Laura's Crush (2005)

I asked my mother if they’d shoot
the white horse
that reared up on Thursday.
No. She said
they don’t do that anymore.
She almost laughed.
Rueful I guess is what we call it
when my mother’s mouth
is half up towards something silly
and part way tucked in
to accommodate the wound.
I didn’t intend to mourn
the white horse.
That’s not why I asked.
I don’t even know it’s name
or if it has a gender.
But what am I supposed to want
for the animal
that reared up so high
it fell over backwards
and crushed my little sister?

(CONT.) CLICK:

Slippers, Racism and Charm School

It’s a good thing I love my slippers. Granted they do poke past the back of my foot quite a bit but that’s because they’re one size too big. I like this though because they still work with enormous baggy socks and when my feet are swollen. My slippers also satisfy my personal aesthetic. They, just by the nature of their size, force me to be what I’ve always wanted. It’s indisputable that this makes for a good relationship, being the best you can be, brought on by the other. See I’ve always had a fascination for women who shuffle in their scruffy slippers but whenever I’ve tried to walk that way I hear my mother in my head. She used to say: "…walk like a lady. Lift up your feet.” I went to ‘Charm School’ when I was eleven. They taught us how to balance a book and fold socks so the top of one didn’t get disfigured by stretching around the other. My mother’s prescription for me was: “You walk like an elephant.” She told the teacher this in a very loud voice the first day when she took me. I know the other girls were glad they weren’t me but look at me now. I’m aging but I made it to here, ethics intact. It’s still a little hard to scuff in my slippers though, because of guilt. I don’t want the ‘Charm School’ fees to have been a waste but when I sneak outside and it’s so early that my breath catches in the peeking light, I just scuff away.

The problem started this morning when I hit the grounded snow avalanche from the neighbor’s roof. The path I so carefully made two shovel-widths wide is now a mess of lumps and craters, frozen solid. I love the crunch though. I went up there to retrieve my errant garbage pails. The pickup was a day late because I put them out without remembering that even though racism has been covertly dominant in Boston, garbage pickup was one day delayed all week because of Martin Luther King day. The wind blowing and my aging forgetting made for a mash-up of trash receptacles, deep inside a neighboring yard. I just walked right in there, hoping the two pounds I think I lost (it could have been where I set the zero on the scale) would keep me afloat through the center-of-their-yard snow-drifts. Nothing doing. My slipper sank and left me. I was one on, sock on ice, with a fist-grip on the pail. It’s okay though. The temperature is low enough that my sock didn’t saturate and thank goodness it’s not as though my slipper fell through a pond. I like to find gratitude wherever I can. Particularly now when everything in our Country is looking up and people are so hopeful and things seem worse than ever before in the history of humankind. Thank God I didn’t have to lay on my belly and poke my slipper up and out with a stick. What if someone had come by and heard my slipper yelling “help” while my sock announced my lack of darning skills and I covered my eyes in hopes that our cultural belief: “…if I can’t see it, it isn’t happening…” would once, just this once, be true so I wouldn’t have to embarrass myself and disappoint my mother.

I got it though. And my slipper is drying happily with its mate, comfortably quiet near the woodstove after I shuffled all the way back down the path. It was a little cold for the toe that pokes through the hole in my sock but other than that, I’m happy to report that all went well.

Revisionist History

I’ve turned the lights off
to sit in the dark while everyone celebrates.
I’m so afraid of revisionist history.
I try to remind myself
that Native Americans and Slavery and even the Holocaust
are now studied in school.
But the proof that my story ever happened
has so often been denied,
even when it was current.

I sometimes think
that if the stories would just conveniently disappear,
it could so much more comfortably be
as if they (I) had not ever happened at all.

As it is though,
I am a receptacle for traumas
that have already happened.
While some will forge ahead
into hope and change,
some of us will bring up the rear,
composting the landscape
with the stories required
for an honest growth.

When 9/11 blasted through our denial
and the glass and bodies fell down,
I thought our world would finally know
that individual terror
really counts.

I want to party with the patriotic,
worship with the religious,
grade test scores with the educators,
read x-rays with the doctors,
design energy efficient units with the architects,
and be able to afford the new car smell of a hybrid.

I wish I didn’t know
that arbitrary divisions of land masses means
fighting over resources,
that organized religions
promote ‘us’ and ‘them’,
that test scores
indicate nothing useful when it comes to compassionate living,
that medical symptoms generally aren’t the issue,
that form needs to follow function,
and that affluence begets access to energy efficient products.

Because then
I could turn my lights on
and dance the ‘HBO, free for all tonight’, television mambo.

The problem is
history happened.
Things don’t disappear
when they already are.
And we can’t let go
of truths we’ve never let ourselves have.

Shameless Begging

I want. I want. I want. And I’m too old to be cute in the raw, undiluted land of desire.

Lest you jump too quickly from my ‘wants’ to the mental island of sexuality, let’s first look at what happens if you leap there. You could say this leap is an arch, a powerful motion, a catapult that shoots brain synapses from one state to another, an elevator up the ladder of inference, a rocket-ship of assumption. Any way you phrase it, it’s a high speed motion from a simple word to an assumed understanding that may or may not be what was intended.

Lets assume you make the bound across. You read or hear or think ‘want’ and arrive at sexuality. The path is fraught with landmarks. Suppose I say that the propensity to jump from my simple expression of a feeling: ‘I want’, to the mind state of sex, comes from the wired cluster of linear connections that ultimately keep us all relatively immobile. It starts with our thoughts. Thoughts lead to words, and words to interaction, and interaction to assumption, and assumption to belief, and this huge galloping mouthful of word connections leads to sex. I know it doesn’t feel immobile when the endorphins are fairly abuzz with possibility but think about locale: against a wall, over the kitchen table, draping the couch, horizontal in bed. Sure looks static to me.

But what makes something true? If everyone thinks that the word ‘want’ refers to sex, does it? This takes me back to a 1970’s feminist group process issue: ‘Consensus Agreement’. A phraseology capable of subverting an entire culture. ‘Consensus Decision making’ is a group process, not unlike ‘Robert’s Rules of Order’, except that by implication, everyone has to agree to agree in order for anything to happen.

So, back to the question. From a consensus perspective, everyone agreeing should make something true. But what if what many people think originates from information that indicates faulty thinking? Doesn’t this mean that the popular opinion could be wrong? There are lots of ‘wants’ that are not based in sex.

Okay. I admit it. A feminist origin is hard to leave behind – even if I wanted to – which I don’t. I do think it’s sad that ‘wants’ and desires are so often marginalized into the sexual arena when, in fact, we can find so many other places to go with it all. But no need to worry -- these other places can still evoke plenty of shame.

Wanting. I’ve never met a person that doesn’t. And yet, we’re taught it’s something we’re supposed to outgrow. And certainly by the time we’re old enough to be a parent, dye our hair, or eat out alone, wanting is supposed to have evaporated in direct proportion to the massive amounts of chemicals in our non-organic food. That is, unless the wants are in a sexual arena, where the natural ebbing and flowing of desire is supposed to increase when you’re wanted and decrease when you’re not.

But. I do. Want that is. In fact I want often. I want a lot. And it is not about sex.

What I want right now is to figure out how to solicit HUGE numbers of people to read and interact with my blog. And this brings me right back to the place I started. Is there such a thing as ‘shameless begging’? Is this an oxymoron? Is it what I am doing right now? What if it is ‘shame-filled’ but I’m doing it anyway? Maybe I disagree with the tenet that it’s shameful to beg. Maybe I think that shame is based on faulty thinking.

I want. I want you. I want readers to interact with my work. Please.

Truth & The Penis (1997)

Click to read long performance text
Note: Contains adult language

Aging

I nearly got caught because I’ve waited too long and now it’s rained on top of the snow. I was busy vacillating in front of the mirror and the temperature dropped so my slippers have no traction. It’ll be okay because I’ve mastered the old lady ice shuffle. No worries though. I look too young to really need to walk this way, so if anyone’s watching they’ll think I’m just goofing around. My double sized order of placenta eye cream is hidden inside my jacket (I got a two month supply for only $19.99, free shipping). I threw out the box with the label right after it came in the mail and since I’ve been using two at a time there’s probably only 35 or 40 in my pocket. That company promised healthy tissue – soft and pliable as a baby’s butt – but the bags under my eyes still look like raccoon cheeks and I’m tired of pawing through my sock drawer to unearth the little tubes every time I have a moment of absolute privacy. I think I’ll still keep trying with the teeth whitening gel. Even if it doesn’t work, it comes with a really fabulous brush. I’ve hidden it inside my one pair of super elasticized, leg-swell reducing knee socks. I’m sneaking up to the outside garbage can because the picture in the advertisement was a lie. They probably used the face of a twelve year old. I hate to admit it but I really thought the placenta ingredient would do the trick.

The problem is I didn’t zip my pocket. It’s unnerving how far placenta tubes can scatter when the person trying to discreetly dispose of them falls down. One slipper’s out of reach and I’m afraid I’m crying, right here on the path in front of my house. I just never thought I’d get this old and I don’t want the evidence of my denial to surface next spring. It’s not like I don’t know about aging. I’ve been supporting my clients through life transitions for over twenty years. It’s just that I get this shock every time I look in the mirror. The me that feels like me doesn’t recognize my reflection. And why doesn’t anybody talk about it outside of therapy? I hope the garbage men don’t check inside the pails. After creeping back up the path in my wet slippers, this time with a shovel, I think I’ve got every single one of those worthless tubes in there.

The timing of it all somehow doesn’t fit the way I thought it was supposed to. Actually, none of this growing up business does. My daughter has an eight-month-old baby but it’s just recently that I’ve given up on the notion that someday I’ll really be a ‘grownup’ and my tastes will magically change. The fact that my cherished-baggy-black-pants are with me for the long haul is a relatively new insight. It’s not as though I don’t like what I like, or even that I don’t like what I am. It’s more that I still love to like what I like so much. And it seems to me that before I became the previous generation, things should have become a little more sedate. Aren’t mature women supposed to be a little less enthusiastic? I always thought grandmothers were supposed to be finished.

Actually, it’s not just baggy clothes. To be honest, words that roar unedited in my mental bullhorn are almost always adorned with colorful expletives and I have finches that fly loose in my house. I sweep snow with a broom and I love the sound of anything that resembles the ‘Beater and Block’ from my elementary school music class.

My daughter’s son was born right here in my living room. I think my wet slippers are drying now, right about where she squatted. Her partner held her up and I crouched underneath. She wailed that baby right into my arms. By the time the after-birth was out, I knew my aging in a whole new way (okay, so I fixed my eyeliner for the pictures but that was my only vanity). Through the weeping and the blood and the overwhelming awe of new life, I never once thought of actually using the placenta for my wrinkles.

Before the birth, when she asked me what I wanted to be called, I said “Anything but Grandma.” I intend no offense here. Many people love the term. It’s just that I realized – in the fraction of a second between my daughter’s question and the auditory waves hitting my heart – that I had some adjusting to do.

Now it all starts to make some sort of sense: a name that’s a crystal clear generic with all sorts of preconceptions isn’t going to look right on the shipping label of the next anti-aging product I purchase.

So. You can call me Babaka.

My Words Were The ‘issue’.

When I was married it was my words that were the ‘issue’.

It wasn’t specifically the words I’d choose or let loose, spit out, spill, dump, let fly or even the ones that would slip out between the cracks in my teeth. It was more how I’d string them together. A flowing brook, stream, river, avalanche, cascading rock-slide of thoughts would roar out of me and hit a brick wall of misunderstanding, readily explained away by the fact of my delivery. So it wasn’t what I’d say but how I’d say it. Naturally it followed then, that with this basic premise in place, his rationalizing when things ran amuck was effortless.

Of course for me, entering the high speed thought chase of talk – a reciprocal, exponentially catapulting, feedback loop of thinking, lip flapping, listening, feeling, and ultimately seeing, and then tumbling, falling, galloping into the next level of interacting with all of it – was intoxicating. But that wasn’t the point. The point, at least the point my then-husband insisted was the essential, earth stopping reason for whatever might be going south in the moment, was that I talked wrong. It was my kind of speaking he said. As if there was a kind of thinking, expressing, being, that was just essentially too … well, too something. So starting right down at the foundation where all connection begins (I’d personally call it the basement, the cold cellar, the long term storage of human interaction), he thought I’d open my mouth and skew things up. It’s not the basic ingredients he’d assure me, the words themselves were fine. It was the total me that encompassed them - the core from which they flew - that created the space between us.

If our argument had been a Russian Borsht, the onions, beets, carrots and beef would have been perfectly adequate, possibly even organic. It was the soup base itself he must have thought flawed – the essence in the liquid one slurps first from the spoon – as if the stock came from some alien, foreign refrigerator. Picking out words one by one, he’d pause like one who savors only the carrots, while surreptitiously feeding the rest to the dog under the table as if nobody could see. And in fact, I couldn’t. I thought I must have been doing something wrong. I was utterly convinced if I could just talk yet faster – be more inclusive, reach farther, probe deeper – that somewhere in the mental melee I’d find a combination of words that would rebuild the bridge between us. Maybe he didn’t like Borsht. I could try Potato Cheese or Mushroom Leek. But the bad taste seemed to have something to do with my pace. As if the roiling connections, the references to various sources, and the odd bits of history added too much spice for his palate. Whatever it was, I certainly didn’t win the Betty Crocker cooking award at the County Fair of talking, at least not during the years he was the only judge.

He called it ANDREASPEAK and eventually refused to participate.