Hunger

We were the seventh group.

Our goals were open and limitless,

Our bodies made of red clay,

red blood, blue lightning.

Our souls without tether.

We had prepared for the voyage

through strict discipline

as instructed.

We had taken the ritual baths

in the mountain temple

for 5 days in a row.

We had been covered in dust

and blankets

and beaten with leather.

Once rising, finally free of dust

and forgetfulness,

they told us we would climb

like a winged bird

towards the sky,

our minds would open

into endless unimaginable landscapes

without the shrouded mist

of our homeland,

without the desolate frozen lakes

of our dying land.

Our newly formed blood

would adapt to the synthetic nutrients,

to the dark brown soil

of the astral ship we were now forming.

For those left behind

we would become part of

the golden rays of sunlight,

a piece of the distant sky.

But certain elements

in the network engineering

began to change our nature.

My companions

hungered for old blood

and I felt waves of a hunger too

even if I couldn’t name it.

We found within ourselves

a desire far greater

than our preconceived nutritional needs.

Somewhere over the horizon

we became creatures of darkness

shadow killers of souls,

and we turned the ship around

and placed within it

the seed of a new message.

We would find a way

To merge

Our desire for flesh

And our wish for the stars.

The Battle

The battle for her, for the thousands of infinitesimal parts which combined to make her, was in full swing.  For several weeks she could feel it building, the pressurized energy mounting, doubling on itself in the course of thirty-six hours. The pulsing of her chest was like a metronome with spastic batteries.
She could not remember another time like this, if there had been one it was so long in the past as to make it non-existent. She knew now that she was oscillating between hell and clarity, and hell had a much stronger pull. It was the black hole, sucking her inwards with a relentless drive. Her mind, her limbs, the heart, her smile, her jaw and teeth, every part of her ached. 
Her heart was hard, lifted only momentarily by a soft touch or smile every now and then. Her mind, a constant deluge of thoughts and anxieties, leading her always downwards, further away from the people she almost stopped recognizing.
In the bursts of clarity, she could feel the movement of every muscle. She focused on every step across her kitchen, grabbing a glass of water in her hand, bringing it to her lips with careful slowness. In those moments she remembered what was nearly always in the background, disguised and disfigured by the daily rhythms of work and obligations. Through the fog she could move beautifully through a space, her attention moving both forwards and backwards.
But mostly she tumbled. Out into the black space where not a hand could reach her. Straight-jacketed in her own misery, she watched the passing world though a car window, the flashes of color and shapes, billboards, couples, conversations. As she saw it fade she was barely conscious of her own desperation, just the tears, the sting of heartache that descended quickly, firmly, coating her in its shell, a thick organic membrane that even those who loved her dared not get close, for her misery was transmittable and they knew to stay away, keeping up lively debates as she fell, further and deeper beside them.
She wondered if this was madness, if it was the natural state of her body.  Was she in the deepest hole or were there blacker lands still to find?
Could she climb? Did she want to? She was frightened most by that thought, the simple thought- did she want to make the effort to climb, to push herself upwards? What if she wanted to sink, what then?

White Wisps Of Smoke

I watched him making the concoction there that night. While the world outside was in darkness and most slept in their beds preparing for the work day ahead, we sat in the yellow light of the studio. 
We called it the studio, supposedly it was a space to make art and create things that existed in our souls, but he just cooked and shot up and got high and imagined he was an artist.
I had stopped drawing years before- right when school began and thoughts and words and self doubt clogged my mind and amputated my hands. I could no longer hold a pen and let the lines come. He was an artist when he wasn’t using or trying to find a vein or scheming and manipulating to get another bag, another hit, to end the sickness- but addiction was a full time job and art came in rare moments- mostly a thing of the past now, a memory he held onto, an image he projected of himself on himself. 
I hoped too for a day my artist would return- the thick chested, tattooed man who had drawn me erotic mermaids. All I saw in front of me in that yellow lit room was a man much too skinny for his frame.  A man with pale green and black bruises over his arms and legs and a paranoid glaze obscuring his bright blue eyes. 
He had taken to wearing the dark blue suit I had bought him years ago for his first court date- only now he looked like an emaciated teenager in his father’s clothes, playing dress up in the middle of the night when the rest of the world outside slept in their beds. 
I sat with him now in the yellow lit studio. With clear and focused attention he mixed a small amount of white powdered cocaine with baking soda and water in a metal spoon. He lit the spoon from below, the same way he cooked his sticky tar heroin. He let it all melt together and bubble around the edges and in a few moments the watery mixture evaporated, leaving a few hard little white ‘rocks.’  He picked them up tenderly and placed them in a four inch narrow glass vial. On one end of the vial was a piece of steel wool which created a filter.  He tilted his head back a little and lit the filter/rock end and sucked on the tube like a straw. 
I watched as thick whips of white smoke traveled up the vial and towards his mouth.  He inhaled for as long as he possibly could, filled his chest with all that smoke and then held it inside even longer. He closed his eyes and then leaned in towards me. I opened my mouth and he breathed into me, giving me all those white wisps.
“Hold it in” he said. 
I looked at him and waited until my body screamed for air, but then I couldn’t even hear it. The room was ringing. 

I wanted more. 

I took a shower and called for him to bring me a ‘hit’ in the shower. I sat on the ground, hot water pouring over my stomach and legs.  He came in and pushed the shower curtain aside.  I opened my mouth and he lit the filtered end. Inhaling, inhaling, inhaling, holding, holding, holding, release and riiiinnnnnnggggggggggg. 
I could feel each droplet tapping my skin.  Slapping my breasts and pink nipples, my hips and arms. 

I wanted more.

Then he miraculously fell asleep.  He never slept anymore but in those early morning hours I found myself alone in the yellow lit studio. I watched him for a moment on the bed which we hardly shared, awash with the neon glow of our television (which he needed like soothing lullabies).
The small plastic baggie of cocaine was half full and on the coffee table. I had not paid attention to the exact amounts he had used to cook- so I added a little of this and that. I tried several different batches, adding various amounts of cocaine to baking soda ratios and smoked all of them.
Then the light started to creep through the edges of the thick drapes.  The baggie was empty and I started looked for crumbs that had scattered over the table and carpet. I picked up what I could find carefully and cooked it too. 
I went into the windowless bathroom sometime around six.  The face in the mirror startled me. It was dead and pale green and the eyes looked both shocked and dull at the same time. 
Was this me? 
“This is me,” I realized. 
I looked into those eyes- brown, absolutely lifeless. I stared and had no words for this woman.

And then I remembered him on the bed.  My addict.  My once-lover. My child, my burden, my chain. My dealer, my demise. What would he say?  What would he do when he discovered the empty baggie?  He had never hit me, had never ever come close, but that morning I wondered.  Would be kick my ass?
I sat on the couch, each minute pushing harder and harder on my shoulders. Every moment like another rock on my chest as the sun rose and I waited for his body to ache, for the pain of reality to shock him into wakefulness. Then he would open his eyes and remember himself and his life and his veins and the itch and the sickness and he would know that it was time for a fix. 
And when he did open those paranoid blue eyes he saw me on the couch, pale green and full of terror. 
“I cooked it all last night. All the coke is gone.” 
“All of it?” 
I nodded and he looked at me in disbelief.  He didn’t touch me, but made me drive to the bank and get $80.  Then he took the car and drove to the beach flats and looked for the short Latin guys on the corner.  I stayed at home but I could imagine it all.  It was a mechanical script and I knew all the players, each actor- what they said and how they moved and where they would be.  I had taken that drive a thousand times. I had done this play each day for years.
Only this morning, I had joined them. In those few dark hours alone in the yellow room, I had inhaled something of them and now I knew what it was like, that dark pulling, pulling, ringing and pulling. It had my ankles. Like that ridiculous foot deep riptide which had almost taken me into the surf fifteen years before, I knew the haunting power of those white wisps of smoke. I knew what it could do. I knew it was too strong and I told myself I would never touch it again.

That day I went to school.  When I came home I found what I expected.  He was in the yellow studio.  I could feel him mixing up a batch.  He didn’t come out to greet me and I stayed in the living room, but I could feel the bubbles on the outside of the spoon, could smell it through the door, could almost hear the riiinggg.
I knew it was back there and it was calling to me. Like thick thorny vines that had wrapped themselves around my arms and legs and heart, I could feel its pull. 
IT wanted me back there. IT was singing, so lovely. 
I stayed in bed, I kept the door closed. I opened my books and read through the soft thudding in the back of my chest, part of me wanted to answer.
By the next day the singing was lighter and then the day after it was gone. I never touched it again, but that was the day I teetered on the edge.  A few more puffs and I might buried myself in the WANT- in that dark hole I had lost him to. 
Just a few more puffs- I might have never emerged.

The Nature Of Pain

Pain demands remedy.  It demands attention, it creates an end.  Ends are found wandering down many paths. 

Little by little I felt like dying.  I drove home up the 15 degree incline that went on for seven miles from the ocean to the mountainous woods.
The late afternoon sun was bright and hit my shoulders, browning them slightly.  The heat came in through the window and he sat next to me, a 200 pound man with the potential for artistic expression and a capacity for miserable effort and run-ins with the law. 
As I began to reach the peak of the oak covered meadow before a curvy 2 mile long descent into wooded Felton, I felt overwhelmed. The man had a multitude of chemical addictions and twenty nine years of pain that needed to be dulled and a father that had just died.
The family would not wait to hold the funeral and as a result, the tattooed addict beside me would never, as my mother said, have closure.  She could see what was coming more than I could, that girl I was with firm round breasts and idealism that had somehow sucked her into a cave full of murky water.
My tattooed addict, sitting in the cushioned chair beside me had a history of minor crimes and outstanding warrants in a few states and credit debt that would haunt him until death.

Each one of his problems fell on my shoulders. I opened my arms to them and held them.
For a time I hoped that they would get better or change or that he would change or that his jail stays would alter him or that visiting the county hospital would at least provide him with methadone or some legal compound, but none of it changed.  He took the methadone and then went to the streets moment later.  Even after the doctors finally approved a physical therapist and a reason was identified for his unbearable back pain, he never stopped mixing and injecting, he never followed through on the recommended exercises. He was in a cave of his own.
He let me carry all his problems. I took him to the appointments and to the streets. I went to work and then handed over my cash to his open hands that were like magnets. I picked up his cigarettes and cringed every moment he stood at the doorway smoking, wasps of pungent odor coming right back towards me, covering my clothes and books with their stench so that one day I would have to throw them all away. 

His problems were my problems. And his problems where too big for me and I wanted it all to end.
I remember saying: “but I haven’t made my mark on the world yet.”  And he agreed.  And so there was no double suicide.
But every day he got worse and I felt the dark cloud grow bigger and thicker and so strong that I could not see light beyond it.  Every day his tolerance grew and he needed a little more black tar.  Every day he needed a little more money.  Every day he sunk deeper and I watched from the edge, teetering on the side, looking in and then beyond. 
I went to work, I went to school.  I brought him money and he took it to the beach flats and got small brown goo wrapped in pieces of plastic. After disappearing into the bathroom for hours and poking in every vein he remembered having he would emerge all sweaty and pink. 
For a precious moment he would be free of pain, he would forget about his dad and the mounting legal problems and his back and the mountain of darkness that hung over our heads. Then time would slip and we would remember and the rattle would begin once again.

Bound To The Moment

When he got locked up, he knew it was my fault.  He never failed to remind me, if he wanted some plastic toy from Kentucky Fried Chicken or a new shirt from the skate shop, he somehow twisted every particle in the air between us and then that inner itch began to tickle.  That subtle and yet overwhelming wave of guilt that worked its way in from the extremities until its firm grasp was tightening around my chest. 
I spent 6 years trying to make up for one sentence said to the wrong person. Six years trying to dig my way out of sorrow and regret with money. Shirts, shoes, cigarettes, cds, concert tickets, milk, orange soda, hot dogs, art supplies, a silk screen press, heroin, lots and lots of heroin.
I worked and he spent as he wanted and I knew it was all because of that one sentence blurted out at dawn in the police station. One damn sentence condemned him as a felon forever. A string of words put him in minimum security jail for two months.
When I first saw him in that bright orange cotton pajama uniform and had to pick up a telephone to talk to him through the glass in the visitation booth, I thought I would crumble. I ran around town meeting with lawyers and bail bondsmen, I looked for an apartment and picked classes for the upcoming term.  I went to his court dates wearing the purple paisley skirt he liked and every gemstone I owned for protection. I put the red garnet ring his mother had sent me on my left hand and walked into the courtroom, knowing I had put him there, knowing I needed to get him out.
I did what I could for him, depositing extra money into his ‘inmate account’ so he could buy extra food. I went back to my job and saved money for his bail, I accepted the collect phone calls and then worked like hell to pay them off. 
When he was sentenced to two months I went to visit him faithfully every Sunday. He had been placed at “the farm,” the low security building by the city dump. It was a one story facility without fences or barbed wire, there were cats and peacocks that roamed the grounds. There he was issued white linen pants and a thick jeans jacket. We were allowed contact on those visits and he had me smuggle in cigarettes under my jacket, which I always hated to do.
He got a job in the kitchen and I was impressed when he told me he made a mini mountain made of melon pieces and parsley. I thought that he found ways to make even the worst of circumstances beautiful.  He became the resident artist and drew pictures for the wives and girlfriends of other inmates.  On Valentine’s weekend he presented me with a drawing of a sleeping mermaid with her arms wrapped around a heart-shaped moon.
I would arrive early on Sundays and be one of the first people in line, which was the way I insured we would have the full visit time of two hours. We would kiss and I would wear a skirt and sometimes he would touch my clit and I would leave there sopping wet.
Six months after he got out our troubles really began.  The heroin became a necessity. I lived with the fear of death or jail. I wanted to save him, I wanted to be with him, the guy who drew and made me laugh, but I had not seen him in years. 
I kept trying to make up for my initial wrong, but it just never worked- he only got worse. He was out of jail, but I had never left that one moment, that damn sentence, those few little words.

The Studio

Isa sat on the old tan carpet, her back pressed against the worn and sagging double mattress. The bed took up nearly the entire studio, which was only about 200 square feet, smaller than some of the bedrooms she had lived in. There was one single wide window by the front door with a view of the grassy courtyard in front, which was green but still managed to exude an aura of abandonment with its yellow dandelions and overgrown patches.
Opposite the window was a small kitchenette just barely visible behind a wall of boxes. There were stacks and stacks of things in the crowded studio, a lifetime of stuff crammed between four walls. On top of the boxes were loose papers and dirty laundry, dust and dog hair, the smell of things left sitting too long. Below the thin glass window was a faded striped couch whose back was covered with an old gray blanket that looked coarse to the touch.
A narrow walkway had been created between all the boxes and trash bags filled with clothes, it wove around the bed and between the boxes and stacks of papers and cut back to the bathroom and kitchenette. The carpet, only visible because of the cleared path, was tan and covered in a thick layer of beige dog hair. The studio was one in a dozen of single-story Indian red cottages just off the intersection of Broadway and San Lorenzo, which ran parallel to the river. The cottages were easily accessible by a single flight of stairs (just ten steps) that led from the intersection down to Barson St, which marked the beginning of the beach flats, a neighborhood of immigrants, small-time prostitutes, street dealers and a handful of students.
Isa sat on the ground, her back pressed against the mattress and dirty box spring. Ray sat in front of her on the couch, his knees shaking, his jaw clenching over and over like he was chewing gum, his entire body a picture of anxiety. Mick was supposed to be back any minute with the score. Until the moment he came back, opening the door with a squeak, Ray would sit there uncomfortably, his eyes darting nervously without seeing anything.
Debbie was laying on the bed sipping on a large glass of water, the golden retriever curled up by her feet.
“When did you say he left Deb?” Ray asked.
“He left about thirty minutes ago, but you know how slow he walks, nothin’ he can really do to go faster- those legs-”
“Yeah-” Ray answered nervously.
Isa pictured Mick walking, a thin man with thinner twisted legs and a colostomy bag hanging by his hip. He looked like an old Bob Dylan, if Bob Dylan had been hit by a car and then left in a hole for ten years. His face was sunken and pock-marked and pale, his dirty curly hair was just a few inches long but looked withered and burnt. Debbie was over forty, had thick limbs and a torso covered in fat. She was in her pajamas sprawled out on the faded blue sheets, looking slightly less anxious than Ray, but she was waiting too, anxious to shoot up.
“He left like- thirty minutes ago Deb?”
“Yeah.”
“Man, I’d have given him a ride if I knew it was gonna be this long. I’m phenin,’ you know?”
“I know. We’re all hurtin’”
Isa was quiet sitting on the old tan carpet, her back pressed against the worn and sagging double mattress. She looked at Ray, her beautiful boyfriend who had turned into something she just couldn’t bare to admit, not now. Now she just wanted the drugs. Wanted him to find a vein, get some dope for tomorrow and then they could go home. Maybe he’d eat her out when he felt better, maybe they’d watch a movie, lay in bed. Then she could pretend things were ok.

Closing The Door

The house was always bathed in a yellowish hue, but this 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, they were the ones that gave the house its distinctive yellow shade.
The two inhabitants looked like a couple. One acted like a pretty girl with school books and thin tank tops. The other one seemed like a skinny guy wearing an oversized suit. That is what they were but they were also something else.
She tried to conceal it in the corners of her heart, in the caves where secrets hid and rested, where they spinned their wool and catched blood-filled mosquitoes with eyes that had long ago been sewn shut. She tried to hide it all away, but blood always found its way out under the door.
The gray cloud above her head darkened her perspective. The steel ball shackled to her ankle ate away at her voice and jingled with each step that she took on the pavement. The pain was written on her face.
The disease dressed itself up in purple spots and lay quietly on his skin. The house smelled of vinegar and burnt tin foil and the books absorbed the smoke like the thick leaves of a jungle.
It was just a thin string that kept her from going insane, an invisible thread that tied her to the world she once thought of as unique, as solid and real. She could only escape from her secret knowledge when sleep overcame her and sent her off into lands unknown. Then she could forget about her present troubles.
But at the moment, she was wide awake.
She could not describe the nature of the impulse that pulled at her will like invisible strings raising a wooden puppet. She couldn’t speak about it clearly, but she knew that she 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, there was a brief full body orgasm that could instantly color her green and leave her wailing without tears, hungry with no need for food.
She smoked from the bumpy skin. She heard the bells of their choir and sat still while the earth spun and her stomach took a ride on the roller coaster that always ended twenty seconds later. Then she stood in line once again. She called for the conductor, she looked for the tubes and the white rocks and the dirty spoons. And again she took the ride.
And when it was over, when she was on her knees and drooling and looking for the foil, she took it again. The same rusty car, the same plastic seat, the same eternal loops that held her with hard plastic handcuffs.
Now there was concrete and tar and little else. She wished to move in the warm contours of soil and sand that now only lived in brief dreams of nearly forgotten chambers. She dreamed of woolen rugs and tapered yellow candles, crushed slivery leaves and stone bowls of water. But this was concrete, hard and unmoving. And there was no easy way to escape.
She followed her body into the yellow room and found the spoons and the powder and the carton of baking soda. She wanted to make rocks from powder and hear the choir and shake with the bells. She tried ‘til 4am until the small bag was empty and every ill-cooked rock had traveled in wisps of smoke into her lungs.
She called for more in the shower and spun as the water drenched her naked body. Later, she sat on the patio, surrounded by dying plants and a created world that made no sense anymore, under the night sky that felt more ugly and brown than she had ever seen it.
She sat and heard the bells. That’s when she decided to go out.

Now she stood at the corner, indecisive about the direction she should go in: south, north, east…Did they all lead to the same place?
The streets ahead were gray slate and drab and littered with old sandwich wrappers and discarded paper cups. The printed slogans drifted away on the wind, forgotten like the half eaten French fries. The gutters were a collage, a temporary museum to the unwitting Mexican artist that had unknowingly constructed it. The dark roads were long, each one of them marked by sign postings and shiny buildings that reached to the heavens in false praise.
Clouds dispersed in the wake of their unmoving weight. The clouds moved slowly. It seemed to her that they moved without care, without emotion. Their form merely shifted and scattered by the merciless force of the wind.
A sharp edge played with the tension in her back. It applied to her inner radio the mute song of a 90 degree angle. It talked in the only way it could.
She still gazed in the four directions. A bus bearing a hundred Asian immigrants passed by her, rustling her hair. Taxi cabs passed by as well, one after the other. They were only blurred colors and shapes. She saw them as unsentimental players in a hidden drama that was just a few steps beyond her. They came and went on command, the drivers, their cars, the lights. She wished she could swim with them, a sparkling fish in their school. But she felt distant from it all, she felt like she didn’t belong where she had once been and she didn’t belong where she was. She simply didn’t belong anywhere.
She reacted with a grimace when a tall woman in a nice dress passed by talking on a cell phone. She smiled at a short Mexican worker selling strawberries in the corner. Acting on pure impulse, she drifted like a kite caught in the clutches of a silent hurricane.
She knew that she was walking right to the edge between pure realization and final death. Then came an elongated honking horn, the stretched out music of a car in flight. It flew towards her, found itself caught up in the coils of her intensities, pulsing with the cold movement of her secret mechanical life.
You are here, she heard in the distance. The cries of bats and ocean waves crept in, the screech of old brakes and country songs curled together like strands of DNA. Distortion like nothing she had ever heard before. Teetering, she allowed the weight of the building to hold her.
A large metal door was half open. There was noise coming from inside. Inside was outside, and there was no safety anywhere, so she followed herself into the open doorway, squinting at the darkness that enveloped her.

A college-aged boy in a white T-shirt and jeans stood in front of a crowded room. His round Asian face looked towards the white pull-down screen in the center of the warehouse wall. An unused microphone rested in his left hand. The room was dim, the only light source came from the projection itself, which was a picture of the same boy, in another place, another time.
She leaned against the wall looking up, looking at him looking at himself. In his flat calm face, she could also see the contours of her own. She wanted to see it and it was there.
The boy in the photo was in a light filled greenhouse. His hard city mask had fallen and he beamed into the camera, holding a red ripe tomato in each hand. In the dark room the boy looked at a boy that was lost in the past. He could not recognize himself. The face that appeared to be his own was that of a stranger.
The boy in the room had been overtaken by death. He stared with eyes blinking. He looked, searching, searching for the self he now knew.
The projected photograph was a sudden flash…something used to be different. For a moment, maybe as quick as the snap of the shutter, he was different, he had been different. He smiled because of tomatoes. His fingers were dirty and his car was useless and all his friends and family were miles away. He was no one to the soil, no one to the trees. But he coaxed life from a seed. And life was given. Birth happened, and the tomatoes were proof.
The photo which he stared at now with strange curiosity, was a reminder of another life, one that faded the moment he left the greenhouse.
A tarot card drifted to the floor. She saw it but the boy didn’t see it, he didn’t feel its subtle wind. It lay face up. A skeleton in armor trampled everything underneath him with the strength of his horse. The flag of death waved in the red sky. A fallen king was lying next to his forgotten gold crown, two children wept at the feet of the white stallion.
The boy with the microphone did not see the fluttering death flag beside his own head. The boy could not recognize himself. But she recognized herself in his projected picture.
The stench of her physical death would take years, but this was just as foreign. It was like looking at her own corpse, the remains of what once was. She had been like the boy in the picture. She could still remember.
Her wide open eyes looked at the being that was left behind. The being had been forgotten, flowering just for a moment. Open and light-filled and caught forever. Caught for a moment that would always exist.
Death came uninvited.
Death came when she began to think, when she began to be “herself.”
Death happened.
A moment of sudden life had exploded out of the rotting experience of a machine, and that moment lived on in the photo. It lived in this dim room, lived in the one moment when she allowed herself to watch. It was the reminder that flowers can bloom in the mud, that a burst of lighting can cause a fire.
There were no words for her sudden realization. No words that could describe the bliss of creativity and birth. Nothing could explain the smile and the love of two tomatoes and the energy of a being spilling forth.
She recognized herself where the boy did not.

It was almost dawn when she looked in the mirror and 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 placed before her for the choosing, like doors leading in very different directions. There was some of each resulting character in her eyes.
The bumpy hands were tight around her ankles, the choir sang without rest. That is when she decided that this would not be her path. She would not surrender to the demons that tried to pull her down. She closed the door and sealed it shut.
She felt them call for many days. The invisible creatures kissed her ears and played in the corners of her mind. She buried herself in books, she buried herself in the open sunlight, she buried herself in a burrowed memory of a boy she would never meet. Working this way, she washed herself clean of the powder. And the call of the demons dimmed so much as to resemble silence. And the silence was just the sound of cars and of old friends who would forever forget to call.

Exceptions

We have confused
The exception
For the rule
And the rule
For the exception.
What we think
We rarely are
Is what we are usually.
What we think
We usually are
Is what we are but rarely.
To look into ourselves
Too deeply
Is to risk
The lethal cold touch of despair.
To never look
Is to be already
Drowning in it.
What we are is here,
In this moment.
Not the exception
But the rule.
Not a moment away
But a moment
Deep within it.

She looked up at me, from her sanctuary by my heart, and she once again said the words I had already heard so often:
“This is not me. This is not who I am. You have met me at a very particular moment, a very unique moment… so please don’t think that this is what I am because it’s not…”
I felt her soft body against me, her naked legs pressed against my own and her stomach pressed against my side, and her sweat mingled with mine and it formed tiny rivers that slid towards the white ocean of the rumpled sheets. I leaned over and kissed her smooth white forehead and she shook her head. I kissed her again as she started to speak.
“I really want you to know… I wouldn’t want you to think… I wouldn’t want you to imagine that… you know?… this is simply not me… you understand? This is not me. Maybe it was once before… but I have left that behind me…even if it has happened now… it’s just a fluke… it’s simple not me…”
I nodded and wondered if she was referring to the compulsive smoking by the garden door, which left behind a trail of cigarettes over the decomposing moist surface of the walls, or maybe she was referring to her constant calling, to her angry jealousy, to her bouts of drinking, to the night when I sat by her in a little bar on Judah while she drank one beer after another and I just watched her eyes slowly drooping and I heard her words getting more and more difficult to comprehend while the old drunks sitting at the bar eyed us with shameless curiosity. Or maybe she simply referred to being here in my arms, to her naked and willing presence where it shouldn’t be. This was certainly not me, and not by choice. And maybe it wasn’t her either, maybe she was right. And in that case, we were two non existent beings borrowing the bodies of others to meet in a non existent place, an imaginary realm of twilight where improbable things could happen.
“I used to act like this… you understand?… but it’s just not me… I have grown beyond all that… you see?… you have to know that this is not me… otherwise you will get the wrong impression… you will believe the wrong things… and you will be wrong about me… how can you truly know me if you are wrong about me? You have to know the real me… this is not it!”
Maybe it was the fact that she had stayed with me for so many nights, so many that now I couldn’t even remember when she hadn’t been here, so many that it now seemed natural to have her small naked white body next to mine each time I half awoke in the middle of the night, touching her big brown nipples with my fingers and feeling them getting hard in the darkness, so many that I no longer flinched when she was upset about a movie or a dinner or a phone conversation, so many that I no longer felt disbelief each time I felt her body from within, each time she groaned into my ear and told me she couldn’t hold it any longer. Or maybe it was all the journeys into strange nether worlds that we had taken together, all the reckless jumping into the vacuum without fear of repercussions or consequences, all the spiraling colors and the deep drones that came from nowhere and took us to a place where her worries disappeared and my rationalizations vanished and we were simply together, floating in the middle of nothingness.
“I don’t want you to get the impression that this is me… are you even listening to me?… this is important!… I don’t want you to remember me some day and think that you knew me… because this is what you know… this is all that you know… and this isn’t me…”
Maybe she was right. Maybe this was all an exception. And it seemed to me that I had been living through a maze of exceptions and this was only the latest one and soon another exception would come calling, taking me further away from the norm, so far away that I would not be able to place it on a map and all the maps I had just then were written over naked white skin covered in tiny invisible hairs and little brown birthmarks.
“I am listening… I understand… this is not you…this is not me… it’s very clear now…”
And it was clear then, in a way, as it is now clear, but in a different way, and maybe later, years from now, I would think about it, and remember her words and the sound of her voice against my ear, and it would be all new again, and once again, I would understand. It had all been an exception. And beyond a certain place, beyond a certain barrier, it was all made of exceptions. Exceptions, exceptions and more exceptions, nothiing but exceptions all the way down.

From A Hungry Ghost

Wanting another…
Just one more
And maybe one more after that…
Your lips glide across mine
Igniting fire within ancient caves,
finally, the strange paintings are visible
and they glow with the magic of secret things
that have been forgotten.
I cry when it ends
Even as your lips touch mine,
I am thinking about the next time,
and then,
the time after that.
When will it be?
When will there be more?
My hunger stops at nothing
I feast on chocolate and bread,
ripe fruits and thick cream
Still, my stomach growls
unsatisfied
The ghostly pit quietly begs
One more touch, feel my breast
One more kiss, taste my tongue
One more
Another, and perhaps I can rest...

But this machine full of trickery
takes the upper hand
Pulling me by my hair,
I crawl along the marble steps,
cleaning the floor with my desire
I consume the dirt,
grabbing handfuls of dark soil and sand
I lick the leaves
crunchy and crackling between white teeth,
they taste like winter in eternal fog
politely, the machine asks for more
without a smile, the machine asks for more
with anger, the machine screams for more
with tears, the machine begs for another
with hurt, the machine wails
sending rays of pain through the white walls that surround it,
into all matter that expands endlessly
in this vast Universe
in which it finds itself alone,
and now at last it lays
tired and drained,
devastated and consumed
frozen to stone and left to rot
and still
hungry…