Surreality or friends coming in and out, changing clothes, celebrating chaos through doubt
February 16-29 / Nightmares & Morning Pages
2/16: Oh the mess in me is alive today! We do difficult, beautiful things every day! Are you thinking about the difficulty or the beauty today? I will kiss my night as tenderly as I woke to my morning, slow and w/ reverie. If my life line is cracked where I think it is, then I must get moving. I read my scars as lines too, under Saturn on the left and the sun on the right.
I’m a little more free today for no good reason - two cups of coffee, eager for life to get more difficult and more beautiful. February comes w/ cruelty and light. I read a sci-fi story* sent to me over DMs by someone who could be a friend - we’ve shared words and words only - I am honored to keep reading, to be somewhere safe for words to land. The writer of The Starship Ariel has undergone something just today, something difficult and beautiful, perhaps it is her freedom I feel, her freedom watering mine from her world of rain and pulsars
*You can find The Starship Ariel in this publication: https://www.atthisarts.com/product/rosalinds-siblings/
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2/17: My past selves are for sale** priced by sentiment and the number of holes I left. I am early for style and late for everything that matters.
**Depop link for context: https://www.depop.com/g_liketheletter/
FOR SALE: tiger stripe, black and white, too tight. The red dress I thought I needed to be loved, all wrinkled. The floral dress I took to Paris to match October and never wore again - too femme. The black maxi dress I sweat in at weddings and funerals and beach days. The pale skirt set, tight w/ all the ties, from when I was trying to be Vex Ashley. The black denim zip dress that never sat quite right. They gray linen pants I wore all summer, cleaning and driving and running.
I am selling clothes I would still love if I made room for them, that would live and last if I wasn’t feeling overrun - secondhand turning into third, going out the way they came in. The cycle is important. This leather jacket, the first I bought when I got my job at the consignment shop years ago, since replaced for one w/ fringe. The black & white shirtdress I wear whenever it’s too hot to wear anything else, priced higher for dear love. Nothing camis I bought at work when it was too hot and sweaters I bought when it was too cold. Dresses bought and worn at weddings, photo shoot pieces thrifted and thrown into the rotation, little things my mom bought for herself and gave to me, a few things for who she thought I would be. A red lace teddy that I paid too much for in my early twenties - all my money used to go to lingerie. I look back at my style over the years and forget about the tight jeans and olive green, but I remember what lingerie set I was wearing for Christmas and my birthday and on vacations. Now it’s all thrown together if worn at all.
I am selling Big Bud Press pants from a mystery sample sale - mint surprise, fit perfect, maybe I’ll due them if they don’t sell. White jeans thrifted & hand-painted by a local Portland artist I love, Two Fern, unreal but too big at the waist. Beautiful lace trim silk blouse, unreal but too big in the shoulders. An AllSaints dress I thrifted that doesn’t make any sense at all but that I still like. Strong organic orange cotton pants that I’ll keep wearing though they’re a little loose. The cropped sweatshirt I wore throughout the big Q until I hated the crop of it. The wool Harley jacket I’ve had since my mom passed it down to me but I never wore. The black and white Fashion Brand Company top that fit too wide. The pinstripe blazer my partner didn’t grow into. The purple vintage sweater his brother forgot all about.
My past is polyester, blacks, reds, tight & mesh. What I like has not changed much, I’ve only gotten more particular. The trends bringing reproductions in and washing them back out again. Always in my closet: black and white and red and gray, brown in leather or leopard, nice soft fleece and platform lift. I like velvet but am picky about shape. I like silk but am picky on pattern. I dress like my mom in her 30’s and my dad as a teenager, Nana Angie on her best days and my friends, my friends, my friends. Black turtlenecks all year round, a closet never divided between seasons.
I look for patchwork and thin tees w/ horizontal stripes. On bad days, I look for sweatshirts and sweatpants w/ shape. I like a wide leg and half tuck and layers. I used to dress for sex but now it’s w/ me always & I don’t think about it anymore (this body of mine something else, now). In doubt I reach for collared button ups & something w/ movement. Jackets of leather, jackets of denim, jackets of faux fur. If there’s a poof or ruffle I won’t feel right wearing it. A good collar is important. I have been thrifting vests for a while and I am not afraid to use them. I think blue jeans are weird, liking only the light light or dark dark. I hardly cuff my pants anymore and yes, I choose my socks w/ thoughts of color and print. Many of my clothes have holes, have stains, have evidence of life lived reckless - what, you don’t wear your clothes? Don’t tell me you live so preciously.
There has always been androgyny in my style but I’m still trying to hone it, my body giving me away. I have learned to make decisions deliberately, have learned to answer the question of my body every morning, to reckon w/ the world this way. Stepping right in. Identity, much like love, much like life, is a choice until it isn’t a choice.
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2/18: It’s that unreal time of year. The body can only be cold for so long, the heart can only be so stoic in its sadness. On my best days, I am half here, addicted to whatever the opposite of presence is - I’m drifting away before defining it. Well maybe that’s not entirely true, but an opening, an opening. My brain tires of Player 1, my body wants a whack at it. My body doesn’t know what time it is and wants a chance to fly.
I wrote about clothes yesterday because I couldn’t get past the costume department, curtains hanging heavy over the self. Double espresso, disappointed in myself, dressed w/ cool humility. I’m on the outside of something so often, watching and hungry.
I step into the space around me and use my body to feel it out. How could I think I could go undetected? Here, in rooms w/ everybody else. February’s parties, toothy and confined. Yes, I am in the rooms w/ everybody else. I am water in the room, filling empty space, sloshing around or freezing (sensitive to temperature, yes I am sensitive to how the room feels). It helps to have someone to love nearby, where rivers meet, flush and pulse, push and shove and settle together over beds of dirt, beds of mud (all the earth, all earth after all). February’s parties full of heavy rain, each of us falling the ways we do, lost and in love, before we hit the ground.
Parties form grooves in the Earth, saying, Love was here in all her forms! You should’ve seen it, you could’ve been there w/ us! Parties for passion as well as patience. For conversation like wellspring - up and over and ecstatic / I am better after grass and a bite to eat, better in fleece and denim, better w/ the rivers I’ve run w/ before and the world, the world in every stranger leading back out to sea (the center spiraling out from the currents, making dirt mud down there at the bottom, mud containing fire).
29# Strafford APTS is a song for smoky dinner parties and rivers dancing out to sea. It plays here, now. Our neighbor is our landlord. Our landlord is redoing his bathroom, has been tearing it up all month. Here, now: a big truck moving in, blocking driveway w/ wood and insulation, highlighter yellow and construction orange. They’re beginning to build after demo, onto something better.
Fear and I have been trying to get ahead of each other again, faster faster each time. I grow tired on the leg of the cycle, tired and impatient, who wins out? Which road is more virtuous? Angel or Devil sharing the pen and taking turns twisting my overgrown hair into braids w/ split ends - picking, picking, weakening, weakening, drying unevenly and cracking like the clay mud I am made of.
Something must be wrong somewhere if I am dreaming how I’ve been dreaming. Wrong or shifting. I am the only thing I can do anything about. I’ve been uncomfortable and unwilling to be alone the last week or so (so recently it was all I wanted, couldn’t soak it up enough). When I am stagnant, my brain chews me out, letting me down, proving to be nothing at all.
What if possibility is too large and uncaring? What if life is too short? What if who I am will be the death of me and who you are will be the death of you? What if I’m thinking about this all the time? (I think I’ve tricked everyone, dressed harlequin in leather, like I’m allowed to be here, mud on my hands and face, gnawing on the meat of life). I spend a lot of time afraid and doing it anyway. It’s time to start loving it instead.
I would like a funny kind of year if only I can look back w/ a heart full after change. I would like to see what I am ready for. I would like help given lovingly and the ability to give help lovingly. I would like to see more of the world’s beauty and more proof of commonality, community. I would like us all to be beyond war, to be helping build instead. I would like to sing and create and collect. I want a good, long, loving moment of life to carry me back to center. I would like to harness it all it all in art. I want my car to run long. I want my cats to live long. I want my love to cradle anyone who’s ever felt it always. I want whim and whimsy to come easy, want sustainability, want self-sustainability. I want who I am to encourage others to be who they are. I want the sun to outlive me and the Earth to stay green. I want to make and make and make
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2/19: Everyone in the world, it seems, is writing about the splintering reality - disassociation, solar flares, flickering connection. We know there is war when we are shown celebrities competing and celebrating each other. We know there is poverty and hunger when the luxury apartments and hotels go up. We know there is war w/ each holiday because w/ each holiday a distraction. We see the blood and rubble, the story as it deepens. We know there is fear in every plea for acknowledgement and support - See me! See me! I see you, see you! I am writing myself down, half here and half somewhere else.
In the rooms w/ the low light where friends gather, we talk about how this could save our world, possibly, possibility - this talking honest, this talking about it all, the mess of us all. Disagreements as honest difference and difference sacred, we know; this has always been how humans dealt w/ the world being so big, so much bigger than us. Now there are articles about saving Rafah and Sudan and Syria and Ukraine, the kids and the lovers and generations, news about the presidential election in the US, articles about all art amounting to a dollar value, about TV starting up again post writers’ strike, about a loneliness epidemic and depression epidemic and anxiety epidemic, our world all unreal. And yes, still COVID-19 and climate disaster and extinctions getting larger, new wonders & new discoveries getting smaller.
We know the connective tissue has grown thicker than ever, it has gotten harder and harder to move the muscles. Does it help that we are all sick together or is a sick world simply harder to heal? Will we become one body working together or will it be a case of competing pain? Pain puts it all into perspective - either we pay attention or we play pretend - but I’ve written about this before.
I am thinking fondly of my own family and their twisted humor this morning. All of us holding our pain w/ the smallest bit of pride, testing our patience w/ it. My mother always hid her pain diligently, from me especially. Something she felt became something she would keep feeling. Something only she could deal w/. Her pain tolerance higher than anyone I’ve known. As a kid who had a lot of headaches, I hold onto pain like that too - stubborn, sometimes secret. Growing up, to complain of physical pain encouraged remarks from my step-father or cousins that went something like this: Want me to break your arm? Then you won’t notice the headache. Our humor has fight to it, a bite to it. No real threats to be found, only evidence of how they had hard when they needed soft - like an embrace turning WWE, like comfortably uncomfortable in pain, knowing pain was common, consistent, that it happens all the time, something inflicted.
True for us all: watching pain changes you, seeing someone in pain changes us all. I remember a baby tooth being loose. I remember it wiggling and irritated in my mouth when pain was still a precious thing. An older cousin gave me a hard shove from the back and the tooth broke free for good, flying over the wooden counter and behind the couch. No pain anymore, nothing to play w/. Now there’s only what we do after pain. In that instance, it involved pulling out the couch and searching for the small milk tooth among tufts of dust, something to put under a pillow that night.
But what about pain the size of today, worldwide? What will ‘after’ look like? I resist letting my affection turn to a kind of violence and I won’t judge how others move through pain. I am stubborn in mine, making no sudden movements, my reality shaky at best. This is all for now. In the way a stone softens in the sea, I will let pain soften me. One day soon edges made smooth - I will roll w/ the world and wind up somewhere new.
I turned my day around, apologizing and stealing time. A surprise day off is different than a typical day off. A record plays, the dishwasher runs, I free bleed, wearing cotton wearing fleece. My friend coming to stay for a week and kindness, kindness is extended when I am honest. Honest, my seams are ripping, I am coming loose, raw skin red and pink in the winter. I trust poetry to be there for me. I trust art. I trust companionship and family. I trust the people that feel like home to me. Forgive me, the pain is right here, let’s dance around it and play charades, we can dig slower now that the ground is frozen and we aren’t expected to plant anything until spring. Simply, we prepare the Earth for the possibility of new life.
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2/20: Incomplete Essay, free to read for now
Incomplete Essay: Dreamin' California
“A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his image…” Joan Didion, The White Album It’s well into February and I haven’t read a Didion book yet. In 2020, I read
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2/21: Some solace in time today, in the ceaseless flow of it. If my friend A is right and time is a flat circle, I am living a future where I am OK even if I feel unreal right now. A is staying w/ us for the week. I don’t think I’ll be getting much sleep but I’ll have companionship. She came up to escape and work on her record, sleeping in the G room and singing in the closets, smoking in the garage listening back to the takes, coming to Maine to release her demons and grow, coming to my house to make her art. I’m humbled to offer our space to her, space and resources and support. It will come together the way it needs to.
Both A and I went to poetry last night in the cold. I didn’t read anything. Instead, I sat at the counter and got a new viewpoint on the night, smoked a cig for the first time in a while. I held the words of friends and strangers w/ unwavering hands. Poetry will always be a place for me. Grateful, grateful.
We got back to the house all dark, took up space on the couches and talked too long, in the depths w/ no excess digging - to be so close w/ someone that the conversation requires no explanations, just experience and emotion, lessons sometimes, common ground often.
Is this what trust feels like? Like letting go and craving tobacco? Places and situations I have met before, do I seem different to you or are lessons still unlearned? Freewheelin’ on foot and in cars driven by strangers w/ nothing to say, my phone charging in the wall, over the ear headphones to replace ear muffs, green cowboy boots, 3 mandarins in my bag. Would I know if I lost my way? Would I know if I found it? I try to laugh when the world is funny, even when frustrating, even when unpredictable, even when dizzying.
No piece is finished until I’ve read it in multiple formats, on multiple screens, w/ multiple perspectives, not finished until I’ve read it out loud a few times, not until I’ve gone in and edited it over and over after it’s been published for 12 hours. My essay is “finished” now, still incomplete. Whenever I publish work to the Hologram, I become fiendish for love for the next hour. Black cat in the yard chasing something until I get distracted or tired again - infusing the digital space w/ the breathing thing of life. The rest of the Internet trained me, chemically, to be like this back when I gave a shit about it. Whenever I share my words it feels like a risk, threat inherent in vulnerability, threat in obscurity and subjectivity. By publishing my words at all, I am breaking rules I made for myself and hoping for the best, creating new habits. I am letting the words come first, that is what helps the most.
My proclivity to be an artist is only outmatched by my proclivity to be a lover. My instincts stuck in fight. Anyone who has ever needed art needed love first.
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2/22: I don’t know what I want until I have it. I can’t parse through my intuition before something goes wrong, can only say, hey, yeah after something already has. My thoughts are here on my face whether I like it or not. Being early, being late, am I a stubborn rider and am I trusting, trusting? I listen to an old favorite over and over w/ breakfast, while A sleeps and the cats feed and the coffee goes cold. I’ve got to drive my car to the mechanic sooner rather than later.
I think of all I insist on doing myself and how asking for help becomes just another thing I have to do. Inhale this dying world, rotting oranges still smell sweet. I don’t know what peace smells like.
I tended bar while The Sweet East played big screen and the gallery filled up. Vivid, violent, serendipitous. Who else is dreaming of disappearing? Lillian becomes Annabelle, becomes Lolita, becomes Lillian Lead Role, becomes captive and runner again and again. America and all her bullet holes, no true escape. Identity and expectations can be a kind of violence, better to move wise & fluid, better to have a way to get free, to run, run w/ and run w/out, but yes, to run. Our beliefs make us predictable in our humanity, in our limited time. Our desires lock us in tight when we try to satisfy them. We learn to run when the music changes, to run when the Truth expands beyond us beyond imagination, to run when the guns come out. Everyone always wants you for something. Anything goes! Anything goes!
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2/23: Showtime: I’m going insane anyway, having more fun believing the world has something to show me, believing it, believing it. My spirituality is at the party now, the moon winks back. I believe in love or I believe I’m seeing it more now - it is all I used to think it was and more, feeling it feeling it & knowing when I’m not feeling it. Now I am learning how to give and how to receive - the attention and care inherent. A sings kiss me deliberate, deliberately.
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2/26: Out & away, I have been out & away. I have been insular & so close. I have been in company & at home. I have been blistering like winter and melting like the end of February. I have been in my body tired but alive, moving wide open eyes, moving teeth like smile and sorrow, moving left right left. It’s not morning anymore but I am late to my day dressed in hard sun. It is Monday, I can’t believe it - weekend off work and at home. End of month, I can’t believe it - alive in it.
My friend A is still here, sleeping upstairs. D was here for a couple days too. It’s been a busy weekend and yes, I am overtired and panicking about money. I don’t want to write about fear this morning though there is so much of it. This morning when the first piece of the world I see is man on fire, man on fire, life burnt out in protest and guns pointed at the human wick - last words: Free Palestine. I watch this in sorrow as I watch everything else in sorrow, half awake and aching. I don’t want to write of future this morning, or failure or honor or blame. I don’t want, this morning, to ask for help or forgiveness (though I will, I will, I do, I do). I don’t want to be strong on 4 hours of sleep w/ bills to pay and locked out of myself. Instead, I will rewind to the final cough of February - this weekend w/ open eyes and tight shoulders ~
I’ve been worn out and sleepy this weekend, my friends all moving in and out, dirt spreading around, all our cups and forks dirtied and cleaned to be dirtied again. I know home when it is quiet like this morning is and full of music like it was this weekend. My friends are familial / my lover is working hard / home is so many things at once.
Saturday, our house was early easy alarm clock. We dressed in layers and locked the doors to the winter whipping. T and C left at 5am, A & D & I left a couple hours later - heading North to walk on water. A had never gone ice fishing before. The New England towns grew smaller on the ride up, more churches and evergreens, summer town all frozen over. We had gas station breakfast, hats and gloves and scarves, snow pants and good company, 10 holes in the ice. This landscape crystalized in my youth. We sat in camping chairs w/ our backs to the wind and our knees close to the fire, ice melting slow slow underneath, holes drilled 3 feet deep. When I laugh w/ my boys on the ice, I laugh at every age, sending it to the sky - all my years, all my love. The day mirrored wide open under the sky. We are united in the cold. It’s American Pie and camping chairs in so many chapters of my life.
We left footprints on the lake, took home 4 Perch, felt the wind on all sides of us w/ nowhere to hide. A got cold quick but the truck was unlocked. We camped there w/ the heat on while the boys packed up the gear, sliding big plastic sled from ice to land up and out. Home in the late afternoon, we settled in once again, making messes and getting comfortable. Saturday, spent like teenagers w/ time to kill and games to play while the sun teetered at her peak before plunging into night once more.
To skin a fish, I learned, you find the spine and saw along it on both sides, cut under the fin and around the guts. My friends and I hungry and learning together. Fear is a thing that lives in the gut. We talk of love and cut around the heartbreak. We talk of belief when we feel most out of control. We talk of the past when we have carried it into the present and find it again. We talk of hope, feeling hopeless. We do our best, suffer anyways, love anyways, like animals - our world big and indifferent, our aliveness yet undeniable.
Saturday, we were awake all day and all night - Sunday slipped in w/out us noticing. When it was morning, my love and I woke up close, shielding the sun from our eyes and rolled in the same direction. Before long, bacon in the oven, coffee mixed w/ milk, a kind of hallelujah for a moment. I woke w/ overwhelm - my hands found dirty dishes and my tone was tight. I felt overprotective and overrun, racing for time. I wake up like this sometimes, w/ my eyes widening at the messes from the night before or the week before. I move quickly before caffeine, I try to find order where I can, control where I can, when I am still too new to my day to temper my impulses of reclamation and there are too many things out of place, my home feeling like someone else’s. I noticed this new behavior during the big Q, getting all worked up out of nowhere, an energy I had to learn to burn off slow. I set the rule to always eat w/ coffee and to breathe deep into my chest when there are messes to clean. I make my hands busy in the overwhelm. I learn to take anger out of it and to talk more softly, one thing at a time.
T and I had to drive after breakfast, a couple states away for my cousins’ baby shower. D left after bacon. We left after clean up. A had the place to herself for a few hours. My family is growing and always there. I am here w/out words and loved w/out fear. We hug tight tight, love you love you, so good to see you. Balloon arch, baby bingo, wildflowers. We wrote advice for baby: BE BRAVE WHEN you get a cut. I HOPE YOU SEE the stars every night. THE BEST THINGS IN LIFE are made w/ love / are spent w/ family / are free free free. We took home pizza and pastries in plastic. T resisting sleep on the highway, I kept him awake rubbing shoulders and fingers and palms.
Home was kind and warm when dusk rolled in, A and I never left the living room after dinner. T went to sleep early but A and I were up all night. Our conversation dancing round and round our wounds and sitting close. I lit the three small candles I brought home from the shower and watched them melt down to wick over hours in insulating darkness. We talked of love, of course, and of lessons, of selfhood and motherhood and habits, desire, pain, exhaustion, frustration and shit, are we ever going to get to bed? We practiced asking each other the questions our interrogative brains only ever asked ourselves & tried to answer honestly, all the things honesty can be. The world turned in time w/ us. Glass after glass of water and gifts exchanged. I dropped my grandmother’s ring into the couch. A helped me lift and tilt it while I got underneath and dug out my gold. We looked at life in its beautiful temporality and wondered what was worth fighting for.
All night, all night, the cats hunting down a mouse - cornering it under bureaus too short and messy mud room, listening for movement, restless & determined like us. They almost had it a couple of times, that illusory tormented thing in our home. Night became morning w/ no conclusion. No mouse tail between teeth, no outlasting answers for any of us. I called it at 5:30 before T would need to be up for work, sleeping in close and quiet, my body stealing a few hours to shut down somewhere soft and familiar. I fell asleep w/ a small tear of relief.
This morning is this afternoon and I am taking pity on myself. Awake now w/ midday sun and anxious w/ future coming at me from all sides. Candles melted down, dishes to put away, the cats and A catching up on sleep. I am no different than I was in all the ways that matter - fearful and powerful and uncertain, w/ a house clean and phone calls to make, SPACE later tonight, something called love that I can look towards.
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2/27: Spring is in the shadow of the sun today, sending butterfly kisses from far away. I miss her like long distance lover; how everything will be so different by the time she returns. My nail beds red and raw, gnawed by life w/ out her. More blood in the dirt and ashes, ashes. Absurdity makes another revolution around our world, hasty this time. Who will love this world when the spring comes? There are roses red on my kitchen table, edges bitten black. I am wearing brown again. The sun charges me today so I will outlast the rain tomorrow, rain and responsibilities of tomorrow. I will try to enjoy the demands I make of my life - as it is now, as it has become.
Last night, I worked the Noun show at SPACE, having seen Screaming Females (a band w/ the same front woman) w/ Lazlo there before he died, cracking open PBR bottle after PBR bottle, thinking of my friend again.
If I went outside naked today, I would know again the truth of 33*F, toes going cold first, then nose, then nipples. This kind of sun, bright as April, May, June - deceptive. The Soul is back in our driveway waiting to take me to the start of my work week. My stomach is processing breakfast & my head preparing best it can. The crash will come and I will hold it myself. I will hold myself. I will give myself gifts of water and grace when I can’t afford anything else. I have gotten even more used to apologizing this month, I have I’m sorry sticking out of my pocket at all times. Thinking of worth is sending me into darkness but humility has taught me forgiveness in all its colors. Sky bright white. Trees dead and brown. Soul alien green like the earth soon will be. There are new sprouts of pussy willows outside right in front of me.
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2/29: Holy, the long day full of breath and buzzing! I felt the last day of February the whole way through - it is a leap year, today doesn’t count. But yesterday, yesterday counted double. I was up early and overtired, the rain washing my weekend away. The wind kicking up trees and trash, thrashing like small anger in small child. I was wearing my Patti Smith shirt, sticking my hair up and yanking it back down, flatter from one minute to the next. Last year, some of my best days my hair went flat and strange - I am freest when I forget myself and can just be. I am still finding myself here, I am trying to like it, trying to find myself irresistible in the most visceral sense - like moving hips and pit sweat.
I spent the last month doubting myself, the last week doubting God, the weekend doubting my path - it’s crooked corners and winding roads, I am the Fool evermore. Me and all my friends went outside with no money and came back w/ less; this is how the future becomes real. We came home and felt our bodies in a new way, prioritizing comfort, reminded of our lives in our bodies more and more everyday. T has had the same job since college. A and D burnt out and resigned, applying to anything and everything. And G, me, spreading myself all over the city w/ day job and cleaning gig and cleaning gig and freelance freedance freefall words collected through a sieve, my nights dedicated to art films and isolated performances and all the artists in my city - I wrap wristbands and serve beer, make simple cocktails and take out the trash but I also experience art in real time in the way I’ve always needed to. When I’m not working all over, I am w/ the poets.
The Workshop Podcast, Pt. III (Listen here)
The Workshop III, a podcast
Last night, last night I was w/ the poets. I took some time and wrote a poem for my city and spent a few minutes w/ work I’ve been distant from, work I wrote when I first moved to Portland and was still playing pretend w/ fiction. My mom wants a novel! But I am w/ poetry now, am w/ poetry still! I sat w/ the rain and I wrote, went to work, felt good about…
AFTER THE WORKSHOP We took half the poets w/ us, through pink lace curtains and the shimmering disco ball lined in dried flowers. The bar was full but not as tight as usual. To the off season, we thank you. YouTube projected on the painted wall above us all, karaoke on request, we got a list goin’. Achilles sang Crooked Teeth and Eli sang Norah Jones, the Rat sang Lover Boy and Benjamine sang Bowie’s Fame. God, we were singing, we were screaming, we were dancing w/ your angels, God, we were spinning in the tight corners between the bar and the tables, between antique glasses and bowls of lost earrings, God - if we stop dancing, Earth is done for.
I stressed through my favorite songs trying to choose, not fully trusting my voice, running off of joy instead. I have a hard time choosing crowd pleasers and a karaoke bar is usually fueled by them, but the Jewel Box was good company, we could lean into ourselves here. That’s the whole point after all. On some level, karaoke songs are either sad, sexy, or sweet, expected or strange or skippable. What did my body want to sing? I chose Billy Joel’s Vienna and regretted it quickly, remembering it’s a slow start and it started to feel outdated. But it felt right in the first note - I know this song, know how it feels. I have surrendered completely to this song. I know how to sing it.
The last time I did karaoke was in New York, drunk on a red velvet night outside of Chelsea. We hopped from a blues bar, where everything touched was caressed, to a narrow bar w/ purple lights and TVs - can’t remember what I sang. I have been nervous to try again despite loving to sing. My voice is becoming integral to who I am, it’s only right I give myself time to sing. I sang Vienna to myself before I sang it to anyone else, my hands fidgety still. I sang it to strangers who sang along to my surprise. I sang it to my friends screaming in the corner, the first time they’ve heard me sing, their eyes widened, their hands reaching out, a bar all summoning the City of Dreams.
Nights like last night make life worth living - a little showbiz in the dirty city, a little desperation in our art, a community that sends its spores all over this wet wet world. I cried three times yesterday, real quick and w/ surprise, tears w/ a barking laugh to the sky - how lucky how unreal how lucky how surreal, to be at the center center of my spiraling city in a heartbroken world!
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