What does it mean

What does it mean to sit silent,
Waiting up with the moon all night,
Expecting something,
Expecting some sound, some signal, some sign?
And get nothing.
Just a blank, embarrassed absence.
An emptiness like an ellipse.
A closed curve vacant as a vacuum
With an anemic moon dimly fading.
And when morning rises
Pale and nauseous,
Sickening as the ass end of a nightmare,
Even the birdsong
And dogs barking
And kids at the bus stop
Aren't enough to make it normal.
When morning drops
Like a corpse onto the lawn,
While the children stand there
Staring, dumb as relics
In the dawn,
You realize
It's over....

I Turned My Back

I turned my back and went.
But instead of going eyeless
I looked
And saw furniture flying from the roof.
Windows, lintels, doorways & eaves,
Tatters of time-dusted draperies fluttering.
A woman in burgundy bustle
Holding a little girl by the hand;
Both suddenly gone into the ground.
A man in frock coat
Powdered the same burgundy
Waved. Smiling.
Then he, too, turned
Into a doorway.
And was gone.
Lattice. Ice on the asphalt. Ivy.
Dim details.
Random fragments fixed from dreaming;
When initially
The whole thing
Was so certain.

Thursday Evening. Houston.

Elizabeth Bishop's Moose
isn't tall enough to fill
all the spaces in this house
where CRAZY has spilled.
Saturated gauze keeps unfurling
even in my sleep, wet and yellow
with cold, edemic discharge
that would ruin all the dainty furniture
kept nice for company and visitors
who never come.

The Way I Remember It : A Reminder To A Sister

Two tiny plastic dogs: one white, one black. A set of Scotties.

The kind of cheap plaything parents buy for a noisome child in the backseat while traveling the New Jersey Turnpike. The kind of plaything a desperate single-mother with few prospects, and no money, few friends, and two children buys in desperation at the rest stop to quiet a noisome child---even though the purchase empties her purse of her last bit of change.

And still several miles (and several tolls) to go.

Tea & Sugar

When sugar melts in tea there is taste. That is known; not a noun; but a sense of something there in the water.

Anniversary

Two small boxes full of dead boyfriend.
I saved just a few ashes.
The rest of him in Italy, somewhere.
Buried in the family plot
which I refused to witness.

I carried him there like a courier,
in a zinc-lined box labeled BIOHAZARD
instead of in a proper coffin.
Embassy regulations. International red-tape.
(Never mind my tears. Or feelings.)

And him burned up just because.
And the family screaming.

Too much. Too much
to think of or remember.
But this would have been
eighteen years.
Half a lifetime; or a lifetime.
Over.

Summer Day : June 4, 2003

What can you do when the earth shatters under your feet
but fall into the crevice and hope either to recuperate or die?

You sit in that dark, smoking hole
amidst the debris
of what had been
a normal, regular life;
with sunshine and house facades,
and perfectly tended lawns,
and immaculate plots of flowers,
fine shrubbery always just the right shade of green;
and everything else that's beautiful and ideal.

You sit in that hole
choking on the fine, ideal dust of it:
A dream that had been so fucking lovely
you thought you'd die from its perfection.

Then,
one day,
everything shifts,
just slightly.
And the precarious balance
of its loveliness
is thrown off,
and there goes
your precious fantasy—
in an avalanche of rosebuds,
wood panelling, antique glass,
your grandmother's tea cups,
all the once-worn clothes
you believed were so beneficial.
It all comes down on you
in dust and darkness;
and covers you up.

And meanwhile,
the sunshine is still glowing;
and all the neighbors are on the street,
standing just at the edge of everyone else's lawn,
admiring the beautiful, chemical perfection of it all.

And no one notices the smoking dust
settling over you. No one misses you.
No one needs you to remind them
of the dust-drenched meaninglessness of it all.

Because they have full faith
in the beauty brought
by a lawn cut just so high,
and a shrub trimmed just so square,
and a life opened just so wide.

September Blues No. 3 : September 2004

Autumn day
quiet with crickets.
Flutter, leaf.
Grass blades bend.
Cat squinting in sunlight.

Nothing more beautiful.

September Blues No. 2 : September 2002

I took my ancient Baedeker to Italy
in an attempt to make my European tour
with a nineteenth-century frame of mind.

Despite cell phones and high speed trains,
despite jihads and Intifadas,
despite bomb threats and terrorists,
I went out with my blinders on,

oblivious—
or as is nearly possible without
taking both my eyes out—
oblivious to the modern world around me,

marching like E.M. Forster
out of the greenwood;
or like Ruskin
swinging my Seven Lamps
over cobblestones
and "night-cold grass"
lit by glow worms,
in places patinated
with rust and dust,
under the porticoes of the past
where rich and indolent ladies
would sweep their skirts
while hoping for romance.

I took my ancient Baedeker—
and my modern baggage—
to Italy.

September Blues No. 1 : September 2002

Endlessly I seek
something eternal,
seek the secret things
in dark hints of dust,
but discover only selfishness.
I see only the funeral shroud
of truth
twisted in a lump.

There is an answer
germinating there,
embryonic.
I know.

But I will never see it.
I will never decipher
its miraculous simplicity
until I've dropped my concern
for this flesh,
until I've given up
the white boy's blues.

September Song

Dead relic LA.
Lights on the roadside
at random.
And for what?
One vast stupidity.

What's the use
of a bend in the road
when the dirt lies unbroken
in every direction?

To represent
that one man
made a decision?

(Specific.
Insignificant.)

To prove that his life
wasn't pointless?
That he had chosen something:
one arbitrary mark
of his will?

A sterile choice,
but his.

Choice makes meaning
of what doesn't ultimately matter.
So, a path across dirt fields
with a bend in it,
to prove that he was here.

And made a difference.

Haiku

Sink or Swim.

Font Therapy.

A New Perspective.

Sometimes it's necessary to get a new perspective on things. Sometimes it's necessary only because there's no other option. When the paradigm shifts, you either close your eyes and cling to the old vision or you open your eyes wider and take in all the details.

When Pandora opened the box and all the evils of the world flew out, the one thing left inside was Hope.

Old Man Winter Needs to Take a Chill Pill

I woke up this morning to what sounded like the roof blowing off the house. Fortunately, it was only some yard furniture which I've neglected to put away rolling into the neighbor's fence. Just trying to live up to the dream of being the only gay hillbilly in the neighborhood. Eventually there will probably be all kinds of broken kitchen implements strewn over the lawn and our hybrid SUV up on some cinder blocks in the back with half of the wheels off. In hard times, it's good to have a dream.

In the meantime, the wind continues to kick up out there. It's so gusty I wouldn't be surprised to see Miss Gulch blowing past the window on her bicycle.

Happy Crappy New Year

When I started my blog last November (which now feels like the equivalent of a million years ago), I never intended it to be confessional or overly personal. I just thought it would be a good venue to introduce little illustrations and slowly begin to promote and market my artwork. And get my mind off the fact that my boyfriend, Paolo, had just been slapped with a succession of negative medical diagnoses. But three days before New Year's Paolo died. He was diagnosed with lymphoma of the stomach last July and had undergone five chemotherapy treatments since then. In early December, just before my last blog entry, he'd had several biopsies taken from his stomach and they all came back negative. Hurray!!

Two days later he went into the hospital---the beginning of a series of late-night hospital admissions and releases and readmissions; and an unceasing series of transfers from the ICU to the cardiac unit, back to the ICU, back to the cardiac unit and so on.... Beginning December 14, every day seemed to begin and end with a new chaos of frantic medical activity and uncertainty. Not to mention the endless phone calls from concerned colleagues, family members in Italy and friends whose well-intended but helpless apprehension only heightened our sense of panic and doubt. Paolo and I had been together for eleven years (as of December 12) and never in my life had I ever seen him pessimistic or filled with anything other than complete optimism until the second week of emergencies and overwrought phone calls began to take their toll.

Ultimately he wasn't killed by lymphoma or any of the other medical ailments that had so disrupted his health and his life and his future, but by a blood clot in his heart that had become untreatable because of the chemotherapy he was undergoing. Paolo was only forty-one years old. He had just won two research grants from NIH, which is apparently unheard of since competition is so severe and funding so limited (thanks to the BUSH administration) that receiving a single grant is a major accomplishment. He was just on the cusp of becoming an independent research scientist. His research into the causes and possible treatments of Huntington's disease (a degenerative neurological disease that affects millions of people and for which there is no cure or treatment as of yet) had just begun to be respected by the scientific community at large.

It's difficult not to be angry. I could drown my sorrows in booze and indiscriminate acts of self-destruction, but I think I'll probably just immerse myself in working on the portrait of my boyfriend that was going to be a gift after his recovery and which will now be his memorial. Hmmm... weird how life turns everything around. As Christine would say (she who was made famous in Mr. Peenee's "Ahh, Home to San Franceeesco" blog post), "Whoever you are, stop shaking the snowglobe!"

And as Paolo would say, "This kind of thing happens in life---now what do we have to do?"

So It's True, Shit Does Happen

 The other day my boyfriend had an endoscopy to see if all that nasty old cancer was gone from his stomach. "Ain't no cancer here!" the pictures said. Awesome!

Later that night I came out of the kitchen, where I was eating ice cream out of the container (I do that sometimes), and found him doubled over on the sofa, what's left of his hair all matted down with sweat.

"Is something wrong?" I tried to sound casual because when your boyfriend's going through chemotherapy you can't get all worked up over every little thing.

"I think I need to go to the emergency room," he answered in a voice like a cat with laryngitis. Um, not awesome. Turns out he has pancreatitis, which is painful but not deadly. So I was right not to get all worked up. But it still made me think of that line from "Shakespeare's Sister" by The Smiths: I can smile about it now, but at the time it was terrible. (groan)

Good Morning, Baltimore!