Transformation of Waste!
Transformation of Waste!
October 8 - October 31 / Nightmares & Morning Pages / Cover photo art by Veronica Perez, ME
10/7: Dog-Ear, free to read for now
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10/8: The Wizards says, I will always taut that water, like shit, rolls downhill & you will always prove that, from warm soil things grow.
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10/9: Where the Wizard lives, there is a secret garden & stacks of books, stacks of papers, dead things worshiped on the top shelf. We stretch the days in the spider season saying shit like, I’m undoing an age-old knot, don’t worry if you don’t see me for a while. Untangling & getting free. The social moon shines w/ half of herself. Ghosts lit up in the yards. Tobacco leaf in bed w/ THC and the ginger cat that keeps tailing us around this neighborhood. After day job, we kicked it by the unlit fire, trying to remember to drink enough water.
We hadn’t planned on the night coming on inky black together but when she came, inevitable, we creeped from the center and stretched out in the West End of our city, breathing deeply at the collective end of something. We help each other do things we’ve never seen done before. We know they’re possible but they were never performed for us. We are gracefully taking aim, walking every way but the straight and narrow. From the playgrounds and ancient Catholic steeples and back again, tiny labyrinths, kitchen sinks. We kick the moon from the swing sets in our city, past apartments of detritus and lush brownstone gardens. Earthwork unfinished, we see all the rocks and the roots. Everything is about capability & curiosity. Every card is the Joker card.
I sit now on the creaky seat at the bar, books all around, doing my best to be. Sweat beneath silk and outgoing messages to my parents while they wait to meet the hurricane, eyes to eye. I wait to follow one job w/ another job while the sun blazes down the spine of my city, pillow talk before the cold, something that tells us we’ll be OK, that we’ve done this before, that when we have doubt, we still have it all. Autumn sweetness promises repeated death and eternal life. An orange glow all over the bookshelves, now, and a thinning.
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10/12: Do you hold your breath when you’re cold? Can we ever truly know when we are wasting our time? How long until that Autumn moon rises beyond and between the trees? I am back where the grass tells us someone has been here, all orange & red in Hometown, NH I look down & see the grasses growing wild, dying here w/ me. Buds gone all brown, leaning this way & that around the tire tracks. Overgrown like T. Overgrown like me. I trust freedom to be a growing thing.
We push past the thirsty misdirection and bump up against each other on the way home. We become layered & undefined together in the green. Together into brown. We have done this maybe too many times before. We look at each other and see what has stayed the same before we really see what has changed. Always, my lover has something too give. Always, I float on the wind, cursed w/ Desire. I mean that I am happy to go wherever. I am trusting. I dare to ask for more.
I land back home where the grass is itchy & all our friends are gone. And if they’re not gone, they don’t want to see us. These dead things all grow up past my knees. While we smoke, I tell my lover I like it like this, the yard all shaggy like us. How it’s supposed to be, he says. Wild and uninterrupted. A contrast to our neighborhood green cut down by some kids our landlord paid. I stand up in the truck bed to take a photo of the moon. My lover expects me to. Gazing up, I think about supposed to be. All of us having our own versions of supposed to be in our heads. So often we have to shake them out, swat at ideals like flies. Other times, they tell us who we are & how to live.
This week, the aurora bled over New England, over North Yorkshire, over Australia, over Kansas. Lipstick smear across the sky. I see myself, a crimson thing half-dead and electric. My hometown dies for the two hundredth time, like it’s supposed to. I’m lying down in the grass and feeling every possible direction I can go, blowing against me all at once. Further & further I sink into the Earth, into the dirt, into the wild. I don’t split up. I stretch into life. I stay whole & stretch. I stretch & sink. I sink & dream. I dream & I drool & I desire and when I am hungry, I find myself fed and lucky, fed and lucky and in from the cold. Still, the grass lays flat below me. & A demon in the sky. I feel not only everywhere I have been but everywhere I will go, everywhere the moon will follow.
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10/13: Spiders build their webs in corners untouched and I am learning something new about my symbols. I see now the stagnancy in their shadows. Redundant & repetitious spirals, further and further away from what they once meant. Life in the lonely corners. Cycles coming back around.
The grass grows best around the leech field and the bonfire has been mounting all year. At the party, music floats up from the basement and despite all my color, no one sees me. I let the cat in. I count the gunshots I hear from down the road. I pick at the pistachios left out on the table. I return to the porch that feels closest to home and know that I am young & quiet & not familiar enough to matter.
On this porch, we drank & dismissed realities - teenagers in the middle of nowhere. Like the round webs in the corners of the wood, we get a little knocked around but we hold true. We stay rooted to where we’ve come from. My lover makes sure the center holds while I am loose silk blowing free from a single tether. When do homes become cobwebs in forgotten corners, smothered by dust & uninhabitable? When does mold start to kiss the corners? And when parents die, when generations end, what ends w/ them?
When I think of this house, I think of dust. Layers & layers of dust. I think of how we will choke on it when we clear this wooden place out. I think of emptiness as a gift from Time. Below, voices crack, singing Dreams. Pianos need tuning.
T’s father keeps a can of kerosene inside the baby grand, swears the moisture maintains the sound as the seasons change. Testing G-A-B, A-B, A-B, A-B. The top pried open, we see the roots. We see the tendons stretch in song. My lover gifts me what he thinks I need - more things made of more emptiness - and when we apologize lately, we don’t say what for, we just say, Sorry, sorry, you know the rest. No one expected me to come back to this town. I feel the disbelief like humidity. Old diner, French toast, persistent traditions and rotting wood. Safe & disconnected while the rain wets the green and while the bass is itchy, adding groove.
Another gun shot over there. Crows arguing through the fog. There is music coming up from the basement but out here, it is just for me, just for me in a place I never quite fit. Black ink like white silk, rebellious & private, what feeds me & what keeps me hungry. The volume is perfect a little ways away. In a few moments, I will let the old singer lean on my knees because her back hurts. I will watch proudly as my lover plays the drums. I will disappear again when the songs get too sad. God bless the untouched corners of my life. Perfection eaten by Time.
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10/15: Blood dries eagerly in the cold. Doors slam shut. I am bathed in red light after the rains. Another busy Tuesday, another long night w/ a friend. I love having forever to talk. The moon leans its cheek from one hand to the other, wondering what I’m going to say now. I’m growing claws in the red October and yes, there’s quite a bit to be afraid of. I slept last night hiding from the moon.
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10/18: I’m in a group chat where we talk about dreams. This morning, I tell them:
My partner & I had been living in the woods for a while, it seems, walking barefoot together. Eons, eons, shoulder to shoulder. It was dry but damp. The mud hardening as the winter swept underfoot, but brown dirt all the same. He was telling me he got a job at the base - the only option in Dreamland. There wasn’t much to know about what it was for, just this feeling of power, how our minds add weight. It was a military base, essentially. Everything metal. An atmosphere of control and hostility. Shortly, he was gone and I was following my cat onto the base. Mallory at the head, her brown coat shining in the sun, our curiosity strengthened when together, friends making each other brave. We were moving in. Front door open, green chrome, hiding in our jungle.
Mallory weaved between feet and I surrendered to being seen. I remember thinking they would treat the cat better if they thought she was a stray rather than my pet. I had a friend there, a creative friend, anti-traditional & honest, impatient w/ injustice. A friend w/ a 4 lb. dog in real life and he was in my dream too, getting kicked around by the guys in charge. Spotted! Two guys in uniform in the dark kitchen with us, with aggressive senses of humor, with too much power. We were put to work. We were to be trained. I didn't see my partner again. He was working constantly. This severing expected but still painful. On our own until an ending. Most of the dream was my friend & I trying to get by without drawing too much attention but the environment was incredibly controlled and unfair. Our superiors who we reported to, who controlled us, who were everywhere, were very traditional women who tried to teach us subservience & strength, disguised self-harm. Women who hated themselves and wanted us to hate ourselves too. Keeping us small, putting us in our place, continuing on what has always been. By the end of the dream, my friend couldn't hold her tongue anymore and I joined her in a small rebellion. I woke up before I found out much else.
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10/21: Twenty minutes to sink my teeth into the life that pulses in my inner thigh - fatty & alive & foolish as I may be. Laugh, laugh in dark corners. This tightrope, w/ plenty of room for both of us, for all of us. Puppets in reverse. No clue what we’re doing but we all try, we try, we weave silk through our teeth. Cinnamon and maple syrup on our tongue from the morning. It’s been a week w/out a pen in my hand, living weekend to weekend, weakened by the morning after moon-kissed nights where I am only what everyone else asks me to be though that’s not entirely true - allow me my dramatics today.
This is how I get when I don't write. Irritable and robotic. Impatient, no nuance. The nymphs of my city follow me down every path home & every path home is where the orange leaves fall. This month my fear has been hard to reach - more malleable than it's ever been - life ahead, life behind, wet wet soil and gravestones of granite. Creatures eat and are full. And this feeling that this won’t last very long at all.
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10/23: Driving to work I swear there are angels in the fog. The clock plays tricks on me this morning, to get me out of the house in a hurry. Now I’m early when I thought I was hopelessly late. I have time to get my face close to smooth paper & clean lines. I was almost out of gas until laughing, looking at the clock on the gas pump w/ plenty of time. I spit over these neglected pages like the rain meets dry Earth, spitting like how it was when I was sleeping, sleeping in I thought, dreaming about missing the world while it was right in front of me.
Smell of gasoline on the concrete now and I’m staring at what’s left of the spiderwebs in my city - missing pieces but pearls wet on the remaining threads. This October has been like that. I will not call it precious, rather strung w/ strength. Everything is always so easy to break. Do I forget as often as I fear I do? My head, a stubborn hammer. Rock hitting rock. Metal hitting metal. Bred to work, bred to breed, bred to keep tempo. Robert Smith singing the same song and calling it something new. Magical anyway, synthesizing magic.
October, you brought my anger back to me, called it a selfless thing, made of ice. Ice is love changed, crystallized. It rests now, melting. A 53 degree day, maroon and marigold against a blurry white sky. I have company when I reach my hands out. I always find a shoulder and open hands; a lover that lets me bite down and friends who trust in a loving silence. My friends are reading Just Kids for the first time. I’m reading about vampires awakening in a worrying world. I think of my aged copy of Just Kids lent to no one, amateurly scarred in red pen like the knees of youth when I read it first. I think of my illustrated copy, too, once lent to the Wizard but too heavy to carry around. They stopped reading right before the split.
Selfishly, I wonder if they’ll see me clearer now and still, this morning's dream of being outside, always outside. They find themselves anyway.
I find their feet on the couch right up against me. We smell our days apart in each embrace before sending each other back out alone & aglow. The fog loves this October finale, loves the wishes we don’t know we are making. The sky is charged w/ every half-thought ritual. It sticks to the Atlantic and what are considered tall buildings in this city. Only water. Only death. Nothing here to see clearly. For what? I hear, Learn to trust what you can’t see. Watch the colors of Death pop on this canvas. Look for the moon tonight when she hides and hangs low. The blood of me knows she’s waning. I know how long beginnings can last.
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10/26: Open the door. I let myself into myself, what feels like coming home when too much has changed. The daylight is dimming now like I’m late but just by a little. Stomach pains - digesting sharp materials. The demons groan when I sit. The world looks around itself as if remembering, Death soon, yes, we know what that looks like.
In October, we sit w/ the ache and try to laugh before it gets too hard to. I remember when I used to smoke ciggies and my appetite would land heavy w/ a thump and disappear. Like that. I tell my lover, I am so sad about the reality of the world. Later in the conversation, he says, I don’t think you’ve been crossed enough. I think we have different ideas of betrayal. Sadness at the back of Autumn’s throat. Still, I glow like a gold coin, lucky. Now, I sit silent, shaking the bars of myself. Let it all break down. Let’s meet where we are liquid and say so clearly what we mean. I believe in possibility, knees raw from kneeling on the rubble, rough and digging, kissing Earth, searching sky. A dare on the lips of the moon, and the sun always tugging on her to leave.
We eat and we get sick. We bleed and something changes, every time something changes. A spell for power. I am at fault, messy spiraling grooves in the dirt. I find my way sloppily and trusting. The world is easy listening here and I like jazz, the stuff that moves ya. I was eating soup. I was buzzing. I was in the bath, in the bathroom, calling in family & imagining conversations where everyone understands each other, where we all define words the same way and can safely assume love. The angels were there. The Devil too. In the living room, my lover on the drums, beating, beating, keeping time. His brother yowls, You’re…..scarin’ me!
My skin is breaking out and I am picking, have been so porous lately. I have been picking just to get the red back into my face, to get everyone’s fucking hands off me, like cutting the ropes and setting the puppet free. Watch it drop. Watch it collapse. Sometimes freedom looks like that.
Hey now, look up here instead. See now, I’m on strings like a puppet, like the spider’s silken thread, like the tightrope always underfoot. We are all strung up together. I brought you here, got you stuck. The breeze moves me as much as it moves you, we can trust here if you let us. We can both be powerful. We can eat the dead together. If I move over here, you feel trembles underfoot over there. When you hide, I wait for you here in the center. This web changes every day as the wind blows every which way.
Something bleeds and everything changes, every time everything changes. Chaotic like that too. Chaotic, the way it’s always been. Alive, the only way we know. Look what alive means to us, we show it every day! We tie on masks and hold fast to the night. Everything golden, melted down, worthless and full of meaning.
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10/29: Angels in the fog, skeletal dreams and whispering maw.
It's the end of October, the webs have changed many times, most of the spiders dead - the band plays on and on and my baby sings the one where the woman dies - I am
Jalapeno breath and confusing to look at, bare legs in the breeze, in black, in red. I drive around to feed. I kick cowboy boots onto the steering wheel. Eat until I smoke, smoke until I write, write until the sky's a cyanotype. Last night,
I slept upside down & felt wings sprout, a fit of muscle & nerve, stronger than before. I woke up w/ the wiry things and bundled them under sweaters. I stood up tall & look,
Look at what my anger gave me. We bleed and something changes, every time something changes. A spell for power. I look down and see my feet
Across from yours. In dreams, I am always barefoot. Mud between toes like that summer when I was only animal. The thing about me is I'm not afraid to lick myself clean. I've seen the apple, covered in honey & sat in a beer trap, rusted & bigger than me. I remember where my rage was born, wet
& sopping. Boy howdy, do I remember. A blessed life below the patriarch. Deeply, I know the punisher in me. I've seen it pierce before, I'd know the wound anywhere - swollen & pink, a goddamn balloon wearing the mask of a feeling thing. Surface burn or dry heave, alive alive. This morning - I woke
To the sound of my Cat's gag reflex - I sat up undead, said, I'm not dealing with that right now. You've had a cat, you've heard it, the gag heard around the world. Like a certain tone of voice & the alarm before we rip them from the ceiling. I slept - as a child -
W/ guns in the house, w/ cameras in the house, pretending fear was kept outside the house. Control wound tight like a rope, braided by hand for generations, a rope hanging from the goddamn third story rafters overlooking the wide open living room, overlooking
The lake the lake the lake w/ a big fucking TV screen covering the windows, a shroud. I broke out w/out knowing where to go.
The rock of granite I grew around, am growing around - I am crumbling & breaking down. I am becoming more. I am losing myself & I am happy to. I am better as the dirt, the dirt in my teeth, the dirt my God spits into between instruction & insult. My God, generous. My God, permission granted for cruelty. I've been
A black & red thing like him. I've been a pink & swollen think like her. In the dirt, I can only be the blood around me, nutrient rich, transformation of waste.
I can only be what I learned to be (better, better, better)
Another bloody October, my roots still wet in the ground. The sun skitters across the floor in the mornings like it knows it's not
Supposed to be there & it's getting away w/ it. Fire on my doorstep, a lovelorn drive-by, an energy that says, Hope
You're looking. Sunday, I take a photo of my three friends in front of the Three Sisters all yellow-leafed & gleaming. I remember, I know home when I feel it.
Please consider donating to the Red Cross while they help get North Carolina back on its feet.
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
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