we must live as though the city had eyes

lost now in these few days & freedom…then I must return to that other place, and the everyday terror of people that the years do not yet take from me (December 2008)

The wildness in me stirs when he is around. How can I say it any other way, or live in the pallid portions when that remains the reality. Up from something primal and unknown, and it comes up again, always. How can the mere identity of another, brushing up against you like that dream of much destruction, stir.

Who could want wildness, or allow it in the civilized portions - the great untamed; is it in all of us? Yet the pale slumber that is the living when I walk away from him…

Who can understand these things, or make right when all else has been the slumber, and the slumber was crafted long ago by other roads, other decisions, other small breaths that seemed like need…

…for all of us.

The shards, after all, become the landscape, and most of us walk here with bare feet.

Creativity, then, the loose wire running through me; alive, and spattering potential annihilation - sizzled sparks in the accidental connection - drowsed personhood and the dancing wire: live, jumping in erratic awkwardness, hissing in white fire, then perfected in electric consummation…

Leaving identity electrocuted along the roadside to gather up later, skin still faintly scented of burning flesh.

the young girl, again, writing

With her diffident shrugs, yawns and nonchalant comments, she seemed, at first encounter, indestructible.

And liked the image.

Made for a good PR.

Legend.

Volumes of correspondence, if you knew her, the habit from high school partings. Her friends kept her letters in plastic drawstring bags, hidden from their parents in the back of small closets, lodged somewhere behind the shoes. Returned the bags to her for permanent archiving.

But all that was later.

For you, now, first meeting. And you knew.

Notagirlyou’dforgettoosoon.

After that discovery, you were well on your way.

“Nikki,” she’d say. Then spell it. Short for Nicodemus - but she only told you if you’d been so impertinent as to ask. If you continued to press, she’d admit it.

Not her real name.

Lost that somewhere - Dallas, maybe - but she couldn’t really be sure.

That long drawl. Teen ennui. Re-aaaa-llly.

Her friends might tell you - later, of course - the name sounded strange - but Nikki was strange, and by that point in your awareness the whole train of thought was fading with its whistle in the long distance finally gone and she’d be there again beside you and that voice that was The Voice capturing you.

Mais oui. Strange.

(Adapted from unfinished 1975 manuscript)

I don’t know, I don’ know, I dunno.

She said.

When you get to the I-dunnos, you have to start over. But where else to begin. There is no magnolia in this yard, the house is rented, it is hot, there is no air-conditioner, I put stray cats in the windows but the landlord says no. And anyway.

They fight.

I keep them in separate rooms. One is black, fat, beautiful. Her eyes are green almonds. The other is ugly - a mismatch of colors, even unto her eyes.She is thin and will not eat chicken.

I watch the morning news. The national show lasts two hours. In the evening, we get ninety minutes of local news before the national.

I live in freedom city. Late-night news at eleven.

I yell at the kids. The neighborhood houses are close; in the summer, I wish there were some other language the kids knew.

The dishes are washed every other day, the clothes on the weekend and earliest day of the week. That is my life.

It is all I tell you.

She said. 

(Adapted from unfinished notes, c. 1988)