No. 15

seventy seven and sunny
forcing your body to do work
sweating out last night’s booze

convex lens in hand, I have an excuse
to exclusively train my eye on your knee highs
bold as blood amidst a sea of black and white

you love knee highs.

in fluid motion passes plastic
body to body, hand to hand
with varying ease and grace

but none with such as yours.

through this rotund glass I
choose to frame and compose
to see the field I want to see

reduce each figure to anonymity
remove myself, the context
remove the meaning of Person

with the exception of you.

despite my manipulation of space and shape
I still taste the saline on your upper lip
feel your fingers pull my pony tail

you’d said stop, bashful and embarrassed
by the griminess of your sinewy limbs
and the grass stuck in your beard

I didn’t care.

at times it can be better to live with
splashes of mud on your hands
drops of sweat on your tongue

a little dirty.

spring ’09.

There’s a komodo dragon on the bed. He belongs to that man in the corner, who I think is more beard than man; more hallucination than human. But this lizard is real, in all four feet of his scaly glory. Scratch his rough, pudgy belly and he writhes not from pain but from pleasure, before falling back asleep.

The fact that he can sleep in this 9′x12′ is in its own small way a miracle, as the space is a tiny box of chaos. Some hooded dude in sweat pants is sitting at the desk rolling a blunt, four high-heeled girls by the door are on round three of shots in as many minutes, the bearded nonbeing is trying to make a phone call in the corner, and as I sit on the bed tickling this komodo dragon, a guy (who introduces himself as Kyle) begins to pitch to me a Bud Light commercial. It involves werewolves and “sorority bitches in bikinis.” I tell him it sounds great. He shakes my hand and suggests we do a shot. Sure Kyle. Why not.

The Captain Morgan goes down easy, even though I hate rum. I never chase. It’s not an act of bravado, but more of an embracing of the burn and what it signifies — it’s a conscious reminder of what I’m choosing to do, and tonight, it’s a reminder that perhaps I shouldn’t do it again. I can’t be hungover tomorrow. It’s the last night, and I don’t know whose room this is, but he’s gonna have a good time cleaning in a few hours. The desk is covered with partially filled beer bottles and cans and liquor bottles and shot glasses and pong balls and dutch wrappers. They tremble, and at first I think my lubricated brain is fabricating their subtle shaking, but then I realize that I can feel the subwoofer through the bed — FlyLo is pumping, only barely drowning out the sound of M.I.A. playing a cash register in the living room.

I wander away from my lizard friend and join the party again. I find my people friends dancing on tables with wings on their feet, their heavy hearts temporarily lightened like helium balloons cut free from mailboxes. I know them only by their silhouettes against the soft light falling from the paper lantern hanging in the corner. No one stands still — everyone is beyond caring about their outfit, their hair, their make up, and everyone sweats together in a nonstop orgy of untethered joy one last time.

I slip outside onto the balcony for a breath of fresh air, and by “fresh” I mean “smoke filled.” I don’t care — can’t. Don’t know how any more. The cool mountain air feels good against my damp skin, and the faces leaning against the brick wall are just as refreshing. Everyone’s chillin’, chatting coolly about how fucked they are. “The REAL WORLD, man. Fuckin’ SCARY.” I find myself thinking about how I don’t really give a shit — they might have to go out and be adults, and that sucks and all, but I’m going to have to be here without them. They’re leaving me behind.

But that’s what happens, right? We are kinetic beings. We move in different directions, at times unpredictably, chasing down some kind of happiness we aren’t sure how to attain. We all know we’ll never be happy again in the way we’re happy now, and we’ll never be together in the same way, but when it’s all over — and it does end — we all go looking to replace this hedonistic pleasure however we can, until we’re satisfied with what pleasures we learn can be more deeply satisfying if we let them be.

I don’t want to think like this right now. I go back inside. Weave my way through the dance party, resisting as my friends try to pull me in and rock out to MJ. Pass the pot smokers in the bathroom, who are mingling with those girls on line who always complain that, “oh my god, I can’t wait any more,” and those other girls who always insist on running the sink tap while they pee. (I never understood that.) I retrace my steps back down the hall.

The bedroom’s empty now. FlyLo’s been replaced, oddly enough, with The Decemberists — “The Bagman’s Gambit.” “No, they cannot catch me now. We will escape somehow, somehow.” I curl back up in a corner of the bed with my lizard friend. I feel bad for abandoning him earlier, knowing how badly I feel at the thought that tomorrow, my friends abandon me. The drunken romantic in me considers the night to be the end of an era, but in a way, it feels like any other night — a dream melted into a dream, encapsulated by the fog of another dream. A number of people wander past the room, looking for someone or another, but no one stays. I’m glad. For the moment, choosing to be alone in the crowd with none but a sleeping lizard feels good. “With the wave of an arm, you were there and gone.“

Being honest about being well.

I often hate when people (myself included) start off a bit of writing with phrases like “Let’s be real here,” but in this case, it doesn’t feel wrong: Let’s be real here. In a matter of speaking, people don’t want to be well. People don’t always want to be happy. People don’t always want to be healthy.

It’s hard, isn’t it? It’s so much work, wellness. It requires a considerable amount of conscious effort to eat properly, exercise regularly, sleep enough and at normal hours, and balance work with play, sociability with solitude, making a life with living. And let’s real here: at this point in our lives, it takes a lot to really WANT wellness.

In a way, we love our depression. We love the lows because they allow us the highs. We indulge in the bitching and whining and moping, so we can indulge in the hedonistic pleasures that allow us to block all that out. In a way, it’s so you have an excuse. It’s actively making bad decisions. It’s staying out late and drinking too much and sleeping too little last night so you can say, “This is why I was unproductive today.” You know it’s poor reasoning, but it’s an explanation nonetheless.

But it’s nothing more than that, either: it’s only an explanation. It’s not a legitimate excuse. I find myself, lately, trying to convince myself that I’m working hard to get better in mind and body and emotions, but I only half believe it. It’s not that I don’t WANT to feel better. I don’t want to be so depressed, so unhealthy. But I also don’t want to lose the joy of the highs that have helped me survive the last few years. I don’t want the responsibility of taking care of myself, when it’s so much easier to neglect myself and my life in favor of other things.

I claim to want balance, but if I’m being honest, I can admit that I don’t truly want to work for it, and I don’t want to lose the comfort of having a built-in explanation for my portfolio of failures. Being unwell is a way of stunting growth, isn’t it? And refusing to cease being unwell is a way of refusing to grow. It’s stubborn and petulant and child-like, a Peter Pan-esque denial of maturity. I don’t know how to shake it — how does one learn to want to care for herself, to want to be taken care of? How do you learn to let go of the masochistic pleasures of unwellness, and desire what you know is best?

No. 14. disorder.

found an old less-than-mediocre poem, wheeeeeeeeeeee.

few streetlights, fewer traffic lights.
I can’t seem to speak.
my speakers are broken.

bbbzzzzZZZZzzz, in stereo
until we hit another pothole

– silence.
time slows.

shy mind too content to spoil with words
a straight and steady road unwavering,
I round a blind internal curve and wait, impatient.

my eyes roll over miles of moon shadowed fields,
trained away from you, framed within frames,
for fear I won’t see what I feel.

and now the window falls, escape wisps
of silver, sparks red, sparks of energy invisible –
microscopic specks from our small cosmos, fleeing.

time folds in, a soft and stifling linen sheet,
the end of a wave rushing to reach the crest

– trapped.
it catches us

me with one hand on the wheel, twirling my hair
to keep my spare hand from straying out of my chaos
into yours, and you, turned away.

strangers

It’s about 23ºF out and every inch of sidewalk from here to the Strand is a glacial sheet of slippery terror, especially given the blizzarding winds on the bridge, so I declined to return from the Maughan Library by that route. I could have taken a bus. I suppose it would have been more financially responsible of me. But, waiting outside the tourist-infested Somerset House, which has turned into a Tiffany’s-sponsored skating rink for the season, seemed torturous, so I chanced north up Chancery Lane instead, to High Holborn. I had never been despite repeated trips to Maughan at all sorts of hours.

High Holborn proved to be a classy, business-minded street akin to, say, 68th St on the UES — not exactly Madison or Park Ave itself, but not far from it — fewer hustling, less bustling. It was around 7pm, and Working Folks were leaving Work. Working Folks tend to make for poor people watching in my mind, since they look so much the same, and as I made my way to the tube station, I dodged and wove with the best of ‘em — countless skinny women in sleek heeled boots and coats perfectly cut in trendy makeovers of classic fashions, and even more men in neatly tucked knit scarves and flawlessly tailored jackets. Even though the day was through and the wind rough, most of the women still sported perfectly coiffeured ‘dos, and the men weren’t even so much as rumpled.

As I attempted to glide with and around them, their faces blurred before me like bitter fruits blended into a bad smoothie. Slowly, I began to distinguish one from another, and realized that the difficulty in doing so lay in the fact that within their aesthetic perfection, they all seemed to wear an identical mask of discontent — stern, pursed lipped frowns; tightly knit eyebrows; distracted eyes that sometimes strayed into abstraction. I see them every day in Westminster and Waterloo– in handfuls on the Strand, in waves on streets like High Holborn — yet, there’s always something sorrowful about seeing so many seemingly unhappy anonymous at once.

Tonight, I began trying to look in each person’s eyes as I passed, whether they were leaving an office building with a briefcase or M&S with a sandwich they called supper. I wondered if they all have similar stories to match their similar expressions of discontent, and I found the idea that so many people could stand facing middle age unhappily for all the same reasons to be petrifying. In an instant, I dropped my glance and their faces began to blur again, until I could no longer discern their misery. Perhaps, at times like these, it’s best to let strangers remain strangers.

“As I walked out one evening…”

Sometimes at night, if I’m feeling restless and it’s too late to walk to Sainsbury’s for a ginger ale, I walk down past the BFI South Bank to the Jubilee walkway along the river. Usually the only people still out are the security guards at the theatre spaces and a few delinquent teenagers. And a smattering of tourists, couples, and tourist couples.

My favorite spot at South Bank, Gabriel’s Wharf, feels a little too desolate and unstable at night for my liking; instead I go in the opposite direction toward Westminster Bridge. During the day, this area is jam packed with too many people. At night, it feels like mine. I go down past the big black book-filled bins of the South Bank Book Market, the graffitied skate park, Festival Pier. Past the restaurants at Royal Festival Hall and Foyle’s book store. Under the Jubilee Bridge, where the trains pass from Waterloo to Charing Cross and beyond.

There are trees here. Not a whole lot of them, but there are trees nonetheless. And benches of all kinds; I love benches. Beside these trees and benches, a few of the inlaid stones that pave the walkway have inscriptions on them. All contain bits of poetry in block capitals, mostly about rivers. Between the Jubilee Bridge and the London Eye is my favorite one, with lines from T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land:

The river sweats
Oil and tar
The barges drift
With the turning tide
Red sails
Wide
To leeward, swing on the heavy spar.
The barges wash
Drifting logs
Down Greenwich reach
Past the Isle of Dogs.

I stand there and reread this several times, breathing the words in and out.

Then, sometimes, I keep walking past the Eye, and stop at the benches near the London Aquarium. I sit, or lean on the massive stone parapet, and look at Parliament and Big Ben and Westminster Abbey, all lit up, golden and green and glowing. Electric lights are marvelous. The sound of the gentle rivertide of the Thames beating against the boats and the embankment let me pretend I’m home on the pier in Island Heights, if I so choose. It’s something I can depend on always being there – the lights, the water – it’s an anchor.

Sometimes I wish someone was with me to share the simple beauty of these moments. Sometimes I am glad I am alone.

I went a little earlier than is my habit tonight. There was a man standing beneath the Eye in the halo of its dimly purplish lights with an acoustic guitar, a mic, and a small amp. As I passed him the first time, he stood there, in a cowboy hat and denim jacket, singing “Stand By Me” with a lady friend. On my way back, he was crooning “Hotel California” by himself, to virtually no one.

I wonder if he is happy.

These nights.

These cool nights are unassumingly sumptuous. They might not seem like anything special, but they are. Their secret lies in the tawdry hood that cloaks what lies beneath. When your lungs have not had the pleasure of recycling carbon dioxide for all that long, it’s easy to want little and need less. With the help of a ghastly breeze, an empty tortilla chip bag crawls across the pavement and out of the sallow streetlight’s glare. In the shadows, a soft hand strikes a match, letting it expire as it falls to the curb, over and over and over again. The words flow like this fifth of whiskey: not constantly, but in liberal doses when the time is right, from body to wretched body.

In this unholy communion, everything is shared, from the sacred to the sacrilegious; and it’s all sacrilege. The ashes, the empty bottles, the rock ‘n’ roll music exist only as evidence of everything we do not need. They are not manifestations of the bond we share, but a silent rebellion against everything everyone else believes we need. As the hour grows later, the night seems to stretch its languid fingertips closer to infinity, and each match falls to the ground a little more slowly. Should we choose to look, we’d see the stars begin to weep, but our selves would start to sing an uncouth hymn of naked joy.

If we keep this up, there will come a day when the last of our youth has slipped away and in the absence of self-awareness, this romance will crumble into the basest, most pathetic tragedy – or worse, a humorless parody. These physical constructs will cease to act as our rebellion. They will morph into a surrender, an acquiescence that our shroud of resilience has fallen and our bond now reflects the bad whiskey and gas station matchbooks that we pass from hand to calloused hand. Perhaps we may cling to the shroud that isn’t there, but one day, we will wake up in late afternoon and realize that we want something else, that we need something more – that we can no longer make a life out of living off these nights.

I can see that day looming in the distance, but it feels nearer than ever. Lately the nights feel like the air before a summer storm: suffocatingly stifling and close, and charged with an electricity that intensifies as that future day creeps closer to the present. It’s terrifying. I’m not ready to relinquish my youthful and borderline juvenile claim on these deliciously irresponsible nights of simple community – and I’m afraid I never will be.