Waves

when she stopped making art,

she became angry,

anxious, irritable, resentful.

she would watch him draw horned beasts,

using only red and black pen on a white canvas.

she would watch him outside a window

swirling acrylics on metal surfaces.

she would browse through her old drawings,

or find a stray red pencil in a drawer.

what had once moved through her?

and where did it go?

early on, when she had felt the first wave  

she got derailed

trapped by her own need for affection

for acceptance, for love.

she abandoned everything to move in with a stranger

she left for the ocean.

every warning was ridiculed,

she surrounded her thoughts with an iron fence.

her body was burdened,

her lungs were tight and closed,

and the thing that once moved through her

became so small as to be invisible.

she thought about it for years.

sometimes she attempted a small drawing,

but she had lost trust in her own hands.

she judged the lines before they were complete,

saw herself as another would see her,

as another might see her.

later she fled,

or was cast aside.

she escaped the narrow path

of needles and crime,

lies and delusion,

denial and fear.

she salvaged what lay just inside the dumpster

and left the rest

to become a vague memory.

and she found herself in a room,

staring out a window.

how long had it been since she drew?

he said to her:
'if you want to make art, make art.'

and she stared at him

with tears in her eyes.

she thought she had to wait

for something to happen,

for a burst,

for an explosion,

for shapes to break open the gates

and explode onto the page.

she watched him standing in the sun

just outside the window.

he never noticed her there,

just a few feet away.

the canvas was on the ground on a blue tarp.

he let the colors mingle,

then would occasionally move

one side of the canvas or another.

After a while

she went back to her room.

Multitude

I was touched

when they passed.

I would never be the same.

It kept on coming

the sweet and gentle

the light ethereal touch

that I would be able to examine

so many years later

on the little pieces of paper

that would emerge from names and numbers

from the invisible that would be

given names and futures

specific locations and shapes

and all the true horrors

of fate and love and loneliness

and a past only partly remembered.

It was a multitude of eyes

that would make love to me

a choir that would tell me stories

of the sky and the gods

and their affections,

of mountain roads so rare

we would never

be able to find them.

They offered me

a complex world of perfection

and reconfigurations

at once true

and never possible.

I stood on a large rock

and I could still see them in the distance.

I let myself cry

Hoping to make myself remember.

I could feel fingers on my chest

on my belly

on my legs

on my crotch

on my forehead.

Fingers that weren’t there

fingers that could never have been

and never would be.

I could feel eyes

long gone and faded into nothing.

I could feel

the invisible circular tenderness

that rarely held on

to the thin

grasp of friends

and books and things

that were never truly present.

I stared at them

and I watched them

slide away into the

passing night

separating into parallel formations

into hands and music,

into tenderness

that became more and more distant

more and more dream-like

more and more a myth

to be forgotten

and discarded as a lie.

I was touched as they passed

I would never be the same.

Anything Goes

My grandfather used to have a building where he would do weird shit.
The sign above the storefront claimed that they made and sold shoes; this was back when shoes were made with leather and thread and skilled hands. There were generations of knowledge flowing through each decisive movement of those worn and callused fingers. I spent my early years watching them move, a rough ballet that smelled of grease and men and cigarettes. 
Later, as a young man, I tried to capture those hands in drawings and photographs, never quite able to capture the dimly lit afternoons where the light would filter in lazily off the sidewalk surfaces, or the silence that pervaded the space, the reverence they had for what they created.
Those dusty old men working behind the counter were my family, the worktables littered with scraps of pungent leather and metal tools became the fodder of my dreams. The shoe polish-stained fingertips and aprons, rough wrinkled faces that kept their eyes on their work, their tongues relaxed and silent.
My grandfather would give us new boots or dress shoes as birthday presents and he would teach us how to care for them with polish and bristles and tender attention so that they could shine like new.
So I know that sign outside the building was not a lie. They did make shoes in that old place with the brick façade and black wooden door.
But I know they were doing other weird shit in there too. Someone was.

There was a basement in the building.  I was not supposed to go down there, that was always clear. No one ever warned me, not grandfather or any of the other men there, nothing was ever said. It was more of an open understanding. I was not to venture beyond that door.
Although I knew this, I was a curious child, and the forbidden lair had a pull I could not deny. I had learned to blend into the dark shadows of the building, to step in time with the thumping needle of the sewing machine and the sporadic coughs of the men at their benches. I could open the door to the basement silently, and descend down the narrow dark steps into the dark chamber.
There was one tiny window at the top of the wall which faced the street at sidewalk level. Whenever someone would walk by the light inside would dance erratically on the brick walls. I listened intently for the sound of my grandfather’s footsteps.
I went down there only a handful of times in my whole childhood. The memories and sensations from those explorations have sunk to the deepest part of me and colored my vision.
In this forbidden space I once found a tooth.  Another time a red cloth napkin with gold jagged symbols, another time I discovered a small shell and a ball of hair in a little crevasse in the wall where the cement had broken apart between the bricks.

Whatever was happening there, it was not safe. In a dream one time just a few years ago I saw him emerge from the door at the top of the stairs with a bloody mouth. He looked at me. I was sitting in a chair just beside the door. He said, 'anything goes,' as he walked past me, holding up one single finger.
I woke with my hands fluttering, I gazed out the window, remembering the lingering smell of candles and matches on the brick walls. His silence, his deference to a room he never referred to, to a past never revealed but for one word, 'Nantucket.'

Tonight I will go back into the dream and tell him, 'you don't have to hide from me. I cannot be rattled.'

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.

Crossroads

One time I was one of them. One of their kind. That was long ago, back when I used to practice shooting rag dolls out of the trees with Crispy.
We ran barefoot through the neighborhoods, me and the three sisters, following the strange music, our soles burning till they callused. Crispy was the youngest. Maybe that was why I liked to play with her so, because I was slipping away, watching childhood descend into the abyss beyond my reach. Shooting rag dolls with Crispy, I held on as long as I could.

But around then, that’s when I started biting boys. First Curtis, technically, though only very lightly. Because of this I’ve never known whether he changed, and maybe he didn’t because I never saw him again. He lived in the desert, but he came to play at our green lake.
The oldest of the three sisters, Angel, she liked him too, but could only express it through utter disdain which made it easy for me. I held his hand and we talked about eternity and something I would later learn that others called the eternal return, but at that time I’d never heard anyone else talk about it.
Curtis and I thought we were the only humans to ever think of it, and since we had both thought of it, it proved we were soul mates and that we had returned many times to this lifetime, repeating it every time we finished it, like re-watching a favorite movie over and over.
Considering this, the bite must have worked, but I never saw him again.

Then I started high school and met Xavier. He was beautiful and I bit him over and over,  never explaining anything- even though I was starting to understand it myself.
But with him I never talked too much about eternity. To him I preached a life of pleasure which was quite contrary to the blanket of misery he was wrapped in. So all the more I bit him and preached but he never showed a strong sign of enjoyment.
By my second year I knew what I was, that I was not like others. I was ready to embrace this, my true nature, whatever it was.

So I left high school and met Rex. Now Rex was a gunsmith and he cleaned my old six guns for me so I resumed my old habit of shooting rag dolls out of trees. But the three sisters were not so much a part of my life bv then and anyway Crispy had grown up, so I sent Xavier up into the tree to hold the dolls and made him flinch with the rabid barking of my guns.
Rex and I left the lake and Xavier behind and went into the snowy mountains.

Of course I bit Rex. With him I talked about the old Gods and we looked up the ancient rites and brought a tree stump into our living room for an altar and stole toilet paper and spoons from the local diners.
We got ourselves a little gray familiar but Rex was jealous of my relationship with the cat and he and I fought heatedly and frequently. But the familiar little feline followed us to the diners leaving adorable paw prints in the snow around the shadowy edges of buildings and pounced on us all night so that we never slept.
Then the apocalypse came and we went back to the sunny lake to eat my parents' rations.

I met Xavier at the S.S. Burger Basket one night and he was very bitter that I had left him. He spent the whole time talking about how awful Rex was so I made him stand on the table and shot burgers and gyros off of his head until he was shaking.

Rex and I fought more than ever. He was constantly afraid I was going to leave him behind, outgrow him. He also wanted to bite other women. For some reason or other we got married. 
Then I met some of my own kind out by the old Mission and told Rex I wanted a divorce. He said no and I shot him with a Russian SKS he had fitted with a special grip. Then for good measure I chopped his head off with the bayonet and buried it at a crossroads.

I moved in to the old Mission with my new found brethren imagining I would spend the rest of eternity with them. It was a very exciting time.
We ran an occult bookstore across the street from the Mission and lured people into “workshops” where we could dim the lights and bite them. We had very strict policies. Anyone we bit either came to live with us at the Mission or we killed them after they had attended a certain number of workshops.
Due to these policies, I never mentioned Xavier, or Curtis.

The leader of our group was called Calliope. He dressed like a clown,  led most of the workshops, and insisted that we should misunderstand his message. He had a childhood friend called Kaptin that lived up North  and occasionally came for our black Sabbaths.
One night Kaptin stole in through a mission window, put a black hood over my head and abducted me. He carried me off to his dilapidated castle overlooking the bay. I was incredibly flattered.
He chained me up and bit me each day. His wife, Delicious, was furious, as was Calliope.
Delicious joined Calliope at the Mission and together they launched an offensive and laid siege to the castle.
On the fifth day Kaptin and I came out of the castle together, guns blazing. I shot out Calliope’s eyes. His group carried him home and took his blindness to be a sign of greater wisdom. Delicious fled to the caves to hire a lawyer.
Kaptin and I formed a band and bit people here and there. Some joined us at the castle. We were very discreet.

The three sisters invited me to visit for the holidays. On one of these occasions I saw Xavier and took aim. I felt responsible for his abominable existence. But I couldn’t pull the trigger so I sent him a fruit basket and a card with a hand written apology.
The following year he responded by carrier pigeon., informing me that he would accept my apology if I attended a Christmas Party with him. At the party he carved the roast duck and showed me a wedding ring encrusted with emeralds and diamonds.
He had purchased it for a mail order bride in June. But after she arrived,  Svetlana stole his car with him in it and drove to the City of Lights. She hooked up with a muscular skinhead by the slot machines.  Xavier served as the flower girl at their wedding.

It was a very pathetic story, but he told it without crying so I was impressed and showed him how to use my guns. I got up on the table and danced while he shot at my feet.
Afterwards he told me that if we had ever married we would have worn flowers in our hair. Then he swallowed the ring and shot himself in the heart, ruining a nice leather sofa.
The hostess was terribly dismayed and asked me to leave the party. I cried, mostly because I would miss the white elephant gift exchange.
Tearfully I lugged Xavier’s cadaver to the crossroads and removed his head. The later I saved so I could use his skull as a drinking cup.
Thus ended my lineage, unless it’s true that Curtis is out there somewhere, biting his way through the world. I’ll never know.

Shortly after this episode I began to feel disassociated from reality. I had frequent fantasies about being an ordinary woman who did ordinary things with other ordinary people. I imagined that I would forget about eternity, bury my guns, and become a dental hygienist who sold Amway on the side and raced in triathlons on the weekends.
It wasn’t hard to imagine. After all, one time I was one of them, wasn‘t I? One of their kind, back before the biting and the shooting got out of hand.
I imagined that I would see a therapist that resembled Crispy and would work out my Daddy issues on a  burgundy sofa instead of by tormenting defenseless young men with instruments of violence. I would be a member of a homeowner's association, I would join a gym, I would buy wrapping paper from neighborhood children.

But I never  really was one of their kind. I was a latent whatever I am. A dark caterpillar waiting to turn into a black butterfly.
It took me some time to come to this realization. It was Delicious’ tortured screams that lured me back to reality.
One day I awoke again and found myself in the crumbling tower that overlooked the bay. Hearing the screams I shook off the torpor I had been bound in and crept into the bowels of the castle where Kaptin was playfully removing Delicious’ fingernails one by one.
“You’re back!” Kaptin greeted me joyfully. “Now you can help me to bite Delicious.”
It was only then that I noticed that the person chained to the dungeon wall was in fact not Delicious. Certainly they shared certain physical traits and even their names were similar, but this was someone new.
I tossed my hair and smiled merrily,
“Certainly. I never did mind the little things.”