“….I couldn’t find a food that tasted good to me.”

She found her calling early in life. About 11. Maybe 12.
She’d been a performer all her life, in plays. But never enough.

I don’t know how or where the idea slipped into her.
The Buddha. Jesus. Yom Kippur. The Media. Her friends.

I doubt it was Kafka but all possibilities.  
Hunger art is the purest form she said.  And she was good at it.

At first we would watch her with our mouths agape.
Sometimes we’d even sit for a meal. Right in front of her.
Pass the salad I’d say.  Dad would reach for the salt.
Her eyes ablaze like an ascetic’s. But not paying us much attention.

Only when we turned away would she turn her gaze on us.
In her prime she could go for days. Weeks even.  
And make it seem like nothing more than the gap between lunch and dinner.

It was transformation that she hungered for. A lessening.  A denial of self.
A thinning. Because the cleanest lines are none at all.

But we didn’t know that.  We thought it was just a phase.
And kept telling ourselves that even as she sank deeper.
Into her art.  Her unself.  Into ether.

There was a reckoning at some point, an event horizon of sorts.
In which the harder she pushed the less was achieved.

And so she died unsatisfied.

Lifting spirits will lift your spirits! Let’s
grab a goblet and have a guzzle.

I’ll toast to you my friend, and when
you’re done, pour you a double.

For those we’ve lost, we’ll spill a little
and stare down at the puddle.

Reflect on the pangs of life a moment,
commiserate about the struggle.

Then splash the liquid all about, and shout
“Barman, hustle!

If our cups didn’t runneth over before,
they better now or there’ll be trouble;

if our tankards aren’t foaming soon
our fists'll be balled and white of knuckle!”

We’ll drink chicha in Peru, and sake in Japan,
mezcal in Mexico, and palm wine in the jungle.

The bar’s our gym, it’s where we go
to train ye oulde esophageal muscle

but we’ll chug or glug or quaff anywhere,
be it farm or cave or hovel.

We live for libations, go goo-goo for grog,
and drain enough to dim the mind of any mere muggle.

The hoppy makes us sloppy; now
most of my drink lands on my stubble;

eyes are bloodshot, mouth is dry,
body wrecked like so much rubble.

You’re not faring much better…
we make quite the lively couple.

But we'll be back here tomorrow sister,
I’ll have no rebuttal!
You may be gone, but you’re alive
in me, a piece of my puzzle.

Let this ***** quench our pain
‘til off this mortal coil we shuffle.

used to think that the older i’d get
the more i’d have to say
an idiom for every thing
a clever turn of phrase
a story for the travel-worn
a poem to stir the cynic
a song to sooth the furies
an oft-repeated lyric
a verse to bend the adamant
a piercing anecdotal
they’d say i was a character
as colorful as opal
they’d come from far away
to hear my pearls of wisdom
from tel aviv to mars
and outside the solar system
my native tongue irrelevant
i’d have the ears of elephants
octopi and flies alike
affected by my eloquence
antiquity’s great orators
would come to me as angels
present to me their inquiries
and wait for my appraisals
a hurricane would pause
its revolution for a while
if only for a chance to watch
me verbalize in style

but one day something in me
snapped and i understood
that all of what i thought would be
most likely never would

now I’m resigned to the alive
consigned to the dead
so most of the time i just
keep my thoughts inside my head

I.
I do not see the (woman) hidden in the forest.

II.
I am attempting to justify myself in your eyes.  I care very little whether I seem to anyone to exist.

--------------------------------
Let your eyes rest on me,
Among the uninformed debris,
After their illicit glancings,
And their numerous advancings,
    I do not want your eyes on me:
Eyes that land yet never cease
Their wanderings and wonderings
On the color of my under things,
   And nauseate with their caprice.

While the scattered rest on the checkered floor
Position adjacent to the banquets,
Ask for more before
The completion of their pigs in blankets;
They ask for more,
As they lick their fingers free of grease
While discussing sports and Credit Suisse…

Perhaps I’ll have one - but just one,
I don’t want to become
    obese
Like a corpse distended in an attic -

I wish it had been me they licked their fingers of;
I wish that it is them I lick my fingers of…

There are eyes on me, I assume
As I rush to the little girls' room.

The truths of comets and little girls,
Death and a young girl
Skulk on painted toes in the murk,
Where Death and a young girl lurk:

    He is with a mannequin in the back,
Hugging it tight in order to lift,
Though the limbs are limp and head is slack,
He brims with hope
    Like a panner with his sift.

I go away and leave you now, I leave you and
go away.

    I know what it is to sprawl
Prostrate and empty in a stall
With these squalid fingers,
To hear the snickers and the whispers;
    I wish that it is me they lick their fingers of,

As they powder their noses
Then emerge from the gloom smelling roses,
They go away and leave me, they leave me and
go away.

   To know what it is to say,
“I am beautiful, o mortals, like a dream in stone!”
In a most definitely denigrating tone,
Though my words and eyes betray;
Or boast that my expertise is
    Spotting a prosthesis,
To call attention to one if I see it
   on display,
    [Including the curator’s toupee];
Or to pop a squat
On his prize Jean-Michel Basquiat,
    [Though He is my personal Jesus!]
You go away and leave me now, you leave me and
go away.

    He is with a mannequin on the checkered floor,
And when he is completed
He licks his fingers and asks for more;
I would show him my portrait and say
    “Ceci n’est pas une moi,”
And agree to disagree,
I would show them my portrait and say
    “This is not a me,”
And they would laugh at my simplicity,
Then whisper hatefully and frown
Into one another’s ear
How they wish they could fit into my evening gown,
     I wish I could dwindle down
And fit into an opaque sphere.

This is not a me, the powdered nose,
The needle between painted toes,
The creak of leather, the swinging chains,
The clumps of hair swirling in drains,
There is still beauty in blackened veins -
Was there beauty in these veins?
Mascara streaks like silent shrieks,
Do your eyes still rest on me?
I would cut them from your face,
But I need lines for me to trace,
Lines to guide me where to cut.
Do not take your eyes from me,
I will not be precise if they are shut.  
Do not go away and leave me now, do not leave me and
go away.

Do I drift between stations,
Bow and curtsy, nod and smile,
Titter courteously at prevarications,
    Struggling to suppress the bile? -

    “Oh my goodness, she got so big!”  
    “Yes, she must be back at it again” -
    “But I love her book club” -
    “Oh my goodness, me too!”
    “Ha ha!”
    “Ha ha.”

There are so many with me, so many eyes,
So many hands resting on my thighs…
I cannot find a solitude,
This is not a solitude.
    
I am a beautiful use of negative space.

I count my age in eyes I detect,
The older I grow, the less I collect.
    Time leaves us out of focus…

I do not want to grow old…I will not grow old,
Unless my mind loses hold.

In this sepulchral cattle car
    We ride,
Like cattle to the abattoir,
With our patron saints beside,
    We take them all along for the ride.
This is all so familiar,
    So familiar…So familiar…
Do I want it?
Time to gargle a gin and tonic
While being shocked catatonic.
Your eyes will still be with me in my vacant sleep,
To function as my guide.
Break me into bread and partake till no sign of me
lingers,
    They have all been taken for a ride,
And even God will lick His fingers.

This pumice really rubs me the wrong way.
Matadors moisturize with oil of ole.  
Heidegger has moves like Jagger.
Any critic - Jaeger; Typhoid Mary - plaguer.

Who's the top chef that goes derpa derp derp?
Wyatt Earp.
I'll drain the swamp like Dagobah's.
A Clovis Person.  Legolas.

The ******'s best on chicken breast.
Pin that on your Pinterest.  To show all the dispossesed.
Witness Godwin's Law at work:
******, you're a ****.

Pick up the phone and call Cthulu.
Get hung up on by Shaka Zulu.
Chalupa mis huevos, says the chihuahua.
Hey Tarzan. Ungawa.

Jesus walked across Titicaca.
Crane thinks the Bridge is over.
Biddy bah bah.

I choose paper ******, I am going cellulose.  
Even Cinderella knows the tone of Bellow's
Prose is bellicose.  Let's smoke some bath salts
Then eat that fella's nose.  What up!

To all my jellicles.  Looky looky
I got hooky.  Put on my robe and wizard
Hat.  Speak Wookie to Sookie.  If 2 cents
Equals three bucks, Skeletor has acid reflux.

Roll over based god.  Don't be hoven
From your umgebung.  Chew Ummagumma
To bubblegum.  Get slim in your jungle
Jim.  Calling all Mongolians.

Those alligators have razor bumps.  If they
Publish this bunkum Faber & Faber
Are chumps.  Plants have lovely lady lumps,
Trucks like sanitation dumps. Angler

Fish love lamp.  El Dorado love Ponyboy.
Caught a full house on the Rio Grande complete
With domovoi.  Know how I know you're poor?
The roaches on your toilet can sing Ode to Joy.

You will be argonaut
one more of the supernumerary
trodding upon the cindered ones
come before you
limbs wooden and somite
encircling a moon
tumescent and blue
in permafrost garrote
on constellations edge
tottering over synapse
mocking
like a mime on highwire
your guilt
lupine in its longing
sawtooth timberline in vivisect night
down promontory
to frozen wave
the broken spoke of your step
on sleetslick carapace
past the preterit
embalmed hide of the world
into the silent millstone
berserk
to return emptyhanded
and changed