toy story 3 and i do all i can to get out of the VW beetle when i realize that the muddy ground is no more than the side of a manatee, except that it is brown. enormous body, he has a relatively small head. i can see his lips trying to eat or say something in the language of manatees which i not only don’t speak, but don’t understand. so i take position to see him from the front. well. to my surprise he is really not a manatee but a very small rhinoceros which comes to me with flying elephant years. i do not feel threatened and tell those around me what a riot it is to think you are face to face with a manatee when in reality, you have encountered the smallest rhinephant.

the rose bush and the southern grasshoppers
08-10-2010

she had just turned 14 when her grandmother died. Technically it was her great grandmother; emotionally, she was crushed. so she blames god. I think religion fucks up when it shrinks everything to a case of cause and effect of all natural phenomena. so she hated god, and I searched for something big and uncomplicated to tell her, after all I was supposed to be her leader of sorts. but i could not come up with anything brilliant so i shut up. So i kept around, didnt say much and waited for her pain to go away or me to become inspired. a few days go by and im in the yard with her: she is ranting about her fucking great grandmother and walk looking at my feet, hoping they will stumble of some good consoling shit. We come up to this old, old rose plant. She was fat at the bottom where the earth touched her bark and as you looked towards the top, the branches were increasingly thinner until the got to the most soft green tips of the same branches. Some roses were fucking awesome, some were barely open and some were half way dropping to the ground, petals and seeds alike. so i turn to her and i say, there, there is your grandmother. She looked for a long time at the rose and then squeezed some of the seeds between her fingers, her young nails eaten to the core. I dont figure god is sitting somewhere picking off greatgrandmothers or roses alike for the hell of it. But for sure the rose dies to make way for the seed.
You see, no self pity, no young rose crying the death of the old ones, no adult ones crying over the loss of a young one, to bug hunger or childs play. Nah… They don’t stop making rose smell, they dont withhold colors. she gets it, i can tell and we walk away. she is hungry, and we are more grasshoppers that southern women. Right now, everything will be alright.

I still hate pink
08-06-2010

earlier today i thought about her. Dona Setembrina. it was second grade life. we passed her house once. mother knew where she lived but i was really surprised to see her at the window. in the sun. like a big ass cat. she was older than the other teachers and had blue eyes. i stared at the white fuzz along her cheeks but i dont think that she ever realized that. i didnt particularly cared for her. nor did i especially dislike her. second grade was a breeze and even excelling was boring because the bar was what it was. i entertained myself by having orgasms in class. what the hell, right. one day she brought me a brand new pink, very soft pink, long sleeved tee-shirt. much like the white one i am wearing just now. ribbed and soft to the touch. around the neck it had the thinnest satin ribbon. i could have cried i liked it so much. this was not your usual second-hand shit. so i said thank you and carried it home on the streetcar. it was cold for a long time in porto alegre. the minuano blew everything from the andes into your soul, no matter how young you were. and cold you lived, cold you slept, cold you ate and the only warmth usually came from the big noisy engines of the buses. chapped lips, chapped cheeks and tears that felt cold right after they ran out of your eyes. so i put the pink tee shirt on when i got home. i didnt take it off for an entire week. i loved it. i would peak under the sleeve of my uniform and felt good about it. a couple of weeks after the gift, Dona Setembrina cornered me in the school yard peered into my eyes and with her enormous German smile she asked me: “is it still ponkly?” I didn’t understand. that wasnt a real word that i knew. i didnt understand sarcasm, (still dont) cruelty, goodness or any of those things, really. i was into survival mode and you dont have the luxury of judgement in that sitch. so Im looking at her and wondering what she meant, i asked her, Im red on the face, Im sweating, i want to run away, but she gave me the fucking tee-shirt, so i stay plugged to the ground, the cold wind on my bare legs, and my chest nice and warm because of the fucking tee-shirt. Is it still pink, she asked, the smile going away. the reality of poverty, poor hygiene, aloness, sweet sour smell, all came crashing down on me as the love i felt for the fucking tee-shirt dissolved right along with her smile..I still hate pink

green ducks on a page
08-06-2010

she was 2 years younger than me. i would go to her apartment everyday so that we could walk together to school. the maid would let me in the large sunny clean living room and i would work my way down to her bedroom. it was close to 11 in the morning and she was always sleeping. after i came in the maid would bring her a tray with orange juice and fresh bread with butter. she never ate. i did. she would then get up and lazily go to the bathroom. i sat alone in the room and entertained myself with reading anything i could put my hands on. i longed to smell the great stuff that always came from her bathroom and her kitchen. i was a complete expert in disguising curiosity, excitement, interest, envy, surprise, jealousie. i never knew that i was supposed to also hide my love for her. her father didn’t care. he was too involved with a lover and a little bastard kid. teresa hated my guts. she was the perfect fucker and i was everything wrong in her eyes. funcny that years later we saw each other at a Bunuel film session and she was totally hip and accepting of the unusual, trying to impress her little architect boyfriend, no longer catholic. I didn’t have time for her. so i waited quietly for her to decide when to talk, when to dance, when to eat, when leave and when to stay. she was kind with the goodness of those that have everything and have never been confronted with the possibility of another’s different needs, or needs at all. so she loved me back, in her own way. she took me to her boyfriends aparment where i was nearly raped by one of his friends and nobody every knew. she would take me to the refined boutique where her father kept a charge account because this was before the advent of the credit cards and she would buy a bunch of shit for herself and present me with a beautiful pair of socks or something like that. and she would take me to the garage of the building on the corner so that we would smoke cigarrettes, except i never did because i had promised that i would only smoke when i turned 18 and that was way far in the future so i would sit quietly and watch her smoke, sometimes two cigarrettes, in case we couldn’t get away for a while. and i tagged along, the shorter older shadow of my beloved friend. i found out that her mother disliked me for thinking me homosexual. i wasn’t even fucking sexual, let alone homosexual. but she feared for my influence over her daughter. i was after all, a little bit of a communist, a little bit of a zionist, a little bit of an atheist, a little bit of a begger, a little bit of a poet, a little bit of a precocious philosopher and i could understand every fucking thing around me, but not the sexual part. i felt sorry for her mother because i knew about the lover and the kid, as i now know that she did too so i feel even sorrier for her these many years later. Ana Maria gave me this book to take home and write something on it. I could not grasp the meaning of it. We talked every day and we walked together every where we walked and what was I going to write on her beautiful book. I so that others had written all kinds of stupid shit, even some had put down lines of some popular songs talking about love and hope and shit. i took the book home with me because it was a part of her. just having it in my bag, in my own squalid little apartment and filthy little bed was like a secret magic touch. the one i could never feel with the beatiful socks she would give me because these were quickly dirty and smelly. the book stayed beautiful pressed among my own notebooks and books. i looked for a special pen and decided on a green ball point to write a special message on her special book because i just couldn’t bring myself to tell her that i thought that was really stupid, much in the same way that i couldn’t later tell my husband how incredibly annoying I found sinatra and perry como to be. so i drew some green little ducks in line with seeds on the ground over the golden lines and I thought it was pretty good except it was hard to find something important to say about the fucking ducks. so i tore the page off, cautiously. the stuff that was written onthe back, i copied poorly…. then i redrew my ducks, this time better centered on the page to make room for words. next time i went to her apartment i quietly put the book back on her pretty dresser and it smelled just like her. delicious. she asked me what had happened with the pages of the book and i told her i didn;t know, even though it killed me to hide yet another thing from her.

3rd grade shoes
08-04-2010

they came from a thick canvas bag, padlocked all the way from the united states of america. reeking of insect killing drug. when mother pulled out all the stuff i fell in love with three things: the faded blue winter jacket with lamb fleece inside and an L shaped rip on the back; a wooden clothes pin of a shape I had never seen before and the pair of shows. they had the thickest rubber soles i had ever seen. black loafers about half-inch too long for my feet. my love for them was all forgiving. I dug into the front with my toes all day long. at least the part when i was going from place to place. they were soft to walk on. i shone them and looked at them: i was in love. i could – and did – wear them all year round, unlike the jacket which was only good for the winter months, or the clothes pin that had absolutely no use and whose lines were so simple it only kept its practical unfamiliarity because ours had springs on them. my shoes were awesome. i gradually grew into them and there were months when i was completely happy, satisfied. like a good marriage i put them on in the morning and i took them off at night. i ran and a walked and it was bliss. by the fifth grade they started hurting my big toes. at first a slight discomfort, then a desire for bare feet, and at some point fucking outright pain on the nails and toes. time for surgery mother took her precious fucking scissors and cut the top of the shoes at the front. enough for my filthy socks to show themselves. plain brown, hardened by sweat, powder, dirty feet. they stuck out of my front window. my free of pain toes, now recoiled in the shame of my dirty socks.

a businessy email
08-04-2010

she came into my office and claimed the acrylic chair closest to the window. her legs were comfortable apart and she looked me straight in the eyes. so are you going to charge me every time i fuck up. there was no other way to put it, right? i had charged her for the error – all 235.00 shmackaroos. because it wasnt like a simple almost unavoidable mistake, it was more like a gargantuan fuck up, like the order was in the right box she read it and she put the wrong screen on the machine, so that she printed all of the blankets with a church picture, instead of the military colleges logo. it was shit, right and she said so herself. but i loved her for her straight forward approach to her small catastrophe. if i were going to charge her for all her errors, then she needed to go back to working at the bar. so i explained that charging her wasnt punishment but actual reimbursement for my loss. I had to replace the fucking blankets. and i am hating the whole thing because i hate to argue over 235. 00 when i know she doesnt have much money and i do. but i figure if she cant be awake during work, then i have to wake her up. so i told her i was impressed that she had been so professional about the whole thing. it was true. i didnt have to tell her that but i wanted to give her something. then last week both her grandmother who was really old and her ex-partner who was not even 40 go and die on the same fucking day! what are the odds, right. i saw her seating on the sidewalk by her grape color car with he pussy decal on the side and she was crying. i didnt go over because what could i do, right. plus women that are crying make me very uncomfortable because it is like they just want to fucking cry and no reasoning brings them out that shitty wet spell. she left and they told me she wouldnt be back for a while this morning I had the most formal email in my inbox. references to the bereavement clause in our manual and some other shit. it was so business like that i dont know what she was trying to say. i forwarded it to rh . they are fucking persistent enough to figure out what it meant.

of paranoia and passwords
08-03-2010

i have forgotten her name. she always has this very complex straw yellow hairdo. I have touched it : it is hard; she is not pretty, she does not smell particularly good, nor bad. her money is rolled tight and disorganized in the front pocket of pants that are too tight for her age too tight for pulling down in the summer time. reluctantly she pays the girl and places her order. when she picks it up she is delighted. her hoarse voice sounds happy beyond the modulations of which she is capable. this time she is short some money and promises to come back. i let her go. what the fuck does it matter if she comes back with my twenty-four dollars. it is her fucking soul, right? anyway she came back yesterday i knew it was her because of the straw yellow hairdo firmly perched on her head. we smiled and I walked up to her she asked for some small favor. she told me she had been in the hospital for the i was chuckling as i started my umpteenth email to keith: dear mr clinton. it wasn’t really paranoia, it was just that the meds were no longer working so well i knew it because i was writing again and the desire to paint had come back. much like dandruff, the same old reliable shampoo suddenly doesn’t quite completely erase the tiny specs off your shoulders you know. i didn’t really know why or when, because it just happened. the thoughts become gradually more insidious and you spend a lot more time trying to think around them, or just ahead of them, or even sweep fast behind them. it is such a chore. anyway, so i write to keith because i locked myself out of my computer. i knew for sure that misa was going to try to ready my emails so i wanted to get a password that she couldn’t crack because she has no self awareness so i made up FatFuckingBastard because nobody in their right mind would think about entering that unkind description of another. problem is, when i restarted the fucking computer – bam: locked me right out! I tried fatfuckingbastard, fat fucking bastard, FatFucking Bastard.. you name it, the fucking thing kept parrotting me with shit like the password is incorrect, or something to that extent. so i know that keith can get me in and maybe make remember which fucking variation of fatfuckingbastard i used. misa is probably still trying to read my emails because she is a real fat fucking bastard. Then of course there are the violets. they seemed menacing now. fucking mother used to grow the all the time and called them african. i don’t think so, but maria gave a stupid small plastic pot with very violet violets. i kept it at the office for a while but then became irritated and brought it home. my hope was that i would forget the plastic pot with the violet violets in the back of the jeep and that they would cook and perish like the three cats in Brazil when I didn’t know any better and was happy that they had finally quieted down and then spent hours driving around to dispose of the fucking incriminating styrofoam box with the 3 dead cats in horrific positions, all sweat, like they had no hair or something and had tried to climb out of their white coffin until they stopped mid air. the violet violets had long ago dried up and fallen off. i didn’t forget the violet violets because i don’t forget shit anymore. a curse. i can run the whole movie in my head and there it is the implacable story of what was almost no matter how long ago. anyway the violet violets sat by the window of my art corner and i figured out how to wet them without putting the water on the leaves because they get burned or something. in memory of the brazilian cats i chose not to banish the violet violets to the floating dock. they live still by the window.

of adam, eve and the fucking snake
08-03-2010

i was talking to her like i always do, with complete abandon and not afraid of crying swearing laughing lying or even telling the truth. it was nice to be able to be there.

it is good that she comes and goes and i don’t really have to be considered or just or faithful. all i have to fucking do is to show up with all my shit hanging out naturally. which is exactly why i went in the first place. she didn’t ask me anything in the beginning but patiently (ha ha ha) listened and looked on once in a while paying a compliment sometimes laughing sometimes crying. that’s how i got the idea that maybe that’s what the whole damned thing of Adam Eve and the fucking snake and the forbidden fruit really meant: you see you meet other people and you are delighted, happy, up, up, like paradise shit, right. then if you are people like her you get to really know what makes people tick (tree of knowledge) and you know when they love you and if they want to just fuck you and you just know it so completely that you become completely outside of yourself in the relationship with them (banished)… so forever you are condemned to make the enormous effort to not see everything, to not know everything, to accept and try to be accepted (earn the bread with the sweat of your brow or however they say this in english). i am yet to figure out how the reconciliation happens.

the orange
07-31-2010

Having nothing to do with my horologio, a timeless golden angel

immortal, for an instant
07-31-2010

i have forgotten her name. she always has this very complex straw yellow hairdo. I have touched it : it is hard; she is not pretty, she does not smell particularly good, nor bad. her money is rolled tight and disorganized in the front pocket of pants that are too tight for her age too tight for pulling down in the summer time. reluctantly she pays the girl and places her order. when she picks it up she is delighted. her hoarse voice sounds happy beyond the modulations of which she is capable. this time she is short some money and promises to come back. i let her go. what the fuck does it matter if she comes back with my twenty-four dollars. it is her fucking soul, right? anyway she came back yesterday i knew it was her because of the straw yellow hairdo firmly perched on her head. we smiled and I walked up to her she asked for some small favor. she told me she had been in the hospital for the duration. melanoma, she whispers. i shiver: shit, this crap kills people. i look into her eyes and she holds the look. she is an american and unlikely so, she doesn’t cower away from my stranger’s concern. it is way more than intrusion because she can tell i give a shit. she had had both her breasts cut out. she thought every thing was alright. she pulls her blouse down at the shoulder and asks me to feel this ball on the shoulder joint: it is soft to the touch and the skin on it feels more like inner thigh than arm. it doesn’t look menacing. they will have to cut me again, she says. i guess every time they cut me i get closer to god. i asked her to let me know when she goes in. i said i want to pray for her which is probably not true. what i want is to just love her once more, once again because when we are loved for no fucking reason, that’s when we are goddamned immortal. Or just not temporal. Today.

Did she cry
07-29-2010

Her eyes scrunched up and looked wet. I was entirely too timid to ask what or why. So I didn’t.

Gilbert is dying
07-25-2010

I met Gilbert across from my front counter. he is not much taller than me, but somehow he doesn’t look like a short man. his head reminds me of an ant and his eyes are full of expression: a bit of anguish, trained into my face, searching for more than my accented words. he wants refinement and brilliance. I can dish it out. there is sweat on his upper lip and right below the hair-line. i try to pick up a scent. he looks so clean and properly dressed. there is none. no cologne, deodorant, after shave, nothing. not even fabric softener. i figure he is unmarried. there is a pronounced aloness about Gilbert. i like him, i want to do things with him and for him and i have no problem praising him. just because he is Gilbert. i love to look at him. some ennui. some angst. no, more like a fucking whole lot of angst. and yet i know very little about him. he lets me look. he takes in my attention. listens to my art talk. i’m happy. he’s happy when he leaves. i don’t think about him unless he is there. about 4 months ago he came in. he was thin and his clothes looked enormous around the neck and thighs. I cheered him because he had told me once he had started swimming to keep in shape. He looked at me and with a really tiny smile said something like he hadn’t been too well. “shit man”, that’s all I could say. more like muttering, when your good seat is gone in the theater. we looked at each other for a long time “you wanna go out and play?” he said nah, it was alright.. he didn’t feel too good. then he came back again a couple of months later: much thinner, in his new small pants, small shirt and a suit coat too heavy for the temperature. his skin was dry but i saw small sweat drops on his upper lip. like a small child that falls down, he looked me in the eyes. I held his face with both my hands and kissed his cheek with as much affection as i could afford without wailing. “oh Gilbert”. i wanted to erase his disbelief and his knowledge. he mentioned a son. then he sat in my little fake wicker chair for a long time, as if it could keep him alive. all he had to do was to not move. so we sat for a while, prolonging his life, hopeful. he told me he wouldn’t get to see the trophies he ordered, but that he wanted them to be excellent. when I came back to the front office he had left. he owes me $356.00.

of writing and not fishing
07-25-2010

I was surprised. it is like fishing, i said. we look at each other knowing that we are immovable on this one. maybe she thinks the writing is morbid. i can not fathom spending a great deal of time trying to fucking kill a fish that I have to smell, touch, clean AND to add insult to injury: cook it – if I want to eat it. so, why the hell not to write. thoughts are pretty cool company. playing a delicious song over and over, or at least being really happy when the cd in the car finally gets to track 7 gracias a la vida and you know every note, each breathing break of the song. just like that i can write about gilbert in my mind and karen and linda and kylia and ben. just like that – no cooking required.

No More Face Book
07-25-2010

for the last 10 minutes or so I sat here in semi darkness while grandson Jake the First, watches Avatar and I half listen to it. I am way more into the marvelous misadventures of flapjack but that is what is on.

I was writing my so long note to Facebook and then the system kicked me to a zoo world… No surprises here.

The point of my leaving Facebook is that I find it increasingly unsatisfying.

You befriend people that you like, people that you love, people that love or like people that you love or like and the idea is to develop an increasingly wider circle of friends – or people that you like or love. But then, you do nothing.

I love living. I love relating to people on a real level. Perhaps a bit intense… Not by choice, but by simply being (never could spell this word).

I feel that there is a bunch of people that JOIN, as you would a gym and then we do nothing –for many reasons, I imagine. Suddenly all those people that you invited into your circle are entirely too close to your daily musings. So daily musings become daily passing superficial notes, or nothing at all.

I don’t want the distant echos of my friends’ experiences dropped into the nothing of Facebook. I don’t want to become one more mute, deaf spectator.

Relationships take a lot of work. I have never shunned hard work. Maybe that’s why I so value my relationships. And it is quite impossible to maintain very significant relationships with 326 people. Throughout the world.

When Brazil lost in the World Cup I am sure a bunch of people didn’t even know it. I am sure a lot people that know me and were my friends knew or wondered how bad I might have felt. Or simply the passing thought. Dang she must be really bummed. Whichever the case may be, in the absence of Facebook, people just might call each other and say something.

My wonderful son Deej, whom a lot of you know, shares my views with me. Not in so many words, as most of you that know him and are his real friends in real life, well know. So, much like Deej, I’m leaving Facebook. I will move my pix to my art site (www.ninarego.com) and hope to keep in touch with those of you who care to do so via that site, or phone, or person, or snail mail.. whichever comes to mind when you think of me.
Affectionally

THaiku
07-25-2010

Deborah bore into Bob. Debilitated Bob. The oracle of her mind: harbor, bed. She couldn’t make love with his watch in the room.

(THaiku = thought/haiku)

Hang him by the scapular
06-18-2010

This certainly was not the first time I was looking at Bob. We would chat after church, mostly we all looked at deborah and laughed a lot. Bob had a way of putting all his weight onto one leg. He waited for his turn to add something to the stories. He was accurate. Usually they were tales about deborah or jackie.Bob smiles more than most men. Even when he came over by himself to tell me that deborah had slept with the priest X. I already knew about it but I pretended I didn’t. It seemed obscene to bring the little detail up now. Like you are not going to ask to see somebody’s prosthesis. Somebody else had told me and I had suspected all along that deborah had fallen for the dumb ass. Fuck it, right? deborah barely clung to her head screws and X was a real shit. I met him. He doesn't deserve to be named. Bob kept lauding the fucker, though for everything he had done for the university… Shit, man , if it was left to me the guy would be hung by his scapular. But not Bob. He could understand ANYTHING really. He understood his wife, and he understood Jackie: her problems with girlfriends in school, boys in college, and men later on. Those spilled over to used cars, overpriced lofts in California and Bob smiled about the whole lot. Saintbob. Go figure. After deborah stopped talking to me, I didn’t see Bob for a while. Out of the blue he stopped at my new office. He told me he had another job, they had paid off all their credit cards with a second mortagage on the house and that the windows were still in the garage. Did I know how to get a hold of the Brazilian carpenter, I said that I didn’t, although I did. I found myself checking out his sunburned wrinkles. They moved up and down with his smiles, while his eyes now appeared to be on the brink of tears. I checked them out and I saw a whole lot of Bob, a whole lot of deborah and whole lot of jackie in them. The hospitals.. The bleach, The rubber gloves. The children that never followed. And the boats. The paintings. The job at NPR. The clams. The brothers and sister. The now old parents. The handwriting. The ships and the friendships. The old cars. The museums. The watch that has to come off to get laid.. The black shrink that sees only Deborah. The windows. The windows. The fire in the kitchen and the windows. Yes deborah is doing alright and you know, jackie is jackie, she is coming along.

A few weeks later he called me. His cell phone was breaking up a lot. I think he wanted a sign for his new job. He said he would call me when he got to the office. He never did.

Kylie on the back seat
06-18-2010

Kylie One, Kylie Two, Kylie Three, KylieFour-nia!

Aliens
06-08-2010

every three weeks or so I sit and wait. I arrive 30 minutes early. I don’t know if the time is really 11:30 or 10:30. It could be either. I come in the middle. There’s something about only losing half of the time. I sit and scan the discovery magazine. It always has interesting things and great pictures. Wonder what camera they use. Great equipment for sure. some of mine could be great except for the camera. so I wait. This woman whose answering machine didn’t pick up the message, she is pissed. She mumbles that her machine has never malfunctioned. When did you call my house? The receptionist says “Twice the same week”. I think she is lying because she really didn't answer the woman's question. I want to side with the woman but the receptionist is extra nice to me so I shut up. Like the people in Poland outside of Auschwitz. What is the difference right? I guess when you are at the shrink’s waiting room you try to avoid a scene. Internment is always lurking around the corner. A third woman with a cane comes down the hall and immediately compliments the perfect answering machine owner on her green shows. I followed her look. Green slipper like sandals, matched to a rather small purse: guacamole green! She claims that the shoes are old and for ten minutes the two women describe shoes they have at home, shoe stores they frequently visit, malls of different sizes, prices, foot width. A husband looks down at the guacamole shoes. His face is stupefied. My brain is stupefied: on the clock, they talked about the green shoes for 15 fucking minutes.
I figure that’s why the world is so fucked up, you see. When guacamole colored shoes consume the interest of two – albeit perhaps in need of psychiatric help on some level – grown, functioning women for an entire 15 minutes, it reaches depths way beyond fucked up.
My time had come and I have to focus on how I can to get rid of an appendage of a relationship that I allowed to invade me. Aliens!

J'Accuse
04-28-2010

I refuse it!
I flatly refuse to accept this bull.
The bystander effect implies that I – with an enourmous capital i – cease to be able to access my arsenal of values when i – with an enourmous capital i – become part of a group larger than my i – with an enourmous capital i.

I cannot ascribe a positive value to my life experience without self awareness.

I have been plagued with the ability to be the first to jump to offer help.
To yell out a suggestion.
To start the applause.
I have been brave all of my fucking life.
Even when I know the coward that I am, I step up and become fucking brave.

So what’s with this shit that in a group people just won’t step up to the plate? I wonder vehemently if these losers are losers in their most intimate moments. Are those the fuckers that bargain with god to pick the lotto numbers? Very possibly they fuck their spouses thinking about the tires they need. They’ve got to be wrong from the get go. I don’t buy it.

I accuse these bystanders of being effectively DEAD.

letter home
04-26-2010

Lately almost every day you come into my mind. It started with the image of your upturned big toe. I walked to the bathroom barefoot. Not wanting to touch the floor with my entire soles, I curled my toes up. Much like yours. Except for the effort. So I counted as thinking about you. It is hard to imagine you, since you left Rio. I guess all your furniture, clothes, books, pots, pans, shoes, pictures were packed up by some dedicated man with clean, clean hands and complete devotion to you. I imagine that those same things were unpacked again, elsewhere. That's where I lose the thought of you. Geography has always distracted me. Sometimes I say that I will call you. I will play the whole conversation in my mind. Truthfully, the conversation by now plays itself, it is so old. Maybe that's why I don't call. I know it is getting colder now, because Donald was born around this time and it was really freezing, plus the rain. This means you're going to have asthma again. I hated when you coughed. You sounded very, very mortal. But you never did die, not from coughing with asthma, anyway. Maybe you will want to go to Rio for the winter. I'm going to want to know that. I hope that will find out.

There is a sense about you in me. It brings dusty gauze curtain that blows in the breeze, into my mind. I like that I see the street when the curtain moves. I don't like the dust smell. The betrayal on my fingers of course cloth when it looks soft is much like your leaving me. A perfect harmony for a number of months and then nothing. Mr. S always asks about you. He thinks you are my mother. I have grown tired of correcting him. Now I give him news - mainly health updates - on the mother that you aren't. He thinks I talk to you often but I don't care. He looked disappointed every time I told him you were not my mother. It is worth it for me to let him believe that you are Ok and that you are my mother. After all, who gives a shit, right? When I talk about you to Fr. E I always repeat to him how much you adored him. For your sake, not his, I do such. I feel like I'm helping you, by letting him know how much you loved him. He is proud of it, which generally irritates me somewhat. After all, what the fuck - is he gonna love you back? You know what I mean? I guess I'm protective of you to some extent.

Schindler's list
04-26-2010

The first time I saw Schindler's list I cried. Black and white impressed me but didn't make me cry. Sciatica made it more difficult. It didn't make me cry. That first time, I couldn't talk about the movie. Chatting about miscarriages or dead deer on the highway just doesn't do it for me. I didn't feel chatty. I resented the little girls red dress. It was too much of a fucking idea in the midst of so much goddamned pain. I have no respect for ideas that hang in front of my nose, like perfect shit that's been taken. I resented the movie, the war, the history, the Germans that had hidden in Brazil for so long. I resented the fact that we can say 6 million and not want to fucking commit suicide. 6 fucking million of what? Miles and piles of molecules? I stayed resentful of the the movie since 1993. Not an active resentment. But every time the movie would come up in convo, I faithfully backed away. I could not talk about it. I prefered to cry in the privacy of my fucking pillow.

After 60 something happens. The youthful overblown sense of decency falls away when one is not looking. In its place is the simplicity of wrinkled, dryer skin. The discreet loss of balance when putting one's pants on. Pants, for christ's sake! That's when I found out I had come to terms with Schindler's list. I cried again, this time for the living. For the utter imperfection of us. I cried for the capacity of persons to silence the inate impulse for life, for fairness, for right. I didn't want to talk about right and wrong. I really didn't. But I believe that for survival, we have to carry within a sense of right and wrong. Even at a very basic level, judgements of right and wrong will take place. Where did those persons that killed so many other persons park their sense of right and wrong? (in the procurement of their own survival?) How could they live with themselves? (like any other vile action one commits? with some pain, with some shame, with some relief from a drink, a sexual fit, a pill here and there?)What powerful anesthetic worked on them? (the promise of superiority conquered and confirmed?) The ether of indiference acted on each murderer, each spouse that knew what was going on and silenced, each PERSON that was not persecuted, did the persecuting on some level. So, what the fuck happened? How the fuck does it happen? I need to make certain that I know, so that I can tell my granddaughter and in the unthinkable possibility that a similar case will come before me in my lifetime, I will know how to scream for justice.

beijo, humanidade!
12-15-2007

pois e, hoje fiquei triste com a humanidade...
vi uma pessoa amiga ignorar completamente uma
mulher igualzinha a mim,
por que ela e preta - na pele
ela tem um sorriso bonito
uns olhos expectativos e francos
e no entanto, foi recebida com - na melhor de todas as hipoteses - frieza
na realidade com total ausencia... mais que frieza, foi tipo " voce nao existe...."
uma pena...
so que uma pena grande
pena de desfile de carnaval
pena de putaquepariu
pena de porre em calcada de sao paulo as tres da manha
pena de querer ser gorda em pais de magros
sabe como e?
e por mais que tenha agradado e sido gentil de minha parte
foi como quando a gente e assaltado: um cara tira 200 dolares da gaveta da gente e mesmo que a gente
tenha mais no banco ou na carteira, sempre fica o vazio da violacao....
foi isso amizade: violando a minha doce humanidade na pessoa bonita de uma mulher negra...
por isso, beijo na sua testa humanidade, espero que nao passes frio hoje a noite, pois esta chovendo

Bastille
07-14-2007

il est souvant que je pense a la bastille. Sanglot et larmes pour la liberte.... la liberte n'est pas q'une chimere. on n'est pas completement libre - mais oui on a des moments de liberte. la liberte de s'en aller a n'importe ou n'est pa la meme chose que la liberte de nous amour. L'amour est una forme d'esclavage. Voluntaire, bien sur, mais esclavage bien sur... alors, vive la liberte limitee, le 14 Juillet....

porcelain hat and rain
07-13-2007

rain could not, absolutely not, get your head wet should you be wearing a porcelain yarmulke. my upsidedown blueberry (or cherries?) bowl would be perfect. I tried it.Driving down Shoofly, jingling coins and loud accented voice.
That s the problem with hats, which I adore: they get wet in the rain.

of singing and century
07-13-2007

Let's say what is happening today...like music.. like singing with Deborah just about lunch time... when I get older... will you still need me, will you still feed me... which I murder in the pronunciation of the will you.. everytime... but nobody seems to notice... well it is just wundebar when you can call your friend and sing almost offkey a couple of different great poetry lines of a 20th century that's zoomed faster and faster until it ended... and then this one began: like there is no other way. It is more difficult to sing with Deborah over the phone than to do so in person while Tim dies laughing. I'm positively happy when I sing and yet I would not want to be a singer and have to get paid for it. Maybe like you may like to make love but don't want to have to perform love. It would be enough to drive anyone into wanting to die or sleep forever or go to jail. So I'll keep on remembering parts of great music and I'll keep singing it to myself while I tap my foot at the bottom of the wet bathtub with a thump that's just great and when people hear me and say nice things of what could have been I just shmile and shmile to meself inside of my heart and know that I would not perform: song or love.

not first
07-11-2007

One minute of not having to rush through millions of tasks. As if by movement alone I could keep it all together. So said Deborah. What does she know. Except for.
Having a desire that this would not be so public. Will see how it pans out.
Starting today a new painting: bipolar writings with rhino and head. It is difficult. Almost as much as the one of Katja in the cold picture. But I gotta do it.

pois e
00-00-0000

ah que o teu
sossego ate faz falta,
no teu jeito de
com respeito vir
se chegando. no teu segredo
me delicio, no teu cansaco
eu me madrugo
de olhos compridos
nas fraldas das tuas
camisas, avoando

anjos de areia
00-00-0000

anjo
de cimento, anjo
de saco,
gunny sack, saco
de estopa - burlap
e lantejoulas, vi anjos
nas areias de ipanema

the relative visitor
00-00-0000

She came in
a visit, once more.
the same permanence
of a Spanish gate,
ornate, built
on the side of the road
to Oros, without a fence

timidity
00-00-0000

Should
I
sit
down
or blush?