Dying/broken/forgiven.... now I begin

Born: 17-06-56....gemini.... monkey
re-born: 3-09-80
born again\found: 14-04-08
other notable dates: 10-03-68; 03-09-87; 23-03-96;
1-05-98; 31-01-02; 5-04-04

Interests: movement, stressed/transgressive embodiment, lived experience (body\space\time\relation)
expression ( word, dance, text, image, story, music, poetics)
learning, yielding......

Hopes for the blog:
offer up the wild intersectedness of lived experience and engage others in creative, expressive, perhaps irreverant, hopefully playful, and respectful encounters....
enact kindness
create moments of pause for disclosure, discovery, stillness

Sunday, February 28, 2010

Dust



somebody, kill the committee!
all of them?
all of them...
especially the son of a bitch with the scratchy whisper
that fella
insisting on reminding me
about the turn not taken
the work not done
or done well
enough
as if that were ever possible
anyway

and especially also the fleet
& deadly feathered Mercury
doesn't talk much & doesn't have to
hurts with a glance
of screeching steel
murders small birds
to drive the point home
another insisting
I've really let myself go
soft
yielding will kill me
since I am already
exhibiting the cracks and crumbles
perhaps that explains all that
dust

swirling
settling
stillness
new music

belay that order!
I made the damn thing...
I'll kill it myself

Friday, February 26, 2010

...not the top three, ta la....




... a culprit is indispensible

my former lover has just been promoted to ( ) ...
I'm not going to fill in the blank...
you might figure out
who she is
or worse
you might figure out
who I am
or I might
perish
the thought of her
assurances :
this could be me
if only I could learn to be
more appropriately
deferential





Friday, February 19, 2010

Virginity: A Trinity

One....

You said you weren't much of a phone person, that the telephone was not your mode, so I believed you. I kept your messages on my phone so I could hear your voice during those long absences when we did not see each other. So much had happened yet the togethering was still young. That night you called, it was strange and delightful. I found myself telling you about the messages, my wistful longing for your voice. You asked what would I think about you being around more often. I said I'd be happy about that, and then I paused.... it was only fair to warn you about the cancer. It was new. No chance for children. Why would that be a problem, you asked me. I supposed that maybe you'd want to be thinking about children, I said. I supposed that might be a need, I don't know.... I remember floundering. My body doesn't need to get your body pregnant, you said then. Ok, I said back. I believe you.
Pretty good stuff for the phone. Pretty good stuff for a life.... Believing, Togethering... this is what happens next.

Two....

Seafood restaurants manage to operate under such absurdly appropriate names. I parked that ancient, ugly Ford Pinto station wagon across the street from The Aquarium ( how original!), the spiffy, nouveau lunch and dinner spot on Duckworth Street where you had landed the food service job. I had told you that I'd be outside waiting for you on your lunch break. It had been a bit of a push getting from the physician's office up on Kenmount Road, but I had gotten there with some time to spare.We were so young, you and I, and you were younger than I . I watched you as you crossed the street. I still remember how my heart would fill my chest, wondering at how dark and beautiful you were, at your effortless grace. You folded yourself into the impossibly small passenger seat of that little yellow Ford, gorgeous in black and white... in anything... or nothing. You held your hands loosely in your lap. I held the wheel and looked at your face in profile. We were breathing and waiting. You did that thing with your face and brow, that question-come on-whaddaya think-tilt and look. So, yes, I'd said, I'm pregnant. My heart was racing. You got very quiet. It's just that this has never happened before, you'd said. No shit, I'd said to myself.... and then you were continuing..... it's always worked out, you know.... you had let your voice trail off, then. I know, I'd said. I know.
You sobbed. It was a sob. I really need you to be strong for me now, you'd said. I can do that, I'd said. Then we were quiet, just looking at each other. It was amazing to me that the lunch hour world was going on as usual on the other side of the windows. Then, I cried, just a little. I'm going to carry this baby, I'd said. You reached over and clasped my hand tightly and you nodded, and smiled, and touched my face. I noticed that your eyes were wet, too.

Three...

You are young, yet older than I was the last time I saw you. I have already decided to follow your lead no matter what. I will not move out of our embrace... I will leave the timing and softening of that in your hands. I will simply be present to how you feel in my arms and how I feel in yours. I will not be letting go of you again. I'm so proud of your tenacity, your steadfastness, your honesty and courage. Regardless of the risks, I fear neither disappointment nor kindness. You being here makes me brave enough... good enough.
You being here: a birth of your choosing, borne of wonder(ing). Your poetry calls , a stillness settles, and, reborn into a fierce tenderness, I lean into your words, forgetful of all but this moment. When I notice my single clenched fist, it opens, like a rose.

Sunday, February 14, 2010

Punctuation / wetHAIKUdream (ing)



finding an empty
realizing I drank it
all pain is like that

finding: an empty
realizing/ I drank it
all; pain is like that

Finding an empty
realizing. I drank it.
All pain is like that.

finding an empty ....
realizing I drank it
all/ pain is like that

Saturday, February 13, 2010

Amends

To: Mr. Rufus Saunders
Manager
Elizabeth Avenue Liquors
Churchill Square
St. John's, Newfoundland
Dear Mr. Saunders,
You will find enclosed in this letter a cheque for $820.00. I need to explain why I'm sending this to you. It wasn't always like this for me, being able to send a big cheque in the mail. The last time you saw me I would have been 18 years old, mousy and unremarkable, probably wearing jeans and a gray or brown jacket, something unmemorable, and carrying a purse the size of a gym bag. I probably had half a dozen men's socks in there..... big socks.
That evening, I purchased a bottle of Moody Blue wine. I liked that wine; it was sweet and easy to drink. I saw your name tag and remembered it because it reminded me of Rufus Guinchard, a fiddler I listened to a lot back then. Long dead, Rufus. But you're not. I checked. I tracked you down a few weeks ago because I knew I had to make it right with you, finally.
I shoplifted half a dozen extra bottles that night. Slid them into the big socks so they wouldn't clink off each other in my purse. 2 scotch, 2 rye, a London Dock and a Southern Comfort. I'm paying you back the street value now, plus interest. The first Monday of this month was my 20 years sober dry date, and you are one of my last remaining amends. I was cold as ice that night as I laid down the eight bucks for that Moody Blue. You were rushed and nervous, probably new on the job, probably not much older than I was. I screwed you over like I did with lots of people back then.
I don't need you to thank me and I don't need you to forgive me. I just have to say I'm sorry and mean it. Being a decent person means more to me now than it did then... almost more than anything. So, I'm sorry. And I mean it.
Please accept my kind regards,
Emm Cee.

Friday, February 12, 2010

Poetic Inquiry: Rosepoo

The other night my son told this funny story about eating potpourri. He was only eight years old at the time, and wondering why something that looked like food would be so tantalizingly displayed in a bathroom, of all places. So, yeah, he took a nibble, realized it was NOT food and got the vile tasting stuff out of his mouth with as much speed and dignity as an eight year old boy can muster. I'm not a big potpourri fan.... incense is more my speed... smoke, spark and ember bathed in a spicy haze. But I don't have incense burning in my bathroom. Mostly my bathroom smells like, well, a bathroom, this in spite of my spouse's occasional jests about alien shits (mine, apparently). I leave these behind in my own and in many other bathrooms with no small sense of pride, happy to take the credit for the products of my labours. But, I digress. I was going on about bathrooms and the means used to keep them appropriately fragrant, and the dangers of inedible fragrance makers to unsuspecting or just plain curious bathroom users.

Bathrooms --not only those in the home but, increasingly, public ones--are well dispersed across a spectrum of odour intervention. I've been unduly - some might say, morbidly-fascinated by this phenomenon over the years. I've been exposed to magnificent opulence, wing chairs, draperies, soft lighting, floral displays, bowls of potpourri and floating candles. I am almost embarrassed to do my business--much less the paperwork--in such luxurious and sacred spaces. There are also bottom of the barrel grunge pits with such well entrenched odour it has morphed into a slick--or, slime, perhaps?--that creeps over floors and walls. Breathtaking... indeed, breath-holding... in its glory. One feels privileged to add to such a body of work.

being present with odour...being present with fragrance..... who can make scents of it? one person's odour is another's fragrance; one person's fragrance ... another's odour. Tolerances are idiosyncratic, and, to be fair, it's not only bathrooms where odours dwell and flourish; it's also kitchens and basements and elementary schools, nurseries and brothels and diners, airports and bus stations and..... well, you can see the sheer immensity of it all.

I am struck, however, by tolerances around bathrooms and, it grieves me to say, around bodies. Human ones, anyway. Shit--ok, I'll be more genteel-- poo blends with the various masquerading contributors to olfactory comfort and joy and visitors encounter not one, not the other, but an even more exotic hybrid: rosepoo. Some bathrooms waft this remarkable achievement via sprays, candles, plug-ins and, yes, potpourri. My hands and nostrils carry away its remnants as a damp and tepid memory of time well spent. A body may smell like a meadow or an ocean, a flower, tree, herb, spice or breeze.... anything other than smelling like a body. Scents are the means by which women fling themselves uncontrollably at casually sauntering men, and are no less the means by which men are mesmerized by the allure of chest heaving, pouting, glassy-eyed, wild -maned women. Common scents, I suppose; or uncommon ones.

Fragrance, odour, repulsive, compelling; the desire to draw closer into a pungent nearness, seduction and ambush, all that awaits, riding on something as personal and fragile as scent. Still.... I have to say, I know it's you before I see you, and I take a tender delight in that sweet anticipation.

Wednesday, February 3, 2010

In the news.....

There's a word for that....

Crowds gathered at the site of an unexpected collision earlier this week at the opening of a Chapters bookstore in Niagara Falls. A cube van carrying a shipment of dictionaries and thesaurusae was t-boned by a large pick-up truck attempting to get through an intersection on a swiftly changing amber light. No injuries were reported, but the driver of the pick-up was vocal in his displeasure over on-site law enforcement's confiscating of his supply of 500 rubber chickens. Onlookers were shocked, dismayed, distraught, agitated, bothered, distressed, perturbed, nonplussed, troubled.......