Saturdaze

The afternoon spread out before them:
a gift.

They lolled in soft chairs, 

delighting in the lack of structure.
They had no where to go,
nothing to do,
just the luxury of time to squander.

Then she got some startling news

and he leapt into action

while she scrambled to gain purchase -

somehow she needed to fully comprehend it,

digest it,

before she could overcome inertia

but he

he was sheer velocity,

hurtling through the seconds, minutes, 

minutes stacking up as he lifted, carried, wrapped, moved

things -

his temper rising with the tempo of his movements

as she stammered and stalled and tried to hold time at a distance -

wait!

just let me!

hold on!

But she couldn't find her footing.

They volleyed in a stilted fever pitch -

each trying to make their case -

out of sync, and overlapping,

his fear like a wind at his back,

hers an anchor dragging her under the ocean's choppy surface.

Later,

the threat contained, neutralized for now,

they would retreat upstairs,

naked,

since their clothes now baked in an angry dryer.

We might as well...

he smiled with a mixture of suggestiveness and a shrug, 

as if to say, I mean...we're here, so why not?

They giggled, and dove for the crisp white-with-blue-paisley sheets,

sweeping the puffy white duvet  to the far side of the vast bed.

After,

she snaked a hand out from under the pile of bedding and satisfaction,

finding the top drawer pull by touch,

and slipped the small choclate bar out of its secret spot.

She let the medically infused confection disolve on her tongue,

the flavor of the plant a wicked reminder 

that she would soon be floating on its currents.

The afternoon had crept into evening

while they were distracted,

and they tumbled into pants-shirts-shoes

and out into the dimming world.

Dinner tasted better than usual,

the Nutella shake might have been the manna from a christian legend...

it felt like heaven on her tongue, 

and she was connected to its Italian provenance,

and to all the other devotees.

A new religion.

What Life Hands You

She drove with the beach at her back 

and the sun in her eyes,

heading for the desert --

heading for Leo and his lemons.

She looked forward to collecting the sunny, rough-skinned fruit,

and to seeing her fella.

She was too old to have a boyfriend,

(but she hadn't planned on being a divorcee again at 75).

The citrus trees dotted the perimeter of his parched land,

keeping out unwanted gazes,

but doing nothing to deter the rattlers

which in turn kept her from ever feeling quite at home there.

She peeked around every bush she passed,

carefully stepping across the porch

and taking the last few steps quickly, in case a coiled beast lay in wait.

She hated snakes,
but it was worth it
for Leo
and those lemons.

Do you remember when...?

Do you remember when blogging was

kind of a big deal?

Do you remember when we poured our souls into keyboards,

and connected like our own mini worldwide web?

We were a microcosm of art and beauty and sex and rock n' roll.

We were raw and joyful and angry and loud.

But

then

we all grew up.

We got too busy to

get busy, wink-wink,

and worked too hard 

to work it hard, nudge-nudge.

But it's time for another round.

Past time, maybe.

Time to dig in and shove the Self out into the public sphere again.

--Artist Formerly Known as the Bored Housewife

Identity Crisis

What am I? she howled, 

with the silence of a gust of wind

in the night sky. 

Without your contours to form against, 

how am I anything? 

Restraint

Self-restraint and I,

we aren't exactly allies...

We tend to pace angrily

in opposite corners of a vast ballroom,

each aware of the other

and a possible symbiosis that should exist between us--

who the parasite,

who the host?

If I advance,

self-restraint retreats;

if that holy asshole approaches 
I writhe in agony,

like a demon splashed with blessed water.

Sometimes,

I dance so close to my nemesis

that our cheeks almost touch,

our steps so synchronized

that we are almost one body.

And 

there are times

            when I feel ripples of self-restraint roll across my skin,

like when I manage to keep myself from

going to you,

dozens of small times a day;

as I manage to not

reach out

to touch your face 

while we chat about the weather 

or the athletic achievements of millionaires.

My arch-enemy crawls across my landscape

slicing into me with the assertion of his-way-not-mine,

not my greedy, devouring, lust-filled way,

I lose, I lose, I lose

                               to my foe,

as I refrain

from dragging you from your pedestal

from holding your face in my hands

from pulling you with me into a vortex of skin and panting...

My adversary defeats me

and I smile,

sigh with relief

and gratitude

for his unwelcome presence.

Smoke and Mirrors

She dashed through the rain
and settled into the broad front seat of his car.
She felt a sneaky delight -
one of those times
when she would slip into the space between.
She wouldn't be all the way in one world
or another -
just that place where they didn't quite touch.
She smiled and inhaled deeply,
choking and laughing
and coughing,
because this was a literal inhaling).
She felt the day soften around her,
the fears and worries melting into the air outside the car,
fading away with the light of the afternoon.
Her face became a smile, and she felt the world smile, too.

She said, Don't you love the Lumineers on a rainy day?
She stretched and yawned a little,
her fingers brushing his shoulder as she settled back into herself.
The hairs on the back of his neck stood up
and he gripped the steering wheel tightly.
He kept his eyes on the road,
even though they weren't driving.
She pulled one leg under her and turned to face him.
They're kind of perfect, right?
She pressed him for an answer;
the world was made of dim gray cotton,
and so was her mind,
but the Lumineers were
illuminating it all,
a melancholy joy bouncing across her tapping knee.
She poked his leg with her toe,
Riiiight?
He relaxed and turned to smile at her, nodding slightly.
Yeah,
kind of perfect.
He cleared his throat and suggested they go inside.
They splashed along the sidewalk,
avoiding the deeper puddles
as they traversed the packed parking lot,
aiming their zig-zag trajectory at the front door of the pub.
They tumbled into the protection of the awning,
and he pulled her into his embrace,
leaning down to press his lips against hers
for one reckless,
urgent
moment.
The foggy world pulsed around her as the kiss lasted an eternity,
in the blink of an eye.
She clutched his shirt in her fist,
eyes wide,
but he turned and threw open the door,
ushering her in and stepping back into real life.

Sweet Jesus

And so then the idea was born
to write some stories about what kind of lover Jesus would be.
I mean, have you SEEN some of those paintings of him?
Pretty hot.
But then I giggled,
because
what if
he was really bad in bed?
Or just selfish, you know?
Like one of those uber cocky dudes
who acts like the sun rises and sets at their command
because,
like,
it does in his case
(if you believe in that sort of magic)
and so,
what if he was one of those dudes
that just sort of flops down on the bed
and grins up at you lazily
from his throne of alpha arrogance,
expecting you to worship his ridiculous boner
and you just kind of stand there smirking
with your own sheen of haughtiness
(bursting with naughtiness)
like,
seriously, man?
Not going to participate in this situation at all??
It can go one of two ways in those moments--
you either roll your eyes and walk away
or you hang back,
and make him come to you...
this is a two-way street, you vain motherfucker.
I could see Jesus being kind of a douchebag like that.
I would still fuck him, though.
Because
they do say
he's hung like
thiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiis,
so maybe it'd be worth the effort.
It's also rather lovely to imagine him a 40-year-old virgin,
kind of shy and sweet,
maybe it's his wedding night
and you're Mary Magdelene...
you usher him through the bases,
slowly savoring each one -
so you have to focus,
really pace yourself as you kiss his ear lobe
and lightly graze it with your teeth.
You leave most of your clothes on
for as long as you can,
so that neither of you
will accidentally
finish
too
soon.
You marvel at the deified perfection of his body -
those gnarly scars making him sexier
and you pause in awe -
maybe he's really a god after all.
You light some candles
and pour some wine
(it did start out as water,
but he winked and the color deepened
to a rich scarlet).
You show him how to touch you,
and where.
You whisper the sweet things
and the sweeter things, dirty around the edges.
You whisper his name,
then shout it -
slightly dizzy at the absurdity that this urgent chant
is his actual name as well as the right thing to utter at the height of ecstasy.
You collapse into a heap of sweat and satisfaction beside him
and he smiles indulgently,
I forgot how much I liked that.
He winks, and rolls over,
the wave of his hand extinguishing the candles and drying the wet spot.
Jesus. What a night.

Bought a Ticket

Every time I hear Soul Asylum's "Runaway Train"
I think of that night in August, 1993,
when I went to say goodbye to Chris.
I would be leaving for Brigham Young University in the morning 
and he would be starting at MIT the next week. 
High school already seemed like a distant memory,
and the future lay crackling like an exposed wire
just out of sight, behind the next sunrise.
I pulled into the driveway in the deep darkness of a Maine summer night,
fog rolling up from the harbor, and pooling around trees and parked cars.
I sat in his parents' driveway, 
and took a deep breath 
as I scanned the shadows in the vast yard beyond the porch light.
I remember slip-sliding down the wet grass on the small hill,
heart pounding as I wondered if he remembered I was coming.
I made my way to the hull of the sailboat where he was living that summer 
in protest of his parents' choice to not put it in the water that year,
for the first time in his life. 
I reached up and knocked three times -
the sound dull but loud in the stillness.
I heard movement inside,
and soon my best guy friend was peering over the edge of the wooden deck
the broad whiteness of his smile illuminated by the scant light.
He put a finger to his lips
ssshhhh
and motioned me toward the ladder on starboard side.
I carefully climbed toward the emptiness above,
and he led me across the deck and down another ladder,
into the darkness of the confined space -
he sitting on one bunk me on the other 
our knees touching as he told me 
how strange and lonely it had been to live out there all summer,
in forced exile,
and how it hadn't helped him forgive his parents.
I tried to make out the features on his face, through the shadowy darkness
and I wanted this space to be familiar,
to have been where I had spent dozens of nights that summer,
instead of this last
final
only
visit.
I wanted to reach out and grab his hand,
to still his voice,
to whisper all the ways I loved him,
beyond friendship,
surpassing the boundaries of my relationship with Charly, or his with Suzie.
I wanted him to hear me speak the bare bones of truth that I somehow 
didn't know 
he already knew.

We ended up taking my car through the car wash, instead.
It was something we'd done before,
something to do,
in this too-small town after 9pm.
We stood in the dark,
spraying water at the car and each other,
laughing from a hollow place.
The jokes were all call-backs to our massive, 
era-long, 
brief 
4-year friendship,
less funny now,
as they echoed into a future without each other.

And then we were standing in the shadow of his sailboat again,
dragging out the final goodbyes,
shuffling our feet and trying not to be too sappy,
but wanting to savor it all.
He didn't want me to leave,
but knew I had an early bus to catch.
Finally it was time, and my heart felt physically heavy,
sagging against my ribcage,
dragging me forward - 
and when I leaned in to hug him goodbye 
I
realized too late 
that he had been angling for a kiss. 
The moment was lost 
and probably for the best that it was 
because I would have been in agony 
to have to say goodbye after that, 
although, I don't know...
maybe finally scratching that itch -
having a nice long make-out session of some kind -
would have been incredibly healing.
I guess we'll never know.

A Tree Falls in a Forest

This blog...
I feel like I am whispering into a hole in a wall,
and there is nothing on the other side of the wall -
it is just a closet or another cell, devoid of an occupant.
I miss the old days of blogging,
but there is something comforting about this -
talking to an audience, but having the freedom to say anything and everything because no one's really listening...

Full

A foggy walk
in the soggy woods
fills my afternoon with sunshine -
the kind that emanates from joy,
not from our sweet little star.
I wander along,
connecting to the world around me through the lens of a camera,
pulling the scenes I savor through the aperture and onto the microchip inside
(oh, how I ache for film, a darkroom);
I hold the trees and moss-covered boulders in my pocket.
The misty air settles on my skin and blurs my car's windows.
The world is soft around me,
muted like eyes filled with morning sleep.
The river pounds along,
over the dam and under the bridge,
filling the air with its song.

Carried on Currents

Sometimes
I get carried away -
by my thoughts,
by my feelings,
by my ridiculously wild
imagination.
Sometimes
I forget where
when
who
I am.

But I'll just ride the waves and see where they take me.

Imagine

"Active 56 minutes ago"
And then I wonder,
so where is he now?
Did he take the dog for a walk
through the sharp night air?
Did he remember his gloves,
or is he cursing the rough chill on fingers entwined in a leash?
Is he making love to his wife
(because it's Wednesday,
so sex is on the schedule)?
Or is he ending her argument with the kids to
GO TO BED
because dads have a way of winning those fights.
And how about now?
Is he taking off his pants,
and climbing beneath a heavy quilt,
as the drafts in his old house
whisper from corners and hover in hallways.
Is he thinking of that girl at the office,
the one that is too pretty to be real,
but too sweet to be fake?
Does he picture her in quiet, rhythmic moments?
Or has someone else captured his imagination?
...he said he doesn't have an imagination anymore.
He said it like he believed that having an imagination
wasn't safe, or maybe just didn't have value.
I wanted to grab his face between my hands
(I imagine palms on furry cheeks, and how his eyes would look that close up)
and say to him,
"Of course you have an imagination--
you can't love music like you do without one!
You can't make jokes like you do without one,
or leap into mine like you have...without one."
But I didn't move,
and I only said the first two things.
Because that is how we behave in Real Life Grown-Up Land.
Or so I'm told.

Rosetta Stoned

Sometimes the words claw at my insides,
trying to get out.
Usually, they just float around,
in a holding pattern behind my ears,
beneath my tongue.
When finally there is just me and
music
they line up eagerly, like dancers auditioning for Broadway and the Rockettes, all in one.
They unfold and spread themselves before me,
a sacred offering
of letters and spaces, rhythm and flavor.
They flow and pop,
luring me deeper into my own mind -
lulling me into a sense of security in their
false embrace.
They are only words.
...words are everything.

Sunday Night Blues (or is it Greens?)

Earlier tonight,
I swam in layers of inspiration and memory,
thoughts swirling around,
offering themselves to me in turns.
I couldn't catch them all
as they slid through my fingers and fell away like liquid sand.
Now I sit, music pumped in through the speakers pressed closely to my ears,
mostly blocking out the husband's incessant televised noise consumption.
He is mostly perfect,
so I mostly don't complain...
But this is a battle I don't bother to fight very often.
Although,
when I do,
I remember without fail
that it is a battle as easily navigated as
floating downriver on a sunny summer day.
It isn't a battle at all
it is just a different path,
as easily walked as the other.
But much more satisfying.
So here I sit, joyful in my cocoon of sound and keyboard.

I have spent much of this weekend lost in a fog of my own thoughts.
I haunt myself and turn my hunting inward.
I flit from the poetry of Mary Oliver to Charles Bukowski,
I drink chai latte and feel impatient to fill the day with more than it can hold;
I run away to the hill and ski down it as many times as I can
before my quads feel like jelly,
and I lie on the massage table
and let the friendly chat with my long-time therapist die out,
and I let her hands push the aches and knots out of me,
falling in a heap on the floor.
From beneath my layers of thinking and dreaming and remembering,
I celebrate with friends their decision to bind themselves together as a family,
and by Sunday night, I find myself immersed in the music of a large,
bearded man whom I wouldn't normally have chosen,
but
after seeing him perform on Saturday Night Live,
I can't shake him,
so I download his latest album and let it press against me
like an awkward dance partner
until the track comes on that I heard on the show,
and it's like noticing that dance partner's boner is against my thigh -
a sly smile crosses my face
and a flush flutters across my cheeks as I lean into him.
This artist is a welcome intruder to my world of rock and rap.

Monday, you're on deck.

Baby Boys

Today I thought of the blog I briefly used for writing about my boys.

I read it all, and loved the memories that fluttered about as I did.

I wish I'd done more journaling during those years, 

more stories of our life, for me.

They are my sunshines, my son-shines...

They teased me tonight about desperately grasping for time with them before they evaporate in a cloud of adulthood...

I'm guessing that like all other mothers throughout the history of the planet,

I will eventually recover from this upheaval.

But I would rather travel backwards and savor them just a little more before that day.

Wish I Knew You

This song is currently haunting me.
I'm not even sure who it makes me think of,
but it reaches into me and stirs something.
Somehow makes me wish I had one more memory to savor,
one more friendship with slivers of
shivers of
something else.
This song makes me look back on that missing moment in my life -
the shadow of a decision I made once, way back when,
rippling out in its own little butterfly effect,
shaping my life around this absence,
letting me move forward with most of the same experiences,
but with this one chapter deleted.
The waters of life flowed around the vacuum,
but I feel it now.
"I wish I knew you when I was young,
we coulda got so high..."
I am sure there are chances I didn't take,
roads-less-traveled that I left untraveled,
and maybe you were one of them.

Armenian Lover

I really dig that phrase -
Armenian lover.
It says so much, doesn't it?
You can almost see his swarthy sexiness, can't you?
I have the advantage, of course,
since I'm drawing on memory not imagination.
He was born in Armenia to an Armenian mother,
but his father was Greek.
He was a demi-god rising from the rubble of the collapsed Soviet Union.
He had eyes as dark as my soul,
a smile as bright as my heart...
Ok, I'm romanticizing something that doesn't need any gilt.
Although, it could've used a bit more guilt...but I digress.
This boy was a passage for me,
the door out of a life I called my white picket fence prison.
He was sexy and strong,
troubled and innocent,
but the best thing about him was that I couldn't fall in love with him.
He was almost not real,
but definitely not a real option for my future -
just someone who wanted to fuck me,
and that is always very attractive...
I would go to his apartment and
fuck him then sneak out while he slept.
Later,
the grapevine would whisper to me
of the pure wonder and delight on his face as he would say,
"Straight fuck me and leave, she did!"
He thought I was such a badass.
They all did - his Armenian best friend, and my Arizonian best friend who was dating him;
the (holy fucking hot) Russians, and that sassy gay Venezuelan that always hung around them.
I don't know why they believed the hard edge of me that I showed them,
because it was only a sliver of who I really was,
but it thrilled me to be seen that way.
I've written about him a lot,
or I did back then.
It was a strange time in my life -
such a rending of bonds,
and a grueling ascent out of hell
(one I'd built for myself),
all swirled with the crippling grief I experienced at the death of a brother,
and the exhilaration I experienced from returning to college,
and writing for the newspaper.
I'm not sure what made me think of him today,
but cheers to my Armenian lover, wherever he may be.
I hope he is happy and well.

Sweet (Sour) Caroline

Neil Diamond is a complex subject for me.
I didn't grow up with his music,
and by the time it was popular in a retro way,
his legacy had been tainted for me.
Gary.
I still cringe/shudder/gag at the name,
the images it conjures.
He never did anything to me,
let me just say that right up front.
And maybe I'm a flaming asshole
for even describing him with the precision that I will.
But.
He remains the most repulsive person I've ever encountered.
And he lived in my parents' basement for a while.
He was a member of their church,
and he needed a place to stay -
TEMPORARILY
(which turned into several YEARS).
When I was a teenager, and still a member of that church,
he was a fixture of horror for all the children and teenagers -
we made a play on his last name,
turning it from Bartrug to Bugrug,
and just generally being nasty mean children behind his back.
I'm not proud of this,
but to be fair,
he was repellant.
His skin was waxy and pock-marked,
his hair was slicked back with a layer of what appeared to be lard
(and what I later discovered was actually from the fact that he didn't bathe, period).
Not only was he physcially off-putting,
but his personality lacked any of the charms that might have tipped the balance.
He loomed high above us, with a large round belly,
making odd comments and repeating things he overheard us saying, like he was one of us -
a 50-something man, trying to fit in with teenage girls?? Um, no.
Fast forward to my first year away from home.
I called home from college,
in the (least) wild (part of the) west,
and my mother dropped this rancid,
curdled news on me like a gallon of sour milk from a balcony:
Gary would be staying in the bedroom in our dank, dark basement for a little while,
while he got his feet under him.
I was mortified, horrified, and quite unable to accept it.
I got home for the summer and pretended he wasn't there.
He worked nights and slept all day,
so I rarely encountered him.
After demanding answers from my mother about why he was there,
and how long he would be,
and how could she STAND IT???,
she finally admitted that it wasn't great.
She admitted that he made her uncomfortable, too,
and that even my dad wasn't a fan.
She said that she had give him a set of towels
and they had never been touched.
That the shower never ran.
The smell that emanated from the basement was a low, steady wave of human grease.
And the sound?
The sound I could only associate with his awful face for so long afterward?
Neil Diamond's greatest hits.
(shudder)
On his day off, he would crank that album so that it shook our living room floor.
I felt trapped, assaulted.
This sound was the most solid reminder that this unpleasant person
was sharing my most intimate space, my home.
For years, any Neil Diamond music would make my skin crawl.
I couldn't listen to it at all.
I wanted to love it, in all its campy, nostalgic glory like many of my peers did.
I wanted to get sappy and sway back and forth when "Sweet Caroline" filled a stadium or an ice rink,
but instead I had to close my eyes and try to choke back the bile.

Finally, enough time has passed that I can smile past the faded memories of my overly dramatic response to some poor (icky) man in need of a helping hand.
Cheers, Neil Diamond.
Welcome to acceptability.

Rainbow Soul

I grew up wrapped in layers of “shoulds” and “mustn’ts,” 

and consequently, 

I have spent many years disentangling myself from their gauzy grasp, 

trying to stand free and strong. 

This journey necessarily started by leaping out 

             and away from the path 

that had been set before me by my loving, kind, patient mother. 

She designed a happy web of rules to keep me safe, 

and to lead me onward, 

marching dutifully toward the eternal salvation she so comfortably believes in. 

I once believed, too, 

but there was no room for me in that structured world of black and white. 

I am all the shades in the spectrum 

from pure white, 

on through all of the rich red-orange-yellow-green-blue-purples 

to the deepest shade of absence of light. 

I have a bit of everything in me, 

and I have spent too many years feeling broken 

because of those nuances of brilliance and opacity. 

And now I know that if the god my mother so firmly acknowledges 

is a real being in any sense, 

that he/she/it could not possibly want me to be unhappy 

through my inability to reach the mostly arbitrary standards 

set by some old white dudes in Salt Lake. 

But before there was relief and acceptance and joy, 

there were the years of uncovering those varied shades on my soul, 

like all the strokes of Monet’s brush, 

layered over each other in one girl-shaped palette. 

Books of Wisdom

An old blogger buddy was talking about a magazine he once ran.

I think I wrote something for it once.

If I'm remembering correctly,

it was a magazine of anonymous confessions,

and I contributed an ugly secret.

Today he mentioned that magazine and the bible in the same post,

and I said:

I remember the magazine,

and the bible.

I also remember the day I turned and flew toward the stars with Neil Degrasse Tyson instead.

The clarity and solidity of physics is a far greater comfort to me than the poems of liars and charlatans...

There is no good, there is no bad.

There are only the places in between.