letter to my agent

It’s hard to disagree with you when you’ve so much conviction, and I’m growing sleepy and warm lying the wrong way on my bed listening to your voice late at night. The truth is, I think most of the things people do are full of shit; especially what I do and what I want to do.  It doesn’t mean anything, we are all just filling in time until the end comes and only survive in conversation as long as there are people still living who remember us. For most people it stops at their children.

I want to believe you, but I’m siding with Bukowski.  I wish I could be a pretty, well-kept and manicured girl but I’m just not. I’m a slob if you’re lucky and just plain cranky if you’re not.  I’m always frowning and thinking about stuff that makes me unnecessarily anxious and I just discovered mascara six months ago. I would drink way more and write that way all the time if I could get away with being drunk so often, but I left that behind in London too.  I love O’Hara and Buk equally, though I think Buk would have offended Frank’s tastes greatly, or they would eventually grow to be good but temperamental friends with me half-heartedly playing peace maker.

Frank would want to make us a nice mixer while Buk would want to swig straight out of the bottle, cue some choice words and animated eyebrows.  I would drink both, to be honest.

I know you think I am great, and good, and can do something meaningful, but I’m telling you…I just don’t think I have it in me; and if do, I talked myself out of it a long fucking time ago.

the orchard eternally

There's something in the anatomy 
of hands that fills you
with chimes, you told me.


That lone gravestone lilac
-part woman in the soil, ever
to be carved around her being.
Driven by the harvest, may 
her stellar attempts haunt
the orchard eternally.


Yet words still sprout as
though they were echoes in sleep
(and I know the chimes you
speak of; they're heard roaming
through winds arranged gently,
half knowingly by a Zephyr
made happy) when she once
smiled at the sight of 
you deep in 
a puddle of memory.

the cellar

I saw you the other night at Pinter's birthday party. 
You were mostly obscured by a strategically placed box of cereal and an out of tune piano; but when you threw your head back gently to laugh fondly at Meg & Petey, the lamp above the piano illuminated your face. Damn, you really are beautiful when you're in the moment.
Like that time you were down on your knees asking for someone to be your Lady Windermere, or was that your Mrs. Erlynne? And when Stan was once again being all tragic around the piano, you seemed to be looking straight at me. Then you stared as I walked past you smoking your cigarette. 
It should be a felony for people to smoke so heavily yet still own such flawlesstranslucentskin.


I saw you yesterday as the six-fingered man; and, darling Timothy, when you saw me laughing with glee during your sword fight, I swear by all the heavens you replied with a little smile back.

finis

The sun shines on him I think. And a little on you too perhaps when you're around him.
He was the first person I'd met that actually sent messages in a bottle...to be found  by a child in Norway looking for treasure with his father along the beach.
Now it is one of my favourite stories, along with 'the selfish giant'. I remember asking him excitedly one morning to guess what song I'd heard at 4am, only to have him reply 'piano man' without missing a wretched beat. It would be much later when he took me to his room and showed me Goya sleeping on the wall above his bed, the kind of sleep that produces monsters I'm told.

night garden

She snuck out to the garden
at night armed with a
torch to track
down what she was
after. In the morning
though all
was discovered.

The acrid smell.
The soft red smears on
her fingertips slightysticky but
what gave it away was the
smattered trail of vermillion petals
leading up to her
desk (like some forward-thinking Hansel
being led by his parents into
the forest placed them there)
The geraniums sat
dismayed in a Black Douglas tumbler
stolen in darkness.

Harpur

Swept up in a diagonal
rain of yellow leaves and
gleefully eating my avocado I
find the silverwood bench that 
I often fantasized about stealing


('cept it's bolted firmly to the ground)


I sit there as the sun
places her warm hand on
the back of my neck. Above, cirrus
clouds make sweeping 
gestures like a relative
just returned from overseas. Those
ancient bells stupidly ring out
'the Nutcracker' and 'when the saints 
go marching in' so that I cannot hear
grace above their commanding 
echoes. And I do 
not want to go back to
that stifling room of
orange
and 
brown
where the mean
tomes give me papercuts
because they know 
I do not understand them.

Epyrus

hey boy, I watch

                 you take the skyway

while I remain here on the ground

knowing that one day you just won’t come back

so until then…

my mother in the next room

watches videos of the island she left

as a child 25 years earlier

to make her home

somewhere else

she tells me that a lone cypress

tree still stands in the same

place she remembers it being

                        as a little girl

and I’m not sure if it’s

                       a miracle I smell or

those lilies of the valley

imbedded deep into the soft folds

of the woolen jumpers she always wears.

Tess climbs up onto my desk

to watch me work

                        and he calls her

                        ‘the perfect killer’

because she is so small & beautiful

                      and deftly quick & silent

but that is simply

the nature

of felines.