Performance Scribble
[this is a bit i read for a crookedletter cabaret in 2003 (i think)]
We meet at the bar, no at the nightclub where the low clouds from the fog machine makes us look like giddy anti-gravity foot amputees . You have black hair, no blond, no well it’s a bit random the pelt of an apocalyptic marsupial, hanging over your nape, gathered by a desperate string, so I can just see the translucence of fine hair on your neck when you stand in front of the neon PBR sign. We’re drunk; no we’re sober.., and talking about a feminist circus clown we just went to see. Or, no about midnight bicycle escapades involving dumpsters, secret swims and near auto-accident epiphanies. Your hand reaches for the bone at the top of my hip, the one here that feels like the top of a holster, snuggled in skin, lightly touches it, lifting my shirt, as if you wanna, well pull out the gun.
There are friends around, enough to punctuate the rivulet of our conversation with eddies of hellos, splashes of news, ripples of laughter. The night around us is somehow both frenetic and at ease. I have the notion that time-elapse film of tonight would show a chaotic jumble of meetings and passings, grumblings and shouts of surprise or joy, the semi-ordered confusion of a cloud of bipedal electrons in orbit around some ideal.
You smile at something I say and I feel lifted, hoisted into some kind of swing, the pendulum of our conversation. It’s easy talking with you, back and forth. Now I’m overwhelmed with the clarity between us, like the first human must have felt stumbling through the smilax and stinging nettle to the sudden clear pool of the Itchetucknee headwaters. What’s down in there I remember thinking as a child. Who lives in there?
We lean against the bar and I let my nose rest in the warmth behind your ear. Smell so fine! How does that song go? The one about you I haven’t written yet? I remember. It’s the one written slowly, couplet by couplet, in slant rhyme, a little each time we speak or touch or think of one another. It contains stanzas of awesome and disorganized desire, of organic internal rhyme, as well as blank verse in delicate frustration, expletives in non-sequence about hopes and boundaries and disappointments, anger and screams, regrets and tentative ellipsis. What a song it’s gonna be! But as I surface I doubt. Am I enough? Do I have the endurance for it, to write it with you, to sing it, in public on key, without looking back? Is that kind of love in me?
Someone says hello to you and we do the orbit, of stories and patter that make art 3/5’s of party. Art of conversation. The bandit tells a story about the man at the election supervisor’s office with his rubber stamp and inkpad that went dry. Your laughter is a thing spun of light, I’m awkward and like a moth, mute, with cheesy things to say having crowded onto my tongue, it’s wit seems lost in the light, like an alzheimer’s patient in a waiting room, reciting Disney endings. Call me Persephone munching away in the cavern at the grenadine nibblets of our life together. What lives down in there? I have Orphean doubts.
I’m jealous of your time, as if every moment not devoted to our swing, our cadence, our song, is lost. Jealousy, that green-eyed troll, is a helluva landlord, among the properties of love. Selfish and undeniable, if you take the I from reality you’re left with opening doors to empty rooms, selling the lay-out, and what fine cabinets you have! I don’t want to be your realtor. Mother, it’s Persephone, will you come get me now? Before I eat too many seeds and make a fool of myself?
I’ve said I am an obsession in boots, looking for a destination. Standing on the on-ramp with my desire like a scrawled cardboard sign reading, “true love or bust.” But up until now, my own neurosis or poor judgment always seems to pull me over in the-- wonder-twin-powers activate!—form of a highway patrolman, and I get to wondering, in the ex-crush, post-love drunk tank, “there must be some way of doing this that doesn’t end in confusion, recrimination and hang-over.
Lonely people jog. I try to jog, but settle for trying to jog my memory, which at least doesn’t give me shin splints. With relationships, it’s like I’m in a trance.
Life is full of spells: the nebulous debts to parents and lovers, fears of dying in a stadium or by chicken bone, assumptions about who I am, and what I’m good at, how lame I am, or how clever, or depressed or generous, or how fat or right or feminist or free I am; ideas about how much the world could change. We live in theses dreams where I come from, and awaken periodically after an accident or roadkill relationship or some navel-gazing to exclaim, Huh! How about that! How weird! I didn’t know I could do that! …Full of spells. Good ones too: the lingering wisp around the 2am crowd of excitement and possibility after a rambunctious performance. The spell that settles over a satiated table of friends following yummy food and wine by candlelight. The entrancing moment of a father swinging his laughing daughter, the gentle power of a confidant encouraging you to have faith in yourself. And of course the electric field of good passionate making the beast with two backs.
Life is full of spells. Most of us didn’t learn too good about spelling. We misspell love. It comes out in a barely legible scrawl between lust and appreciation. To be appreciated means to be helped to grow. That’s a spell of mystery and good power, but I amble through it often like a cloud of cigarette smoke, waving it away with my left hand, as if it were some sinister influence. I want to learn to right the situation now, to appreciate the finer points, not just the knobby ones, to be a finalist in the Spelling Be Here Now. Back on the highway with my weather-beaten and stained cardboard sign, yielding right-of-way, eyes peeled for the uniform in my head.
What are you righting, she says.
I’m spelling, I say.
And now we’re crouching over each other as if we needed resuscitation, and maybe we do. We spend an hour at the petting zoo, without bars nearby. Yeah, we often start out slow, awkward, like kids touching our favorite hiding places, the muscle just behind your armpit when you raise your arm, the sump under a knee, the little pillow under the jaw, but we wander afield, and it’s crazy with wildflowers there, and dragonflies zinging, and the shy breeze and as we breathe and crouch and crawl, feline and purring the vines curl round and we’re happily trapped, the slow seizure, turning liquid, struggling to separate so as to touch again, and unveil the ocean underground.
Then comes overwhelming intensity that precipitates a flopping out, we giggle in the moonshine, lips wet and cooling, the film or your tongue on my neck, awkward contortions, we get tangled in the bed sheets and don’t know whether to laugh or keep rolling, like a sailboat in a transatlantic typhoon, hoping the mast doesn’t break, a symphony of murmurs and exhalations escape, all the cells in convulsive call and response, we’re changing shape and form, into a rowboat on mirror pond and dawn, then like crabs the crew-racing team, put your finger in the pie, we go to the horse-track galloping, I’m a jackhammer man, yeehaw! And suddenly sometimes the lyric moment, an intergalactic stare, the long look, eyes aglow, where that sweet message is now sent and received: semaphore to the heart, and the heart fills with a lovely knowledge: we share, we’re one.
The crickets are gossiping, the crows cackling, the truck downstairs nearly knocks down a speed limit sign. Realtors are closing deals, doctors are passing through rooms, speech writers spill black coffee over barren typewriters, lonely people are jogging, a military convoy somewhere makes roadkill of nearby life. But you and I are lights in oblivion, in our own submarine volcano, sharing the most controversial urge in history. We are making love.
DOWN THE ROAD FOR A SPELL
We meet at the bar, no at the nightclub where the low clouds from the fog machine makes us look like giddy anti-gravity foot amputees . You have black hair, no blond, no well it’s a bit random the pelt of an apocalyptic marsupial, hanging over your nape, gathered by a desperate string, so I can just see the translucence of fine hair on your neck when you stand in front of the neon PBR sign. We’re drunk; no we’re sober.., and talking about a feminist circus clown we just went to see. Or, no about midnight bicycle escapades involving dumpsters, secret swims and near auto-accident epiphanies. Your hand reaches for the bone at the top of my hip, the one here that feels like the top of a holster, snuggled in skin, lightly touches it, lifting my shirt, as if you wanna, well pull out the gun.
There are friends around, enough to punctuate the rivulet of our conversation with eddies of hellos, splashes of news, ripples of laughter. The night around us is somehow both frenetic and at ease. I have the notion that time-elapse film of tonight would show a chaotic jumble of meetings and passings, grumblings and shouts of surprise or joy, the semi-ordered confusion of a cloud of bipedal electrons in orbit around some ideal.
You smile at something I say and I feel lifted, hoisted into some kind of swing, the pendulum of our conversation. It’s easy talking with you, back and forth. Now I’m overwhelmed with the clarity between us, like the first human must have felt stumbling through the smilax and stinging nettle to the sudden clear pool of the Itchetucknee headwaters. What’s down in there I remember thinking as a child. Who lives in there?
We lean against the bar and I let my nose rest in the warmth behind your ear. Smell so fine! How does that song go? The one about you I haven’t written yet? I remember. It’s the one written slowly, couplet by couplet, in slant rhyme, a little each time we speak or touch or think of one another. It contains stanzas of awesome and disorganized desire, of organic internal rhyme, as well as blank verse in delicate frustration, expletives in non-sequence about hopes and boundaries and disappointments, anger and screams, regrets and tentative ellipsis. What a song it’s gonna be! But as I surface I doubt. Am I enough? Do I have the endurance for it, to write it with you, to sing it, in public on key, without looking back? Is that kind of love in me?
Someone says hello to you and we do the orbit, of stories and patter that make art 3/5’s of party. Art of conversation. The bandit tells a story about the man at the election supervisor’s office with his rubber stamp and inkpad that went dry. Your laughter is a thing spun of light, I’m awkward and like a moth, mute, with cheesy things to say having crowded onto my tongue, it’s wit seems lost in the light, like an alzheimer’s patient in a waiting room, reciting Disney endings. Call me Persephone munching away in the cavern at the grenadine nibblets of our life together. What lives down in there? I have Orphean doubts.
I’m jealous of your time, as if every moment not devoted to our swing, our cadence, our song, is lost. Jealousy, that green-eyed troll, is a helluva landlord, among the properties of love. Selfish and undeniable, if you take the I from reality you’re left with opening doors to empty rooms, selling the lay-out, and what fine cabinets you have! I don’t want to be your realtor. Mother, it’s Persephone, will you come get me now? Before I eat too many seeds and make a fool of myself?
I’ve said I am an obsession in boots, looking for a destination. Standing on the on-ramp with my desire like a scrawled cardboard sign reading, “true love or bust.” But up until now, my own neurosis or poor judgment always seems to pull me over in the-- wonder-twin-powers activate!—form of a highway patrolman, and I get to wondering, in the ex-crush, post-love drunk tank, “there must be some way of doing this that doesn’t end in confusion, recrimination and hang-over.
Lonely people jog. I try to jog, but settle for trying to jog my memory, which at least doesn’t give me shin splints. With relationships, it’s like I’m in a trance.
Life is full of spells: the nebulous debts to parents and lovers, fears of dying in a stadium or by chicken bone, assumptions about who I am, and what I’m good at, how lame I am, or how clever, or depressed or generous, or how fat or right or feminist or free I am; ideas about how much the world could change. We live in theses dreams where I come from, and awaken periodically after an accident or roadkill relationship or some navel-gazing to exclaim, Huh! How about that! How weird! I didn’t know I could do that! …Full of spells. Good ones too: the lingering wisp around the 2am crowd of excitement and possibility after a rambunctious performance. The spell that settles over a satiated table of friends following yummy food and wine by candlelight. The entrancing moment of a father swinging his laughing daughter, the gentle power of a confidant encouraging you to have faith in yourself. And of course the electric field of good passionate making the beast with two backs.
Life is full of spells. Most of us didn’t learn too good about spelling. We misspell love. It comes out in a barely legible scrawl between lust and appreciation. To be appreciated means to be helped to grow. That’s a spell of mystery and good power, but I amble through it often like a cloud of cigarette smoke, waving it away with my left hand, as if it were some sinister influence. I want to learn to right the situation now, to appreciate the finer points, not just the knobby ones, to be a finalist in the Spelling Be Here Now. Back on the highway with my weather-beaten and stained cardboard sign, yielding right-of-way, eyes peeled for the uniform in my head.
What are you righting, she says.
I’m spelling, I say.
And now we’re crouching over each other as if we needed resuscitation, and maybe we do. We spend an hour at the petting zoo, without bars nearby. Yeah, we often start out slow, awkward, like kids touching our favorite hiding places, the muscle just behind your armpit when you raise your arm, the sump under a knee, the little pillow under the jaw, but we wander afield, and it’s crazy with wildflowers there, and dragonflies zinging, and the shy breeze and as we breathe and crouch and crawl, feline and purring the vines curl round and we’re happily trapped, the slow seizure, turning liquid, struggling to separate so as to touch again, and unveil the ocean underground.
Then comes overwhelming intensity that precipitates a flopping out, we giggle in the moonshine, lips wet and cooling, the film or your tongue on my neck, awkward contortions, we get tangled in the bed sheets and don’t know whether to laugh or keep rolling, like a sailboat in a transatlantic typhoon, hoping the mast doesn’t break, a symphony of murmurs and exhalations escape, all the cells in convulsive call and response, we’re changing shape and form, into a rowboat on mirror pond and dawn, then like crabs the crew-racing team, put your finger in the pie, we go to the horse-track galloping, I’m a jackhammer man, yeehaw! And suddenly sometimes the lyric moment, an intergalactic stare, the long look, eyes aglow, where that sweet message is now sent and received: semaphore to the heart, and the heart fills with a lovely knowledge: we share, we’re one.
The crickets are gossiping, the crows cackling, the truck downstairs nearly knocks down a speed limit sign. Realtors are closing deals, doctors are passing through rooms, speech writers spill black coffee over barren typewriters, lonely people are jogging, a military convoy somewhere makes roadkill of nearby life. But you and I are lights in oblivion, in our own submarine volcano, sharing the most controversial urge in history. We are making love.
The comments are owned by the poster. We aren't responsible for their content.