October 3, 2012 10:49pm

It’s a sensual process.
Watching him paint.
But today I’m his subject, and there’s no talking. He likes it completely silent when he works. He talks about his paints like they’re a person, his brushes – a fine wine, and his canvas – a beautiful lady. He’s the kind of person that has a mind so complex that after a five minute conversation with him you’d just assume he’s dumb, or extremely high.
He says he can taste color. Sometimes I think I’m dating an eight year old. Then my eyes roll over his body, and I remember why I put up with it. When my eyes get to his waist he makes a hand gesture, signaling me to look at him. He wanted this painting to be profile. He’s very persistent about keeping eye contact. He says that the muse is as much the artist as the painter. They’re both part of the process. I open my mouth to say something, but he puts a finger to his lips and shakes his head. I scowl at him from behind wisps of my unruly curls. He smiles. He loves when I pout.
I’m wearing nothing but an oversized, tacky Bill Cosby sweater and a pair of his grey boxer-briefs. I’m sticky. I can feel the sweat dripping down my back. He’s been at it for an hour now. I’m uncomfortable, cranky, and tired. He says It’s ****. He says I look better when I’m all grungy.
The cat curls up in my lap. He looks up from his canvas and frowns. He walks over to where I am on the couch and shoos the cat away. He walks back over to his canvas. It’s so large, he can nearly hide behind it. That’s saying quite a bit considering his large frame that stands as a whopping six feet and two inches.
Sometimes I think he enjoys painting more than he enjoys physical intimacy with me. When I see the way he looks at them – the paint, the brushes, the canvas – the way he speaks to them – the way he touches them. I envy them. What I wouldn’t give for him to caress me so gently. To whisper so sweetly. To love me so tenderly. My heart aches.
His fingers are on the canvas. He’s smearing the paint. He pushes his hair back from his brow and gets some blue across his forehead. There’s yellow on the bridge of his nose, and green on his left cheek. If I could taste color, I’m sure he’d taste divine.
He finally drops his brush against the easel, steps away, and smiles – admiring his work.  I stand and he waves me over. I look at it. It’s beautiful. Gorgeous even. But it’s not me. The girl in the picture is radiant. She’s flawless. She’s happy. She’s what he wished he saw when he looked at me.
We’re all just somebody’s muse I guess.
I wish I were the one behind the canvas, instead of the one on it.

My words jump ship
A careless mutiny
Do they not realize their weight?
My words fly, from lips to sky
Little birds of stone
They gather in the depths of
The ocean
Brought to shore by a jealous storm
Years later
You forget, I am a fickle girl
Flush with promises to stay
But
My words are not walls
Instead they are the smoke
Veiling my escape

Imagine loving a sober alcoholic Gemini biker with a chipped tooth.


After you are together for eight months, let that sober alcoholic Gemini biker with a chipped tooth take you out in to the ocean, when the waves are cresting at six feet and you are terrified.  You almost drowned when you were a child.  He tells you to come out further.  Turns his back on the wave, just like your father said never to do. He looks you in the eye and says I will never let anything happen to you, I am not him, you can trust me, I will not hurt you.  
So you dive under the wave and he has you in his arms and the sun is expanding through the water droplets on your eyelashes.  It’s cold but not too cold and it feels clean.  You believe him, and believe that nothing is truer than this moment right now with the salt drying our lips and tangling our hair, nothing is braver than trusting someone despite the past.  This is one of the greatest days of your life and you never want to leave the coast or his tattooed heart because this is what is real.  

Imagine that you two part several weeks later.
Imagine that he begs for forgiveness.
Imagine that you go back.

Because you remember the beach and that day.  And every day in its consistency when you are together, and how your anxiety subsides, just for a little while.  Things do change, for a week, maybe, but then the past arrives reading The Book of Power and she is hungry.  Wrapped up in memories, she plants a green kiss on his cheek and he leaves you in the water to drown.  You are treading water trying to seem like you are swimming but you are failing, failing miserably, and when he finally drags you to shore he doesn’t pump your lungs with oxygen, he watches you choke as everything comes up.  He tells you that he loves the past and he is waiting for her to come home and always has been.  
So now, you do not even have the past.  He took it from you and everything you thought was real.  You cannot tell the difference now and ask and ask Could he have loved the present, just for a small while? Does he look at your chair in his house with his dog and think of her? When he looks at the ocean, does he taste you?
You are the past, too, just not the right one.  

Imagine this but do not live it.

Predictable, like an afternoon breeze
Gently touching the hazy sky
This heaviness in my heart grows
I need more, some insatiable thirst
For a drink not yet known
No matter the happiness I have
Nor the possessions I hold
I am not satisfied, and I know
Deep down in my broken soul
That I will die without tasting
Serenity

We sipped boulder rock from refrigerators doors
and watched the heavens hand out food stamps with IBM logos.
“ode to Mehmet” we sang, and licked the Mossberg—
fixating on the blue collar philosophy that lived in our empty wallets.

Trash cans filled with water bottles stared at us to find our essence—
the one we had lost while being fed quintessential American idioms
in state-of-the-art classrooms sponsored by slaves and Popol Vuh blood.

Six million years of human existence trivialized down to a single sentence—
* Man loved God, man wrote, man conquered God, and now man loves science* —
scribbled on SmartBoards afforded by fire burning from Prometheus’ female liver.

Trees sing with oxygen no more for the sake of making paper,
and eyes soak in the words on paper for the sake of making paper.
Trees make the avenue but the future holds an Avenue of no trees—
… for in the land of the free, anything but freedom ain’t free.

Naked pictures of God on my nightstand,
Dry bones of Moses painted on my button down shirt screaming,
“to be or not to be” is not an English word.
In the daze of the thoughts of Neurology, I saw a man kick a bucket full of Starbucks giftcards down the avenue street. He screamed in pain as he watched the bucket tumble and roll down the street, blessing every Bohemian with a slight cold.

Naked pictures of God on my nightstand,
I dreamt about a land before man where the Oxygen that sprang from the pores of flowers
sang a sweet death. Where dishwashers are saints, for afterall, man will not be if not for food.
Where books are written not to be read, but for the sake of Orange trees that will grow in the future.
I once wore a poker face to a funeral and laughed at the man in the casket because the souls he had underneath him were two left feet.

*We all once had naked pictures of God on our nightstands but lost it after Einstein  
Lost the fried chicken war of 1812 to Isaac Newton.