Consultation at the Hospital

 

The doctor said,

"This is what I found

inside her."

An orange

a white horse with one hoof up

Roberta Flack 'First Take' on vinyl

A river, rushing over smooth stones

and a knitting needle

through her heart.

The family sagged to one side a little

like a tent in wind.

The father said,

"You're talking nonsense."

The mother said nothing.

The husband said,

"Are you sure you had the right patient?

   I could sue."

The best friend said,

"Of course you did." 

"Where is the orange?" 

the mother asked.

"I ate the orange."

"There was no horse,"

insisted the father.

"There was a herd."

The best friend smiled 

but was silent.

The husband looked at his watch.

The mother added,

"If there was a knitting needle

through her heart,

she must have put it there herself."

The father waved his hand

and walked away.

The husband said,

"I wonder what all this will cost?."

The best friend asked

if she could see her.

The mother leaned on her husband

and walked away 

carrying her purse

and her bag of knitting.

____________

for Dverse Meeting the Bar. "Magical Realism" 

Music: Roberta Flack No Way To Say Goodbye

Iris Indigo

 

Iris Indigo used to sing on shore and shipboard

with the voice given her by some broken, incandescent god

now and in the hour of her death, amen. 

Loved by the moneyed and shanghaied, 

tuxedoed and tommyrotters,

Iris Indigo

indiglorious

into everything,

indi gone. 

_______

for dverse quadrille monday "indigo"

Music: Melody Gardot La Llorona

In Camera

"You've got to remain to bein' yourself... you cannot be

Nobody else, it ain't no use tryin' bein' no whirlwind

An' uh, jumpin' here an' an' playin' checkers with

Your own life, that ain't gonna work, baby..."  --Propher Omega 

The mirror is running a con.

No reflection or meat-suit can tell you who you are.

Yes you, in disguise there. You are

a sparrow flown straight from the hand of God.

You are a bulb that wants its light back,

but you are the light.

It's the bulb that struts in its brittle body

voguing like it thought you up.

We have come through the looking glass, 

in costume, in camera, incognito,

even to ourselves. We wander lanes of traffic like amnesiacs,

dreamers who show up naked and unprepared, in a panic of shame

for a test we have already taken and passed. 

________

for Sunday Muse 227. 

Music: Adrian Belew and Prophet Omega "I Am What I Am"

Power Couple, 1970

 She said,

"I shall strike a sewing needle through your heart

for a gyroscope to keep me level.

Spin, wounded dancer,

declare yourself a world."

Spinning and bleeding, he said,

"Primp yourself a pelt

for ornament and testament.

Live your life upon my wall,

to collect and devour each passing eye."

And every bird begins its bower

with a glittering bauble in the early hour.

Wearing him as he wore her, she said,

"Make yourself a mummy,

preserved forever in cement Jello.

I shall bury you with various anchors

I calve from the ice of my womb."

Tearing himself away,

he became a skeleton, dancing, playing a flute.

"I have found a new mask to marry,

made of prescriptions and rococo furnishings.

She is a lovely acid, a suicide waltz."

And every bird in its rotting nest

fades with its bauble low in the west.

______

for The Sunday Muse #175.

How I Know

Mrs. Capgras isn't Mrs. Capgras.
Whoever she really is, she's very clever, right down to 
parading around the neigborhood with the young Capgras children.
I confronted her.
"You can't fool me," I said, 
and the nerve of her,
the brass, 
she wouldn't drop the pretense.
Pretty soon the children were crying and she and I were 
clutching and kicking
biting and screaming
right there at the entrance to the park. 

The police were called, of course.
Idiot neighbors,
credulous biddies,
believed her that she was Mrs. Capgras.
Off she went, pretending upset,
gushing crocodile tears as she herded those kids back up the street.
She--whoever she was--kept looking back over her shoulder 
with her flushed, 
fake Mrs. Capgras face. 
She even fooled the police, who scoffed at me
as if I were insisting that the earth is flat,
when all I did was to state the obvious fact--
Mrs Capgras isn't Mrs. Capgras.

My nerves are so frayed,
so jangled,
it really is a trial to be put through all of this,
fresh on the heels of Mr. Fregoli's machinations yesterday.
He conspired--yes he did--with every jane and johnny in the development
to leave me a nervous wreck,
and a laughingstock.
Everyone I met yesterday was wearing a Mr. Fregoli face,
talking Mr. Fregoli talk,
and plotting evil against me.
I wasn't fooled for a moment, but what a position it put me in! 
"Poor Samantha, she's gone quite crackers."

And now you.
You're in league with them, don't bother to deny it.
You Capgras, you Fregoli, you second-rate duplicate!
You changed, right after you bashed my head in
with the wooden bread keeper that used to sit on your counter.
I had said some things.
I had been angry, and hurt, and I said some unfortunate things.
I said them, and you cold cocked me
and began recruiting your doubles.
You, my girl, can be cold and dark and distant,
and fracture something of mine every blue moon,
but this is not you, 
whether anyone wants to hear the truth or not.
This is not you--
my heart would know.
________ 

for Fireblossom Friday "The Distorted Lens."

Process notes: Capgras delusion is a condition in which the sufferer believes that people around them are false dulpicates of who they seem to be. Fregoli delusion is a state in which the person believes that everyone they see is one particular person in disguise. Both can be the result of a head injury. Finally, domestic violence between female couples is an under-reported crime, and not uncommon.

Quiet On Set

A career in opera doesn't always work out for a girl,
and so then she has to fall back on Plan B.

The land around here looks like it's been through God's own laundry press,
and it only rains every Fourth of July,
leaving the year-rounders feeling itchy and bad-tempered.

This is no place for Bo Peep, with a pink bow in her hair.
Nobody wants to hear Puccini,
but there's a snake handler under every tent.

Into this maelstrom of dust and cowshit comes Our Heroine,
by means of Plymouth automobile,
ready for a different kind of star turn.

Sick of marrying the same guy over and over,
she sets her happy ass down in front of the big yellow ball of the setting sun,
and memorizes her lines,
which are, basically,
the sort of stuff some screenwriter in L.A. thinks a girl like her might say.

Well, who cares?
Her leading man is gay anyway,
and she's doing the job for a flat fee, 
so she doesn't give a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut whether it tanks or is a smash.

Tomorrow she'll rope the young actor from Indiana,
and by the time the stars come out,
he'll be rattling off nonsense about the future, and men on the moon.
She'll have shown him,
first hand and--though softly--right in his ear
how well she can yodel,
among other wondrous things.
_______

Mixing fact with bullshit for Magpie #231.

 

Candace Cleopatra Beautiful

Her parents were stage actors,
dreamers,
and they named their little girl Candace Cleopatra Beautiful.
She spent the summer of 1910 sleeping in a nest of blankets
inside a suitcase,
backstage,
cooed at by every passing dancer and extra.

Unfortunately for Candace,
she grew to be only a pleasant-enough looking girl,
not a true beauty like her mother.
She went by the nickname Candy until one Sunday afternoon,
on a rare visit to her maternal grandparents' house.
"Awful name," remarked her grandmother from over her tea cup.
"Candy. Sounds cheap." complained her grandfather.
She was never taken to visit them again.

There are those who can create loveliness in the world,
and they seem to spin it out of thin air, or out of themselves by magic.
Candy Beautiful's parents were such people.
They could be standing in the wings, fanning themselves,
shrugging their shoulders and taking deep breaths,
on clay feet like anybody else, 
but then when they went on stage, 
a thousand faces would look up at them, there in the lights.

Those people had been just a crowd, faces sticking out of furs,
or tuxedos,
out for an evening,
talking about nothing,
smiling, concealed;
and then Candy's parents would get hold of them,
with every line and every gesture.
They would win their hearts, then break them, then mend them again,
all within an hour and a half.
Each person in the audience would blink and cover themselves as the lights came up,
feeling themselves naked in some way,
exposed,
but gloriously so,
and then their faces would break into smiles and they would clap.
Oh how they clapped!

After each show, Candy Beautiful would watch her mother as she removed her stage makeup,
asking her endless questions as children do,
only to be interrupted--every time!--by some lackey delivering huge bouquets.
"For the leading lady!" he would announce with a flourish.
To the end of her life, Candy Beautiful could never think about her childhood without thinking of flowers--
how lovely and delicate they were,
how fragrant,
and all of it a tribute to the beauty her parents could create.

They were Gypsies in those years, the three of them.
What fun it was to grow up riding trains and running up and down the aisles of theaters during rehearsals!
In 1918, just after the war, 
warnings were published in the newspapers to avoid crowds
such as restaurants, 
public transit and gathering places; the theater, for example.
Actors always say, "The show must go on!" and it did,
for a while,
playing before thinner and thinner crowds.
Times became lean, and then her parents--
her young, beautiful parents--
died from the Spanish flu, and there she was,
alone.

Candace Cleopatra Beautiful never liked to talk about the years that followed.
In time, she grew up,
though she did not grow any more beautiful, to match her name.
She worked, at different times, as a waitress,
a telephone operator,
a sales clerk in a department store,
and as a secretary in the War Department.
None of it had any loveliness to it.
No handsome lackeys ever came sweeping in with flowers for anyone.

However, one not particularly young man did notice her,
and he did bring her flowers,
and she did marry him.
His name was Ed, and he slicked his hair back with Brylcream.
He turned out to be quite good at turning a buck,
and he called her his Little Queen, because of her middle name.
Ed was slightly buck-toothed,
but when he smiled at her, she thought him pretty marvelous,
and when he died of a heart attack in 1954,
she wore black and wept all through the funeral, leaning on a cousin's arm.

Candace Cleopatra Beautiful had been through bad times before.
At least, this time, she had a lot of money in the bank,
and was a grown woman, able to make her own choices.
So, before long,
she made two important ones:
first, she bought a dozen acres in Ontario, Canada;
then she bought a cat, a little calico that she named Miss Daffodil.
The kitty was a great comfort,
and when they finally moved into their new home,
Candace said to the astonished mouser, "Welcome home,"
and set her down in the big sunlit entranceway.

Over the next forty years, Candace Cleopatra Beautiful created loveliness.
The house had a rounded,glassed-in greenhouse around one side,
and she filled it with every pleasing bloom she could lay her hands on.
She papered all the rooms with floral patterns,
each more calming and remarkable than the last. 
The windows were enormous!
She bought white couches and chairs,
installed potted ferns and small indoor trees.
It was like living in a gorgeous light-drenched garden.

After a year or so, Candace Cleopatra Beautiful,
who by now insisted that the workmen and visitors call her "C.C.",
added another cat.
Then another.
They were so delightful, 
and brought such an elegant loveliness in with them!
The Queen of Egypt could not have valued those cats more than C.C. did,
giving them the run of the place and all the devotion of her heart.

Cat calendars!
Cat sofa pillows!
Cat books!
Cat everything,
and ever and always, more cats.
How they soothed her. How their antics and their needs filled her days to bursting!
It's true that she began to go out less and less as she got older,
but everything she loved was right under her nose.
Flowers! 
Cats!
Loveliness around every corner and down every sight line!
Even her clothes, bought by special order through the mail,
were mostly floral designs or cat themed.
Peace.
Happiness.
Her own Eden.

Candace Cleopatra Beautiful died at 90, of a stroke,
and distant relatives came to take care of the cats.
There is still a note on the refrigerator door:
"Be sure to pick up and handle the kittens three times a day!"
but the cats, and everyone else, are gone.
C.C's house sits empty on its dozen acres,
but the long windows still let in a lot of light,
and the plastic plants--she couldn't get around well enough to water live ones--
are everywhere, still bright, still waiting to be admired,
as if they were famous actresses from yesteryear.

__________

Thank you, if you've taken the time to read this whole long tale. I was inspired by a YouTube video taken by urban explorer TikiTrex. It's long, half an hour, but if you have the time to watch it, it's really interesting. It's called "Urban Exploration: Abandoned Cat Lover's House" and you can find it HERE.

Meanwhile, a little Elvis Costello to close with.

For Young Poets

First, stop banging away at silence 
like you would with a snow shovel against the ice.
A poem is not a dancing dog,
summoned to perform on its tiptoes at parties.

Put away all spirituous beverages.
Those who write while pitching in a sea of booze
do so in spite of such idiocy, not because of it.
If you haven't the imagination to see things differently without such props,
then become a mail carrier or a bus driver.

Read.
Read Lorca and rip your hair out til you're bald.
Read Neruda and flail, little fledgling on the cliff-side!
Read Plath, tuck your children safely in their room and then
to the kitchen with you to contemplate why cowards can't be poets;
at least not for long.

All you wild spastics shouting at the coffee bar,
waving pages and thinking volume and auctioneer-speak make poetry?
Sit down. Have someone duct tape your cake hole shut.
Think about what you haven't done, until you're ready to join us.

Now, to purge.
Write several great long hunks of unreadable shit,
staggering along on broken syntax,
with words strung together willy-nilly like last year's holiday lights,
all the similar-colored ones in a row, and half of them burned out.
Write haiku about a yew tree or a cherry blossom.
Get your paper plate-eyed friends to declare it all "brilliant!"
Then throw it away and we can get started.

Light candles.
They won't help you to write, but I like them.
Lock the door and don't answer it;
your husband will find his favorite golf shirt on his own,
and your children are already ruined anyway.
Let's do this thing.

The hard part is already done!
The lonely rejections and upheavals of childhood,
the sexual confusions and self-destructive rebellions of youth,
they're over with.
The burials, the pointless treks, the lovers who laughed and left,
the beetle of doubt and otherness digging its burrow behind your heart--
all of this is long complete.

Now, just stare out of the window at the sorrowful blue of the sky,
and the silver beauty of the impossibly distant moon.
Bite your knuckle if you have to, but stillness is best,
even to the point of drooling and apparent catatonia.
"What are you doing?" you'll be asked.
Working. Slaving. Making art.
Understand this, give yourself permission for this,
even as the dishes fester in the sink and the baby cries;
The seeds of greatness will germinate inside the still soil of you, The Poet.

It's not an easy road,
but there is soul and pride to it.
Your poems will be your own particular inverse garments to wear,
heart and guts to the world.
You have joined the cabal of those who possess a true talent:
unicycle riders have their uncanny balance,
lesbians their tongues,
demons their blackness;
now you have your poetry and people to admire you and say,
"It's nice",
"This is what you were doing?"
and "Huh."

Or,
you could still apply to Beauty College.
It's up to you.
________

for Get Listed at Real Toads, this time with Brendan.
 

In Character

The actor portraying the character of my significant other walks in.
I have to kiss him,
though I'd really rather beat him to death with a shoe.

My character is mild.
Kind.
Self-effacing.
It's in the script, written by some man.

Lighting and make-up's gonna make me look fetching
despite my bad night.
I had interminable dreams of being stalked by tigers
inside a house contaminated with hostile spirits.
I blame it on the medication
given to me by the character of my quack-ass doctor.

I shovel out some really stupid dialogue.
"Have a nice day.
Thanks for the rose.
I love you."
Who wrote this shit?
Probably some hermit trash novelist from Erie,
wearing a ratty sweater with elbow patches,
head down over his keyboard like a hunchback.

I let the actor portraying the character of my significant other fuck me last time
on a different set,
because at the time I was trying to be normal;
I'm an actress, I sleep with my leading men,
even though they wobble their heads and kiss me like ticks--
I exsanguinate slowly, and look up at them, pale as a blank page.
They fill me in,
in a foreign language,
and in black and white.

Suddenly, I can't stand any of it anymore--
the fat pretentious director in his chair,
the endless re-takes,
the sheer idiocy of the story itself.
My mild,
kind,
self-effacing character breaks a prop dish against a table,
and holds the jagged edge to the throat of the devil who imagined all of this.

Someone calls 911.
Someone else calls the producer.
A rent-a-cop shows up, disturbed from his detective novel,
fumbling for his starter's pistol, mistakenly restraining the continuity editor.
At last, here is the character of my quack-ass doctor,
with his palms out,
trying to calm me.

I make the familiar motion to cut the scene,
and this crew of self-important baboons gasps like they'd never seen that simple gesture before.
I try to tell them all to fuck off,
do not pass Go,
just please, for once and for all, fuck off and leave me alone,
but I can't articulate my lines, because

I've gone off-script,
off the rails,
off my nut,
and the feeling is glorious
for as long as it lasts.
________

 

Woman Seeks Vagina

Lambs, it's time for me to play Stage Mother. You won't mind if I have Bosco the super herding dog use his herding talents to shove guide you through the doors of the Ringwald Theater, will you? I'll tell you why.

Back in my open mic days, when I would trot my happy ass down to the late great Xhedo's, to inflict treat my fellow java junkies to some of my poetry read aloud, I made a young friend named Julia. This girl had style, and I liked her right away. 

Look, I don't often talk/post about my transness. To me, talking about my Previous Life is like talking about high school; I hated it, it's over, move on. All that to say...I don't often feel a connection with my fellow transpeople. I feel like I should, but I don't. Julia is different. She felt like family to me, right from the start; a soul sister, despite age difference, despite her being straight and me being lesbian, despite the details, baby. My lil sis, if she'll let me say it. I have always been really proud of her.

Unfortunately, I lost touch with her. Still, I have often wondered what happened to her. Well dayum! She's a star of the stage! Who knew?!

June 23rd, she will perform her own "Please Give Me Your Money So I Can Buy A Vagina" at the Ringwald! I will be there. Oh, and...I said "vagina" on my blog again. Can western culture survive it?

Please visit Julia at her blog, and tell her to "break a leg". I can't wait to see her show. Read more about Julia HERE.

Here's a little video gift for you, Julia, if you drop by:

  

Georgia

She first noticed Antonio when he stepped out of a mob,
holding roses for her;
a bloom for every head in the rabble.

She took him on--
her personal little rooster.
He made love to her as if in timelapse--
an ardent insect skittering adoringly along her body.
She could have kept him in a jar, or a desk drawer.

The war came, then.
The sun went off-kilter, tilting drunkenly into the further reaches of the canals.
What use, anymore, for filmmakers
or their gaudy chattering treasures wearing ridiculous gowns,
smiling automatically at the invading armies?

Her last film was a dark comedy
released with subtitles and smuggled to the West
only to languish in a storage locker,
unwatched,
as round and unheeded as the lessons of history
in its circular tin container.

Her rooster was never meant for difficult times,
and he became tubercular--
within a month, he drifted through the bedroom curtains like a ghost,
and took to living with a flock of crows
as their underling,
but yet, he was flying, wasn't he?

She missed Antonio
and the competition of auditions and readings.
Feeling bitchy and out of sorts, she joined the underground.
Wearing berets and trench coats, they taught her to handle a rifle
and to shoot fat-faced officials through the heart.
It was her ingenue days all over again.

Antonio and the now-faded diva met again after the war,
on a single occasion,
at a hotel in Suwanee, Georgia.
She ordered gin through a heavy accent,
and he flipped his good wing, tiredly.
After a silence, they both spoke at once--
"Do you remember..." they began, and then laughed.

It was, by then, the only thing to say,
and it was enough.
_______

Satori In Mid-Air

How can it be possible
that in the end, you and I reduce to a problem of motion,
or a child's idle riddle?

Perhaps it is due to all the falls
and the late nights,
but I thought we were more than that.

It's so hard to bear that we should end this way,
with this impossible combination:
the weightless feel of new love in June in the Botanical Gardens,
and the elevator-drop nausea of irremediable fact.

I never saw this coming.
Should I have?
A new CGI-fed generation finds us less thrilling--
special effects having replaced
flesh and bone,
balance and muscle memory.

One magic obliterates another.

My faith, though, is the old familiar kind,
rooted in our hands holding each others' bodies, suspended,
hearts lit like floodlamps on a string.

Our landscape has always been nothing more than
a small platform, a swing, and thin air.

In the same way that I believed the next dot on the map would be there--
that the tents would go up and the crowds would come--
I never questioned that you would always catch me.
It was me who insisted that we not use a net during performances,
so entire was my confidence in your touch and your outstretched arms.

I was wrong, 
and it is the surprise of it that is worse than the concrete rushing close 
with its merciless kiss.
I wonder why you gave me up to the air and let me fall?
Ah well. I shall have the rest of my life to ponder that.
_______

The Betrayal Of The Flesh

When I was small,
I lived in my own little Ellis Island--
I could not make myself understood.

See the ghost woman,
With a clever tongue in Prague or Stockholm--
Thought backward and ridiculous on a new shore.

Certain words
Beat me before I spoke them--
People said, sharply, "Speak up!" until I went mute as a stone.

It was not my history that was foreign,
But my flesh that betrayed. And now again, when I am cold or tired,
Words lose themselves before they reach my lips.

It makes me feel small and stupid,
Though I have taught my hands to speak
In languages no one else can touch.

In 1915, a diva visited Detroit--
She was the darling of the Italian opera,
But she couldn't order her own breakfast.

At the next table, some swells snickered at her accent
And her fumbling. That night, the same dandies wept when she sang,
Remarking nervously to each other,
Isn't that the same dumb wop bitch from this morning?

After the performance, she spoke in the cadences her lips would allow her,
Saying, I feel lost here, it is so cold
And I am tired.
_______ 


for Fireblossom Friday at Real Toads

art by Alphonse Mucha

Wheels

The woman who broke her heart had red hair
And blue eyes--
A sunset over deep water.
With her head tilted back, she believed,
As the bloom believes in the bee--
She did not, could not, see it coming.

Feeling herself destroyed,
She became a woman of the earth, as the quiet ones
In graveyards are--
A bus station bohemian,
Far down the road ahead of any memory,
Alone, disappearing.

That is where she met the man,
Who counted out his life in silver blades--
She thought she could stand to be with him,
Since she wouldn't really care,
And so,
Then and there she poured herself into his emptiness
Like a jar of smoke.

Each night he sent the knives at her--
They seemed to come out of his bright white cuff, like bones,
As she turned on the target wheel.
Each night in front of a popcorn crowd,
He built a skeleton around her from fifty paces
And she became its face and heart beat.

"Do you love me?" he demanded sourly
In the small hours after a show,
And when she said "no", the next night he missed,
Twice, and cut her.
She knew that to stay meant being carved,
A bar of soap vanishing to satisfy his anger.

The buses are comforting in their way,
But now, back on the Greyhound highway,
She finds her vision empty;
Blank as tomorrow, without the flying knives,
Without anyone's body to be heart for,
Without her red-haired love with the deep water eyes.
___

picture by Metin Demiralay