Stars sprinkle the inky night sky
Like crumbs of diamonds on a still, midnight ocean.
I am not afraid to be here, alone,
In the vastness of twilight.
For these few moments, time is as long
As the space between those stars,
And as empty, too.
The uncertainty that sunrise will follow.
As sure as the sun is destined to rise everyday,
When there's only darkness surrounding you,
Pierced slightly by the silvery glow of moonlight...
You're all alone and helpless.
You only have the vague hope that the sun will return.
And as I sit here now, star-gazer,
Faceless nomad on the damp grass;
I feel immortal, and I am afraid
That I will always be alone with the stars.

It’s day seven of NaPoWriMo;
I have to write a fresh poem.
But it is also Monday
and I have no topic,
no inspiration.
So this feeble
nonet will
have to
do.

My married life
has a new ghost fix du jour—
a show called Haunted Collector
where John Zaffis pulls *****
historical do-dads out of haunted
domiciles, lines them up in bell jars
every harrowing episode.
His basement must be bursting
under the floorboards with EVP
chatter, ephemeral dead men
making residual trips down the hall
for midnight tuna-fish.

Last night we went down to Louisiana
in Deep South Paranormal
where a cast of drawling ghost hunters
cat-called the departed with backwater
truisms about cats and frissons.
Two bearded ZZ Top-types rattle
and shout through the Longleaf sawmill,
suffocated, chipped and abandoned.

But interestingly, our typecast yokels
take a new tactic beyond respect,
sympathy and confrontation. They play
their guitar for the undead, unleash
a melody, tempting the cryptic spirits
to step over the trimmers and chippers
and into the laser grids of square
lights, K2 meters, thermal camera frames,
the obelisk.

The peepings of ghosts have ceased
to ***** me. The proliferation
of paranormal pollsters
are crotchety and terrified,
modeling and grandstanding
the character American,
heirs of TV Kings and monsters,
castle builders, suffocating,
chipping away and abandoning
our very real screaming human
American creature.

A prose poem*

It’s all boarded up now, abandoned in the triangle of downtown Roy, New Mexico, but like a lost island named Capronea two-hundred forgotten years ago, I find myself back in the summer of 1977, seven-years old in the balcony of a second-run, small town movie house watching *The Land That Time Forgot in that small-town, movie-timeline kind of way: two years after everyone else. Popcorn brides, my cousins and I walked the movie processional during opening credits, almost missing the proverbial plummeting message thrown out to sea in a water cask. Candy-bored through all the world-war-submarine scenes, I perked up with innocent horror at the spreading circle of blood in the river, rifles shooting into a gaping dinosaur mouth. And the thunk of its neck hitting the deck. Years later I come back to the epic on classic TV. This time I notice the wobbly love story, German metaphysics arguing with British empiricism that lasts only one flirty scene. Now I’m shocked and a little dismayed over how little screen time the dinosaurs actually get, their three Shakespearean scenes, how I still feel all the same heartache as they enact their long and dramatic death throes. Doug McClure is alright, I guess, except that his hair is always blown out to an impossible feathered confection, just like the German Captain who keeps his hat on way past when this is necessary or useful. We laugh with ironic smugness at the stiff Jurassic puppets and the blood on rubber, the convolution of the island’s evolutionary biology. Those river amoebas are a hoot! Oh, the ironic wink that double-crosses itself in the end, an irony that is really homesickness longing for sincerity, simplicity. My husband says he prefers this movie to those Spielberg ones. I give him hell about this but later come around to see his point. Let’s take the movie’s basic premise: we are at the end of history presumably. So even if we could forget all that history, wipe the slate clean as it were, we still wouldn’t get along with our rivals. At least not enough to fashion an oil refinery from sticks and stones, pack up all that oil in barrels, and roll on outa this nightmare.

None of us will get off this island alive. At the end we’re left crossing a mountain of ice with two people whose only hope is to simplify things down to survival and ***—and *** in those impossible furs no less (in dinosaur leather maybe). We can’t help but trip over the metaphors here. They're everywhere. Only back in 1977, we believed them.

An unrhymed Pindaric

“Either be wholly slaves or wholly free.”
-- John Dryden

I. Strophe**

Free verse, you are my original verse, my birth voice,
music of my inheritance, placenta full
of breath and heartbeats, my riotous word maps
shred of the rules of the patriarchy, the white
old world. Self reliance is All American, I say;
I say what I mean like daggers on blood stains, scientific
particularity, embellished with the subversive, diabolical
enjambment, a soothsayer and a liar, a sister assumed
in the interruption, a sister resolved
in the final line.

II. Antistrophe

But you can spin out in an open lot.
Who’s to say a sister can’t mark out her own
shape—skinny, fat, fit to be *******?
Who’s to say she can’t be obscure, obtuse, coquettish
with a song and dance or with raw, pickled reason?
There’s more to ****** than some two-faced
enjambs. There’s the rhetorics of ******* and assuming
you invented the knife. Can we just cut the game
of its gangrene?  Smelly history, politics,
and idolatry?

III. The Stand

I take back the music; I will sing badly in my parlor,
set a line with a waltz or a moon dance.
I refuse to relinquish my words to the tyranny of English.
I refuse to relinquish my words to the tyranny of me.
I take back all shapes (if they flatter me) and mathematics.
I take back the agenda nailed to the wall,
refusing to relinquish my self to the tired old generals
of either side. I take back the third waves of the entire sea
and shitbox and I take back the almighty decision
of which witch is which.

A Donna Summer Triolet**

The disco dancer needs a singer,
a heart spasm simmering with the pulsing zeitgeist.
The sequined torch song craves a *******;
so the disco dancer needs a singer.
Giorgio-beats-per-minute, the remix has been spliced
as the belladonna exits onto the dance floor of Christ.
The disco dancer needs a singer,
a 12-inch ****** blessing the joyous zeitgeist.

When he lays down
sushi on the pallet
it exhales a sigh

Paddle into rice
damp, caking sea
warm in the throat

Glistening with meditation
flesh of reds and white
dead beauty on wood

Using fingers
I am a bear and a wolf
stained with salt and soy

oh but my love is not
a red, red rose.
i chose to replace
every tear on my face
with dying embers
of every memory
you said you would remember.

i trust
that you must know
that i am not a summer's day,
i will never play
at being warm
or temperate.

you can berate
me for not knowing
whether i am to be
or not to be,
but forgive me
if i don't play by the rules
and exit
the right stage
in a wrong scene.

it just means
that your music
is not the food of my love.
i will continue to shove
your thoughts
under a carpet of denial.

do not throw away
any vial you might find
in my room,
you sealed my doom
when you stomped down
that staircase,
tripping on the last time
we went for a walk.

my face doesn't run
smooth like the course of love,
you should have known
this truth.

my eyes are not rose petals,
my heart not a white dove,
my love
when they say hell is empty,
they haven't been inside
my mind -
here
you'll find horrors
of a sweet kind.

(NaPoWriMo Challenge: April 3, 2019)

“Not all those who wander are lost.” -- J. R. R. Tolkien

I was an office temp for many years when I was young. All the companies: Kelly girls, Manpower, Adecco. I took innumerable tests in typing, word processing, spreadsheets.

The worst job was at a sales office for home siding. I logged complaints all day on the phone about faulty siding.

I worked at a construction site in Los Angeles, a new middle-class ghetto they were building on the Howard Hughes air strip. I worked in a trailer and had to wait until lunch break to walk a block to the bathroom in the new library.

There was one warehouse I worked in that had mice so employed a full-time cat to work alongside us. The cat left dead mice everywhere. I was always cold there.

A lot of places I was replacing someone on vacation, someone the office assumed was indispensable but there was never anything for me to do there but read. I wrote a lot of letters to pen pals and friends. Email hadn’t been invented yet. Sometimes I’d walk memos around the office. Nobody ever invited me to meetings. Be careful what you wish for. Sometimes it comes true and you end up sitting in endless meetings.

In one swanky office I prepared orders in triplicate on a typewriter. I kept messing up and having to start over. Eventually I started to enjoy this. It was a medical lab and was convinced they were doing animal testing so I left after a week.

One of my early jobs was as a receptionist in a war machine company. My contact there asked me to do “computer work” (as it was called then) but I didn’t know how to use a mac or a mouse. My contact called my agency to complain about sending out “girls without basic skills.” My agency told me not to worry about it, the war company was just trying to scam us all by paying for a receptionist to do “computer work.” So they stuck me at the switchboard up front where I found bomb-threat instructions taped under the desk.

I worked at a design store and learned a program called Word Perfect. I started typing and printing the letters to my friends. The St. Louis owner was trying to sell the company to a rich Los Angeles couple. Once, a young gay designer I admired called and referred to me as “the girl up front with the glasses.” I immediately went out and got contact lenses. Before I left, I bought a desk and a chair they were selling. Years later, I sold the desk to an Amish couple in Lititz, PA, but I still have the chair.

I once worked for a cheap couple running a plastic mold factory. The man was paranoid, cheap and houvering and I said I wouldn’t stay past two weeks. They asked me to train a new temp and I said okay. The new temp also found the owner to be paranoid, cheap and houvering and so declared to me she wouldn’t stay past the week either. She confided in me she had gotten drunk and slept with someone and was worried she was pregnant. She was freaking out because she was going through a divorce and already had two kids. I told her about the day-after-pill which she had never heard of. I don’t know if it worked because I never used it myself and I never saw her again after that to follow up.

At another office I did nothing at the front desk for three weeks, bored and reading all the Thomas Covenant novels. I would take my lunch break under a big tree to continue reading the Thomas Covenant novels.

I worked for months at a credit card company reading books and letting in visitors through the locked glass door. Week after week, the receptionist would call in sick. One young blonde woman would give me filing work. She was telling me all about her wedding she was planning which sounded pretty fun and it made me want to plan a wedding too. After a few weeks she asked me what my father did. I said he was a computer programmer. She replied that my dad sounded like somebody her dad would beat up. I was too shocked by the rudeness to say dismissively, “I seriously doubt that.” (For one, my dad wasn’t always a computer programmer.) When it became clear the woman I was replacing had abandoned her job, they asked me if I wanted to stay on. I said no, that I was moving to New York City. I wasn’t  (but I did eventually).

Some places “kept me on” like the mortgage underwriters in St. Louis. That office had permanent wood partitions between the desks, waist-high and a pretty, slight woman training to join the FBI. She fainted one day by the copier. It was there that I told my first successful joke ever. Our boss was a part-time Baptist minister and we loved him because he was able to inspire us during times of low morale. One day we saw a bug buzzing above us in a light fixture.  Before I even thought about it I said, “I guess you could say he finally saw the light.” Everybody laughed a lot and I turned bright red. I wrote my essay to Sarah Lawrence College there after hours at the one desk with a typewriter. My boss and I got laid off the same day. He helped me carry my things out to my car.

I worked at a large food company in White Plains, NY. I often came home with boxes of giveaway Capri Sun in damaged boxes. I helped a blind woman fill out her checks. She was really grouchy and I wasn’t allowed to pet her service dog. She had dusty junk all over her desk but she couldn’t see it to make it tidy. I realized then that she would never be able to use a stack of desk junk as a to-do list...because she couldn’t see it. You can’t to-do what you can’t see and how we all probably take this fact for granted with our piles of desk junk. Years later I had the same thought about to-do lists burned in phones or computer files.

They also “kept me on” at the Yonkers construction company. I was there for years. The British woman next to me was not my boss but she ordered me around a lot. She told me I looked like an old 1940s actress I had never heard of who always wore her hair in her face. I was annoyed by this compliment because when I looked the actress up on the Internet I could see it wasn’t true. At the time, everyone was just getting on the Internet and I was already addicted to eBay. I would leave meetings in the middle for three minute at a time to ****** items with my competitive late-second bids. It was my first job with email too, and I emailed many letters to all my friends all day long. One elderly man there thought it was funny to give me cigars (which I smoked socially at the time) and told me unsavory ****** facts to shock me. I thought he was harmless and funny and his attempts to unsettle me misguided because I had already grown up with two older brothers who were smelly and hellbent on unsettling me. Later the man started dating and seemed happier and I met his very nice older girlfriend at one of the laborious, day-long Christmas parties our Italian owners threw every year. Months later his girlfriend was murdered in her garage by her estranged husband. Most of the office left to go to her funeral and I felt very bad for him.

And they kept me on at the Indian arts school in Santa Fe. I loved every day I spent there, walking the halls looking at student art. I had never seen so many beautiful faces in one place. One teacher there confided in me about her troubles and I tried to be Oprah. She ended up having to take out a restraining order against a man she met online. At the trial, the man tried to attack the female judge and she awarded the teacher the longest restraining order ever awarded in Santa Fe: 100 years. He broke the restraining order one day on campus and we were all scared about where he was and if he had a gun. All around the school were rolling hills and yellow blooming chamisa and we found tarantulas in the parking lot. I was there almost a full school year until I moved away.

I was once a temp in a nursing temp office that had large oak desks and big leather chairs. The office was empty except for one other woman. The boss was on vacation and she spent all our time complaining about what an *** he was and how mistreated the nurses were. I remember feeling uncomfortable in the leather chair. The boss, who I never met, called me one day to tell me he had fired her and that I should know she was threatening to come back with a gun. When I called the agency they laughed it off. I told them I wouldn’t go back.

My favorite temp job was at a firefighting academy in rural Massachusetts. I edited training manuals along with two other temps. It was very interesting work. The academy was in the middle of the woods, down beautiful winding roads with old rock walls. Driving to work I would listen to TLC and Luther Vandross. And whenever I hear Vandross sing I still think of the Massachusetts woods. When I left, they let me have a t-shirt and I wore it for years. One of the trainers had a son who was a firefighter who asked me out on a date. I said I was moving to New York City (this time it was true) and not interested in a relationship. He insisted the date would be just as friends. He took me to Boston’s North End and we ate gnocchi while he told me how he didn’t believe it was right to hit women. This comment alarmed me. He then took me to a highrise, skyview bar downtown where he proceeded to **** my fingers. I thought about Gregg Allman and Cher’s first date where Gregg Allman ****** Cher’s fingers and how now Cher and I had something in common: the disappointment of having one’s fingers ******. My scary date didn’t want to take me home and I was living with my brother at the time, so I told him my brother was crazy and if I didn’t get back by ten o’clock my brother would freak out like a motherf&#$er. That part wasn’t true...but it worked. I made it home.

I used to be deathly afraid of talking to strangers on the phone. I used to be bored out of my mind watching the clock. I used to wish I were friends with many of the interesting people walking past my desk.

When I look back on all this and where I’ve been, it seems so random, meandering through offices in so many different cities. But it wasn’t entropy or arbitrary. I was always working on the same thing.

I was a writer.

In a suburban, Midwestern split-level, a piano teacher (just turned thirty),
leads an eleven-year old girl and her parents down eight shagged stairs
to the piano room illuminated by backyard sunlight from a sliding glass door.
**** has infested the entire room and a polka-dot-print couch with skirt ruffles
and a low brown coffee table create a makeshift waiting area.
This is where the parents sit writing out checks (the bank president’s daughter
was denied lessons last week for paying too late, too often). A faux-wood
sign slid into a gold-trimmed stand demands Please No Smoking but it’s only 1980
and too overbearing not to offend the parents. Smoke still ascends the ashtrays
atop their classy black uprights with chipped middle Cs.
Nobody in the neighborhood but the piano teacher has a metronome.  
She wears flowered blouses and is slightly overweight in a padded movie-like way;
she has fat, muscled fingers for playing all kinds of notes.
A stubby brown piano is piled with stacks of dog-eared songbooks.
The eleven-year old slouches over the keys attempting simplified Chopin, Bach,
and “Tubular Bells” from The Exorcist, simulating her close-ups for Solid Gold.
Every year there are recital awards, a scale-shaped silver hanger or a coffee cup
with a handle fashioned like a quarter note. One year they all memorize the lives
of the composers. One year the piano teacher is pregnant by a tall, awkward,
bearded husband who practices fencing out in their backyard. Today she tells
the eleven year-old about last night’s dreams where “Christ is holding her baby.”
The parents overhear this and close their checkbooks.

For twenty minutes my father argued with her about the end of my music career.
She acquiesced in the end, saying a girl should always obey her father.
Within the year my teacher did find fame in the papers by obeying her father,
the day he commanded her to steam-clean the crimson stains on the **** carpet,
the day after he shot and stabbed and set afire that awkward, bearded, fencing man,
father of the baby that dreamed-up Jesus was so fond of. And now when she takes
the 5th, I never know if it’s that Amendment or Beethoven’s.
                                                                ­                                       Please No Murdering
the perfect melody with your bars and keys. The piano teacher went on teaching scales
and I imagine her piano is festering like a box of echo and madness, notes floating
through the sliding glass door stuck ajar. I imagine her frumpy, stomping on the stiff
damper pedal that sustains all our dreams.

Real success indicators*

- Skill in the persuasive negotiations of terms, a kind of sedimentary geological persuasion
- Ability to conjure Oprah behind closed doors, talk downs
- Proficiency in juggling fire
- Possessing the gift of grasping the bigger picture metaphysically, spiritually on Sundays
- Facility with the in-crowd, a knack for small talk in lunch lines
- Talent for producing imaginative and influential spin for both external and internal corporate communications
- Competence in project management and setting expectations, ballet dancing
- Aptitude in translating poor self-esteem into long work hours
- Capacity for taking sht at all levels of the disorganization

She was kneading the crevice
under my left shoulder blade with a forefinger
which had a tremor when she pushed hard
or “did anything with intention.”
Said it was only her right finger, a family trait,
(honestly, not an ineffectively way to argue
with a muscle).

I could hear the voice of an old man on a table
behind the curtain. His relaxation was a confession,
(maybe the knee **** response to premeditated touch),
and I was like the otherwise engaged
priest. There was a surgery
and he was eight years addicted to pain
pills. One-hundred days sober now,
getting self care, (as Oprah would say),
he was enjoying his wife’s cooking again,
looking forward to some ice fishing
out at Eagle’s Nest, (something
he hadn’t done for 10 years).

“The canyon bowl is so quiet,” he said.
“Even if you don’t catch any fish,
you'd be content to sit there all day.”
“It’s Zen-like,” he said, “the ice caps
surrounding you, the elk and the coy-oats
frolicking out there on the ice.”
(Not with each other I presume.)
The old man’s masseuse
was a young man who never said a word
except, “Is the pressure too much?”

“It’s not like I have respect,”
the old man on the table continued,
“for those who get addicted to illicit drugs.
But now I have a great respect for the pain
they go through.” His masseuse and my masseuse
went on kneading.
“At least I have a life to go back to.”