Sunday, January 20, 2008
Two rejection missives from a small literary journal no one has ever heard from and a cup o' coffee....
...is how I begin my day. My body toddling across the academic soil where I work weird hours during interim session, clad in the shirt from last night that she told me to wash because of the maroon oval imprints of her lips still bitten into the collar like a crimson welt from my chin--like in late 80's movies where the husband who is having an affair always swipes his collar with his thumb before he fishes around the interior of his ash tray for his wedding ring. It feels like it is 10 degrees outside and the emerald aproned Pharaohs at Starbucks inquire why I am bundled up, looking like an out of work eskimo as I try to resuscitate my vision and smile, leaving to go work 12 hours, proof-reading my brothers manuscript, anticipating the nest of her limbs, her smile, her face.....
Saturday, January 12, 2008
excerpt from novel dealing with corporeal loss and suffering of the interior limbs of the heart....
…And she is coming, groping, biting her nails in to the back of his palms, feeling, fucking, levitating above him. Her sweat glistened forehead alone seems to be hovering above him like a helium balloon hovers above a cornered vent. And now she is coming. Bulbous chins of sporadic cloud poofs, he can feel her coming—he can feel the movements of his body responding to the subtle titters and sighs of her body, can feel her felt, can feel her idioms lost in scattered translations, of alphabetical shapes and slashes, biting down, oppressing inside the cultivating feeling, the feeling of flying, floating, fucking, fucking her body, lids closing and brushing opening and fighting to be free- a momentary release, pressing down hard, pressed, above, flying-and this is how he wants her now. He wants her to fuck him from above. Drill deep, almost there, he can tell by the way her forehead dews with sweat that she is arriving. Can tell by the writhes of her body, the syncopations of her breath that something is about ready to happen. Can tell by the way she clutches and jerks and closes and opens her mouth and eyes at different intervals that something beyond what he thought could possibly happen is about to indeed occur. Presses hard. Just a minute. Above land there is no need for a saftey belt. Jeans sloughed and tangled in a corner, burrowed beneath sweat stained thong and jester boxers. Just a little more. The mattress appears to be levitating. A mass of sweat and hurt until finally, he jerks and she caterwauls, her lips falling from her face, screaming, taking a new breath of life—her eyes nailed close, the feeling coming inside her like a newborn planted release and here, right at this very moment, this is the way her body meets his body. This is the way they enter each other, the subtle thrust, the feeling of leaving, the lips bitten down and half-sawed off-the feeling that you have left-have to deported, only to have tediously arrived at the place you have always been-the place you have always felt welcomed-the place that feels more home to you. Her body continues to pry itself open with you inside, as if it is offering a vacancy that has previously been filled. Her mouth jarring out accolades, salutations, hullo’s. her mouth blossoming between her legs, opening. Swiftly pedaling, yawning, griping-it is the grip of her smile—her every electrons, her teetering toxins, kissed simply by sashaying the back of her hand. And she is coming. It is slow at first. It takes a while. Waiting, looking at her watch, wondering when an opening will allocate itself—to push herself open-the terminal hanging heavy ribbed grafters, a ticket of rectangular proportions folded four creases inside itself and squashed in her back pocket, a carryon, her body is mostly sweat, water, the treacle of perspiration, precipitating her pores, open, touching her button notch near her waist-yawning-the flight where Patrick once took three years past scratching his dead lice yucca moose and wondering out loud to a priest, while, gazing out the window looking out, mulling over the direction and general vicinity and overall discreet possibility of the afterlife. Wondering to himself, out loud, where the angels cache their wings in buttered scoops of nipple clouds.
Sunday, January 06, 2008
ST CECELIA'S PLAYGROUND
David A. Von Behren
TREATMENT
St. Cecelia's Playground is a hip, late-seventies retro drama chronicling the lives of the Cotton brothers Melvin (or "Black Mel" our posh afro-sporting protagonist) and his much lighter skinned twin brother Marquette (or Mark). The film serves as both an inquiry into the economic slavery evident in lower-income Americana as well as a street meditation on the recurring theme, "What's the difference between God and Man?" The answer being that man, flushed with all of his foibles, has the capacity to change, whereas a fixed notion of a deity often tithes emotional incarceration in lieu of individual forgiveness.
THEME: What’s the difference between God and Man?
ACT ONE
1.)
Our story convenes in ATLANTA, GA 1967. Bickering barflies SEYMOUR “SCRUGGSY” SCRUGGS(29) and portly jovial CLEVELAND TUBBS (31) loaf at a bar stool with JERZ LORDS, owner of BOO RADLEY’s, (41) a popular Afro-American Jazz Dig. The bantering comfortably evolves around drink, debauchery and the dulcet soprano voice of BROWN SUAGH (24), performing later that night. Enter BLACK MELVIN, our stories protagonist. Orphaned at a young age, MELVIN COTTON (20) was raised inside ST. CECELIA’s ORPHANAGE in a downtown vector of Atlanta. MELVIN is dressed in camouflage military garb. In two days he will be deported to Vietnam. MELVIN is a jazz phenom and has his SAXAPHONE CASE with him in tow. On the far corner of the bar an OLD MAN jaded by the peril of life ruffles newspapers headlines and mysteriously walks out. MELVIN seems to have some sort of affiliation with the OLD MAN but remains reticent when Cleveland inquires.
In struts sergeant MARK (20) a corrupt, arrogant white Atlanta cop. He is followed into the bar with two of his badged toadies. MARK cracks lewd jokes about lynching and gets into a verbal scuffle with a stoned CLEVELAND TUBBS. JERZ LORDS placates his multi-cultural clientele with free drinks. Sergeant MARK walks to an opposite side of the jazz club.
As the carousing continues MELVIN and SCRUGGSY have a heart to heart about ST. CECELIA’s, the institution they both attended. SCRUGSSY brings up the name FATHER ANTOIN and MELVIN seems distant. He is anxious to leave ATLANTA. Something in the past seems to be bothering him and MELVIN seems anxious to start life anew, even if it is in the war torn tattered republic of Vietnam.
On stage an ILLUMINATED CONE encircles the ANNOUNCER. Claps are heard as GRACIE “BLACK SUGAH” begins to sing. MELVIN momentarily forgets about his mysterious past and stargazes on the angelic countenance and smooth vocal tendencies of GRACIE. A HISPANIC WAITER clears martini glasses from the tables.
After Gracie has sung the ANNOUNCER focuses his attention on MELVIN, informing the raucous audience that MEL is leaving for NAM come two days time. After a little verbal nudge from his cohorts, MELVIN picks up his saxophone and heads towards the stage. His sonorous tunes rivals GRACIE’s in terms of tonality and beauty. The audience remains awed.
Following MEL’s performance clattering and cursing is heard in the back of BOO RADLEYS. Apparently, the HISPANIC WAITER has inadvertently spilled part of a drink on one of the WHITE OFFICERS. IN a fit of rage the WHITE OFFICE overturns the table, pins the HISPANIC WAITER into the floor and endeavors to beat him comatose. When JERZ LORDS endeavors to make PEACE, OFFICER MARK fires several random rounds into the air, informing JERZ that, “even though things thave CHNAGED in this town, things haven’t really CHANGED.”
OFFICER MARK swivels the nozzle of his pistol from JERZ into the forehead of the ANNOUNCER. Without a word the trigger is pulled. The announcer falls over dead. A sick look of shock etched into his face. OFFICER MARK re-cocks his pistol, aiming it in the direction of the battered HISPANIC. As he is about to fire the pistol he is forcefully shoved aside by MELVIN COTTON. AS OFFICER MARK misfires the pistol, the wayward bullet enters into the chest of his fellow OFFICER. The third officer rushes toward MELVIN and MARK, only to be placed in a headlock by CLEVELAND TUBBS. MELVIN and MARK continue wrestle. The gun gets kicked aside and is quickly picked up and emptied by JERZ LORDS.
The scuffle between Mark and Melvin continue. Mark accuses Melvin of not knowing who he truly is. The two continue to flagellate the other with their fists. MARK MELVIN on the ground, choking him. He lifts up an empty bottle of JACK DANIELS. MARK attempts to christen MELVIN’s face with the bottle by shattering it over his head. The moment he swings the glass gavel, MELVIN moves and the bottle smashes into the floor. Melvin then maneuvers on top of MARK and quickly presses MARK’s own face into the pool of GLASS SHARDS.
MELVIN gets up. Blood has sopped through his Military garb. He is breathing heavily. BOO RADLEY’s has for the most part completely emptied. He looks at the fallen bodies of OFFICER WARREN and the ANNOUNCER. The HISPANIC WAITER slowly sputters and groans into consciousness.
CLEVELAND TUBBS nods his head. Scruggys bends over and begins to drag the dead bodies near the alleyway door. JERZ LORDS brushes back descending tears from his sockets and begins to vent out a nervous breakdown. LORDS begins to crack open BOTTLES OF BOURBON in rage. TUBBS and SCRUUGSY nod their heads back and forth in shame. MELVIN endeavors to calm JERZ down. Unsuspectingly, a bloody faced MARK bats the inside of his pant cuff, unveiling a knife.
More bottles of Bourbon and other Liquor break. Melvin tries to calm down the proprietor, unaware that MARK is behind him brandishing a KNIFE. Seconds before MARK’s KNIFE slices into MELVIN spine, the battered Spanish waiter screams out a Hispanic warning and MELVIN turns. The slicing knife scrapes the side of MELVIN’s cheek, granting him with a MARK of CAIN welt.
Unable to control himself, JERZ lashes at OFFICER MARK and is immediately stabbed in the stomach. Melvin turns around, launches his entire body in the direction of MARK. The two fall down again and begin to wrestle.
MARK is on top of MELVIN pummeling him several times. MELVIN lifts up his boots and tosses MARK into a barge of TABLES still dim lit with CANDLES. The CANDLES skid off the side of the table and land on the bar, where JERZ LORDS broke bottles of BOURBON in a maniacal rage. The bar soon erupts in flames. MARK gets up and lashes his feral limbs towards MELVIN again.
Innately clumsy, pissed off and stoned, CLEVELAND TUBBS, in an endeavor to do the RIGHT THING, picks up several bottles of whiskey and baptizes the flames. The fire snickers and crackles. The whole bar and half the club is swallowed in flames. The screech of FIRE SIRENS becomes audible.
TUBBS is pushed out the door by SCRUGGSY. Inside the bar OFFICER MARK and MELVIN continue to stab each other with their fists. FLAMES ensnarl the building.
The SOUND OF SIRENs continue to blare. MARK is on top of MELVIN and continues to gash MELVIN’s face into the earth. BOO RADLEY’s is now HADES. Black MELVIN and WHITE MARK have now become a metaphorical nemesis. MELVIN appears to be completely enervated, weak.
Mark launches one final pummel into MELVIN’s face. The bruised MELVIN locates the KNIFE MARK stabbed JERZ LORDS with, beaming in a quivering strip of flame. AS MARK launches one final blow, MELVIN deftly grapples the knife, slicing it on the left cheek, similar to where MELVIN’s face is scarred. The two rivals stumble. TUBBS and SCRUGGSY haul a battered and bleeding Melvin outside BOO RADLEY’s just as the establish soars into flames.
2.) Melvin awakes inside CLEVELAND TUBBS’ bachelor pad. SCRUGGSY doctors Mel’s welts with a BOTTLE OF VODKA. He reads a newspaper Headline about Boo Radleys then reads an obituary for JERZ LORDS. TUBBS makes a point of noting that MEL and Sergeant MARK have the same last name. Disgruntled, MELVIN notes that the spelling of their last name is slightly different.
There is a knock on the door. As SCRUGGSY answers it the room is filled with bullets. SCRUGGSY falls down dead. TUBBS shoves MELVIN towards the window. Looking MELVIN straight into the eyes TUBBS tells MELVIN that, out of the three of them, his job is simply to stay alive. TUBBS then kisses MELVIN on the lips. MELVIN is shocked. TUBBS steps back, smiles and forcefully pushes MELVIN through the glass window. He then turns around, wielding the empty bottle of VODKA like a sword.
MELVIN falls three stories down below. Upon hitting the cement he realizes that he fell straight on top of an OLD LADY walking her SCHANUZER. As MEL attempts to resuscitate the OLD LADY he hears more bullets. The BOTTLE OF VODKA smashes on MELVIN’s left hand. TUBBS is DEAD.
MELVIN takes off running. The Schnauzer chases after MELVIN. When MELVIN finds himself cornered in an alleyway, he picks up the snapping dog and tosses him against the brick wall.
MELVIN finds himself entering a DREAMWORLD. He is cornered on all sides. SILHOUETTES of the PAST encroach him. He finds himself looking at his demons. He sees himself as an ELEVEN year old boy talking to FATHER ANTOIN at CONFESSION.
3.)Melvin awakes in the apartment of GRACE HOLIDAY, the lounge singer who goes by the name of BROWN SUGAH. The two have been making love. GRACE hints that MELVIN should be thankful that she saved him. The two make love and Melvin informs GRACE that he had to leave town, but not before he attends to some unfinished business.
4.) Melvin enters the interior of St. Cecelia’s parish. He enters into the oak confessional booth. Without saying a word, MELVIN grapples FATHER ANTOIN and, inexplicably, begins to pummel him. MELVIN demands that FATHER ANTOIN “If he has sinned.” FATHER ANTOIN damns MELVIN as MELVIN drags the priest into the front of the cathedral, sodomizing him with a crucifix.
As Melvin exits St. CECELIA he spots the HISPANIC WAITER. MELVIN accuses him of starting all this, claiming that if the waiter could just hold a Martini glass straight, none of his friends’ would be dead. Without saying a word, the waiter pulls out MELVIN’s SAXAPHONE. It is polished and bright. MELVIN accepts the gift and when he inquires “what the fuck is going on?” all the waiter can respond is ¡La paz de Dios!
ACT TWO
1.)
In Vietnam MELVIN becomes lonely. He scribbles epistles of timeless love for GRACE. He is placed in truculent SGT. "NO SHIT" MOORE’s infantry. In the infantry MELVIN becomes known as BLACK MEL. His best friend is a Mexican-American street-legal pothead named JESUS DE CIELO (21). A bevy of other soldiers are also present including nerdy pocket-calculator toting Ralph Whickers (17) knife-wielding Jordie Reents (19) ex-hippie Abby Brooks "A.B"(23), semi-portly comic relief Chuck "CHUCKLES" Hungslow and coy, Oscar wildish cross-dresser Thespian Tommie Newman.
BLACK MEL: Your name geez-us, as in JESUS CHRIST what the hell is going on.
JESUS: It looks like Jesus but its pronounced Hey-zeus. Like the other God. The god of all them other gods.
BLACK MEL: So you gonna turn that water into wine first or you gonna raise my black ass up from the dead when I'm shot.
Jesus (toasting a libation): Both.
One night, after a series of battles, BLACK MEL is in his sleeping bag, masturbating, and thinking about GRACE. Tommie thinks of this as a come on, enters BLACK MEL sleeping bag and tries to fool around. MEL rightfully snaps, pins TOMMIE and almost kills him if not for JESUS stepping in between them. Jesus and Mel have a heart to heart in the dense foliage abutting Saigon. Jesus rolls a joint and the two men reminisce of home.
One night SGT. MOORE is chomping down hard on the spittled end of his cigar, contemplating. Chuckles is entertaining the group with anecdotes about the Asian whore "PUSHIE HONDA." SGT. Moore disciplines CHUCKLES and whips into a diatribe. BLACK MEL ignores Moore’s comments and continues scribbling a letter to GRACE. SGT. MOORE confiscates the letter and reads it aloud to the fellow troops. At first the troops laugh, treat the scenario like a locker room. Soon though, the SGT. himself chokes because Black MEL words are so poetically poignant. Sgt. Moore stops just short of the last paragraph and crinkles MELVIN’s epistle into the size of a golf ball.
SGT. MOORE: If only all of you fuckers knew you were fighting for something you could come home to.
2.)
In Vietnam Sgt. Moore's battalion has one week left. It is a quiet night and crickets are heard chirping oratorios. Black Melvin is playing his saxophone thinking about GRACE. RALPH is showing JORDIE how to fix a radio transmitter. Abby is listening to the DOORS PEOPLE ARE STRANGE. CHUCKELS is fixing a sandwich parodying a little tummy-jiggle dance of pending freedom, discretely pointing his utensil in the direction of TOMMIE (who is brooding over a volume of Oscar Wilde) every time Morrison says the word strange. Jesus is rolling something seedy and green, licking tobacco paper with his tongue. SGT. Moore takes something out of his pocket and examines it.
There is a close-up of BLACK MEL humming into his sax and then there is an inexplicable explosion followed by cursing. The whole entire planet seems to fall into itself, into the dank casket of the earth. There is mass confusion and emotional pell mell. Black Melvin is trapped by shrapnel and to his left he sees the empty sockets and bloody head of SGT. Moore. His saxophone is melted. Black Mel looks around and sees RALPH and JODIE wailing in pain. BLACK MELVIN yelps out for help and CHUCKELS is heard laughing.
CHUCKLES: DEATH. We're dying. HA!!!!!! This is it. This is the point of the movie where the credits begin to roll. Death! HA!!!!!
Chuckles continues to slowly hum People are Strange before being swallowed into a military obituary headline.
"When your strange, faces come out of the rain. When your strange, no one remembers your name."
BLACK Mel yells out. He hears Tommie call MEL Othello saying that he can go fuck his own five-fingered Desdemona, big Black fuck. Apparently Tommie has found a way out.
BLACK MEL begins to hallucinate. It seems like he has been down here for days. He thinks about TUBBS wearing a nuns habit. He thinks about the pensive expression plastered on the lips of the Virgin MARY while he was sodomized FATHER ANTOIN with a crucifix. MEL reaches around his neck and thinks about GRACE. He reaches the scar on his right hand side and thinks about officer MARK. He feels that he is slipping out of his earthly attire.
Black MEL looks next to him, he sees a scarred Jesus. Jesus says that he can help BLACK MELVIN but only if MELVIN says Jesus name.
BLACK MELVIN: Hey-Zeus. Hey-Zeus.
Jesus: NO, say my name. Say my name the way your mother said my name in church. Say my name the way you said my when you were taken away from my mother.
BLACK MEL asks if JESUS has lost it. He asks if JESUS is fucking crazy. Finally, he says JESUS name as a vulgarity and JESUS asks him one question.
JESUS: DO you want to go back home, or do you want to come with me?
BLACK MEL: I just don't want to remain stuck. Shit. Jesus Shit. I been stuck all my life. I've been stuck all my life!
Jesus slowly trudges over to BLACK MELVIN. He loosens the metal detritus and, playing Virgil to BLACK MEL's downtrodden Dante leads Black Melvin out of the wreckage into a DOME OF WHITE LIGHT. The two shadows eventually coalesce into one integer and Balck Melvin is surrounded by rescue workers. Baffled, Black Mel looks around. He sees the bodies of Sgt. Moore, A.B., Chuckles, Jordie and Ralph piled up in a funeral pyre. Then he sees Jesus dead body heaped onto the pyre as well.
Apparently BLACK MEL was buried alive for 72 hours. Jesus' body was exhumed charred and deceased ten hours after the initial blast.
When BLACK MEL feels around his neck, he sees a dog tag. On it is the name JESUS MARTINEZ.
3.) MELVIN wakes up in a psych ward. BLACK MEL is confused. He spends days in a psych ward where he finds Tommie Newman alone one day and immediately begins to pummel him. When Melvin is refrained from TOMMIE it turns out that what Melvin was actually hitting was a picture of the cross.
Inside the Psych ward MELVIN is called JESUS de Cielo (since that was the dog tag he was wearing) He begins to have long sessions with his sexy counselor VICTORIA MEADOWS. He tells VICTORIA about his friends who died in ATLANTA before his departure. He tells VICTORIA about his friends who died with him in NAM. He tells her how he feels that he is nothing more that a character in a novel where weird shit keeps on happening and everyone who he loves or cares for dies.
Slowly he begins to reveal more intimate details to Victoria. He tells her being rapped by FATHER ANTOIN at a young age. He tells her about his mother, LADY GREGORY, who ran a brothel. When VICTORIA inquires whether JESUS is aware of any other family members MELVIN’s face remains silent. Rubbing a finger down his facial SCAR MELVIN tells VICTORIA that he once had a brother.
On the day of their last session VICTORIA and MELVIN kiss. VICTORIA (still calling Melvin Jesus) implores him not to go back to Atlanta, fearing that his life may be stake. MELVIN tells VICTORIA not to worry. That even Jesus was met with a pretty big reception when he re-entered Jerusalem. The two make love on her therapist couch. Melvin thinks about the playground at St. Cecelia’s.
4.)
Back in Atlanta MELVIN has usurped the identity on his savior’s dog tag, JESUS DE CIELO. The city has become even more segregated and oppressed
Slowly Jesus begins to become an alcoholic. He is 27 years old. He sports a full afro, wears vinyl jackets, walks with a limp, drinks forties of STROHS LAGER out of brown paper bags. There are dilapidated scenes of MELVIN's old neighborhood. We see the rundown WHITE ONLY water fountain. We see the ruins of the CHURCH. The neighborhood is in financial decay. Only St. Cecelia’s seems cleaned up. They have a new fence. New playground equipment. It is no longer solely an orphanage but a parochial school.
Walking past St. Cecelia, drunk, Mel notices a young girl of six in pigtail and a catholic skirt running across the street. He feels some esoteric, bloodline connection with the girl. Across the street he sees GRACE. Though seven years older her skin is still refulgent and smooth. The young girl leaps into Grace’s arms. Melvin begins to walk he sees SARGANT MARK, doff his police hat and place his solicitous arm around the two of them. They are obviously a family.
JESUS is stunned. A car beeps. MARK looks at JESUS and tells him to get out of the middle of the street.
JESUS limps over a cemetery and finds FATHER ANTOINS grave. Without giving a second thought, JESUS (Melvin) unzips and urinates, pouring out the rest of his beer and then smashing the bottle on the FATHER's grave. Melvin then begins to cry. He damns God. He damns his father. He rips off the JESUS dog tag and tosses it into the ground.
Feeling all alone, JESUS saunters past his old haunt. He hears the sound of a jazz trumpet. Turning the corner he sees a portly man in a wheelchair with no feet. The man is wearing a derby cap and is blowing smooth jazz tunes. There is a BOTTLE OF VODKA next to his wheelchair. It is TUBBS.
TUBBS immediately recognizes MELVIN. He is excited to see him. MELVIN tells TUBBS that his name is really JESUS. TUBBS becomes disconcerted. He claims that he took bullets and became paralyzed so that MELVIN could be free. MELVIN insists that his name is JESUS. TEARS begins to drip down TUBBS fine chin and he tells MELVIN that it served him right that OFFICER MARK married GRACE, even if she was pregnant with you-know-who’s child. MELVIN becomes silent. Slowly he continues to walk without looking back. TUBBS throws his trumpet in despair.
TUBBS: I wait all these years for use to come back and use don’t even know whose use is. Fuck you then, Melvin, Jesus, whatever use names bees, fuck use.
MELVIN continues to walk. He gets another forty and walks past a boarded up and dilapidated BOO RADLEYS. Sitting down at an abandoned BUS STOP outside, he hears a voice. The old man who MELVIN saw seven years inside the jazz club is seated next to him, reminiscing about JERZ LORDS fine establishment.
JESUS shares his forty with the old man who goes by the name of DRUNK HAROLD (54). Melvin says that his name is Jesus but that none of his friends’ know him. DRUNK HAROLD disparages JESUS, telling him that he never did know who he was—even growing up. Slowly, JESUS becomes aware that the old man knows something. It turns out that DRAUNK HAROLD is MELVIN’s father.
HAROLD tells MELVIN all about his mother, LADY GREGORY.. DRUNK HAROLD explains that actually, his LADY GREGORY was carrying twins fathered by different males, at the same time. A genetic possibility but one that is rarely heard of. MELVIN is Harold’s son. When MELVIN inquires about his brother, HAROLD runs his finger down the side of his cheek. MELVIN remains silent.
The father and son roll a joint. MELVIN begins to ask his newly found father for advice. DRUNK HAROLD offers insight, tells a drunk and stoned MELVIN that sometimes in life, you gotta go back to the place where shit happens and fix everything.
MELVIN thinks about this and smiles. He gets up and avails a revolver from the inside of his pants. Without saying a word BLACK MEL shoots DRUNK HAROLD.
“Looks like god the son finally get gonna come back after all, Tubbs.” He says.
ACT THREE
1.)
BLACK MEL is lurking outside of St. Cecelia's Playground. There is a catholic sister and a small class size playing duck duck goose. The school has cleaned up considerably but it is still located in a shady part of town.
Without saying a word BLACK MELVIN leaps over the fence. He whips out his gun and presses it against the nun's heads. When the nun asks who he is, MELVIN says that his name is JESUS and that he has come back from the dead to take what was rightfully his. MELVIN forces the classroom out from the playground and back inside the school. They enter the sanctuary. BLACK MEL is crazy. A locomotive stream of vulgarities erupts from his lips. He forces the kids down in front of the statue of Virgin Mary. He tells them to pray. Pray that there is a god and that God cares enough about your ass to let you live. Pray for verification.
Melvin bolts the students in the sanctuary. Slowly Melvin escorts each student to the confessional booth. He asks then the question, "What's the difference between God and man?" He tosses the children down and fetches another one. The last student he interrogates is MELODY (7) the daughter BLACK MEL conceived with GRACE before he left for Vietnam. The daughter MELVIN has never met.
Outside MELVIN hears the sharp whirl of police sirens begin to escalate. He looks at his daughter.
MELODY: IF you is, Jesus than why you black?
MELVIN looks at his daughter. He removes his nozzle and points it sharply onto his daughters temple. MELODY tells MELVIN that her dad is a police man. MELVIN (JESUS) tells MELODY that his dad is a God. The two look at each other. MELVIN kisses his daughter on the forehead and tells her to kneel down in front of him and pray. As soon as Melody closes her eyes, MELVIN puts the nozzle of the gun into his own mouth. He closes his eyes and is about to pull the trigger before he hears the sound of a saxophone, humming in the direction of the playground. It is a sweet dulcet sound. MELVIN drops the gun and picks up his daughter. They walk down a corridor and look into the playground. Near the jungle gym, both Melvin sees the Hispanic waiter, humming into a saxophone. The waiter is shrouded in a corona of LIGHT. The sound of jazz is beautiful and sweet and hovers above the shrill of the police sirens. MELVIN turns to his daughter and tells him that she needs to know who she is as a person, before she knows or accepts anything else in life. He asks his daughter if she sees the man playing the saxophone and she innocently nods. MELVIN tells his daughter that that’s what an angel sounds like. He picks her up and together the two walk in the direction of the white light. The moment the door to the playground closes—Bullets are heard thundering across the playground.
2.) There is a close-up of MELVIN’s body lying dead in the middle of the playground. The HARD LIGHTS of police vehicles reflect shades of red and blue. MARK steps up, steam hovering above the top of his rifle. He looks at his BROTHER and feels the fissure on his own cheek. The moment MELVIN COTTON-BLACK MELVIN-JESUS DE CEILO’s body is escorted away in a black shroud a sound is heard. The office looks behind him to see his daughter, MELODY, inexplicable groping a shiny brass saxophone. MELODY blows in the horn, erupting flat notes and sour chords. Slowly Melody, is learning to play.
David A. Von Behren
TREATMENT
St. Cecelia's Playground is a hip, late-seventies retro drama chronicling the lives of the Cotton brothers Melvin (or "Black Mel" our posh afro-sporting protagonist) and his much lighter skinned twin brother Marquette (or Mark). The film serves as both an inquiry into the economic slavery evident in lower-income Americana as well as a street meditation on the recurring theme, "What's the difference between God and Man?" The answer being that man, flushed with all of his foibles, has the capacity to change, whereas a fixed notion of a deity often tithes emotional incarceration in lieu of individual forgiveness.
THEME: What’s the difference between God and Man?
ACT ONE
1.)
Our story convenes in ATLANTA, GA 1967. Bickering barflies SEYMOUR “SCRUGGSY” SCRUGGS(29) and portly jovial CLEVELAND TUBBS (31) loaf at a bar stool with JERZ LORDS, owner of BOO RADLEY’s, (41) a popular Afro-American Jazz Dig. The bantering comfortably evolves around drink, debauchery and the dulcet soprano voice of BROWN SUAGH (24), performing later that night. Enter BLACK MELVIN, our stories protagonist. Orphaned at a young age, MELVIN COTTON (20) was raised inside ST. CECELIA’s ORPHANAGE in a downtown vector of Atlanta. MELVIN is dressed in camouflage military garb. In two days he will be deported to Vietnam. MELVIN is a jazz phenom and has his SAXAPHONE CASE with him in tow. On the far corner of the bar an OLD MAN jaded by the peril of life ruffles newspapers headlines and mysteriously walks out. MELVIN seems to have some sort of affiliation with the OLD MAN but remains reticent when Cleveland inquires.
In struts sergeant MARK (20) a corrupt, arrogant white Atlanta cop. He is followed into the bar with two of his badged toadies. MARK cracks lewd jokes about lynching and gets into a verbal scuffle with a stoned CLEVELAND TUBBS. JERZ LORDS placates his multi-cultural clientele with free drinks. Sergeant MARK walks to an opposite side of the jazz club.
As the carousing continues MELVIN and SCRUGGSY have a heart to heart about ST. CECELIA’s, the institution they both attended. SCRUGSSY brings up the name FATHER ANTOIN and MELVIN seems distant. He is anxious to leave ATLANTA. Something in the past seems to be bothering him and MELVIN seems anxious to start life anew, even if it is in the war torn tattered republic of Vietnam.
On stage an ILLUMINATED CONE encircles the ANNOUNCER. Claps are heard as GRACIE “BLACK SUGAH” begins to sing. MELVIN momentarily forgets about his mysterious past and stargazes on the angelic countenance and smooth vocal tendencies of GRACIE. A HISPANIC WAITER clears martini glasses from the tables.
After Gracie has sung the ANNOUNCER focuses his attention on MELVIN, informing the raucous audience that MEL is leaving for NAM come two days time. After a little verbal nudge from his cohorts, MELVIN picks up his saxophone and heads towards the stage. His sonorous tunes rivals GRACIE’s in terms of tonality and beauty. The audience remains awed.
Following MEL’s performance clattering and cursing is heard in the back of BOO RADLEYS. Apparently, the HISPANIC WAITER has inadvertently spilled part of a drink on one of the WHITE OFFICERS. IN a fit of rage the WHITE OFFICE overturns the table, pins the HISPANIC WAITER into the floor and endeavors to beat him comatose. When JERZ LORDS endeavors to make PEACE, OFFICER MARK fires several random rounds into the air, informing JERZ that, “even though things thave CHNAGED in this town, things haven’t really CHANGED.”
OFFICER MARK swivels the nozzle of his pistol from JERZ into the forehead of the ANNOUNCER. Without a word the trigger is pulled. The announcer falls over dead. A sick look of shock etched into his face. OFFICER MARK re-cocks his pistol, aiming it in the direction of the battered HISPANIC. As he is about to fire the pistol he is forcefully shoved aside by MELVIN COTTON. AS OFFICER MARK misfires the pistol, the wayward bullet enters into the chest of his fellow OFFICER. The third officer rushes toward MELVIN and MARK, only to be placed in a headlock by CLEVELAND TUBBS. MELVIN and MARK continue wrestle. The gun gets kicked aside and is quickly picked up and emptied by JERZ LORDS.
The scuffle between Mark and Melvin continue. Mark accuses Melvin of not knowing who he truly is. The two continue to flagellate the other with their fists. MARK MELVIN on the ground, choking him. He lifts up an empty bottle of JACK DANIELS. MARK attempts to christen MELVIN’s face with the bottle by shattering it over his head. The moment he swings the glass gavel, MELVIN moves and the bottle smashes into the floor. Melvin then maneuvers on top of MARK and quickly presses MARK’s own face into the pool of GLASS SHARDS.
MELVIN gets up. Blood has sopped through his Military garb. He is breathing heavily. BOO RADLEY’s has for the most part completely emptied. He looks at the fallen bodies of OFFICER WARREN and the ANNOUNCER. The HISPANIC WAITER slowly sputters and groans into consciousness.
CLEVELAND TUBBS nods his head. Scruggys bends over and begins to drag the dead bodies near the alleyway door. JERZ LORDS brushes back descending tears from his sockets and begins to vent out a nervous breakdown. LORDS begins to crack open BOTTLES OF BOURBON in rage. TUBBS and SCRUUGSY nod their heads back and forth in shame. MELVIN endeavors to calm JERZ down. Unsuspectingly, a bloody faced MARK bats the inside of his pant cuff, unveiling a knife.
More bottles of Bourbon and other Liquor break. Melvin tries to calm down the proprietor, unaware that MARK is behind him brandishing a KNIFE. Seconds before MARK’s KNIFE slices into MELVIN spine, the battered Spanish waiter screams out a Hispanic warning and MELVIN turns. The slicing knife scrapes the side of MELVIN’s cheek, granting him with a MARK of CAIN welt.
Unable to control himself, JERZ lashes at OFFICER MARK and is immediately stabbed in the stomach. Melvin turns around, launches his entire body in the direction of MARK. The two fall down again and begin to wrestle.
MARK is on top of MELVIN pummeling him several times. MELVIN lifts up his boots and tosses MARK into a barge of TABLES still dim lit with CANDLES. The CANDLES skid off the side of the table and land on the bar, where JERZ LORDS broke bottles of BOURBON in a maniacal rage. The bar soon erupts in flames. MARK gets up and lashes his feral limbs towards MELVIN again.
Innately clumsy, pissed off and stoned, CLEVELAND TUBBS, in an endeavor to do the RIGHT THING, picks up several bottles of whiskey and baptizes the flames. The fire snickers and crackles. The whole bar and half the club is swallowed in flames. The screech of FIRE SIRENS becomes audible.
TUBBS is pushed out the door by SCRUGGSY. Inside the bar OFFICER MARK and MELVIN continue to stab each other with their fists. FLAMES ensnarl the building.
The SOUND OF SIRENs continue to blare. MARK is on top of MELVIN and continues to gash MELVIN’s face into the earth. BOO RADLEY’s is now HADES. Black MELVIN and WHITE MARK have now become a metaphorical nemesis. MELVIN appears to be completely enervated, weak.
Mark launches one final pummel into MELVIN’s face. The bruised MELVIN locates the KNIFE MARK stabbed JERZ LORDS with, beaming in a quivering strip of flame. AS MARK launches one final blow, MELVIN deftly grapples the knife, slicing it on the left cheek, similar to where MELVIN’s face is scarred. The two rivals stumble. TUBBS and SCRUGGSY haul a battered and bleeding Melvin outside BOO RADLEY’s just as the establish soars into flames.
2.) Melvin awakes inside CLEVELAND TUBBS’ bachelor pad. SCRUGGSY doctors Mel’s welts with a BOTTLE OF VODKA. He reads a newspaper Headline about Boo Radleys then reads an obituary for JERZ LORDS. TUBBS makes a point of noting that MEL and Sergeant MARK have the same last name. Disgruntled, MELVIN notes that the spelling of their last name is slightly different.
There is a knock on the door. As SCRUGGSY answers it the room is filled with bullets. SCRUGGSY falls down dead. TUBBS shoves MELVIN towards the window. Looking MELVIN straight into the eyes TUBBS tells MELVIN that, out of the three of them, his job is simply to stay alive. TUBBS then kisses MELVIN on the lips. MELVIN is shocked. TUBBS steps back, smiles and forcefully pushes MELVIN through the glass window. He then turns around, wielding the empty bottle of VODKA like a sword.
MELVIN falls three stories down below. Upon hitting the cement he realizes that he fell straight on top of an OLD LADY walking her SCHANUZER. As MEL attempts to resuscitate the OLD LADY he hears more bullets. The BOTTLE OF VODKA smashes on MELVIN’s left hand. TUBBS is DEAD.
MELVIN takes off running. The Schnauzer chases after MELVIN. When MELVIN finds himself cornered in an alleyway, he picks up the snapping dog and tosses him against the brick wall.
MELVIN finds himself entering a DREAMWORLD. He is cornered on all sides. SILHOUETTES of the PAST encroach him. He finds himself looking at his demons. He sees himself as an ELEVEN year old boy talking to FATHER ANTOIN at CONFESSION.
3.)Melvin awakes in the apartment of GRACE HOLIDAY, the lounge singer who goes by the name of BROWN SUGAH. The two have been making love. GRACE hints that MELVIN should be thankful that she saved him. The two make love and Melvin informs GRACE that he had to leave town, but not before he attends to some unfinished business.
4.) Melvin enters the interior of St. Cecelia’s parish. He enters into the oak confessional booth. Without saying a word, MELVIN grapples FATHER ANTOIN and, inexplicably, begins to pummel him. MELVIN demands that FATHER ANTOIN “If he has sinned.” FATHER ANTOIN damns MELVIN as MELVIN drags the priest into the front of the cathedral, sodomizing him with a crucifix.
As Melvin exits St. CECELIA he spots the HISPANIC WAITER. MELVIN accuses him of starting all this, claiming that if the waiter could just hold a Martini glass straight, none of his friends’ would be dead. Without saying a word, the waiter pulls out MELVIN’s SAXAPHONE. It is polished and bright. MELVIN accepts the gift and when he inquires “what the fuck is going on?” all the waiter can respond is ¡La paz de Dios!
ACT TWO
1.)
In Vietnam MELVIN becomes lonely. He scribbles epistles of timeless love for GRACE. He is placed in truculent SGT. "NO SHIT" MOORE’s infantry. In the infantry MELVIN becomes known as BLACK MEL. His best friend is a Mexican-American street-legal pothead named JESUS DE CIELO (21). A bevy of other soldiers are also present including nerdy pocket-calculator toting Ralph Whickers (17) knife-wielding Jordie Reents (19) ex-hippie Abby Brooks "A.B"(23), semi-portly comic relief Chuck "CHUCKLES" Hungslow and coy, Oscar wildish cross-dresser Thespian Tommie Newman.
BLACK MEL: Your name geez-us, as in JESUS CHRIST what the hell is going on.
JESUS: It looks like Jesus but its pronounced Hey-zeus. Like the other God. The god of all them other gods.
BLACK MEL: So you gonna turn that water into wine first or you gonna raise my black ass up from the dead when I'm shot.
Jesus (toasting a libation): Both.
One night, after a series of battles, BLACK MEL is in his sleeping bag, masturbating, and thinking about GRACE. Tommie thinks of this as a come on, enters BLACK MEL sleeping bag and tries to fool around. MEL rightfully snaps, pins TOMMIE and almost kills him if not for JESUS stepping in between them. Jesus and Mel have a heart to heart in the dense foliage abutting Saigon. Jesus rolls a joint and the two men reminisce of home.
One night SGT. MOORE is chomping down hard on the spittled end of his cigar, contemplating. Chuckles is entertaining the group with anecdotes about the Asian whore "PUSHIE HONDA." SGT. Moore disciplines CHUCKLES and whips into a diatribe. BLACK MEL ignores Moore’s comments and continues scribbling a letter to GRACE. SGT. MOORE confiscates the letter and reads it aloud to the fellow troops. At first the troops laugh, treat the scenario like a locker room. Soon though, the SGT. himself chokes because Black MEL words are so poetically poignant. Sgt. Moore stops just short of the last paragraph and crinkles MELVIN’s epistle into the size of a golf ball.
SGT. MOORE: If only all of you fuckers knew you were fighting for something you could come home to.
2.)
In Vietnam Sgt. Moore's battalion has one week left. It is a quiet night and crickets are heard chirping oratorios. Black Melvin is playing his saxophone thinking about GRACE. RALPH is showing JORDIE how to fix a radio transmitter. Abby is listening to the DOORS PEOPLE ARE STRANGE. CHUCKELS is fixing a sandwich parodying a little tummy-jiggle dance of pending freedom, discretely pointing his utensil in the direction of TOMMIE (who is brooding over a volume of Oscar Wilde) every time Morrison says the word strange. Jesus is rolling something seedy and green, licking tobacco paper with his tongue. SGT. Moore takes something out of his pocket and examines it.
There is a close-up of BLACK MEL humming into his sax and then there is an inexplicable explosion followed by cursing. The whole entire planet seems to fall into itself, into the dank casket of the earth. There is mass confusion and emotional pell mell. Black Melvin is trapped by shrapnel and to his left he sees the empty sockets and bloody head of SGT. Moore. His saxophone is melted. Black Mel looks around and sees RALPH and JODIE wailing in pain. BLACK MELVIN yelps out for help and CHUCKELS is heard laughing.
CHUCKLES: DEATH. We're dying. HA!!!!!! This is it. This is the point of the movie where the credits begin to roll. Death! HA!!!!!
Chuckles continues to slowly hum People are Strange before being swallowed into a military obituary headline.
"When your strange, faces come out of the rain. When your strange, no one remembers your name."
BLACK Mel yells out. He hears Tommie call MEL Othello saying that he can go fuck his own five-fingered Desdemona, big Black fuck. Apparently Tommie has found a way out.
BLACK MEL begins to hallucinate. It seems like he has been down here for days. He thinks about TUBBS wearing a nuns habit. He thinks about the pensive expression plastered on the lips of the Virgin MARY while he was sodomized FATHER ANTOIN with a crucifix. MEL reaches around his neck and thinks about GRACE. He reaches the scar on his right hand side and thinks about officer MARK. He feels that he is slipping out of his earthly attire.
Black MEL looks next to him, he sees a scarred Jesus. Jesus says that he can help BLACK MELVIN but only if MELVIN says Jesus name.
BLACK MELVIN: Hey-Zeus. Hey-Zeus.
Jesus: NO, say my name. Say my name the way your mother said my name in church. Say my name the way you said my when you were taken away from my mother.
BLACK MEL asks if JESUS has lost it. He asks if JESUS is fucking crazy. Finally, he says JESUS name as a vulgarity and JESUS asks him one question.
JESUS: DO you want to go back home, or do you want to come with me?
BLACK MEL: I just don't want to remain stuck. Shit. Jesus Shit. I been stuck all my life. I've been stuck all my life!
Jesus slowly trudges over to BLACK MELVIN. He loosens the metal detritus and, playing Virgil to BLACK MEL's downtrodden Dante leads Black Melvin out of the wreckage into a DOME OF WHITE LIGHT. The two shadows eventually coalesce into one integer and Balck Melvin is surrounded by rescue workers. Baffled, Black Mel looks around. He sees the bodies of Sgt. Moore, A.B., Chuckles, Jordie and Ralph piled up in a funeral pyre. Then he sees Jesus dead body heaped onto the pyre as well.
Apparently BLACK MEL was buried alive for 72 hours. Jesus' body was exhumed charred and deceased ten hours after the initial blast.
When BLACK MEL feels around his neck, he sees a dog tag. On it is the name JESUS MARTINEZ.
3.) MELVIN wakes up in a psych ward. BLACK MEL is confused. He spends days in a psych ward where he finds Tommie Newman alone one day and immediately begins to pummel him. When Melvin is refrained from TOMMIE it turns out that what Melvin was actually hitting was a picture of the cross.
Inside the Psych ward MELVIN is called JESUS de Cielo (since that was the dog tag he was wearing) He begins to have long sessions with his sexy counselor VICTORIA MEADOWS. He tells VICTORIA about his friends who died in ATLANTA before his departure. He tells VICTORIA about his friends who died with him in NAM. He tells her how he feels that he is nothing more that a character in a novel where weird shit keeps on happening and everyone who he loves or cares for dies.
Slowly he begins to reveal more intimate details to Victoria. He tells her being rapped by FATHER ANTOIN at a young age. He tells her about his mother, LADY GREGORY, who ran a brothel. When VICTORIA inquires whether JESUS is aware of any other family members MELVIN’s face remains silent. Rubbing a finger down his facial SCAR MELVIN tells VICTORIA that he once had a brother.
On the day of their last session VICTORIA and MELVIN kiss. VICTORIA (still calling Melvin Jesus) implores him not to go back to Atlanta, fearing that his life may be stake. MELVIN tells VICTORIA not to worry. That even Jesus was met with a pretty big reception when he re-entered Jerusalem. The two make love on her therapist couch. Melvin thinks about the playground at St. Cecelia’s.
4.)
Back in Atlanta MELVIN has usurped the identity on his savior’s dog tag, JESUS DE CIELO. The city has become even more segregated and oppressed
Slowly Jesus begins to become an alcoholic. He is 27 years old. He sports a full afro, wears vinyl jackets, walks with a limp, drinks forties of STROHS LAGER out of brown paper bags. There are dilapidated scenes of MELVIN's old neighborhood. We see the rundown WHITE ONLY water fountain. We see the ruins of the CHURCH. The neighborhood is in financial decay. Only St. Cecelia’s seems cleaned up. They have a new fence. New playground equipment. It is no longer solely an orphanage but a parochial school.
Walking past St. Cecelia, drunk, Mel notices a young girl of six in pigtail and a catholic skirt running across the street. He feels some esoteric, bloodline connection with the girl. Across the street he sees GRACE. Though seven years older her skin is still refulgent and smooth. The young girl leaps into Grace’s arms. Melvin begins to walk he sees SARGANT MARK, doff his police hat and place his solicitous arm around the two of them. They are obviously a family.
JESUS is stunned. A car beeps. MARK looks at JESUS and tells him to get out of the middle of the street.
JESUS limps over a cemetery and finds FATHER ANTOINS grave. Without giving a second thought, JESUS (Melvin) unzips and urinates, pouring out the rest of his beer and then smashing the bottle on the FATHER's grave. Melvin then begins to cry. He damns God. He damns his father. He rips off the JESUS dog tag and tosses it into the ground.
Feeling all alone, JESUS saunters past his old haunt. He hears the sound of a jazz trumpet. Turning the corner he sees a portly man in a wheelchair with no feet. The man is wearing a derby cap and is blowing smooth jazz tunes. There is a BOTTLE OF VODKA next to his wheelchair. It is TUBBS.
TUBBS immediately recognizes MELVIN. He is excited to see him. MELVIN tells TUBBS that his name is really JESUS. TUBBS becomes disconcerted. He claims that he took bullets and became paralyzed so that MELVIN could be free. MELVIN insists that his name is JESUS. TEARS begins to drip down TUBBS fine chin and he tells MELVIN that it served him right that OFFICER MARK married GRACE, even if she was pregnant with you-know-who’s child. MELVIN becomes silent. Slowly he continues to walk without looking back. TUBBS throws his trumpet in despair.
TUBBS: I wait all these years for use to come back and use don’t even know whose use is. Fuck you then, Melvin, Jesus, whatever use names bees, fuck use.
MELVIN continues to walk. He gets another forty and walks past a boarded up and dilapidated BOO RADLEYS. Sitting down at an abandoned BUS STOP outside, he hears a voice. The old man who MELVIN saw seven years inside the jazz club is seated next to him, reminiscing about JERZ LORDS fine establishment.
JESUS shares his forty with the old man who goes by the name of DRUNK HAROLD (54). Melvin says that his name is Jesus but that none of his friends’ know him. DRUNK HAROLD disparages JESUS, telling him that he never did know who he was—even growing up. Slowly, JESUS becomes aware that the old man knows something. It turns out that DRAUNK HAROLD is MELVIN’s father.
HAROLD tells MELVIN all about his mother, LADY GREGORY.. DRUNK HAROLD explains that actually, his LADY GREGORY was carrying twins fathered by different males, at the same time. A genetic possibility but one that is rarely heard of. MELVIN is Harold’s son. When MELVIN inquires about his brother, HAROLD runs his finger down the side of his cheek. MELVIN remains silent.
The father and son roll a joint. MELVIN begins to ask his newly found father for advice. DRUNK HAROLD offers insight, tells a drunk and stoned MELVIN that sometimes in life, you gotta go back to the place where shit happens and fix everything.
MELVIN thinks about this and smiles. He gets up and avails a revolver from the inside of his pants. Without saying a word BLACK MEL shoots DRUNK HAROLD.
“Looks like god the son finally get gonna come back after all, Tubbs.” He says.
ACT THREE
1.)
BLACK MEL is lurking outside of St. Cecelia's Playground. There is a catholic sister and a small class size playing duck duck goose. The school has cleaned up considerably but it is still located in a shady part of town.
Without saying a word BLACK MELVIN leaps over the fence. He whips out his gun and presses it against the nun's heads. When the nun asks who he is, MELVIN says that his name is JESUS and that he has come back from the dead to take what was rightfully his. MELVIN forces the classroom out from the playground and back inside the school. They enter the sanctuary. BLACK MEL is crazy. A locomotive stream of vulgarities erupts from his lips. He forces the kids down in front of the statue of Virgin Mary. He tells them to pray. Pray that there is a god and that God cares enough about your ass to let you live. Pray for verification.
Melvin bolts the students in the sanctuary. Slowly Melvin escorts each student to the confessional booth. He asks then the question, "What's the difference between God and man?" He tosses the children down and fetches another one. The last student he interrogates is MELODY (7) the daughter BLACK MEL conceived with GRACE before he left for Vietnam. The daughter MELVIN has never met.
Outside MELVIN hears the sharp whirl of police sirens begin to escalate. He looks at his daughter.
MELODY: IF you is, Jesus than why you black?
MELVIN looks at his daughter. He removes his nozzle and points it sharply onto his daughters temple. MELODY tells MELVIN that her dad is a police man. MELVIN (JESUS) tells MELODY that his dad is a God. The two look at each other. MELVIN kisses his daughter on the forehead and tells her to kneel down in front of him and pray. As soon as Melody closes her eyes, MELVIN puts the nozzle of the gun into his own mouth. He closes his eyes and is about to pull the trigger before he hears the sound of a saxophone, humming in the direction of the playground. It is a sweet dulcet sound. MELVIN drops the gun and picks up his daughter. They walk down a corridor and look into the playground. Near the jungle gym, both Melvin sees the Hispanic waiter, humming into a saxophone. The waiter is shrouded in a corona of LIGHT. The sound of jazz is beautiful and sweet and hovers above the shrill of the police sirens. MELVIN turns to his daughter and tells him that she needs to know who she is as a person, before she knows or accepts anything else in life. He asks his daughter if she sees the man playing the saxophone and she innocently nods. MELVIN tells his daughter that that’s what an angel sounds like. He picks her up and together the two walk in the direction of the white light. The moment the door to the playground closes—Bullets are heard thundering across the playground.
2.) There is a close-up of MELVIN’s body lying dead in the middle of the playground. The HARD LIGHTS of police vehicles reflect shades of red and blue. MARK steps up, steam hovering above the top of his rifle. He looks at his BROTHER and feels the fissure on his own cheek. The moment MELVIN COTTON-BLACK MELVIN-JESUS DE CEILO’s body is escorted away in a black shroud a sound is heard. The office looks behind him to see his daughter, MELODY, inexplicable groping a shiny brass saxophone. MELODY blows in the horn, erupting flat notes and sour chords. Slowly Melody, is learning to play.
Thursday, July 19, 2007
Teddy
If after all that— would I knot my tie in the same manner as your Ted?
Take you home, spread your legs, enter the
Split aerial, gold on my fingerprints blood bitten bottom lip
Don’t hesitate to harangue
Enter the place where all your poems come,
Be your mattress, you on top (so much shit they gave us once)
Plumsugahskies lid, lavender ships, my spring break, my circled ink calendar space
Buoyed matter, my little pinkie curled around your auburn tress, sloughed
Skirt blouse, heaped in androgynous dune, corduroy tangled afternoon
Where I tell you shit—
‘Don’t hafta turn the oven on 400 to stick your head in it—
To feel warm inside’- fairy child since he lied, kiss your July forehead
Paint your nails an amethyst blue, dew your tears and wet your hips,
Watch your fingertips come—
would I be like him, though.
Etonian fop, dressed alone, salutary, milk
Your nipples until a bad poem curdles, sully
Sunday alone, tweed, elbow patched, your name
In my jacket, your fluid on my handkerchief
Scent stilllife with a bowl of honey
Salt from my body, your eyes black as
Tacks pinned to that place where you would
Not let me take you.
Where you would not let me take you away.
Take you home, spread your legs, enter the
Split aerial, gold on my fingerprints blood bitten bottom lip
Don’t hesitate to harangue
Enter the place where all your poems come,
Be your mattress, you on top (so much shit they gave us once)
Plumsugahskies lid, lavender ships, my spring break, my circled ink calendar space
Buoyed matter, my little pinkie curled around your auburn tress, sloughed
Skirt blouse, heaped in androgynous dune, corduroy tangled afternoon
Where I tell you shit—
‘Don’t hafta turn the oven on 400 to stick your head in it—
To feel warm inside’- fairy child since he lied, kiss your July forehead
Paint your nails an amethyst blue, dew your tears and wet your hips,
Watch your fingertips come—
would I be like him, though.
Etonian fop, dressed alone, salutary, milk
Your nipples until a bad poem curdles, sully
Sunday alone, tweed, elbow patched, your name
In my jacket, your fluid on my handkerchief
Scent stilllife with a bowl of honey
Salt from my body, your eyes black as
Tacks pinned to that place where you would
Not let me take you.
Where you would not let me take you away.
Monday, July 16, 2007
On Easter Morning 1983 we found the dead body of Superman
Hung off a dead-tooth branch of the balboa tree in our backyard
I remember that it was Sunday morning before Church.
Georgia May had pinned her palm branch from
Sunday School above her headboard, crying after Aunt Glynnis
Told her in between drags to, “Can it with the hosanna’s, alright!”
Grandpa had woken up early to go out and fire
his Remmington at the one-legged whippoorwill
Returning with a red knee high boot cupped in one palm.
Superman’s shirt was inside out.
A pair of crooked spectacles with
Spider web lens lay crippled below his shadow
His body hung swayed and paused
Like the transparent spine of a grandfather’s clock
A ballpark patch of urine drew fleas near his crotch.
Grandpa said that apparently he had used Wonder woman’s lasso
Which led Uncle Karl to momentarily put down his
PBR and make thrusting sounds with his torso.
In a way thinking back on it now, it was kind of funny
The way grandpa angled the ladder against the tree
using his own father’s Cherokee knife to free
Superman’s neck from the jaundice strap.
A listless blue plummeting into the earth.
Georgia May ran around rattling the plastic
Eggs to see which ones contained dimes and
In the evening time, none of us took note
Of the train that whistled past in the distance,
Lugging tufts of smoke on the railroad
Tracks that hadn’t been used
Only Georgia May pointed at the unusual array of Canadian
geese flapping over head
Forming a mathematical greater-than- sign
In their formation headed in a direction
That wasn’t quite South.
Monday, July 09, 2007
Two dredged up prose poems composed Valentines day 1995....
Since I’ve somehow fucked things up with Maggie…
I spend Valentine’s day with Jennene, who I used to go clubbing with five years ago, and who I used to kiss even though Jennene is a flannel clad dyke who’d kick my ass if I ever slipped her the tongue-- Jenenne would only let me kiss the perched hyphen on her face, once, very quickly—after we snuck into the girls’ bathroom at the Red Fox Den and snorted lines of coke off the porcelain bicep of the sink, in front of a rather philosophical rainbow painted above a sad browed mirror proclaiming the Lesbian mantra: I KANT EVEN DRIVE STRAIGHT, we’d chop up powdery caterpillars, inhaling honest sniffs as the grainy olfactory sentences drilled saccharine numbness into nasal canyons and then we’d dance, our hips straddled tightly beneath the stutter and crooked din of the dance floor, chinking long-necks Jennene would stop between cinder shots and tell me that she loves me before our eyes would close at the same exact time—like dual garage doors slowly digesting strafed genitals into the cement palate of wayward loss.
Vespers
We drove home drunk, mistaking the thud for a speed bump until Kirby got out, vomiting a crimson rug near the fuel tank and realized that we had run over something; his bicycle upside down, banana cushioned and wheels oscillating like a spindle; two spoked binoculars grating in dismayed wondering in what direction the wind will whistle.
Friday, July 06, 2007
BOOKSTORE EMPLOYEE BRANDISHES MALLET BEHIND COUNTER
REVEALS IDENTITY OF ROBOT PATRON FALLS IN LOVE
REVEALS IDENTITY OF ROBOT PATRON FALLS IN LOVE
Perhaps it would not be so obvious at first
The corporeal gait of the surrogate human
Ferrying a pagoda of summertime tomes
Between the retail labyrinth of bargain
And Bestsellers strutting with the same
March of middle class uppity
As he fumbles his purchase on the cash wrapt
Oprah’s seal stamped on each of them
Like the Magna Carta of artistic security
Or maybe he treated you
The way patrons often treat menial bookstore
Slaves as if they are manacled to the
Ray guns that scan the merchandise
Nothing more than blinking ATM machines
To barter currency for hazed over sentences
(And how dare you invite them to join
Some sort of a members benefit club!!!)
Even though it is required of you to ask them
When you know they will scowl at you in decline
Even though job security often involves
Placing certain expressing organs and glands
Of our body into Tupperware
While invisible steel hooks
Tug the side of our lips into a smile
Inquiring to the robot patrons if there is anything
We could help them find before annihilating them
Cudgeling them with the investigative mallet you
Told me about when first we met
The tip of the warrior baton
Lanced in his side like a flag
The slot white of his eyes whirling back
Into his skull reminiscent of a casino jackpot
Tendrils of steam streaking from earlobes
In a jet stream of gray smoke
As his ersatz anatomy continues to leak
Coating the manicured carpet with the
Springy coils and greasy gaskets of his intestines
As one final yellow shock snaps
Out near his neck and you know he is gone.
In first grade Cedric Dockery told me
There was a robot inside of him
Miss Heinz didn’t realize I was dyslexic so
We had to stay inside the classroom during recess
Re-working over simple addition
My head unable to discern the numerical scrotum
Between six and nine
Between a lowercase p and a lowercase b
Balloons on a stick
Hovering above the inky cornfields of sentences
Twisted as they entered the innocuous field of
My six year old vision.
Wishing then that I could have been
Tapped over the head with the
Tip of a mallet wand
In an effort to help me perceive what the first added
Elementary sum of what reality was supposed to resemble
Or how a wielding patron annihilating mallet
Would have come in useful
During my own bookstore days ten years ago
The born again middle-aged Christian
Calling me a marketer of the devil
Because we sold playboys and magic the gathering cards
And how he planned on publicly telling
Fellow patrons in the store
That he plans on boycotting us.
How I wish I could have had a mallet
To pry open my lips, informing
Him that most gas stations also sold playboys
And magic the gathering cards and I don’t think
He plans on boycotting them—
Plus we also sold bibles!!!
Or the time I stole a copy of the Kama Sutra
For the woman I thought I wanted to marry
Hoping that it would serve as an accelerator
Switch the limp pistons and gears of our bodies
Feeling as if our flesh itself was coated
In a film of aggregated rust
Hoping that maybe one slight
Movement of combined muscles into flesh
Would reignite something that had long
Since been diminished,
Something that could not be
Put back together again in time
Like a car motor or a snapped serpentine belt
How I wish I had the insight of a smashed
Mallet across my skull then
The carousel of hurt correlating with the
Sockets of loneliness
Under the lid of my chest.
But I couldn’t find a mallet
The vertical weapon of slaughter
Curled in the grip of your palm
Wisps of steam still incinerating
From the guts of the robot carcass
Whose skin you just obliterated
Wondering what would happen
If you hit me over the head
With a mallet
wondering if my heart would
Topple out from my lips
As if you had just placed two
Quarters into the slits of my eyes
Twisting my nose a certain direction
Watching as everything
Inside of my body
Breaks free in front of your eyes.
The corporeal gait of the surrogate human
Ferrying a pagoda of summertime tomes
Between the retail labyrinth of bargain
And Bestsellers strutting with the same
March of middle class uppity
As he fumbles his purchase on the cash wrapt
Oprah’s seal stamped on each of them
Like the Magna Carta of artistic security
Or maybe he treated you
The way patrons often treat menial bookstore
Slaves as if they are manacled to the
Ray guns that scan the merchandise
Nothing more than blinking ATM machines
To barter currency for hazed over sentences
(And how dare you invite them to join
Some sort of a members benefit club!!!)
Even though it is required of you to ask them
When you know they will scowl at you in decline
Even though job security often involves
Placing certain expressing organs and glands
Of our body into Tupperware
While invisible steel hooks
Tug the side of our lips into a smile
Inquiring to the robot patrons if there is anything
We could help them find before annihilating them
Cudgeling them with the investigative mallet you
Told me about when first we met
The tip of the warrior baton
Lanced in his side like a flag
The slot white of his eyes whirling back
Into his skull reminiscent of a casino jackpot
Tendrils of steam streaking from earlobes
In a jet stream of gray smoke
As his ersatz anatomy continues to leak
Coating the manicured carpet with the
Springy coils and greasy gaskets of his intestines
As one final yellow shock snaps
Out near his neck and you know he is gone.
In first grade Cedric Dockery told me
There was a robot inside of him
Miss Heinz didn’t realize I was dyslexic so
We had to stay inside the classroom during recess
Re-working over simple addition
My head unable to discern the numerical scrotum
Between six and nine
Between a lowercase p and a lowercase b
Balloons on a stick
Hovering above the inky cornfields of sentences
Twisted as they entered the innocuous field of
My six year old vision.
Wishing then that I could have been
Tapped over the head with the
Tip of a mallet wand
In an effort to help me perceive what the first added
Elementary sum of what reality was supposed to resemble
Or how a wielding patron annihilating mallet
Would have come in useful
During my own bookstore days ten years ago
The born again middle-aged Christian
Calling me a marketer of the devil
Because we sold playboys and magic the gathering cards
And how he planned on publicly telling
Fellow patrons in the store
That he plans on boycotting us.
How I wish I could have had a mallet
To pry open my lips, informing
Him that most gas stations also sold playboys
And magic the gathering cards and I don’t think
He plans on boycotting them—
Plus we also sold bibles!!!
Or the time I stole a copy of the Kama Sutra
For the woman I thought I wanted to marry
Hoping that it would serve as an accelerator
Switch the limp pistons and gears of our bodies
Feeling as if our flesh itself was coated
In a film of aggregated rust
Hoping that maybe one slight
Movement of combined muscles into flesh
Would reignite something that had long
Since been diminished,
Something that could not be
Put back together again in time
Like a car motor or a snapped serpentine belt
How I wish I had the insight of a smashed
Mallet across my skull then
The carousel of hurt correlating with the
Sockets of loneliness
Under the lid of my chest.
But I couldn’t find a mallet
The vertical weapon of slaughter
Curled in the grip of your palm
Wisps of steam still incinerating
From the guts of the robot carcass
Whose skin you just obliterated
Wondering what would happen
If you hit me over the head
With a mallet
wondering if my heart would
Topple out from my lips
As if you had just placed two
Quarters into the slits of my eyes
Twisting my nose a certain direction
Watching as everything
Inside of my body
Breaks free in front of your eyes.
Wednesday, June 27, 2007
Babies in avocados
I found it on my way to work this afternoon
Perched on the lip of my doorstep
In a thick brown envelope like the
Abandoned bassinet you always
See placed in front of an orphanage
Christmas morning in movies where
The young superhero reared by nuns
Learns through a series of jump cuts and stilted
Black and white flash backs the elusive
Origins of his past and how I smiled
At first when I saw your name
Picking the package up with two hands
And just holding it for a minute
Remembering how our bodies fit together
How I could hear, audibly hear
The syllable of your every thought
Swelling in your pulse
Your petite neck on my chest
As I held you early that morning
Before you left as I held
The postaged preemie
In my arms before
Opening it as if I were
Trying to unhook
A brassiere for the first time
Excited and curious as to what would
Release itself into my palms
Yet nervous and even a little scared
Watching with awed vision
As the contents availed themselves
An autographed (!!!) novel by Sherman Alexie
(Whose short-story “The Toughest Indian in the World
Is one of my all-time favorites.”)
The mixed CD the first half I’ve
Already listened to during my break
Here at work today,
A copy of Harold and Maude
Your favorite movie which I have never seen
And a letter
—Two letters composed in pencil
Nobody including myself writes
Beautiful letters and sends them via
Mail anymore without logging in a
User name and dotted password first
Unfolding the twin sheaths
Still fresh with the DNA of your
Fingertips and breath
Alphabetical paper ships
Of your words floating across
The white pond of the page
Where you wrote me about your religious periphery
Language kneeling at the altar behind your voice
Where you wrote me about
Yearning and about fear
And about leaving and near the end of the second
Letter you told me to drop you a line if I wanted to have babies
The quote I have never before heard
Embraced in a gray-ripple of penciled
Dashes buoyed with an exclamatory stalk
Walt Whitman’s name standing
On the banks of the quotation
As if the overweight bearded poet himself
Toasted the pear shaped orb up to the sun like a film negative
One morning after bathing
Naked in the Hudson
And found a fetus
Pitted within the center of the fruit
Like a dead Christmas tree ornament
The color of the wood in my apartment since you left
The embryo spending the last trimester
Outgrowing the mother
A seed so lonely for the taste of what once was
Surrounded by a moist placenta of mushy
Wonder wet with joy.
Perched on the lip of my doorstep
In a thick brown envelope like the
Abandoned bassinet you always
See placed in front of an orphanage
Christmas morning in movies where
The young superhero reared by nuns
Learns through a series of jump cuts and stilted
Black and white flash backs the elusive
Origins of his past and how I smiled
At first when I saw your name
Picking the package up with two hands
And just holding it for a minute
Remembering how our bodies fit together
How I could hear, audibly hear
The syllable of your every thought
Swelling in your pulse
Your petite neck on my chest
As I held you early that morning
Before you left as I held
The postaged preemie
In my arms before
Opening it as if I were
Trying to unhook
A brassiere for the first time
Excited and curious as to what would
Release itself into my palms
Yet nervous and even a little scared
Watching with awed vision
As the contents availed themselves
An autographed (!!!) novel by Sherman Alexie
(Whose short-story “The Toughest Indian in the World
Is one of my all-time favorites.”)
The mixed CD the first half I’ve
Already listened to during my break
Here at work today,
A copy of Harold and Maude
Your favorite movie which I have never seen
And a letter
—Two letters composed in pencil
Nobody including myself writes
Beautiful letters and sends them via
Mail anymore without logging in a
User name and dotted password first
Unfolding the twin sheaths
Still fresh with the DNA of your
Fingertips and breath
Alphabetical paper ships
Of your words floating across
The white pond of the page
Where you wrote me about your religious periphery
Language kneeling at the altar behind your voice
Where you wrote me about
Yearning and about fear
And about leaving and near the end of the second
Letter you told me to drop you a line if I wanted to have babies
The quote I have never before heard
Embraced in a gray-ripple of penciled
Dashes buoyed with an exclamatory stalk
Walt Whitman’s name standing
On the banks of the quotation
As if the overweight bearded poet himself
Toasted the pear shaped orb up to the sun like a film negative
One morning after bathing
Naked in the Hudson
And found a fetus
Pitted within the center of the fruit
Like a dead Christmas tree ornament
The color of the wood in my apartment since you left
The embryo spending the last trimester
Outgrowing the mother
A seed so lonely for the taste of what once was
Surrounded by a moist placenta of mushy
Wonder wet with joy.
Friday, February 02, 2007
Letter to my Lover
Love,
I never made it to my spiritual vagina. I was
En route Saturday afternoon, the mercurial
engine of my blue Toyota Camry rattling down
The country highway arteries of autumnal
Illinois on a full tank of gas—its owner still
Half-sleep, wizened from work-week and wear
On the soul, harnessing the plastic steer like a
Button or a globe in front of him, two packs of
Smokes and a Venti coffee stowed in the passenger’s
Throne where once you sat next to me just three
Saturday’s before we drove into the sun that blissful
Afternoon I dumped my heart out for you like a
Carafe of memories for you to sip on and from which
You drank (can still intensely feel the curve
And syllables and alphabetical shapes your lips made
Over the faucet of my heart from that day)
Your Copper—the tangible token—a solidified
Tear licked from the upsidedown
Ocean of your heart stashed in my front right pocket
The copper, culled from your own northern
Superior spiritual nest, the pulsating eternal token
A green on-line ajar-eyelid keyhole to
The mysterious joy of my beloveds’ heart—an introit
To the conversation of lips and longings the
Tango of universal souls separate yet solidified. My
Last sojourn to Matheisson Grace had foundered
Outside the town of Lacon with the mechanical organs
Of my vehicle foundering like the transient
Interior orbs of the human body, leaving me stranded
Out of reach from my wooded creative uterus—
And your smile (always with me) As I drove,
Wending my vehicle over dips and valleys
The weather was pushing sixty, yet overcast
Beautiful gray continents of clouds
Cobbled the atmosphere in a ceiling like
British Tea occluded even a treacle of orange light—
There was the woods between the worlds and there
Was my car and there was a desolate road
Sliced between the skeletal brown brush
Strokes of the trees I followed inexplicably the
Wounded arm of the Illinois river to my right
abandoned, my orientation guided now by
the navigating tug and reel of the atlas inside
My chest, the atlas that pulls me into long drives
In autumn madly chasing, madly smoking, madly
Frisking my soul for meaning dashing after
The Last ashy dregs of sun spilling out on the
Earth in a blister of gold and tears.
Oh love, I was lost yet I was driving, content
In a zone out dream state, not giving a
Fuck about the discourse of my sojourn, visually
Enamored by the sight of a sunken
Red brow barn slouched and lonely, fields
Clipped yet a two-day harvested no shave
Gruff semblance connoted to the land—following
In love with the sight of a two story country house
Swallowed on all sides by land and thick sky—
I drove, as fast as I could, smoking
Lost, past a hamlet, into the swerves of
Hills and inclines and steady slopes when
I noticed a vehicle tailing my rear bumper—
The vehicle blue, reminding me of the
Car you drove around MN-St.Paul last august
The night you tottered and balanced with
The acrobatic finesse of an angel tottered
Sedate on my lap before we cruised home,
Lost in the syncopated chimes of Depeche mode my
Fingers lost in the veil of your hair not wanting
To let go of creature situated next to me. That car was the same
Blue as the one you were ferrying that night
August last, behind me as I was lost, and I thought it was indeed
You in the vehicle for a moment
The editions of Rumi and Leaves of Grass both
Tucked in my back dashboard— both
Editions pregnant with fallen leaves from the
Picnic table the morning after you left
Finding the expired kisses of cigarette butts, creases of our bodies
Still imbedded in the mattress of earth from
That day. I let the vehicle pass me and it gunned ahead
Myself, turning on a road I had never ventured down
Before, Myself still lost in the gray autumnal
Overcoat of the afternoon amidst barns and silos
And Trees pregnant with fairy tales, driving a
Different route then the vehicle I thought
Contained your smile—only to find that vehicle,
(speeding) behind me once again, as if it had chosen
Me, as If the vehicle were beacon leading the
Front of my car into nocturnal vistas
A dalliance of dreams, the rich lathered soil of night
Fused in front of me past shires and dirt roads
As I followed only to find it shooting ahead, swerving
Into a large house with a fence and yard
(front newly refurbished) a bouquet of thicket and
woods between the worlds on all sides
I knew as I past it that I had seen this house before
That I had lived in the house once perhaps
Before—for it was the house from the dream we
Shared—at least the front of it matched my
Dream from earlier in the week and the vehicle I had allowed
To navigate pulled into the driveway and waited
A white arm extending from the drivers side—waited
For me to pull into my dream world and
Discern the inside of what it was I had driven so long to find.
I never made it to my spiritual vagina. I was
En route Saturday afternoon, the mercurial
engine of my blue Toyota Camry rattling down
The country highway arteries of autumnal
Illinois on a full tank of gas—its owner still
Half-sleep, wizened from work-week and wear
On the soul, harnessing the plastic steer like a
Button or a globe in front of him, two packs of
Smokes and a Venti coffee stowed in the passenger’s
Throne where once you sat next to me just three
Saturday’s before we drove into the sun that blissful
Afternoon I dumped my heart out for you like a
Carafe of memories for you to sip on and from which
You drank (can still intensely feel the curve
And syllables and alphabetical shapes your lips made
Over the faucet of my heart from that day)
Your Copper—the tangible token—a solidified
Tear licked from the upsidedown
Ocean of your heart stashed in my front right pocket
The copper, culled from your own northern
Superior spiritual nest, the pulsating eternal token
A green on-line ajar-eyelid keyhole to
The mysterious joy of my beloveds’ heart—an introit
To the conversation of lips and longings the
Tango of universal souls separate yet solidified. My
Last sojourn to Matheisson Grace had foundered
Outside the town of Lacon with the mechanical organs
Of my vehicle foundering like the transient
Interior orbs of the human body, leaving me stranded
Out of reach from my wooded creative uterus—
And your smile (always with me) As I drove,
Wending my vehicle over dips and valleys
The weather was pushing sixty, yet overcast
Beautiful gray continents of clouds
Cobbled the atmosphere in a ceiling like
British Tea occluded even a treacle of orange light—
There was the woods between the worlds and there
Was my car and there was a desolate road
Sliced between the skeletal brown brush
Strokes of the trees I followed inexplicably the
Wounded arm of the Illinois river to my right
abandoned, my orientation guided now by
the navigating tug and reel of the atlas inside
My chest, the atlas that pulls me into long drives
In autumn madly chasing, madly smoking, madly
Frisking my soul for meaning dashing after
The Last ashy dregs of sun spilling out on the
Earth in a blister of gold and tears.
Oh love, I was lost yet I was driving, content
In a zone out dream state, not giving a
Fuck about the discourse of my sojourn, visually
Enamored by the sight of a sunken
Red brow barn slouched and lonely, fields
Clipped yet a two-day harvested no shave
Gruff semblance connoted to the land—following
In love with the sight of a two story country house
Swallowed on all sides by land and thick sky—
I drove, as fast as I could, smoking
Lost, past a hamlet, into the swerves of
Hills and inclines and steady slopes when
I noticed a vehicle tailing my rear bumper—
The vehicle blue, reminding me of the
Car you drove around MN-St.Paul last august
The night you tottered and balanced with
The acrobatic finesse of an angel tottered
Sedate on my lap before we cruised home,
Lost in the syncopated chimes of Depeche mode my
Fingers lost in the veil of your hair not wanting
To let go of creature situated next to me. That car was the same
Blue as the one you were ferrying that night
August last, behind me as I was lost, and I thought it was indeed
You in the vehicle for a moment
The editions of Rumi and Leaves of Grass both
Tucked in my back dashboard— both
Editions pregnant with fallen leaves from the
Picnic table the morning after you left
Finding the expired kisses of cigarette butts, creases of our bodies
Still imbedded in the mattress of earth from
That day. I let the vehicle pass me and it gunned ahead
Myself, turning on a road I had never ventured down
Before, Myself still lost in the gray autumnal
Overcoat of the afternoon amidst barns and silos
And Trees pregnant with fairy tales, driving a
Different route then the vehicle I thought
Contained your smile—only to find that vehicle,
(speeding) behind me once again, as if it had chosen
Me, as If the vehicle were beacon leading the
Front of my car into nocturnal vistas
A dalliance of dreams, the rich lathered soil of night
Fused in front of me past shires and dirt roads
As I followed only to find it shooting ahead, swerving
Into a large house with a fence and yard
(front newly refurbished) a bouquet of thicket and
woods between the worlds on all sides
I knew as I past it that I had seen this house before
That I had lived in the house once perhaps
Before—for it was the house from the dream we
Shared—at least the front of it matched my
Dream from earlier in the week and the vehicle I had allowed
To navigate pulled into the driveway and waited
A white arm extending from the drivers side—waited
For me to pull into my dream world and
Discern the inside of what it was I had driven so long to find.
Thursday, June 09, 2005
"And the Blessings were like Poets that we've never found time to know..."
Just got hired on at the library FULL time!!!! This means I'll be able to make financial split-ends meet and still be able to write SIX, seven hours a day!!!!!!
Monday, May 02, 2005
Kamikaze Countdown...
Novel due on Prof.'s desk in nine days. Today, retype the rest of the thirty pages that I lost. Try to go through my Glossaria and employ opperative moves. Say fare-thee-well to fellow Chambers classmates (George still has both my copies of Before Sunrise/set). Se Bulls take a hopeful 3-1 lead in playoffs with Best friend.....
Dirt tired and in dire need of caffeine....
Dirt tired and in dire need of caffeine....
Sunday, May 01, 2005
"....."
Write! Write! Write! Write like your life depended on it, boy!
Seven hundred page "draft" of my novel (my very corpulent, four year old daughter who for some reason goes by the disgusting name of 'Yellow Monkey Bars & Unbidden Erections: A failed campaign') is due on Dr. Palakeel's desk a week from Wed--and all I can due is bitch that I have to retype forty pages that I lost......
Gotta get motivated. Gotta get crazy. Eschew the urge for spontaneous feminine contact and write!!!!!!!!!
Back to work young man, you've got a long way too go!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Seven hundred page "draft" of my novel (my very corpulent, four year old daughter who for some reason goes by the disgusting name of 'Yellow Monkey Bars & Unbidden Erections: A failed campaign') is due on Dr. Palakeel's desk a week from Wed--and all I can due is bitch that I have to retype forty pages that I lost......
Gotta get motivated. Gotta get crazy. Eschew the urge for spontaneous feminine contact and write!!!!!!!!!
Back to work young man, you've got a long way too go!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Friday, February 04, 2005
Faretheewell Fellow Bloggers....
On the three year anniversary of his Father's Death, Little David has decided to take a blogging -bymonth and pursue a cyberspatial sabbatical.
I've written five (!!!) quality short stories (and reams of poems) in the last coulple of weeks and now comes the task simply to market them and to keep on writing. I love blathering my life away into the jaws of the keyboard in front of cyber soulmates and total strangers but in all honsety I sort of took up writing as a vocation 'bout ten years ago and I can't tell you how much it would mean to me if I could make a steady income from this shit. Can't tell you how much it would mean if I could support a love-mate from my writing, to help someone grow, to help other crazy seekers locate their joy and bliss.....
Also need to Kill the Dragon Thou Shalt. Note to dearest Sister A, if you really want to rid yourself of the lizard quit wearing glittery stitches of "Dragons" on your jeans. As all the sages note, Dragons and Lizards horde things--"Heaps o Gold and beautiful virgins"--and they don't know what to do with either of them, they just remain stuck....
I've been stuck in front of my own dragon for a long ass time. Now its time for me to go into battle, lace myself with the armor I've gleaned and not look back....
Big Deadline begining of March. I'll be back with a new set of wheels, tons of legends and, of course, the scalely hide scalped from the carcass of a lost lizard...
Kick some ass for me out there!!!!!!!!!!!!
I've written five (!!!) quality short stories (and reams of poems) in the last coulple of weeks and now comes the task simply to market them and to keep on writing. I love blathering my life away into the jaws of the keyboard in front of cyber soulmates and total strangers but in all honsety I sort of took up writing as a vocation 'bout ten years ago and I can't tell you how much it would mean to me if I could make a steady income from this shit. Can't tell you how much it would mean if I could support a love-mate from my writing, to help someone grow, to help other crazy seekers locate their joy and bliss.....
Also need to Kill the Dragon Thou Shalt. Note to dearest Sister A, if you really want to rid yourself of the lizard quit wearing glittery stitches of "Dragons" on your jeans. As all the sages note, Dragons and Lizards horde things--"Heaps o Gold and beautiful virgins"--and they don't know what to do with either of them, they just remain stuck....
I've been stuck in front of my own dragon for a long ass time. Now its time for me to go into battle, lace myself with the armor I've gleaned and not look back....
Big Deadline begining of March. I'll be back with a new set of wheels, tons of legends and, of course, the scalely hide scalped from the carcass of a lost lizard...
Kick some ass for me out there!!!!!!!!!!!!
Wednesday, January 19, 2005
Stranded up Shitcreek without wind or a sail.....
When I die and Bradley chooses to immortalize my literary genius by erecting a gilded naked statue of my lanky frame a la Michelangelo's David--I hope they plant it backwards, headfirst into the bullseye center of Olin Quad, facing Swords Hall, so all the financial witches in room 111 can kiss my brass-ass!!!!
If you can't tell by the sappy sarcasm it happened again--on Edgar Allan Poe's birthday no less!!!! My refund check which they TOLD ME was supposed to arrive today was delayed. "OOOPPPPPS. I'm sorry. You forgot to sign a release form."
WHAT!!!!!!!
Two weeks ago when I verified my financial status they assured me all was in check. Now.......
Shit, Swords Hall even called me the night of Feb 5th three years ago (my father died very early that morning) asking for my father's name, requesting a cordial alumni donation and I Bit My bottom lip so hard it bled down my cheek as I refrained my whiplash tongue from ushering out an I-ching of random vulgarities......
Shit, my grandmother even worked in Swords Hall...for 33 years!!!!!!!!
Oh well, now comes a trip to mama Bears to humble beg for a loan. Mom's been somewhat cool lately. she even showed my stupid lil' story to her co-workers and now they think her son's a total nymphomaniac..............
Ahhh....Life.......
If you can't tell by the sappy sarcasm it happened again--on Edgar Allan Poe's birthday no less!!!! My refund check which they TOLD ME was supposed to arrive today was delayed. "OOOPPPPPS. I'm sorry. You forgot to sign a release form."
WHAT!!!!!!!
Two weeks ago when I verified my financial status they assured me all was in check. Now.......
Shit, Swords Hall even called me the night of Feb 5th three years ago (my father died very early that morning) asking for my father's name, requesting a cordial alumni donation and I Bit My bottom lip so hard it bled down my cheek as I refrained my whiplash tongue from ushering out an I-ching of random vulgarities......
Shit, my grandmother even worked in Swords Hall...for 33 years!!!!!!!!
Oh well, now comes a trip to mama Bears to humble beg for a loan. Mom's been somewhat cool lately. she even showed my stupid lil' story to her co-workers and now they think her son's a total nymphomaniac..............
Ahhh....Life.......
Monday, January 10, 2005
Attaboy Link!!!!!
CHECK THIS OUT!!!!!!!!!
http://www.villagevoice.com/specials/take/six/
Congrats Link, Ethan and elusive-eyed fairytale-French Goddess of my dreams Julie for making such a kick-ass film that totally captures the human condition as we know it.....
http://www.villagevoice.com/specials/take/six/
Congrats Link, Ethan and elusive-eyed fairytale-French Goddess of my dreams Julie for making such a kick-ass film that totally captures the human condition as we know it.....
Tuesday, December 21, 2004
Let Me Sleep It's Christmas Time--1997 (i)
Gray clouds lay aimlessly scattered like abandon jigsaw pieces over brisk denim patches of December sky fifteen minutes prior to dusk. I strutted across Bradley Quad, a half-smile chiseled above my chin, the memory of her lips soaked into my chest, Karen the Fern cupped firmly in the grip of my icy paws.
The winter sun squinted and swelled and swirled into an orange thumbprint as students, fatigued from finals, jittery-eyed from caffeine, lugged back packs and suitcases through the student center en route to suburbia while my thoughts oscillated around the girl I had just held; the girl I had just said goodbye to--the girl who would be flying down to South Padre to see her parents. The girl whose skin was cinnamon tan and whose flesh sprouted into an orchard of hidden scents every time the magnetism of our bodies clinked into an embrace.
I wore my ersatz camel colored trench coat; a checkered scarf loosely tossed around my neck flapped in the cool winter breeze like a minor league pennant. Beneath the coat I layered GAP sweaters; tattered corduroy jeans--a hemp necklace furnished by my ex-girlfriend Allison itched its way around the stump of my neck spawning a love rash for a wayward soul like an artists signature etched into his mock masterpiece.
My hair was cut short and was dyed strawberry blonde. On a good day my hair adapted the tint and hue of a brassy highschool band instrument; a Green Day reject. A palsied punk rocker looking for his next up-tempo frenzied venue. A boy in search of a thickly chorded soil of human bodies from hence to mosh through his every mangled emotions.
It was December. It was 1997. I was twenty years old and, outside of the assurance of a steady menial waged paycheck every Friday, had no clue where the fuck I was going with my life.
The previous autumn brought the ill-time demise of Princess Diana. I was a sophomore at a local commumity college--Illinois Central College--"ICC" (Ick)--Two years prior I had graduated from one of the worst high schools in the state. Manual High--where my Father had briefly attened in the early sixties. It was the same building where my grandmother's locker was trashed because she showed favor to the "colored" folk. The same building where my pack-a-day grandfather dropped out of in the heat of the depression working as a printmaker's apprentice before enlisting in World War two.
Although my ACT was well above the school's avg. of 14.7, I was suicidal for three-fourths of my junior and senior year. Back then a change of scenery would have altered the status quo of my life today--but living in south side working class poverty, witnessing academia as a sort of joke--gradually gave me the ability to laugh; the capacity to find joy in suffering--the drive to become something other than a sorry-ass statistic--the wisdom to discern that so much of our lives depends solely on the topography of our birth; the financial proclivities of our parents; the realization that, even the worst high school America has to offer is better than 95 percent of the schools currently functioning on our globe.
I was twenty years old and was living alone with my parents. My two siblings (one was still in high school) had already left town, enrolled in prestigious bording schools. I was the self-deemed scribe of the house hold. A writer; a workaholic-- a Starbucks addled saint. I had job slaving over a cash wrap, scanning barcodes into a computer, informing yuppie customers how much they purportedly saved.
It was the autumn rich with books. Thomas Pynchon's MASON and DIXON. Don Dellilo's UNDERWORLD. Rick Moody's PURPLE AMERICA. I kept a copy of James Joyce's ULYSSES in the corner of my writing desk, along with DAVID FOSTER WALLACE's INFINITE JEST--the book that I felt already said everything I was trying to say.
There was also philosophy: William James' Variety of a Religious Experience; Wittgenstein's Tractatus and Philosophical Investigations. One night in late November, a found myself smoking clove cigarettes, listening to Ani DiFranco's "Both Hands" I highlighted a passage of out Wittgenstein's Tractatus:
If eternity is understood not by endless temporal duration, but by timelessness; than he who lives in the moment lives eternally.
I ran ten miles everyday, got through a pack of camel filters in two. I noticed how the hard slant of autumnal light cast geometical patterns against the sidewalk and eighteenth century architecture of Moss Avenue.
I was trying to write a book--a compoiste of every toy-train simple sentence my dual-decade aged eyesight had ever perused. The novel was written in ghetto slang (back then I called slang patois) was all about Basketball and Opera (?) and was, for the most part, completely unreadable.
As my creative writing teacher, Craig Shurtliff, at ICC was wont to critique. I came into the class pawning a Kerouac stream-o-piss-conscious finesse. The portly novels that influenced me then, The VISIONS of CODY, the James Joyce's, the William Gaddiss', the Gravity's Rainbow--
the books I thought that were important and that mattered; the books that differentiated from the mass market populartiy of the Grisham's, the Creighton's and the King's, the books that
qualified as leet-turh-ah-ture were for the most part unreadable tomes of arrogance, ensuring tenure for a select few academic dweebs unable to endure the carp and cavil of some other low-life critiquing their own creative tithe.
I wrote one kick ass short story that semester. Dropped all my other classes; decided to focus solely on writing--was certain that, of course, in a years time at least, the world would catch up to my accelerated genius and I'd be scribbling in my name, endorsing six-figure checks from New York publishing houses. My pulitzer acceptance speech was practically already penned.
The novel failed ignominously--it didn't make any sense. People seemed to grow accustomed to looking at everything I wrote with their vexing head titled heavily into their left shoulder in abstruse puzzlement.
My best friend--a writer named Patrick living in New York even told me; "You've lost the desire to be comprehensible. You've lost the will to let people understand you."
Say least my parents. The urge to write--the urge to breath and to live and to thrive--the urge for a future--for security--for a fuckin' life was nil at best. I was what I was--community college caliber-- post-modern pogo stick. Gutter drossed washed up in the middle of Illinois; yearning to heavily flap my dreams in the direction of the waning, rich autumnal dusk.
On Novemebr 17--a month before I said goodbye to the girl with the pearl smile and orchard flesh; a month before I shoveled up Karen the Fern and stood, staring at my shadow in awe across the frosty tufts of Bradley quad--I left. I left everything behind me.
Flustered by my failed shoebox vignette of a novel--I left class early, plopping my book bag into the back seat of my chevette- a clunker my grandfather in Chicago drove throughout the arteries of the city a decade before. I gunned home, shaking, sweating, trying not to look at my agitated reflection in the blue tint of the windshield. A young man on the cusp of flunking out of adulthood. A fetus witnessing the venom of its own abortion--feeling that he is leaving a place before being properly formed.
I drove. I drove as fast as the clunker would allow. 80 mph. The dilapidated muffler firing what felt like cannon fodder beneath the bumper.I drove, even though I had no where to go and worst of all, I had no way to get there. Void of the luxury of FM radio and power steering, I continued to drive.
I brewed a thermos of coffee, filled up the tank at a local gas station, bought two packs of Camel filters and a box of swischer Sweet blunts. I placed dog-earred editions of Kerouac's On the Road and Whitman's Leaves of Grass (germinal intellectual reads--both since given to females) in the passenger seat.
In life you come home empty but you still come home. A year earlier, Autumn of 96' I monopolized a journalism scholarship to serenade the love-o-my-life residing in central Wisconisin, a beautiful girl named Megan with a beautiful oak pasture forehead and short cidery hair. Things between us had punctuated in blisters and romantic welts and I came home all alone, my thoughts--my heart blanketed in the gauze of a voice that no longer wanted anything to do with me.
A week before I boarded my grandfather's clunker and left, I received a letter from Megan in the mail. When it comes to chasing the strings of your heart, writers are notorious for locating snippets of sentences and plots in the hushed smiles of scattered muses. So far I've identified three amazing, timeless females who inspire my art in the fashion of what Beatrice was to Dante; what Laura was to Petrach. I have a bond with these individuals that transcends the borders of time and vaults over the arbitrary directions of space. So it was no surprise that day when, arriving home after one of my long ten mile jaunts that I knew Megan was inside the steel jaw of the mailbox. That I could feel her bulging; could feel her tidal-wave of multi-colored sentences foaming off the shore of the lined paper. She wrote me letters in different colored markers, placing random stickers of Barney or Burt-n-Ernie throughout the cursive missive, sketching pictures of flowers on the bottom of each page.
Megan wrote about her experiences as a freshman in Decorah, Iowa. She wrote about the classes she was taking; about the writers she was discovering; about the fluids she mixed into her pettite nervous system on Friday nights.
She wrote about the hills of northern Iowa "You would love it here, David. The parks make me think of you."
Enclosed in the letter was a current photograph snapped on one of her state park hikes. Her smile splashed across the poloroid like a puddle of light--two wild lilies were placed in her hair like estranged homecoming boutenaires.
I kept Megan's letter folded in my flannel shirt pocket, in between the boxes of cigarettes, above my heart. I kept her photograph pinned above the dashboard, close to the rearview mirror. Everytime I glanced into the hyphenated reflection I would see my eyes, looking behind me, and then see her smile focused in front.
I drove and I drove. I ran stop signs, broke speed limits, forgot how to function the turn signals.
it was as if my car was a wild mustang and I was clinging on in the saddle for dear life, unaware when the vehicle would thrust me from the passengers seat.
I guzzled thick slurps of coffee. I chained smoked cigarettes, lighting a fresh stick from the alighted dregs of an expired cork. The ashtray already looked like ground zero by the time I skirted my vehicle on to the interstate wings and I continued to drive, unaware of my destination, unaware of my place in the world, cognizance only the flush of blood, the color of the sky, the feeling that the faster and the further I drove, I would somehow find myself, locate what I was looking for, find the lyrics of my song, the name of my muse, the address of my poetic yearning.
The winter sun squinted and swelled and swirled into an orange thumbprint as students, fatigued from finals, jittery-eyed from caffeine, lugged back packs and suitcases through the student center en route to suburbia while my thoughts oscillated around the girl I had just held; the girl I had just said goodbye to--the girl who would be flying down to South Padre to see her parents. The girl whose skin was cinnamon tan and whose flesh sprouted into an orchard of hidden scents every time the magnetism of our bodies clinked into an embrace.
I wore my ersatz camel colored trench coat; a checkered scarf loosely tossed around my neck flapped in the cool winter breeze like a minor league pennant. Beneath the coat I layered GAP sweaters; tattered corduroy jeans--a hemp necklace furnished by my ex-girlfriend Allison itched its way around the stump of my neck spawning a love rash for a wayward soul like an artists signature etched into his mock masterpiece.
My hair was cut short and was dyed strawberry blonde. On a good day my hair adapted the tint and hue of a brassy highschool band instrument; a Green Day reject. A palsied punk rocker looking for his next up-tempo frenzied venue. A boy in search of a thickly chorded soil of human bodies from hence to mosh through his every mangled emotions.
It was December. It was 1997. I was twenty years old and, outside of the assurance of a steady menial waged paycheck every Friday, had no clue where the fuck I was going with my life.
The previous autumn brought the ill-time demise of Princess Diana. I was a sophomore at a local commumity college--Illinois Central College--"ICC" (Ick)--Two years prior I had graduated from one of the worst high schools in the state. Manual High--where my Father had briefly attened in the early sixties. It was the same building where my grandmother's locker was trashed because she showed favor to the "colored" folk. The same building where my pack-a-day grandfather dropped out of in the heat of the depression working as a printmaker's apprentice before enlisting in World War two.
Although my ACT was well above the school's avg. of 14.7, I was suicidal for three-fourths of my junior and senior year. Back then a change of scenery would have altered the status quo of my life today--but living in south side working class poverty, witnessing academia as a sort of joke--gradually gave me the ability to laugh; the capacity to find joy in suffering--the drive to become something other than a sorry-ass statistic--the wisdom to discern that so much of our lives depends solely on the topography of our birth; the financial proclivities of our parents; the realization that, even the worst high school America has to offer is better than 95 percent of the schools currently functioning on our globe.
I was twenty years old and was living alone with my parents. My two siblings (one was still in high school) had already left town, enrolled in prestigious bording schools. I was the self-deemed scribe of the house hold. A writer; a workaholic-- a Starbucks addled saint. I had job slaving over a cash wrap, scanning barcodes into a computer, informing yuppie customers how much they purportedly saved.
It was the autumn rich with books. Thomas Pynchon's MASON and DIXON. Don Dellilo's UNDERWORLD. Rick Moody's PURPLE AMERICA. I kept a copy of James Joyce's ULYSSES in the corner of my writing desk, along with DAVID FOSTER WALLACE's INFINITE JEST--the book that I felt already said everything I was trying to say.
There was also philosophy: William James' Variety of a Religious Experience; Wittgenstein's Tractatus and Philosophical Investigations. One night in late November, a found myself smoking clove cigarettes, listening to Ani DiFranco's "Both Hands" I highlighted a passage of out Wittgenstein's Tractatus:
If eternity is understood not by endless temporal duration, but by timelessness; than he who lives in the moment lives eternally.
I ran ten miles everyday, got through a pack of camel filters in two. I noticed how the hard slant of autumnal light cast geometical patterns against the sidewalk and eighteenth century architecture of Moss Avenue.
I was trying to write a book--a compoiste of every toy-train simple sentence my dual-decade aged eyesight had ever perused. The novel was written in ghetto slang (back then I called slang patois) was all about Basketball and Opera (?) and was, for the most part, completely unreadable.
As my creative writing teacher, Craig Shurtliff, at ICC was wont to critique. I came into the class pawning a Kerouac stream-o-piss-conscious finesse. The portly novels that influenced me then, The VISIONS of CODY, the James Joyce's, the William Gaddiss', the Gravity's Rainbow--
the books I thought that were important and that mattered; the books that differentiated from the mass market populartiy of the Grisham's, the Creighton's and the King's, the books that
qualified as leet-turh-ah-ture were for the most part unreadable tomes of arrogance, ensuring tenure for a select few academic dweebs unable to endure the carp and cavil of some other low-life critiquing their own creative tithe.
I wrote one kick ass short story that semester. Dropped all my other classes; decided to focus solely on writing--was certain that, of course, in a years time at least, the world would catch up to my accelerated genius and I'd be scribbling in my name, endorsing six-figure checks from New York publishing houses. My pulitzer acceptance speech was practically already penned.
The novel failed ignominously--it didn't make any sense. People seemed to grow accustomed to looking at everything I wrote with their vexing head titled heavily into their left shoulder in abstruse puzzlement.
My best friend--a writer named Patrick living in New York even told me; "You've lost the desire to be comprehensible. You've lost the will to let people understand you."
Say least my parents. The urge to write--the urge to breath and to live and to thrive--the urge for a future--for security--for a fuckin' life was nil at best. I was what I was--community college caliber-- post-modern pogo stick. Gutter drossed washed up in the middle of Illinois; yearning to heavily flap my dreams in the direction of the waning, rich autumnal dusk.
On Novemebr 17--a month before I said goodbye to the girl with the pearl smile and orchard flesh; a month before I shoveled up Karen the Fern and stood, staring at my shadow in awe across the frosty tufts of Bradley quad--I left. I left everything behind me.
Flustered by my failed shoebox vignette of a novel--I left class early, plopping my book bag into the back seat of my chevette- a clunker my grandfather in Chicago drove throughout the arteries of the city a decade before. I gunned home, shaking, sweating, trying not to look at my agitated reflection in the blue tint of the windshield. A young man on the cusp of flunking out of adulthood. A fetus witnessing the venom of its own abortion--feeling that he is leaving a place before being properly formed.
I drove. I drove as fast as the clunker would allow. 80 mph. The dilapidated muffler firing what felt like cannon fodder beneath the bumper.I drove, even though I had no where to go and worst of all, I had no way to get there. Void of the luxury of FM radio and power steering, I continued to drive.
I brewed a thermos of coffee, filled up the tank at a local gas station, bought two packs of Camel filters and a box of swischer Sweet blunts. I placed dog-earred editions of Kerouac's On the Road and Whitman's Leaves of Grass (germinal intellectual reads--both since given to females) in the passenger seat.
In life you come home empty but you still come home. A year earlier, Autumn of 96' I monopolized a journalism scholarship to serenade the love-o-my-life residing in central Wisconisin, a beautiful girl named Megan with a beautiful oak pasture forehead and short cidery hair. Things between us had punctuated in blisters and romantic welts and I came home all alone, my thoughts--my heart blanketed in the gauze of a voice that no longer wanted anything to do with me.
A week before I boarded my grandfather's clunker and left, I received a letter from Megan in the mail. When it comes to chasing the strings of your heart, writers are notorious for locating snippets of sentences and plots in the hushed smiles of scattered muses. So far I've identified three amazing, timeless females who inspire my art in the fashion of what Beatrice was to Dante; what Laura was to Petrach. I have a bond with these individuals that transcends the borders of time and vaults over the arbitrary directions of space. So it was no surprise that day when, arriving home after one of my long ten mile jaunts that I knew Megan was inside the steel jaw of the mailbox. That I could feel her bulging; could feel her tidal-wave of multi-colored sentences foaming off the shore of the lined paper. She wrote me letters in different colored markers, placing random stickers of Barney or Burt-n-Ernie throughout the cursive missive, sketching pictures of flowers on the bottom of each page.
Megan wrote about her experiences as a freshman in Decorah, Iowa. She wrote about the classes she was taking; about the writers she was discovering; about the fluids she mixed into her pettite nervous system on Friday nights.
She wrote about the hills of northern Iowa "You would love it here, David. The parks make me think of you."
Enclosed in the letter was a current photograph snapped on one of her state park hikes. Her smile splashed across the poloroid like a puddle of light--two wild lilies were placed in her hair like estranged homecoming boutenaires.
I kept Megan's letter folded in my flannel shirt pocket, in between the boxes of cigarettes, above my heart. I kept her photograph pinned above the dashboard, close to the rearview mirror. Everytime I glanced into the hyphenated reflection I would see my eyes, looking behind me, and then see her smile focused in front.
I drove and I drove. I ran stop signs, broke speed limits, forgot how to function the turn signals.
it was as if my car was a wild mustang and I was clinging on in the saddle for dear life, unaware when the vehicle would thrust me from the passengers seat.
I guzzled thick slurps of coffee. I chained smoked cigarettes, lighting a fresh stick from the alighted dregs of an expired cork. The ashtray already looked like ground zero by the time I skirted my vehicle on to the interstate wings and I continued to drive, unaware of my destination, unaware of my place in the world, cognizance only the flush of blood, the color of the sky, the feeling that the faster and the further I drove, I would somehow find myself, locate what I was looking for, find the lyrics of my song, the name of my muse, the address of my poetic yearning.
Monday, December 13, 2004
Mara Muse
Just saw Hippie-Nikki (or Hikki-Nippie) for the first time in three weeks since our booze-addled assignation. Told her that after i left her apartment that morning I went back to the party to look for the ring she lost. I told her that I raked my fingers through mud beneath the stairs where we made out that night, feeling like frodo, hoping to locate the ring she lost. Nothing.
She didn't mention that she received the e-mail I sent her.
She told me she's going to Amsterdam over break.
Crazy girl. She's shorter than I remember her. Her dreadlocks were dirty and she was wearing cool thrift store clothing. She kinda looked at me like I was her parent or something (it's the short hair and the fact that I'm seven years older).....
ah well, the human heart. Thank God I didn't get more involved.....
(WOMEN ARE STRANGE!!!!!!!)
"tho we are not now that strength which in the old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal-temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield."
-Tennyson, "ULYSSES"
She didn't mention that she received the e-mail I sent her.
She told me she's going to Amsterdam over break.
Crazy girl. She's shorter than I remember her. Her dreadlocks were dirty and she was wearing cool thrift store clothing. She kinda looked at me like I was her parent or something (it's the short hair and the fact that I'm seven years older).....
ah well, the human heart. Thank God I didn't get more involved.....
(WOMEN ARE STRANGE!!!!!!!)
"tho we are not now that strength which in the old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal-temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield."
-Tennyson, "ULYSSES"
Sunday, December 12, 2004
Douchebag
It's the word-o-the-week for my boss. I love this word. Douchebag! Yesterday I worked 11-3, 5-10, 4-7 (am) and now 9-2 and he comes in here and immediately berates my ass.
Wonder what crawled up his ass and died?
Wonder what crawled up his ass and died?
Monday, December 06, 2004
Crunchtime
It's 2 am and my senior project is due in fifteen hours! I'm dressed in my ghetto garb-- Atlanta Falcons cap, raiders shirt and baggy pants ( to match the drooping baggs bustin' a sag under the lids of my eyes) "Give me a project bitch" and I haven't changed my contacts in three days......
I've already spent a cozy 40 plus hours in the library this weekend already. Just keep reminding myself that every sentence I sompose is one rung closer to the top....
Also in dire need of companionship. Anyone out there reclining in the matress of cyberland want to cuddle?
(Not you Mirza, if you're reading this.)
And he's off.......
I've already spent a cozy 40 plus hours in the library this weekend already. Just keep reminding myself that every sentence I sompose is one rung closer to the top....
Also in dire need of companionship. Anyone out there reclining in the matress of cyberland want to cuddle?
(Not you Mirza, if you're reading this.)
And he's off.......
Saturday, December 04, 2004
Hanging up my halo; fallen feathers and timeless light...
Third shift still sucks. Twice in the last week I arrived at my 9am class after working ten plus hours the previous night. That and payrolled screwed up so I won't get my big "Holiday-my-ass-bonus" until after the new year.....In the next week I have a 20 page, a ten page and a 30 page paper due. The 30-pager is already out of the way (It was a final for a creative writing class....(duh)..I finished it in September) but the other classes are dry, scaly, arid academic prose....
No wonder no one likes english....
Thanksgiving greeted us with eight inches of ice and snow caked in thick white tufts gracing the American Heartland. A goliath, three hundred pound slab of oak fell over blocking Uncle Mike's driveway and I put on my cowboy hat ( The one I redeemed from Marlboro back in '97 for a mere 300 miles) and used a chainsaw; hacking each limbs with a disel-fuled sever; lugging the sawed timer deep into the woods behind Mike's house. It was arduous work and sweat froze in little beady icicles on my forehead as I ploughed the skeletal branches across the slick drive, burrowing them deep in the post autmunal foliage of the same woods I used to play in as a child--the woods I immortalized as the "Nuclear Woods" in my first novel.
My great-Aunt turned 98 the day after Thanksgiving. She grew up in a farm outside Kewanee.
Over her life she's witnessed a genesis of tehcnological advancement unprecedented in the discourse of this planet. She's witnessed the automobile, the airplane-the space rocket--radio and telephone turn into television turn into internet. She's lived through presidential assasinations; spiritual segregation, the civil right movement--Viewed through the eyelashes of an aged centurian, her planet has remained the exact same size yet has decresed rather dramatically. She could tell you where she was when News reached her of the Titanic's descent. She's kept her wit and her insight and her memory; She remembers the name of every female I've ever brought to Thanksgiving dinner. Every wrinkle indented into her papery skin serves as an indelible fold to the testament of the human condition. ..
Gotta study. Hoping to blogg holiday memoirs in a week or so.....
No wonder no one likes english....
Thanksgiving greeted us with eight inches of ice and snow caked in thick white tufts gracing the American Heartland. A goliath, three hundred pound slab of oak fell over blocking Uncle Mike's driveway and I put on my cowboy hat ( The one I redeemed from Marlboro back in '97 for a mere 300 miles) and used a chainsaw; hacking each limbs with a disel-fuled sever; lugging the sawed timer deep into the woods behind Mike's house. It was arduous work and sweat froze in little beady icicles on my forehead as I ploughed the skeletal branches across the slick drive, burrowing them deep in the post autmunal foliage of the same woods I used to play in as a child--the woods I immortalized as the "Nuclear Woods" in my first novel.
My great-Aunt turned 98 the day after Thanksgiving. She grew up in a farm outside Kewanee.
Over her life she's witnessed a genesis of tehcnological advancement unprecedented in the discourse of this planet. She's witnessed the automobile, the airplane-the space rocket--radio and telephone turn into television turn into internet. She's lived through presidential assasinations; spiritual segregation, the civil right movement--Viewed through the eyelashes of an aged centurian, her planet has remained the exact same size yet has decresed rather dramatically. She could tell you where she was when News reached her of the Titanic's descent. She's kept her wit and her insight and her memory; She remembers the name of every female I've ever brought to Thanksgiving dinner. Every wrinkle indented into her papery skin serves as an indelible fold to the testament of the human condition. ..
Gotta study. Hoping to blogg holiday memoirs in a week or so.....
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