A Smoke Break Away From Bliss
A Smoke Break Away From Bliss
September 2 - September 11 / Nightmares & Morning Pages
9/2: Eternity grips me between thumb & forefinger like the joint we passed back and back around the porch yesterday. I am gripped careless and examined slowly. I am in the tall grass w/ my friends in the sun and then I am in the church all red, smells like weed in here. I love to be a little nothing in my city. The enormity of being nothing, expansive and leaking into everything.
Sometimes, in my freedom, I go silent. My friends don’t care, not my lover, not my coworkers. I dress in red and keep my mouth useful, saying, Hello and Hell yeah. I can keep my spirits high, flamboyant and soaring like I’ve been trained to. I can keep myself quiet and hollow, only hollow, only happy to fill up. I can leave early and elusive, silent hand in silent pocket, fiddling for keys or a smoke.
September, handed off to a trickster, holographic & giggling. On a Sunday, my friends and I became the right hand of the world, reaching out and touching, in transition, relearning trust. We smoke and we sit and it is simple. We giggle when we have nothing to say. Alok, tonight, saying, All my highest self does is giggle. It’s part of the bit, of the pun, but I think it’s beautiful.
I sit on the red red carpet w/ my red red book and red red drink in my red red jumpsuit. I listen to the poet tell jokes w/ our body. I think of yesterday among carnival lights and the swarms. I think of giggling more than speaking, raptured w/ the sounds of my life. Friends’ laughter in the fun house mirror of Now. Friends’ screams as the ancient roller coaster does what it has always done, rise and fall and fuck w/ our ideas of control.
Last night, the carnival twinkled under the clanking of metal and my friends sat on the ferris wheel w/ their feet up. Tonight, the poet became the comedian, said, Look at me! Born for my life exactly! I’ll put myself down here, in Portland, I’ll lay right where Christ did and we can laugh and laugh about it together. The comedian spoke of fellow trans comedians vs ‘dudebro’ comedians, said, We’re funnier than them! We hate ourselves more than they do! The poet said, My most committed relationship has been to my self-hatred.
The human asks, Is this my disgust or theirs? The philosopher says, Love is a synonym for possibility and I love the parts of you that still hate you. I sit centered in red down the red red aisle, right there on the floor, when a tear drips onto my cowboy boots. A packed room, from the pews to the menagerie, 500 tickets sold for a Monday night show. Alok draws crowds of belonging. We all giggle w/ our highest selves. We sit here held in love like a hammock, like a web, like fingers interlocked underneath you.
I wonder about the new week, the new moon, the rains. August ends gushing. In September, my mouth is dry. From now on, I drink until I’m satiated and I leave the party while it is still fun. I say, let the moon and the stars twinkle all they want as the ferris wheel turns. We are deceptively unalone at the top of the world, this world that drops off outside of the condos and motels, carnival rides against velvet night and draining beaches.
I get to look back at the world as it turns me around. I wonder about alone again. Both my smile and my fears come from the space between my parents, shared and unfinished. The moon at the end of every dock, winking across every beach like my lover winks at me when the lights are red and words have fallen away. Like worship, thoughtful worship. W/ my limitless freedom, I walk in my city holding my own hands, keeping my hands in my pockets, my lips still and red from the taunting September wind.
✺
9/3: The sun peers on mirrored lenses inside the Mexican bar. I lean my head on the shoulder of Time and I peer down at her overactive design. I am dizzy w/ my lover as the world endlessly changes. The ways I stay the same: Not enough sleep. Extra pickled onions all summer, crisp and pink. Whipped by the same vines overgrown in our yard, vindicated w/ the blood rush. Soon, emerald. Soon, burgundy.
The year deepens while the soil gets heavier, settling, new roads to repair by this time next year, slab of concrete by slab of concrete. Until then, I am winding overgrown in my city, catching snags on the brick and dropping myself in the street. What parts of yourself have you dropped in the street and kept on walking?
I stay out between dayjob and poetry and I wind up facing the sun while I walk up Free St. Feeling funny if funny means free. Feeling free if free means wide. Wide open and knowing nothing. I won’t claim surrender yet but I will choose lucky & alive. We are lucky to meet who we meet in one lifetime. It can’t be everyone. It must be the most electric absurdity, who we meet and how we find each other. I am less like bubblegum these days, or less like concrete or less like the cellular system. I’m more like a river going in the same direction, flowing quickly around familiar rocks and washing them smoother than silk.
✺
9/4: To be wearing red in September after a restless summer. To say some things out loud. To be trying to be weightless, to be active in waiting. My tongue in my mouth now, pink and swollen in the centerfold of my day where crumbs and dirt collect in the binding. I love to be a thoughtless nothing in my city on a Tuesday that tickles like the weekend.
In the last week, I wiped the mirror clean. I told my lover, I’m more likable in smaller doses, like the sheets and the stage and in the summer when the sun lets me love you how I always hope to. I told him I would spent more time in my room across the hall, but since we made the bed, I’ve just been crawling in next to him. He is half awake in his body while mine gets settled in after bouncing brick to brick. I’ve been running w/ the poets in my city, rubbing head and tail, nuzzling into reality. A crooked and winking moon. The girls were screaming again and I smiled wide imaging snow on the ground, a flower from the past promising a perennial Now. The artists all high on possibility.
Possibility, we said unto the night! Possibility w/ all our goodbyes, w/ our hands full of paper, w/ everyone’s glasses and cups piling up together. It was the Doctor’s last night at poetry for a while. She moves next week to Arizona. Last night, she sat on the velvet couch and teared up as elegantly as Grace Kelly, the kindest heart listening to the world like it’s all music after all.
Harry wrote her a poem that started w/ lines from the Joan Baez song I couldn’t let go of only a couple moons ago. Walt came through. He cut out of work real quick to send the Doctor off and to read his piece about going Missing - a life w/ a lover and a parrot named Lupe in a rusted van on some American sand, American dirt, American concrete. I imagined the Doctor watching the saguaros bloom and writing about it, some cold day in the winter, across the dry miles. A stranger showed up and broke a curse right there in the red room. All of us, witnesses to the burning thing. The power of words. Achilles sat backwards and watched the show through his mirrored lenses. Then he got up w/ Punky and performed a dialogue, read over one microphone and a shared clipboard of pink acetate. They did it, goddamnit! I said from my place in the back.
Along the brick wall I sat next to the Wizard and Grimm, a table of paper between us looking at the indulgent stage and possibility pried wide - safe, shameless and made golden. The Wizard is finally all moved in, walking distance from the red room, center of the web. The pilot has poetic caveats w/ his poems, a protector of the word riding the high winds w/ good posture and playful authority. He said, If you want to hear my Workshop piece, you’ll have to come to the Workshop & he smacked his soul on the counter as a generous tip. Beer Money is off traveling before the weather closes the doors so MC was our host. All of her gold, all of her light - reaching above her head to adjust the microphone and dancing w/ Red all over the map. The ball keeps rolling, edgeless, gaining momentum. We offer up tequila and cake and wine to the playful angels, the ones all too curious in where we’re headed. The merry poets let loose to pollinate whatever grows up through concrete and around chrome.
I am a smoke break away from bliss. We all go to the bar w/ the maps like reversing time and revisiting ourselves. I sit down and talk shop w/ the boys w/ long hair and lean close while the girls cast their spells. Art isn’t created here but it is conjured, believed in, energized after a long time, things waiting to be made and somewhere muddy for them to land.
Walt brought me a slice of carrot cake and I carried it around all night thinking of GH. I turned the end of the spoon around to everyone I knew, offering a bite or two. Who leaned in and who politely declined, the shy and the bold like shuffling cards. All the while, I am rolling along w/ spice and frosting under the September night mirrored in mica, glittering below our tramping, stomping feet sending ripples out to the angels listening. I am held softly here. Oh, Portland, you’re blushing!
✺
9/5: I turn soft, rolling in my little hole in the ground. Morning is on my forehead and I wear nothing tight, nothing heavy, nothing tight, nothing heavy. I let the music confuse and induce me from sleep to drivers’ seat. Thursday, the softest day of the week.
What to do w/ all my little eternities? To color, to light, to the doorways w/ my heart and free will, truthfully only loose hinges and careful hope. I don’t want to sit pretending between decisions again - pretending lonely, pretending impossible, pretending to be a floating thing only to have roots below the water, pretending destructive like, I’ll be the bullet if no one else will. Pretending I could be held still, held steady, held definitive.
The metaphor collapses quickly, landing soft in the same grass as the seasons change. The purple bellflower creeps. New threads of silk are catching light between heart and home, walk through them in dreams.
(& in dreams, the field is open and we are making things w/ our hands before we are hunted and running, scrambling up the green at impossible angles, trying to save ourselves for ourselves).
✺
9/6: Inch by inch, we stretch into the soil. Growing above. Growing below. I wake up this morning w/ art-laced dreams. Pure night meets sparkling day, solid under a September sun when the heat waves level out to a workable breeze. I reach out only to those who need me and in that need, love becomes solid like it does.
Get your hands on something damp and delicate, a thing of possibility, circular in and of itself, rolled up and left on counters, on doorsteps. We are small so we work w/ what we have. Safe in the red as it flowers and the brown as it is overturned. Safe in our brick city where we are camouflaged as one of its own. In time, in time the leaves will die and change and look more like us. In time, in time, we will learn ultimate love creates itself incrementally. Issue by issue, a living thing changes. A living thing can’t help but grow.
I am thinking of paper paper paper, documents and decrees as we have always had. How these artifacts are like stones, dropped into the world whole & unmoving unless chipped away. Solid. Symbols. I find where I have always been so hesitant, questioning. I am a lifer of poetry unfinished, a meaning maker wrestling w/ decisions, a different kind of art. I am learning. Thank you Earth. Thank you lovers. Thank you Portland. The space, the help, the people. I go instead searching for color, for movement, for texture, for time, for temperature. Through me, words become new little nothings, as physical and fluid as I am.
Show, don’t tell echoes. I’ve done enough telling, not enough living. I only have interest in creating art that lives w/ me, alongside the world and its spinning. Tireless spinning. Art can w/stand it all but the body cannot, we know this. I work backwards. I do the slow thing and the risky thing. I work consistently only as long as I have my belief in possibility.
The sun sleeps in behind the clouds. I sit outside w/ the dirt letting her rest while I work. I think of rainbows and playing cards, of a life that jumps off the page and my body, my body letting go at the farthest Future and returning to the dirt, the soil, w/ forgiveness and adventure. I think of the funeral scene in Big Fish where the body floats and is swallowed, where the circus arrives and all the stories become true. One salty tear to moisten the soil today, Friday, to prepare for what’s to come in time unpredictable and all at once.
My feet in the soil w/ yours alive and wiggling filthy. I present the root system of our city, for now small and fragile but one day as wide as the split Red Oak on Brighten. It starts by accident or by ambition, but it starts. It can be fed. It can become its own beast, its own angel, its own ecosystem. The salt of sweat, the innocence of tears, the metal tang of blood, it all goes into the dirt. It finds the center, the center, the molten moving shared soul. It turns our stomachs. We turn ourselves out onto the sidewalks, onto the streets, onto the sands. This is how we find each other, how we have always found each other.
✺
9/7: I go out dressed as a mystery. After dayjob, I take my hair down. My lover and I find neon, find mussels, find romance where we left it. Our lives overlapping and washing out. I am blue and clear as a glass of water on a Saturday of mixed energies. Art on the streets. Sinking like home in communal leather seats. They play Plantasia at the bar, I hear it from the cobalt bathroom. I parked right in front of the bar w/ all the maps while the bulbs blinked in their sconces and visitors stumbled from the basement, leaning on each other and asking the city, What’s the name of this place anyway? I leaned on the Soul to smoke, dressed up as myself. There is a chill now, larger waves now, closer to the freeze than the thaw.
I sent out some messages and told my friends to come find me. A mixed energy night w/ invitations sent, ink on my hands. I stare now at the cobalt paint in the bathroom, the one w/ the infernal wail and the romantic scrawl: Let’s think about tomorrow when the sun comes up. The humidity drags my hair straighter and swampy, overgrown like a willow. I text Walt wondering if he’s working tonight. I lean in to the endlessness.
The Wizard finds me hip cocked next to nobody at the counter, a bubble around me, protected from the social swarm. The Wizard pops it all clumsily and I am less alone. We sit in the blinking corner and slouch while threads unravel. We see the steps down to dreams and we take the next one slowly. J finds us there, wearing black & our matching cowboy boots. We find a table outside w/ a friend of hers from work we’ll call Courage. He says, Portland is strange - her smallness, her homeless, her raised fists all white like sand and blue like the sea, no billboards but guns in pockets and expensive restaurants. Watch, Wharf St. stumbles over herself.
We find ourselves on the sloping bench like rocks in the current. A drink dropped, splashed J. Uncool. Courage tells us about the Midwest, saying, I don’t understand the alpha insistence out here. J says Hi K, to the lady who sells the bouquets of flowers at midnight while the nymphs all dance. She smiles back w/ her arms full, blooms held tall and sprouting above her head. The Wizard gleans the history of clowns. I drop my thumb ring on the wiggly streets and give in, talking about the Dirt.
On the picnic table, we yap while Wharf St. spits up on itself. The drunk, the inspired, the desperate. Twenty-somethings traveling in packs. Visitors’ first time on the cobblestones wearing the wrong shoes. The two arguing in the corner - a bike, a blanket, a blankness, a back and forth, a love, a hate, a messy misdirected intervention in a world w/ no absolutes. An angel on a smoke break gets in between the two, offering sense. When K comes back around, our drinks are empty and her arms are nearly, only a couple bouquets left. The bee, in spray-paint, always smiling. Cold out when we leave.
✺
9/8: This weekend, I imagine myself an oyster in a trusted sea, slimy and purple like the caverns of one. T and I drive into the sea. Or we drive North a bit where the land breaks around Casco Bay. Sand all in the soil, lobster claws left by the shore. Friends getting married.
T & C’s parents are both here to help, their father on sound and their mother in the kitchen. C is a groomsman. T wears a bolo tie and my mirrored vest. I wear a sweater over my dress most of the night w/ cowboy boots underneath. T and I were in our own world, not knowing many people but feeling brave. Too electric, too honest, delirious like tension breaking. We watch as uncles fire a canon from the beach. It is comically underwhelming, like wilting masculinity. I’m telling old stories that still amount to where we are. There is one vape and it is passed all around the Kelp Shed. Hallelujah like trousers cuffed and dress shoes off in the sand. Husband and wife in perfect sync w/ friends, w/ family, w/ the hog that’s been roasting since 9AM. We saw the smoke when we pulled up.
The tide was at its highest during the I Do’s, the sea rushing right up under sure feet. A lot of hands to help this wedding go. An endlessness to this island, an expansiveness, the moon smirking w/ some missing teeth and me, turning over the Joker card again. T caught the energy and zipped around. We kept bumping into each other, looking and not looking, revealing pearls or choking on sand, splashing water like a tease on Head Beach. We were sat at Table 11. Each of the table numbers was carved from wood by the bride’s uncle and passed down from wedding to wedding. We helped carry the tables outside to clear the dance floor. T set the table down in the sand nearly undisturbed.
The bride’s father brought clams to steam while American Pie played, the last song of the night. I thought of my grandfather, my great-grandfather, their fryers full of clams and dishrags over their shoulders. T’s pot filled with sea water and butter outside on the sand while the clams steamed. Everyone yanked and dipped and swallowed while cleaning up, all hands on deck, seeing every star in the sky. On the van that the bride and groom took across the country, beer cans hung on ribbons, Just Married in script on the driver’s door. We heard the clang of aluminum over rocks in our bumpy ride to the after party, a campsite just up the road.
The bushes grew low and the sky opened its wings wider, wider as the sun tried her best to stay awake for the party. Brushes soaked w/ watercolor. Wide, angelic rays of sun as her eyes closed on the road, glorious orange against indigo. T and I were on the porch watching the sky and no one was looking for us. We had no idea where our phones were. Morning crested after the after party. We were awake for it, walking to the adjacent beach while it was still dark, a winding trail through low beach cabbage and wooden crosses in the night. Headlamps on and off and red and off, guided mostly by stars. Mars stood bright and alert. T set a camera up in the sand and took photos of the stars, a small group of us running out in the night.
Our incredibly bright nothingness and how fast those purple clouds washed over. My city blinking red light after red light at an uncanny distance from the shore. She holds on tightly, smothers it in the clouds, tricks you of stars. But I see them now. I see them as the beach turns red, turns black, as T and I make our way back, our campsite away from all the others where the wind comes through the open tent window while we sleep.
Tonight, languages deepen and develop. Lovers speak to each other only how lovers speak. Tomorrow, squawking Blue Jay. Tomorrow, hard sun and soft insides. Tonight, a breeze washing over us as if we were only ocean.
✺
9/11: I sit romancing my inconsistency into something greater than me. It’s lunch or it’s dinner. I’m tired or I’m just getting started. Fine on the cusp of Autumn, taking up space on a corner in my city. I’m wondering if there’s anything I love more than an open door. That’s it, isn’t it? The feeling I’ve been after? Nose to the dirt in my city w/ a cowboy click-clack waiting for my hair to raise.
At once, the moon is in a bed of soft purples and then it is quickly, blinkingly obsidian. She is a diamond or a lighthouse or a star, all that I’ve looked at these past few days when I haven’t been writing. I hit my anniversary and slumped, slumped like this wing of the city, where I sit now leaning backwards & looking up. Everything tilts towards One City Center on this side. It looms behind me now. Something like the center. Something like the moon captured and her mirror. Again, obsidian. I choose obsidian because GH chooses obsidian, writes it in so many poems - a bejeweled word for the most abyssal black. See obsidian always in corners, never in the booming light of day, never how the sun starts to look past this city.
We had friends going so we gave the bands some money and showed up w/ the city. I ran into an old friend, the kind of friend w/ gnarled roots and fumbled loved, the messes left of youth. You know, how behavior changes at the end of something. It was a quick run in and we were back in the energy of the beginning when it was simple and unserious, happy for the now we get to be. A witnessed infinity. Then GH and I split into the crowd of why we came - MC and Red in the middle somewhere. The music was worse than I remembered, their hits familiar from a time dark green and in the woods, an evergreen youth all anxious all of a sudden, or not so sudden - the electric anticipation of this body.
In the mirror image of my memory, I was every version of me at once, every timeline emanating. I get to choose something so close to where I am. Talking about it feels like a jinx but I will write about it. Over the water, GH and I talked about it, about choice and longevity, about how love has changed us and how the world has shown us: honesty is rewarded. I tell him I want to write the story of his life, of his dreams coming true, how he has to stay the course for the plot. I tell him, Hey, we need a safe word for when you realize you’re in a cult and need someone to call. But everything is fair play in our conversations. Undecided, we wander Thompson’s Point while the music plays. The crowd shows up as the day dies.
The crowd allowed movement and the lights from the stage bounced off the mirrored polish of MC’s nails. She said, Show me the chrome! & it’s decided, GH’s safeword acquired. We danced and no one asked for an encore. A mass exodus into the city, getting lost but never not knowing where we were. We met MC and Red for pizza until I was falling asleep in the booth and said goodbye to GH for another month. At home, all quiet. The cats hunting a mouse and it escaping under the door to the basement. Undressed and up the stairs, I slipped into bed next to T. In a dream, I kissed his forehead and fell into today.
Today, where I feel unhelpful and appropriately underdressed, staying out past dark in the city while T is away for work. Our unique middle ground. Our home so close to the highway. My lover and I always in the car together. I tell GH, Some of T and I’s best times have been in the car. Some of our worst too, but some of our best. GH gets the metaphor exactly. Today, that sacred rest stop that Wednesday can be.
I pay attention to appreciate where I’m at. I think of the ashtray I bought J a while back, the one that says, tend to the garden you can touch. I touch ink and newsprint. I touch lover’s cheek and arm and waist. I touch vintage fabrics and they catch on dead skin, little burns on my fingertips that prompt me to ask myself, What am I not paying attention to? One thing at a time, I remind myself, Abundantly. I catalogue what belongs to me and what I am simply a part of.
Over pizza, Red asks me, What about you, G? Are you in? Are you staying in Portland a while? W/out thinking, I say, Oh yeah, I’m rooting in for a bit. MC, begrudgingly, sparklingly, staying too. Promises made under the pink glow where Lazlo and I still sit in some blushed memory looking at lifelines. Love gives us faith beyond consistency. Inconsistency gifts us reasons to celebrate.
This entry is a part of my Nightmares & Morning Pages series, where I write every day and share the good stuff. Subscribe to keep up with me & share what you like (please).
My messages & chat are open for inspired journal prompts or anyone who wants to pick apart the world with me. Catch you on the next go around 𖦹
G
Love this one