Music For The First Time

When was the last time you heard music for the first time? The notes from an old David Bowie song jump from the steel guitar strings, they rush through the air, vibrating moments apart from each other, they leap into the ears of a toddler running by. The men stand on a street that’s crowded with vendors selling the first strawberries of spring and the remnants of a short winter’s harvest. A toddler waddles by, she runs past the music and then two feet past, she stops abruptly and turns once to the right, then to the left, as though trying to identify something, looking for something she saw or felt on the edges of her consciousness. She stands still for two seconds, then turns around and runs back to the musicians, to the source of the music that fills the street. She stands still in front of them, like a small mortal at the feet of giants that reverberate in the world of sound. She stares at them, without a smile, without an indication of joy or fear, just an open mouthed stare that borders on disbelief, as though she is trying to understand her perception. I look past her and see a middle aged man sitting on the warm asphalt with two small children in his lap, their attention focused on the musicians. Is this the first time they’ve heard the orchestrated notes of a Bowie song? The first time this particular arrangement of seven notes has run through their ears? They come towards the music like strange worshipers to a stone covered in undecipherable marks. Unsure and curious. Like a vibrational comet, they fall towards the closest source of sound. They can always find an airplane in the sky or point to a pinecone perched on a table full of soap and incense. A little baby stares with wide eyes at the singing face in front of her. Her big hazel eyes take it all in, watching everything. I wonder how she senses each note. Is it a pure sensation, like touching snow? Does she see it though a lense of color and sparkles, not just hearing, but seeing the music that moves around her like a breathing story? The crowd moves past her, adults with bags full of ripe produce, ten year old children that care more for their ice cream cones than the two buskers under the full sun, children that have already begun to watch the magic drain from their bodies like bubbles from a bath swirling down the drain. The baby is in her father’s arms, she points to the music over his shoulder, but he is busy talking to an older woman in a stylish jacket, he doesn’t see her tiny hand rise up in a tight fist, she jerks it in the air, as though pounding a drum and then opens her little hand, pointing to the musicians. She stares at them, fascinated, captivated. Suddenly, she looks away. Something has broken the spell. Sooner or later, something always does.

Genes

They walk as a small group down the barricaded street. They move as a tribe, three generations of faces that have mingled with sex to produce the new human painting. The eldest has white hair, but a piece of her face is reflected in her daughter, not overtly, but the resemblance moves like a soft whisper, landing like a delicate hand upon her flesh. The daughter is wearing a summer dress, her dark brown hair is swept up in a pony tail. Her youthful reflection trails after her own daughter, a three year old that is the perfect blend of genes. With one eye, I see her father, with the other, I see her mother. A completed fusion of male and female.
Three generations share their skin, share their genes, a slight dilution with every man that enters, painting what has been with his own new brush. The genes trail over generations, each copulation resulting in a new form, slightly different than the face that came before it, but still, harboring the same set of eyes.
I watch them walk past me, undeniably a family of blood. They have transported the face and ears for millennia. They are the carriers of a line. How long has their DNA been moving, slowly, winding its way through history like a patient snake, carrying everything it requires within its code.
My own face comes from an older generation. My grandmother’s eyes, I saw them in the old photo before it blew away in the wind. I remember her eyes. The eyes of me. Passed from my father, dominated in utero…I am the result. The blend that seems to have no visible trace. The photos look like strangers, I must have come only from her, from the power in her code.
And I watch them pass, the family of blood, of shared looks, of shared traits. They smile, they know me. I see their progression, the noses, the eyebrows. The miniature lineage of looks, walking before me like a strange sideshow.
Was I once a part of their line? Did we share a distant past, a distant source? I look at them now…can we trace our steps and find a beginning?
I watch them and my mind wanders. It moves to the seashore. It moves to a great ape. It watches the dilution of river water into an ocean. The source of what? Source…is this a word with any meaning?
I stand outside and ponder. The sun moves past a dark formation of clouds. The sundress does not look as inviting.
The child runs towards a small dog whose ears reach the asphalt. What quirk of nature designed an animal whose ears drag across the ground?
“Why are they so big?” I ask in childlike wonder.
“To fly,” the girl holding the leash responds.
I can accept that answer.
Nothing is beyond possibility.
Not when we have all the time in the world.

Family

I stood before their open front door, my face illuminated by the porch light. I was staring at the couple with a smile on my face. I was present in the cool night, my attention upon them, nodding at their words, looking into their eyes. They talked of birth order, the predisposition to be either gentle or aggressive was determined by sibling placing. The eldest…the peacemaker. Too much of a generalization to have any meaning. I agreed with them, nodding my head. But then, I broke from them and journeyed inside, wasn’t I the eldest in a family? Yes, my brain confirmed the fact. “The peacemaker” they said, I continued nodding, responding as needed to their words. I am the eldest. But I have caused the most strain, the most worry. I am the lone wolf in a family of strangers. I grew up alone, alienated from each of them. I was the caretaker of the home after school. I was the nurse when bills had to be paid, I was the companion on a street without children. My earliest friends were not made of flesh, invisible to all but me, and then even they left me alone, both of them, Domba and Mitsy…they vanished, even the memory was stolen, taken to the eternal place where little children dream about fairies and tooth collectors that come with twenty dollar bills.
Their theories crumbled in my hands. Its generalizations that smear the colors of the world with a flat paint brush, coloring it all gray. The wet stones are as different as the swirling lines of jasper. Take the cover off your eyes, we are all the same mechanical operations that function out of fear and desire, but within this nest of wires and blinking lights, we can scrounge and find the rainbows sent off by electric fish, alive and glowing with the pulsations of a rhythmic heart.
I hold both extreme points of the spectrum in my hand. I watch them turn like stones. The blend of truth beats against a sky that speaks in the seven languages of light. I stand below the sky, with my mouth open and my tongue pointed up to the fast moving clouds. Grant me the wish, send a single drop of sweet dew, my tongue is waiting, the scepter that awaits its crowning. The clouds open, and inside, waiting, is darkness…waiting like an exposed queen, her legs wide and open, but the portal leads to more nothingness.
Does this painting fit into the small world were the eldest children are kind? Does the open mouth, the wet tongue, does this fit in a world of small controlled families that dine on each other’s failings? It is a feast that is always cold, but they gather just the same.
With set tables of linens and crystal, they gather to eat the tepid turkey and drink from their glass of sadness. My eyes are hollow as I watch the scene, an unwilling participant, but my body is there nonetheless. The con continues, you call me daughter, I call you my chain. The birth portal is closed and sealed. The wet tunnel long ago condemned. The silver cords that bound us were severed decades ago when the hugs stopped and the hair on my legs became an issue and my jiggling breasts caused you to stare in revulsion. The silver cords are not buried somewhere below the surface of earth, they have disappeared from memory, the bond is gone, vaporized like my old invisible friends, thoughts tempted into existence only by the photos that I carry with sadness and wonder.
Who were those people? I recognize the faces, but the moment is buried, far away, in a place where families hold their love like weapons and children sing out of tune while they wait for their secret midnight myths to come true.

Out There

"Welcome home"
"It’s good to be back..."
The shuttle has entered the atmosphere, cutting through a thick layer of gray clouds… they are home…on earth. Welcome back… to everything you understand as "human," as "home." Our cities of concrete and steel and glass, our domesticated dogs and our oxygen and our shopping malls and warm beds that have awaited you. Here is gravity, here are fish and continuous waves and continents full of talking people that can’t understand each other and green trees that exchange our waste for invisible gold. Out there, in the vast blackness of a space that has no sentimentality, among rocks that spin just like ours, amid air devoid of oxygen, our planet is one of many. Our sun is one of millions.
Floating in the darkness, looking back at what you know as home, does anything seem relevant?
A lone astronaut fixing the side of a satellite, a glimpse of earth, of swirling green and blue and white… "we are so small," she thinks to herself. On that globe, there are battles for water, a baby cries for its mother, a handful of people die in a car bombing in Iraq. Does any of it matter?
Our sun continues to burn, sending fiery explosions our way, our moon orbits faithfully, waxing and waning month after month...how long has it cast its silver light? A man dies in the street, hungry and crippled. A young child walks to school with her friends on a sunny day.
The astronaut sees the swirling white, she sees the orb. She cannot see the woman being raped in the Congo, she is not watching the flood waters rise on TV… floating, breathing through a tube, she sees the whole, the one sphere where we know people breath and fuck. Where people die with a gasp and are born with a push.
Does any of it matter at such a distance? At that distance, is any death a tragedy? Or is every single action a hiccup absorbed into the greater blend of green and blue? Looking out…past home, into the true vastness of a space that moves past the threshold of logic and comprehension, does our home, does this one planet even matter at all?
Somewhere on an oxygen filled planet, a young woman sits in a small apartment on the crust of a complex system, she types diligently on a device invented just a little while ago, a blink on the watch of time. None of them know her, the astronauts, the sun, the comets that streak across what she knows as the sky, does her life matter amid the chaos of floating rocks? Do her tears matter to the moon? She feels the tie that connects one thought to the other, the thread that connects one small life to the system that spins around it; she is the spinning, she is the wonder, the lifetime of rocks, the wars that continue without end. Century after century, there is another conflict and stars flicker out and new ones are born and some planets merely turn half a degree and the century passes like a blink, a mere flutter.
From out there, does any of this even exist at all?

Survivor

Tears come easily, like water from the suburban tap, just lift the handle, just sing the song. It’s a pretty melody with a tribal beat and a chorus of strong, pretty women chanting in unison, and their energy, recorded long ago, exploited for years, it comes through me like the dagger of something real. Raw emotion, communicated through melody, told lovingly by thick voices heard with a ripped heart. It moves through me, in through my ears, down to my chest, out my eyes, along the edges of my skin. The colors flash by and I know I must use it, to do anything else is neglect. Precious and fleeting, it cannot be bottled, but it can be channeled, funneled into writing, pushed in and moved around and reconfigured into a human language made of numbers. I grab a hold of the moment, unwilling to let it die beneath the florescent lighting, unwilling to let it evaporate in the night or absorbed into another bite of cake that coats me like a blanket of fog. No, the moment moves like a soft wind, easy to feel and enjoy, easy to dance within, and easily forgotten as a new thought immerges on the fringes of my mind. Is the training taking root? Has some small piece been remembered, internalized, a step towards a second nature…I wish for this. This evening, it can be blamed or accounted for, on hormones and built up forces of primal sex that have yet to spill, and now, I rush towards the tide. The waters come and I fling myself towards the white foam naked and hungry. My ass jiggles with each step on the beach, each narrow print is a plunge into the earth, a temporal dent of existence. Does the womb remember my birth? The people of stone push back and I stay above the crust’s edge. I run naked, covered in the salt of waves and the hope of a virgin. Thick clumps of matted brown hair cling in streaks to my pink cheeks and thin neck, my hammer is by the fire, and the smoke rises behind me like a signal to all those that can see and the very few answer back in thunder and small sparks. Black wisps turn into colored messages, delivering them to the beauty that rests on his bed. Does the conch cry for me? Do the lips that press against it know the value of its sound? The mermaids will be arriving soon, in time for tepid tea and limp cookies and wet kisses from a devoted mouth. On the waves of the coming storm they come, in the arms of dark clouds and hanging on to the earlobes of mighty tritons that tower beyond the clouds. I run towards them, to the crashing black waves, to the shells that rain like pointed drops of hardened semen. The desire for life scrapes across my skin, leaving streaks upon my arms. My breasts are painted in lines of blood, my hips are etched with the marks of their descent. I feel each stinging line as it comes, it enters, it crosses, it falls to the sand. I feel it as I run and I notice it all, the sand which enters between the gaps of my toes, a cool wind nearly pushes me back, but I charge forward again, and here… they come, my ass jiggles as I run. The necklace bounces on my neck as the teeth and shells that conform it clink against in a music of escape, the feathers in my hair dart back and forth in geometric patterns on an invisible canvas. They arrive and the tea is poured, the cakes wait for their mouths, my breasts await their curious hands, my ass hopes for the tritons sword. They come on the blackened waves, they come with the salty tears upon the cheeks of a round mother, it comes with a song, a simple melody that ignites fires among the waves, they surround us, holding the energy in place, and the song crashes towards me with the shell soaked wind.

Powder

Before I had a language to describe them, long before the nature of the Pull was described to me, and years before I began to understand the savagery of my eternal habit, I lived in the hole for a couple of days in early spring. In the waning months before my degree would be awarded, in the tautness of a rubber band about to break, I smoked from the crinkled hands of demons.
The house was always bathed in a yellowish hue, but it couldn’t be blamed on the light bulbs. It was the inhabitants of the chamber, the vermin clothed as humans, the sticky sludge that resembled normalcy, the fluttering shadows that projected life. The colors looked like a couple, it acted like a pretty girl with school books and thin tank tops, it seemed like a skinny guy wearing an oversized suit, and they were that, and they were not. I tried to conceal it in the corners of my heart, in the caves where secrets lay and rest, where they spin their wool and catch blood-filled mosquitoes with eyes that have long ago been sewn shut. I tried to hide them away, but blood always found its way below the door. The gray cloud above my head shaded the perspective, the steel ball shackled to my ankle ate away at my voice and jingled with each step on the pavement. The pain was written on my face and the disease dressed itself up in purple spots and lay quietly on his skin and the house smelled of vinegar and burnt tin foil and the books absorbed the smoke like the thick leaves of a jungle.
I did not know the language, then, I could not describe the pull, but I smoked from the hands of red demons. Disguised as the glass vase for plastic roses, hidden in the product of water and fire and metal and coca leaves that combined into a surge of power, it was a brief full body orgasm that colored me green and left me wailing without tears, hungry with no need for food. I smoked from the bumpy skin, I heard the bells of their choir and I sat still while the earth spun and my stomach took a ride on the roller coaster that always ended twenty seconds later. And I stood in line again. I called for the conductor, I looked for the tubes and the white rocks and the dirty spoons. And again I took the ride. And when it was over, when I was on my knees and drooling and looking for the foil, I took it again. The same rusty car, the same plastic seat, the eternal loops that held me by a plastic belt. I called for more in the shower and spun as the water beat my body. I sat on the patio, surrounded by dying plants and a created world that made no sense and under the night sky that felt more ugly and brown than I had ever seen it. I sat and heard the bells.
He finally fell asleep and I felt the pull calling the deepest holes in me, I followed my body into the yellow room and found the spoons and the powder and the carton of baking soda. I wanted to make rocks from powder and hear the choir and shake with the bells, I tried ‘til 4 am until the small bag was empty and every ill-cooked rock traveled in wisps of smoke to my lungs. It was almost dawn when I looked in the mirror and I saw a strange woman from a bleak distant land. A woman in the clutches of a force she had no language for. A stranger from a parallel world, a whore, a student, a woman…all could be possible, all were before her for the choosing, there were some of each in her eyes. The bumpy hands were tight around my ankles, the choir sang without rest and I decided then, this would not be the path. I closed the door. I felt them call for many days, the demons kissed my ears and played in the corners of my mind, but I buried myself in books, in the one clear goal that was only a couple of months away. Working this way, I washed myself clean of the powder.

Dirty Laundry

When the piles begin to tilt and flirt with toppling, when every sock is missing from its wooden bed and I go pantyless for days, its time for a good soak. Bubbles and soap and lint, they come with the task. And I arrive home, to the small home I have carved in this city, and I take the piles of still-warm clothes to the small closet and the five drawer dresser that I’ve had since childhood and the steel file cabinet I have begun to use for storage. But there is no room in the closet for all the clean clothes. There is no room in the drawers or space on the small shelf above the hangers or in the filing cabinet stuffed with dress-up clothes. I stack the jackets without homes on the floor, I leave the piles of sweaters in trash bags next to the closet, there just isn’t any space to hang them. My closet spews freshly washed pants, it vomits the scent of sunshine and the memory of a day beside the whirl of spinning machines. The hamper is empty, but I am left with another sort of mess. Overpopulated by jeans and T-shirts, I have broken a cycle. There is nothing dirty, nothing soiled that waits for later, nothing that hopes for a rendezvous with water and detergent and piles of quarters that I exchange for energy. At this moment, I am caught up, and because of this, there is no cycle, no in and out. Right now, there is only in and there is not enough space in the room to contain it all.
And the people we crumple like stained socks and throw in the corner? People with brown faces that never turn white, not after a thousand scrubbings, people with black faces, one of every three of those faces sits in a cage, rejected machines that eat Doritos and drink soda and live in the cracks of this paved city and eventually find themselves lifting weights behind barbed wire. These are the people of my hamper, the ones going out, the humans that stay out of circulation, making room for the "fresh breeze" of folded skirts. In the ecosystem of this small room, the accumulated matter of my life, the dirty laundry gives me psychic room, space to feel clean even while the white shirts and delicate sweaters lay at the bottom of the plastic hamper. Those forgotten faces make room for the rest of us. They sew lingerie and assemble cars on barely more than a slave’s salary and they keep the parking spaces of this community free and housing available and health services a little less crowded. Hidden from the world in a cement hamper with bars and electrical wire and watchmen that delight in their extensions of power with guns and a ring of keys, they are there, off the streets, the eternal output. We need them there, this particular ecosystem needs almost two million exiles packed in dim warehouses. Out of cars, out of jobs, out of schools. Their bodies are property of the state, their tattooed bodies are used in the name of legislation and morals and their bodies are used by politicians and their bodies are used by corporations to feed the hungry closets of consumers like me. They are the skins that no one wants, but also, they are what some recognize as a necessity. In the ecosystem of America, in this land founded on ideals of freedom and dead Indians and stolen land, they are the cargo, the dirty laundry, out of circulation. Their void is quickly filled and only a number remains. And while their girlfriends cry and their mothers pray and their children turn hard and angry, they roll in the waves of necessity. They perform the duties of those without tongues and those without hope. And as they roll, tattooed tears form at their ears and spider webs grow across their arms and men in business suits champion safe neighborhoods and stock markets continue to rise and men continue to sit in cages, their shirts a little more dirty each day.