Relishing when your smirk draws my snarl.
Proving to me, that you are second to none.
Give me your open palm, I will trace the wrinkles running.
Massaging knuckles a’loose.
Popping like logs a’flame,
the liquid spaces between bones and cartilage.
I am cleaning your hand’s battleground
from being strewn with tension’s carnage.
I can make you swallow hard, unexpectedly, but
let me be soft right, exactly now.
Turn on the radio.
Let’s listen to some interview on the public broadcasting system.
Listen until we are bored enough to
assemble our very own Ways and Means Committee.
Our tax dollars, after all.
I espy, with mine little eyes, four seagulls a’lit on the roof
across the way.
Framed between the two distant buttes of land wrapping the water
into the body known as the Sound.
And, I have naught to say, yet I say it anyways.
And, still, I can count crows like sticks and tea leaves.
My grandmother taught me:
One for sorrow
Two for joy.
Three for boys.
Four for girls.
Five for me
Six for all.
The way when you see a bale of hay you must
make a wish and look away.
A pink and blue sky is a wishing sky.
Not to be confused with the racket of space star ordering and wishy thinking.
Giggle.
The meadow languishes.
Three pairs of your feet’s steps remain visible now,
even though you lied down, minutes ago.
Grass pressed into small etches slowly refilling themselves to full volume.
My eyes go loose and wide as
they stop seeing and start imagining the imprint your form will leave
when you arise.
Topiary impressionist piece.
Watching the moody weather make its precious, little changes.
False threats of pending precipitation.
The sky throwing a hissy fit for our benefit.
I finally sit down to watch it proper.
Strange grid-like lines buzz low intensity neon colors into a concaved and convexed axis.
Strange maths laboring, barely concealed by a cloudy cover.
I feel that sudden lucidity accompanying
the realization that I am dreaming.
Come.
Sit by the fire in the hearth.
I will put my chin on your knee, stare into the ether and let my thoughts run.
Perched upon your feet, keeping your toes warm.
Closer to the earth.
The storm passes, the rain relents, and the sky above the Sound nearly recovers.
The air outside remains cold.
⊙
Locals say this place is cursed.
I’ve seen enough tragedies in others in my four months here, to believe it.
Heard of even more.
Yet, here shall I establish my residence.
A mid-thirty year old,
amongst the retirees still seeing themselves as inhabitants of Stellar Street.
Mick and Keith working the corner shop.
⊙
The wealthy snow birds hum, at the restaurant where I work, about migrating to the South for the winter.
Winter homes.
“Guess how old I am”: he says.
His wife giggles.
Howl I loathe this game.
But, this pair is old enough to not take anything personally.
78: I guess.
The correct answer is 97.
He proceeds to tell me experiences from both the first and second world wars.
I am captivated.
They do not take their leftovers to go. They turn down the offer of free bread.
°
The less well-to-do appear even more non-corporeal.
No winter homes to which they may abscond.
Disembodied spirits of bodies that no longer exist.
To serve and host at this restaurant requires second sight.
Many of these people long ago became invisible to most.
Are you Irish?: he asks.
No, I’m from the South.
Oh, I was stationed there with the good old boys. They went to bars during their off-time. I went to museums and landmarks. But, I was odd.: he tells me.
He shares stories of being an 18 year old from Montana who ended up in the South during George Wallace days.
I am captivated.
He and his wife take their leftovers home in a box and ask for extra free bread
which they are given.
Let me nuzzle my cheek, just barely, against the uppermost part of your pectoral muscle while you tell me stories of before I knew you.
Let us, again, rub limbs together like how crickets sing, to keep warm.
Because I can see the pending winds of winter on the watery horizon of the Sound admidst the
clouds of steely grey.
Smoke from some celestial dragon finishing an exhalation
from his degree of inclination.
Pull close in arms and tether me against you.
Listen to the furnace rattle and to the homestead’s ribbing creaks.
Because, when the partially frozen rain begins descending,
we wilt not see but what is immediately in front of us,
So, let it be one to the other, through this season of alaying bare.
He says: Attention is not the same as recognition.
I reply: What if you seek the attention of just one, only to be gained through recognition?
A remembrance of your re-cognition.
Private exhibitions in a single gallery.
Not a diasporic display, even if openly splayed.
The change from bitter to better is [i] before [e]
Except after [c], like my initial.
So, Æ remain unembittered for the better; but,
sometimes, my left eye twitches
A defiance of my body in the face of the mirrored reflection of self-control.
Self-taxing to grow your privatized, closed economy.
And, I scriven in this big notebook with smut.
Do most people know for whom they make themselves appear
or do they just present?
I should have written the words flowing through mind as I slipped to sleep, last night,
because, now, they come less easily.
⊙
Exfoliating feedback into smoothness.
Someone imitating you back to yourself to show how ugly you just appeared to them.
Trying to tell the girl who dogged herself to her face.
You remind me of mom, making that face: she says, making a face.
That’s exactly the kind of thing our mom would say to flip the script when she feels uncomfortable: I think but do not say.
The hinterlands wherein we hide behind passive aggressive similes and abide behind thoughts unsaid.
I am not whom I used to be; and, you liked her better; but, I like me more.
Price your art for your target markets and I’ll keep giving myself out for free.
Valued or bought and sold?
Valueless or invaluable?
Just desserts or just dessert?
A dable of monsoon in a desert.
Success for me is not success for you.
Success for me is the Tao of doing while still being able to notice when my bootlaces untie; so, I may, once again, pull this sea monster heart up by them.
He says: I know the magic trick called Algerian Bootstrapping.
I giggle.
I wasn’t talking about you, but I like to: I say with the pedantic, daft determination of someone choosing to end her sentence with a preposition.
Pre-position.
Consider an unabiding yet unbidden compulsion to comply.
Like how geometrical axioms are neither synthetic judgements made a priori, nor are they experimental facts.
They are conventions.
I do not enliven life through vitiating the mystical.
Yet, I use geometrical axioms everyday.
The magical, unconventional nature of all of our common conventions.
The cost of convenience should be underwritten in insurance policies.
The difference between idée reçue and idée fixe.
To understand universal symbolism you must realize
it is all subliminal.
A real dilemma, in the technical sense of formalized logic.
The associated oxyopia.
The difference between invoking and evoking.
What you see inside the mirror is just an image of reality,
a virtual reality- a dream.
So what are we, but breathing mirrors, dreaming ourselves awake with
an intuitively informed sense of discrimination, with this ability to perceive patterns.
Being perceptive is to be Praterhuman.
⊙
Someone asks: Why do you always speak in such language?
My eyes go wide, in pure surprise.
How could I not?: I blurt out.
Troubadours clap out: one, two, three, four
before launching their song.
Choreographers snap: five, six, seven, eight.
⊙
Í, silently, count
one, two, three
four
five.
⊙
{Inhale and move.
An animal playing her lungs,
with the discipline of the earnest open-amateur.
Done for pleasure and not profit.}
⊙
A fugue of breath.
Comingling.
There is no room for thought when stood upon only one foot’s toes.
There is just getting oxygen to muscles without falling too hard.
Repeat until the body is too tired to not sleep.
It is not always elegant, and sometimes,
it becomes less so as the progression continues.
Irrelevant.
The point is the intent to doing;
and, the resultant action.
You’ve got to enjoy
the ride
until, abdomen and sides ache from maintaining
unnaturally natural postures.
⊙
It is in this ephemeral space from which
Í best perceive the flowing visions.
Pure restraint,
Time in mind.
Coalescing confluence of the conjunction
of this intersection of dimensions.
Planes upon planes with turtles
all the way down.
⊙
A whirling dervish aside a spiraling top.
Spinning pips and mumbly peg.
I do what I can to pass the time.
Only boring people suffer from boredom.
Says the voice called: don’t stop now.
So, í drop into a planked position.
A push up posture slowly dropped into an upwards arch.
Face presented to the moon.
With idiosyncratic impunity,
to own this longing to belong…
Sacred wood is the heaviest to carry,
But the most worthwhile in terms of time to cost,
down to, smouldering, remaining benefits of glowing embers.
Whose odd, red light trembles like magma flows.
And a voice more clearly reveals that it is a musical instrument
when it speaks in languages foreign,
In a strange tongue
that makes my shoulders suddenly fall forward,
caving in
going downwards
Shallowing into empty water lakes
into the above of
each, respective collarbone.
Where skin becomes
shoulder.
Elizabeth Cotton picking and singing Freight Train.Turns out this was the first song Lucinda Williams learned to play.
{Hither and zither, the sheet music “shows you which notes to pick”.
Giggle.
⊙
None of the clocks on my appliances match
the time displayed on the screens of my devices.
Because moments changed
Over night,
As if by magic.
The practicality of protracted wakeful periods during daylight hours.
The associated productivity increase.
You can get a lot of work done, outside, when you sleep all night
And only become conscious when the sun is up.
But, you can learn a lot by staying up all night and sleeping through the day.
⊙
My alarms continue their incremental resounding.
Like they do when I gotta work the restaurant.
But, not today.
Today
is my
off day.
⊙
/
[clears throat]
Al(l)right…
/
⊙
I let
the alarms
keep
going
off
⊙
/
Freight train,
Freight train,
runs so fast
/
⊙
I do strange things with my sleeping.
An alarm set at 3:33 a.m.
To force me awake to immediately resume sleeping.
I easily become lucid in dreams this way.
At the very least, it consistently improves my dream recall.
⊙
/
Please don’t tell what train I’m on.
They won’t know what route I’m gone.
/
…
I sleep upside down,
time
to
time.
Bed properly remade
Clean sheets
But with my head at my feet.
Pillows at the wrong end.
Feet by where a head usually is.
⊙
/
Place the stones at my head and feet
Tell them all that I’ve gone sleep.
/
⊙
I wake,
again,
thirsty.
Flit to the kitchen.
Make the mistake of reading poetic words
And I feel my heart beat.
Like the water had actually been coffee.
Now the hour bends down and touches me
with it’s clear, metallic ring:
my senses tremble. The feeling forms: I can—–
and I grasp the malleable day.
Nothing was complete before I saw it,
all becoming stood still.
My eyes are ripe, and whatever they desire
approaches like a bride.
Nothing is too small: against a lovely background
I paint it large and lovingly
and hold it high, and I will never know
whose soul it may release…
The Poetry of Rilke. ISBN: 978-0-374-53271-0
I arrive at the restaurant through the back door.
I walk through the kitchen into the back office to drop off my coat and purse.
A book of poems by René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke sits on the employee table. I know it has been dropped off for me to take and read.
But, there is no note and no one says anything of it.
I do not bring it up.
The community blocks off the high street this evening.
No cars are allowed. Only hoards of costumed pedestrians.
The restaurant is booked. Chock full of reservations.
We are situated in the heart of the affair.
The previous owner, who retired two years ago arrives
to distribute candy with the new owner.
I introduce myself and
open with: so you released this place two years ago?
Yup. After twenty one years.: he shrugs.
Did you found the joint?
No. We inherited/bought it from the previous owners.
Was it called the same name when you took over, or did you change it?
Yup. It was called by the same name.
Do you want some hot tea to take with you? It is cold out there.
I want a glass of chardonnay at exactly seven o’clock, when this ends.
I make a sticky note reminder and post it where it will continue to catch our bartender’s eyes and thus,
Attention.
⊙
The seemingly ancient regulars begin arriving. None of the regulars made a reservation
for
Tonight.
Every reservation includes a note: window table requested.
Specters at a feast, watching the separate feast of the youngest generation,
through our looking glass.
The tables have been rearranged. The layout of the floor altered to allow more tables to be in front of the huge frame windows.
I intuit how unwelcomely our regulars perceive this change.
Understand the regulars eat every night here and have done so for over a decade.
Well, I suppose we’ll sit at this table. We want to watch the trick or treaters.: they huff, already walking towards the desired table.
In anticipation of this, i have placed placards on tables reserved for those who called ahead.
It bears their name and time of arrival.
I fear this one is reserved. I can seat you here or here. Anywhere there is no placard.
But, we never call ahead: they protest.
A lot of people did: I say.
I think: how do you not know what to expect tonight? You have been eating here for decades.
None of the reservations do I recognize.
The aura of the restaurant becomes maroon instead of its usual sunset orange.
{I hear a whisper say: tulpa.
I whisper: heyoka reads, tulpa.}
⊙
An exasperated, decorous but uncostumed, regular flags me over.
She and her companion dine with a couple I have not seen before.
[Trans. They planned to impress their friends here, this evening.]
She has been painstakingly doing panto. Craning her neck, trying desperately to espy the youngbloods in the street.
Yes, Misses ______?: I say.
I don’t know any of these people you have given the good tables to. All these people made reservations?: she accuses.
Yup. They all did. And, they all specified they prefer a window seat. You know, I don’t recognize any of them either, yet something led them here. Kind of magical, huh?
If those people leave, can we move to their table?: she responds.
Perhaps.: I allude, walking away.
⊙
These reservations are specters of the feast of the specters at the feast of future ghosts.
To them, i am tonight’s hostess.
Like them, I remember I have died before, will die again, and
I forget to remember it.
I will wake up.
I will fall asleep.
I will sleepwalk.
I will lucid dream.
I will remember to not forget that I am going to fail to remember
Again and again.
In delicious, concentric, Socratic circles,
Ever issuing out to the ether.
Í think í awake to the feeling of faint fingertips tracing my stermum.
Í jolt and suddenly say: í want to write for you.
He says: you do that already, yes?
Yes, but í mean to say í want to write to you.: í say
You are not conscious, yet, aurora. Slow down.
⊙
Let me trace your collarbone and the ligaments that pronounce from your neck. Let me delicately pinch that sweet Adam’s apple in your throat.: í say.
He says: Anything to stop you fidgeting with your fingertips.
That’s why í keep this cord wrapped, seven times, around my left wrist. Í play with knotting it.
He says: I know knots. I also know that you loosely bind your wrists together with it when you sleep.
Sometimes, because í am curious and desirous of that which no-one has done to me.
He says: I know.
⊙
He asks: did you dream last night?
Yes.
Tell me the story you saw…
Í am in a pub by the shore. Minimal decoration. A few pithy sayings adorn the walls. The wood of the floor and the glass installation behind the bar is the crowning aesthetic detail. There is the one drunk guy. The level of toleration he receives suggests he is a bar fixture, as well.
There are, perhaps, seven tables total, yet there are multiple hostesses. They sit at a service area by the front window, giggling in hushed voices and rolling silverware into cheap, paper napkins. Bohemian Rhapsody plays.
Alone and a’sat at the bar’s counter drop, í drink my beer too quickly.
It gives me goosebumps and a head rush.
The chandelier is double-sided and made of eighty, clear, glass beer bottles with candles burning inside. Í count them up and think: í must be back in Electri-city, where there is only candle light.
It is nearly charming, but the staff is in their own world.
Bad service kills the ambience.
Í see eight people sat around a large rectangular table.
That’s my group: í think.
Í rise and find my way into the only unoccupied chair.
As í lower myself into the chair, a courier enters the pub. Wearing a solid black cloak; the hood pulled so far overhead, no face or form is visible.
The courier strides to me and hands me a parcel wrapped in brown paper and tied with twine.
Í take it.
No words.
The courier turns and walks out the door.
Open it: urges my table mates.
Í do. Inside is a hooded robe. The colo(u)r of burnt sienna. There are stars and slivers of new moons in col(u)ors nearly unnoticeable.
The others at the table clap and cheer, like this is important. Like í have earned it, somehow.
Like they already knew and had planned this as a celebration.
Í leap to my feet, having, still, spoken no words.
Í run out the door. Í look wildly up and down the street.
Who was the courier? Í must know.
This is no time for celebration, this is another moment of testing.
Í feel my heart pound.
Í want to be scared but there is no time; so, í imagine
Í am a beast, a wild animal.
A junkyard bitch set to strike and kill.
And, the adrenaline becomes ichor and not poison.
Then, í woke up to sensing your fingers on my sternum: í tell Him.
About the ghosts.
I wrote a lot today.
You are good at what you do.: Æ says.
What do I do good?: I ask.
Being yourself: is the reply.
Thank you kindly. I’m the best at being me. Nobody does me better: I giggle.
Ghosts of stories yet to be born.
Fetal.
Feral.
A deep Joni cut.
~
/”It takes cheerful resignation
Heart and humility
That’s all it takes,”
A cheerful person told me
Nobody’s harder on me than me
How could they be
And, nobody’s harder on you than you
Betsy’s blue
People don’t know how to love
I wish her heart
Moon at the window/
A bath drawn to
to draw your words.
To soak your bones and remind your greyhound mind
to unwind.
Put the pen and paper away. I have nothing to say: he says.
Excellent. Í don’t wish to take dictation, then.
Ballet slippers donned and satin ribbons laced up my calves.
A custom pair. A parting gift from the corps
following a fall that took my left ankle’s ability to regularly dance en pointe.
There is no visible trace of the bone’s weakness, but I sometimes feel it,
still.
An act now saved for special occasions, and certainly not slick floors of bathing rooms.
But, I can still stand on my toes all day,
A white, gauzey skirt, flowing but slitted, and worn, only at home.
Black, satin camisole, containing little but fully covering.
A pinched waist.
There are valid reasons for dressing the part.
He says: Do your barre work in here. Can you extend each leg to the towel rack?
Yes, my extension is good but my turn-out requires me to warm up. Í’ll start with the countertop.
Familiar feeling of tendons pulling. Straining until a’loose.
Initially struggling to stay tight, they go loose like fretted guitar strings after many plucks.
Í arch my back and bend my spine backwards. It releases its tension more easily.
My arms move slowly like a lava flow.
Í warm my muscles.
Í imagine the heat your body feels, in the still hot bath water.
Í envision the expansion of your blood vessels and the increased flow of your bloodstream,
Therewithin.
The pulsing that your body sensates through the process of acclimating.
Í feel it.
It limbers me.
Í feel your eyes.
Í pretend not to but í delight in knowing that you know that í know that í am
under observation.
The awareness of this suddenly envelopes my attention and í slip from my posture,
but í do not fall.
Oops. Giggle.
Tell me, again, your mythos of Svetlana Zakharova and Robert Bolle.
Í love it when you have me repeat myself.
Well, she is from the Balanchine school, where every movement is lavish and ornate, pronounced and, often, painfully slow. Most male dancers get cast as choreographical fillers. They dance in support of a prima or a principal or a soloist, keeping her held in spotlights in impossible postures. This is changing, though. Bolle was the best at this. But, when he dances with Svetlana, she needed no outside support. She would hold her own positions while he knelt and/or took the spotlight. Her tenacity, strength, gave him a chance to both shine and rest. A chance to breathe. You know í found some of my prostrations from her La Bayadère variation.
He says: I know. The way you wrap your arm about your crown to cup your opposite cheek
My eyes have gone wide.
Í am loose now.
You look ready: he says.
Í know the perfect album: í say, flitting away.
From the other room, í drop the diamond tip to spinning vinyl.
Beaming.
Watch this: í say.
As the music flows.
My eyes remain open but í am not seeing.
Í feel as if becoming music in motion.
Í snake, í extend. Pronounce the flare of hips.
Í make strange signs with my fingers.
Í shift in this solo performance for the audience of the one.
His neck bends back and rests on the tub’s edge, eyes narrowing.
He begins speaking words as they come
to his mind.
There is no need to write these.
He says: I like how you begin with the restraint of ballet proper before losing yourself into more, less classical, feral movements.
Í whisper: ballet is a foundation of five simple positions from which infinite variations may be culled; but, dance is second to second and cannot be predicted, only experienced. It is undomesticated, improvised, choreography at heart.
You cannot awaken someone pretending to be asleep: he said.
Making a desk into one’s own.
Write upon me. Pleas: í say.
Priapus’ pen is pushing into papyrus; and, the
song of the sound produces a strange and intoxicating
ability within me to suspend mine own breath.
í hear your eyes speak to me:
If I dropped my pen to the floor,
how hard
would it be to convince you to recover it, for me, in your mouth?
⊙
And, if imagination is a precursor to reality, well,
í have got it in spades,
Howl í can only hope and imagine
Whomever, in this card game, takes the bid calls spades as trumps.
The sunny, shiny queen of magnets is also the
aloof, wide-eyed lady of looking-glass house,
and, wanting, to be
Your night witch.
⊙
Do the pillars ever leave or do they
simply appear
to leave as we move further closer
…
Further
Closer
….
As we imagine our stillness to be actually motion in movement?
/venture forth and know me/, no-one man of wildest dreams.
Howl í howl when í say or do something wild,
like the sweet, little monster í am
And, you respond: I know.
Prove it, pleas/e.
The silence slaps the sweet smile from my face.
Two dimples disappear and my eyes go wide and watery like reflecting pools.
It was expected, knowing the routine.
Like my cheekbones slipping softly against your inner thighs.
I return of my own volition.
I am into repetition. Can ya tell?
A cassette played and then rewound, to be as the stabilizing soundscape to enhance feeling and gift a smile,
but cared for and never unspooled.
After doing the same action, ten times,
the action becomes anew,
because we extend the potential through practice.
Carrying wood.
Ritualization.
Not new, but still true. Reposted
Like an aged letter.
I am soft today.
Wide-eyed in hope and a hint of previous hurt.
An open vessel never being vacuous.
I embrace it,
whispering in a whimper: hey, let me in.
A Tea Party for your sobering Psychopomp.
Vamp for me, wild thing.
I will howl out the accompaniment to your movements.
The accompaniment as the autumnal ewe fades away,
but before the howling winds of this
fall remove all the leaves from your limbs
And leave You exposed to face the winter
Unrooted.
Locals always laugh at the outfits of outsiders.
Before this autumnal fall,
í, in summer, remember when the sun would not fully go down until the double penetration of digits of the timely hour:
ten o’clock
eleven o’clock.
The midnight sun.
Mooning and fully waxed, then too soonly waning;
like how the free market prefers prefit,
favoring beholden over that which is bespoke and
hand-made.
Hot-air ballons.
so tightly wound, we no longer remember which is the right side of the road
down which to drive.
What of those howling, “sincerity is my only credential?”?
Those who live where the gravity is strange?
Where it pulls at such acutely obtuse angles?
Like shadows of the diabolicals we call hills and valleys.
Leaning forward whilst reaching back in this pendulous periodicity of the multiform streams.
No rights: homage
to a song I cannot get enough.
Giggling my ass off since early this morning.
A lovely, silly diversion that lightens my mood.
Has a sort of Ian Dury and the Blockheads feel.
⊙
This album was released today.
Josh Homme has a disposition that attracts great talent.
From Queens of the Stone Age to Them Crooked Vultures (with John Paul Jones).
From Dave Grohl and Trent Reznor.
And, Iggy Pop.
And, now, Matt Berry.
Cheers
The sun hits that magic hour in its descent.
Making the black wrought iron scaffolding of the ongoing, neighboring construction appear alive and bioluminescent.
A shiny male hummingbird buzzes about my feeder.
He sounds like how carpenter ants work.
A single strand of spider web, disconnected from
save one of its points of anchorage, bandies about in the breeze like a tethered up sail boat does overnight, with its rigged sails furled tight like sleeping’s closed eyes.
The sun catches the gossamer strand in line segments up to but not including
its full length.
I smell someone has lighted a fire in their hearth for the first time in a long time.
My nostrils taste stale smoke.
Shall I gather the kindling while you carry the firewood?
My chimney flue prepared, opened after a recent clean.
Strike a match to it so I may wrap around, in the fire light,
like a little, infinite möbius
s
t
r
i
p
.
WrittenCasey 