Let this be the story of how I write;
Last night I woke up from a dream as though
dropping back into my body, awoke from a dream
two weeks above the sandblasted ceiling and
was thrown six stories back into a body, into a
bed. Muscles cramped at this invasion, body
trying to push me back out, and I awoke
doubled over, face to matress, desperately
trying to rub the cramp out of my legs,
feet and hands. By the time I was me again I’d
forgotten everywhere I’d been.
Let this be the story of how I
write with both hands when one grows
unforgiveably tired, backwards and forwards
in frantic indescicion across the page.
“I can’t stop writing – so there’s an end to it” our
teacher quotes Virginia Woolf and tucks her
head back proudly against her hair, pleased
with herself for having discovered such a
goodexplanation. “I trust the Divine Child of
my dreams,” she says.
Alexandra trusts the hyperspace elf
machines, the golden child playing with colored
balls. I don’t trust anyone but Alexandra—I hope
she never finds this out.
Let this be the story of how I write
because I never get beaten anymore – because
I am oiled and vitamined and smooth
smooth smooth – tie me up, tie me down, I can
absorb anything without shaking. How can you do it
without fucking, everyone asks. Doesn’t it
make you horny? The sight of my own
applet breasts beneathe my t-shirt makes me
horny. Being beaten just makes me want more. And
sex just makes [me] that much crazier for pain.
I bite every vanilla boy harder than they can possibly
enjoy, in hopes they will eventually just once
bite me back – I am eternally sick
of adoring kisses. Kisses devoted only to the
softness of my skin, and not to me. Oh, oh,
what do I want? Shut up and I will tell
you what I want.  ¶ 3:32 AM 0 comments

  Thank You for Calling Old Age Thank you for calling. Shoshana does not exist. The phone has turned to gold lame. Please leave your message now.
I try to transcribe my dreams in shallow sleepless pauses between songs. The Cure is playing lullabyes to brittle-boned children. My comforter is stuffed with clouds of dust, it sifts powdery through the duvet, settling uneasily over ratty carpet; when I step too hard it crowds into my lungs.
The cats are fighting again—I can feel a single, sharp horn growing up from the center of my head as they chase each other [sic] through stacks of furniture. My house is a department store for the recently blind, everything has a scent/feel of its own.
I have given up going to salons. I polish every fingernail a different color; that is how I see them, anyway. My weight fluctuates between 98 and 380 pounds, depending on who is standing next to me. I forget to shave my legs, delaying my period for monthes on end; I am hoarding my estrogen for old age.  ¶ 5:18 AM 0 comments

  Pulling Secrets Out of My Socks 04.26.01
11.24.03

[ ]

“We don’t have a boob for this poem yet.”
Solidify the vague self-consciousness,
self-rightousness of poems and you can
fill any vaccuum.
When I take over the world no one will be allowed to cry in public. The world is not your support group. “Go ahead, discuss please.”
The tranquilizer wears off and I start to get itchy, twitchy. This is the last long class like this. Pebbles under my skin. “Who is the one that went in for triple by-pass?”
I’m 6, it’s summer camp, day-camp, at the JCC, Dayton, Ohio. The little kids have pre-school in the regular pre-school rooms. Also swimming, holding beads knotted along a rope, each assigned a different color—how retarded did we look—unable to walk in a single short line unassisted. The elastic is always pulling out of my socks. I want to go home. I want to go home please. My jaw aches with spurts of wisdom teeth. Pleasesomebody come and take me home. I’ll be good.
Shane said, tell me something about your carnal preferences, something I don’t already know. I tried to tell him about my bad-girl thing, wanting to get dressed up in school-girl outfit and go out for a day to the mall or movie or amusement park and just be really bratty and bad. And Shane said—that doesn’t count, I knew that already. But this was the secret I’d been saving for him, this was the secret I hadn’t told anyone else, that no one knew, not my master, not his mistress, not Alexandra, not my best friend—this secret was mine and I was offering it to him red-faced in the pillows and hoping he wouldn’t think I was too weird. And he just said yeah, I knew that already, it wasn’t too hard to figure out. I wanted to know how he knew my secret, and he said it was the same way I knew he was kinky, and a virgin. But I didn’t know he was into watersports specifically, what right did he have to know this about me? So tellme another, he said. I told him about Robin, about Sassi – not just the basic ‘I was in a cult’ stuff, but what I did, what it involved, some of it anyways. Because the same way I don’t think they would ever have guessed about my bratty side, I don’t think he would have understood how deeply submissive I can be. And I tried to tell him, but I think it was only rituals, to him. Things I did to please Robin because I like authority. Not the whole of it, not the way I obeyed because I enjoyed it, because I was compelled to, not by threat of violence or indifference but because the only thing I like better than being bad is being good. And I was very, very good. I was late once.  ¶ 3:28 AM 0 comments

  The First Time Was a Disaster The first time I did ecstasy was a disaster 4 hours of nothing except extreme frustration compounded by teen hormones and october sweat or was it november I remember it was cold at night the next am at the nile and how did I get to the nile anyways was it aaron I don’t actually think it was but maybe or possibly sara though I thought I just went with her that one time with dave I did not make a particularly good impression that time I know. anyways, teen-age longing I had such a lust for jay then and now in retrospect I like that word a lot retrospect I have trouble sometimes even remembering why I liked him in the first place Scooby remembers things like that for me because he told you stories he says because he took the time to get to know you as a person but alexandria did that too didn’t she or maybe not maybe that’s why things were always so fucked up between us anyways because we just sort of fell madly in love or thought we did without ever stopping to consider each if we actually knew the other or just thought that we did.
anyways, yes the ecstasy why did I buy it it was from some guy that jay knew at least I think he did but I had the money corrine was there I think she and I really stopped hanging out after aaron it just seemed like such a weird time and also I lost a lot of faith in her judgment from how she reacted to him plus also then scooby and I moved out and the house-warming party where we segregated at becky’s and corrine and jay had sex at our house while we slept was it in the bathroom or was it at our pv apartment that they fucked on the bathroom sink maybe both I’ve lost track perhaps it wasn’t that important after all.
yes, the ecstasy…already described the pills in my journals lumps of beigish powder that reminded me in color of all those children’s tylenol I used to chew up six at a time cause I was too afraid of swallowing anything whole to take the adult pills but even then I got the moist miserable headaches. lumps of powder and maybe that’s why they didn’t affect me for so long cause I didn’t think that they would cause they looked so innocuous to me not innocent but…they were really these gritty brown speckled lumps about the size of a frozen pea and they looked like someone had just taken a pinch of wet powder and squeezed it together and let it dry that way no real shape or imprint or anything at all total bathtub shit in the days before sammy the bull and 20/20 ecstasy exposes.
the e the e the e…and we called it e then or ecstasy not x like kids do now back in my day and all but I remember it truly did confuse me the first time I heard someone refer to it as x and why is it always so important that people not mistake me for younger than I am anyways?
the drugs...i still have that book I was reading at the time….what car were we driving that night it feels vaguely important somehow that I remember it would have been scooby driving of course none of the rest of us had licenses then or anything. prospero his first car had already died, he only had ruby for about a week or so and didn’t have the trashy red car yet…must have been his dad’s van, I think, though I guess it could have been the truck. No, no I don’t I think that yes it must have been the minivan and we drove back to jay’s house tip-toeing in and I was wearing those high-heeled black boots, pointy-toed gothic fake suede I was vegetarian then and still trying vainly to repress my leather fetish and they made my arches hurt after a while sometime the ones in the shoes were so high and I was so used to wearing those shapeless sears flats all day god those were horrible shoes and the boots had a bit of black embroidery at the ankles.
I was trying to set my feet really carefully on the tile floor so as not to wake up jay’s mom or grandma but I remember the heels still clicked kind of loudly anyways cause I wasn’t terribly used to them and really my main objective was not to slip and fall and I seem to think I remember his mom coming out into the hall anyways after we scampered to his room maybe they spoke out there for a minute and she said something disapproving and told him to keep it down and I would inevitably have had to get up and use the bathroom and now I remember we took the pills with root-beer cause that was all the soda they had and the water there always tasted sort of funny it came the refrigerator tap cause they seemed to feel that there was something sort of barbaric about drinking it in a glass straight from the sink but the fridge water always tasted like freezerburn though that might have had something to do with the glasses they were huge blue glasses with a faint scum of dishwasher soap left on them and it made nearly everything taste a little odd but at least with soda the soap taste was covered up a little bit.
we swallowed it with root-beer….there must have been music playing through the room when I lay on the bed for all those hours full of joni mitchell….i remember scooby holding a lit cigarette to my mouth jay is the only person I’ve ever known who lived with his parents and smoked in his bedroom I guess it represented a kind of defeat on everyone’s part I still remember how after we were semi-officially together and I was spending the night there all the time his mom asking if I wanted to keep a comb or toothbrush in the bathroom or something and I never have been entirely sure whether she was being sarcastic or not but I was really embarrassed and it made me feel like a slut or something. but that was not for a year or so after this night, though maybe none of it would have happened at all if nor for the e….
but so scooby tried to hold a cigarette to my mouth and get me to smoke it but I could only manage one drag it was just too much effort and I could barely hold my head up anyways I was so fucked up.
and later I think someone tried to get me to drink from a glass of water maybe that was scooby again or possibly jay I have the instinctual feeling that it wasn’t corrine and actually maybe that was the night that finally killed any chance of friendship between us cause I got to stay there with jay in his room on his bed and she had to go home and maybe she thought I tried to make it come out that way on purpose cause I think she was just starting to pursue him then but maybe I am just ascribing negative feelings to her now in any event I will never know for sure.
I didn’t stay on purpose, I didn’t even know that she and scooby had left till about three hours after they’d already gone, and I asked jay where they were and he said they left and didn’t know what to do with me so left me there with him and part of me wonders why the fuck scooby left me there like that but what else could he have done cause we couldn’t have all stayed and corrine had to get home and he also had to get the car back before his family was all up and he couldn’t have taken me back to his house and I guess I should be glad that they didn’t just try to take me back and drop me at the dorm like happened with that one dj guy who died od’ing in a pma fever in a small room by himself and god what kind of hell that must be I think one of the things I am most frightened of is dying by myself especially like that so perhaps it was all for the best that they left me there with jay, and certainly it was nice for him to take care of me and let me stay like that I know I wouldn’t really have wanted someone like me there in the way like that when I was trying to come down from a trip like that. and I’m listening to no woman no cry bob marley the song that jay played for me after we were together late one night and he sat on the edge of the bed and I woke up abruptly to hear it playing and for some reason I thought he might be close to crying, and he told me that the song always made him think of corrine and then I was the one near tears cause I really did love him the and how could I compete with something like that I was always so uncertain of myself and it’s strange at the time I was horribly sensitive to any critical comments jay made comparing me to corrine like saying I was going to get fat and stuff but it never actually bothered him in her so why should I have been so upset by it maybe I was afraid that if I wasn’t careful he was going to leave me if I wasn’t good improved enough and of course that is exactly what happened though it turned out to be a good thing for me that it did I am so a million gabillion times glad I am with shane instead of someone like jay…I think I need to take a break from this for now and go pee again and watch the simpsons this is getting to be a bit much and anyways my back is doing its evil computer chair thing again. I’ll take a Xanax maybe….  ¶ 9:55 AM 0 comments

  Refugee From Flatland In Flatland there are no shadows; no shades of grey. There are lines, and there is the abscence of lines, as God created them, one from another and like light and dark, neither existed until the other was formed. In Flat land the world exists all together or not at all. And in Flatland, the Law is God.

Moving from Ohio to Arizona, these are the things I notice: the lack of fireflies; the way no one sits outside; and how the black people talk like white, and the white people dress like teenagers\20-somethings on tv.

I know doubt, I know uncertainty. I know grown-ups lie as a matter of course, but don't know why. I know what it's like to spend 25 years misunderstanding time. I know that I have memories of the last 21 years of my life, if not more, and I know just how faulty and self-creating memories are. I doubt their veracity but am uncertain where else to turn. I know I can't live another 25 years like this.  ¶ 2:17 AM 0 comments

  The Smell of Burning Bread I’m not sure just what kind of self-conscious memories I’m trying to obliterate, being as I’m not all that sure what even happened all those years of time. It is difficult to write clearly about a childhood I have never left; one which I may never even have experienced in the first place. There are so many different versions of what counts as true. I want to pick one long sinew of memory and follow it cat’s cradle style to the next.
I was born in a hospital to parents who may or may not have wanted me, exactly, though no parents ever really want the particular children that come out, grab-bag style, and sometimes the idea of a sort of communistic town square where one could trade babies back and forth does have its appeal. At least that way there might be a chance of children’s temperaments being suited to their parents. I am stalling of course.
My mom’s kitchen smelled like plastic and old play-dough and things that had long since finished being cooked…crumbs of stuff dropping into the heating element of the toaster oven. She used to make beer bread in it and the top would always come out blackened and the inside raw and sickish beery pasty but she would never make it in the regular oven because she thought it was a waste of electricity to heat the whole oven for that one little loaf of bread.  ¶ 10:47 AM 0 comments

  Crucifying My Dad Insanity runs through my family history like a cheap romance novel. Depression, obsession, schizophrenia, it’s all there, and it tends to lend a certain surreal cast to everything we say to one another. I am haunted by my family’s plastic past.

My father’s father owned a small store in Detroit, Michigan. He sold bicycles, lawnmowers, and bathroom sinks, the cheap marbleized kind with plywood cabinets built beneath. He used to come home from work, set his head on the table and cry quietly for hours as everyone in the family moved edgewise about him. In time my own father would do the same. He tells us stories over shabbes dinner, stories of his own tormented past as though answering a question none of us has yet asked. His mother, my favorite grandmother, would load all the kids in the car and set off merrily down the freeway, chirping suggestions of driving them all into an embankment. She chain-smoked Carleton cigarettes and locked herself in the bathroom for entire days. These are the stories my father offers up as heirlooms, undisputable as the passed-down tablecloths and wavery silver. In my family the past shifts with dinner-table discussions; it was always the best or worst of times.  ¶ 9:01 PM 0 comments

  The Road to Hell Is Paved with Peanut Butter

My ninth-grade chemistry teacher, Mr. Robinson, changed my life with a single telephone call to Child Protective Services. I never found out why exactly he did it, I assume he had altruistic motives. A fourties-ish bottle-blonde woman named Dolly came to meet with me at school several weeks later, I took her for a librarian but she turned out to be a caseworker for CPS. She spent ten minutes asking me questions about my family life, scribbling notes on a powder blue legal pad, I wanted to see what she was writing but reading cursive upside-down is not one of my strong suites. Half an hour later I was being signed into Springhaven, a Phoenix shelter for “troubled girls.” Most of them were there for getting knocked up or running away from home. Thus began my six month sojourn into the seamy underworld of child-storing. Dickens would have had a field day.

That afternoon marked my introduction to government food. There is nothing like eating charity for lunch. A black woman named Deborah with oily skin and green contact lenses listed rules for me while spooning a bit of peanut butter from a white plastic jug the size of a mop bucket. First rule, no going into the kitchen unsupervised. She scraped green bits from a piece of wheat bread and indicated the padlocked cupboards and drawers; second rule, no handling the food, dishes or silverware without permission. Deborah slid the sandwich across the table to me along with a glass of water and a single sheet of paper towel folded into quarters. I ate nervously while she watched my face for danger signs.  ¶ 1:08 AM 0 comments

  Bread and Jam For Francis 05/10/1996

Someday, when I grow up I’ll live in the attic of the peeling paint house down by Mill. And sometimes at night I’ll come down from the attic and when I walk out the back door I’ll be on a beach. And no one else will be there because no one can go there but me. And one night I’ll build an enormous sand-castle on it and when it’s done it’ll get bigger or I’ll get smaller or the world will get more accommodating and I’ll walk into it and I’ll live in it, in an enormous sand-castle. And one night I’ll leave it through a small scullery door and be in a field that borders on an immense forest. And there will be a trail that no one but me can see. And I’ll follow it until I come to a small clearing, all soft moss which is good because by that point I’ll be naked and barefoot. And in the middle of the clearing will be a pool. The sides and bottom will be dark blue stone and the water will be clear and clean and blue. And I’ll step into it and after a while I’ll close my eyes and slowly sleeping sink to the bottom. Then my body will disappear somewhere so as not to clutter it up any and I’ll be off on my next incarnation.

“An unbelieved truth can hurt a man more than a lie.”

“People are interested only in themselves….a great and lasting story is about everyone or it will not last.”

“There’s more beauty in the truth even if it is dreadful beauty.”

“When a man dies….Envies are gone, and the measuring stick is: ‘Was he loved or was he hated? Is his death felt as a loss or does a kind of joy come of it?’”

“It is one of the triumphs of the human that he can know a thing and still not believe it.”

“Money’s easy to make if it’s money you want. But with a few exceptions people don’t want money. They want luxury and they want love and they want admiration.”

“When you’re a child you’re the center of everything. Everything happens for you. Other people? They’re only ghosts furnished for you to talk to. But when you grow up you take your place and you’re your own size and shape. Things go out of you to others and come in from other people.”

East of Eden John Steinbeck

“Everyone wants to be something. Everyone has some secret aspiration that they don’t follow through with.”
Jared Loran Howard Blood

11/01/1994 Halloween
After trick-or-treating we went back to Scooby’s house, and after sitting with his family a while we went up to his room to talk. Scooby said that nobody takes care of him, that he has to take care of me and Loren but nobody takes care of him. I offered to, but Scooby said he didn’t want me to. Then I said that everyone needs to be taken care of sometimes, and I could do that then. I know I’m not the person he wants, but I didn’t say it. Someday, hopefully someday soon, Scooby will find a guy, but until that friends are better than nothing. Anyways, then Scooby told me that I do take care of him sometimes, like listening to him talking about guys. I hope I do, someone has to. It seems like me and Scooby are becoming close friends again. I hope we are, I really miss being good friends with him.  ¶ 12:50 AM 0 comments

  Limbo

In my closet is a cracked
black plywood trunk,
my parents bought it for me when
I went off to summer camp.
When I was twelve I began
grandly calling it my
Dowry Chest.
In the bottom of it,
securely wrapped in a bundle of
fading crib quilts
is a flat gray cardboard box.
In the box is an unused baby
book shrouded in
water stained ivory satin-
I rescued it from the attic when I was ten.
On the first mildewing page,
sketched out in my most careful handwriting
is your name.
And you are dead.

  ¶ 12:45 AM 0 comments

  Neology

Gotterdamerung; the world will end in fire
from an ultra-light GPC cigarette
flung sparking from a broken car window—
something too petty for any connection to God.

I will be pushing a shopping-cart with blue cracked
plastic handlebars through Wal-Mart,
digging through my clutch for a pacifier,
walloping an open-lunged child and counting to ten.

Dented cans of Best Yet mushroom soup will bounce from shelves.
Life will not pass before my eyes, only
cartoon scrims of turtles, singing
‘Duck….and cover.’

I forget to remember fucking.
I forget to remember my lover, child, name.
Chaos, Hollywood style—
I forget to pray.

Steel fixtures domino for aisles; neon splashes, polyester burns;
the last thing I see is a high-school hallucination
of the world curdling in tidal waves
of green and golden cream.

  ¶ 10:08 PM 0 comments

  American Lotus

calligraphed skin
indifferently
bruised no escaping
geisha dreams

enduring
etiquette of
bent knees and
supplicating back

koan bound
hands
twisting rice paper
into masks

  ¶ 10:05 PM 0 comments

  I Wish I Missed Me

I can't stand her,
this girl I used to be.

You dont have to like her,--this girl--you dont have to identify with, sympathize, pathologize or apologize for her.

You dont even have to remember
who you used to be.

  ¶ 1:13 AM 3 comments

  My Name in Limbo   ¶ 12:38 AM 0 comments

  Rainy Night Crackhouse I spent my first night on Ecstasy lying on a friend’s double bed in Paradise Valley, repeatedly humming Joni Mitchell songs to myself. It was a crackhouse scene. The only window was covered in aluminum foil. The room was furnished only with a black vynyl foam chair and a bed. Candles dripped colored wax over my three friends and I, and everyone was smoking.
We bought the pills at a goth club in Mesa for thirty dollars each.  ¶ 8:50 PM 0 comments