Luco wishes you a belated happy Valentine's Day

  

I know it is post Valentine's Day. Post-February the 14th. I have missed it! That time of  hearts, cheap candy, and cries of love. Devotion.

And I know I let the day slide by. I did not look any of the animals in this house in the eye - say to them dearest, my heart is in your paw or something else as bland. Instead I slept. Slept and dreampt and then awoke to find Mingus in bed with me.

Mingus, uninvited. Mingus, my cellmate these past eight years.

Strange how quickly and how very slowly eight years have washed over us. A moment ago, here he was mewling in the night: today I am an old feline, bent, stooped. And he hardly any green left.

He is half my size and twice my heart.

And if I were the type to fall and fall in love, it would be into him that I would tumble.

See you his spotted paws? His vulpine ears?

And when he dreams he moves his body, inching closer or further away from me. His whiskers tremble with slightest sigh.

I did not ask him to be my Valentine. I have never asked anyone to my Valentine be.

And if I did, what would he say? Would he scoff, tossing golden fur in disdain? I imagine every bone in my body disintegrating at the sound.

Maybe I would say - my heart

                                          is a kind of poison            tonight

it is overfull

                                  and  you     an antidote

His laughter would be so resounding as to wake every sleeping bird, every nestling thing starting up, reaching for mother, craning neck to hide - small, small - and I a ghost, then, disappeared, then.

Perhaps he would be angry at my audacity. Angry that after eight years, eight years, I am now sidling up to him, searching his eyes for warmth. He might have loved me once and forgotten. He might have loved me once and grown to hate me. He might have loved me once, before I became who I have become.

And who am I? That which encompasses everything and which is itself nothing - that which is of the air - that which cannot be named and yet we name - the same as you and as you and as you and as you.

And happy Valentine's Day to us all, yes? To us all searching and not finding, or searching and then finding and then losing, or searching, and having searched, grown tired - to all of us buried beneath the rubble of ridiculous expectations. To the tyranny of desire. To knowing better and not caring. To never knowing better and not wanting to learn.

To all of us awake in the middle of the night, startled by Mingus' laughter which permeates our dreams.

And yet he lies here, with me, and I lie silent, lying to myself, playing word games in my stupid head, imagining my tongue on his ear. My body covering his.

And doing nothing. Nothing.

Happy belated Valentine's Day. I could not bring myself to post this before. I could not bring myself to face these feelings.

And facing them has taught me this.

Luco is to craven as Mingus is to kiss.

Secret Meena (aka Fremlin)

I feel sometimes like a secret.

A cat can be a secret, can't she? And what am I if not that, loitering in doorways, scratching at windows I'd be too afraid to leap out of. I prowl the hallways at night, unable to keep myself from wailing I am lost, I am lost.

What compels this? What clockwork in my heart grinds to life?

A secret, abandoned. Like four and twenty blackbirds I exist just below the surface of surveillance. I coast, I hum, I caterwaul (and damn my feral lungs for their clamor); and am unnoticed.
 

So I might say I love you, Christmas tree, I love you and by this mean nothing, for who hears but the glitter approximating snowflakes dusted across my forehead? Who notices besides the artificial village?

I'm the maid in the garden, aren't I? And the blackbirds bear down on me.

But why should I seek to quiet this swelling feeling? This expansiveness barely contained by, let's say, pie crust (if you don't mind my fascination with a nursery rhyme - it's just so gruesome, so cruel - an apt, if brutal, metaphor for injustice eternal).

It seems to me I ought to feel hopelessly alone. And I do, but I don't. Perhaps just not hopelessly so. I do sometimes feel abandoned, yes, and I began this post by informing you a cat can be  a secret.

But here I am also an apex. Of what I'm uncertain, but of something. It bubbles within me. A potential. And in streaks the hope, out the lessness.

 

I am small or I am large and yet it persists regardless. Happy Christmas, happy Hanukkah, happy Kwanza. Happy happy happy happy. A word maybe stranger than we understand. Originally it meant something more like lucky.

Am I lucky? Am I abandoned or am I found or am I both or neither? Does it matter what I call myself when I stalk the darkness? Who is this moaning creature who has become unmoored within herself? 

Let the wildness roam. Let the feral speak. Let it pour from my lips like breath.

I will find solace here in this fake village. I'll move in, make do.

And you can visit. Ask me why I've changed my name, my home town.

You can bring tea. You can sit with me here. Do something with this pocket full of rye. And find the king and find the queen and save the poor maid - me? - who, like you, toils under the falsehood she is anything other than as artificial as this newly painted snow.

And yet we are something far more than lucky; the fact that we even in this moment exist is extraordinary. How rare we are, and how infinite. How alone and how interconnected. We thrash ourselves to insomniac frenzies and feel desolate, but these tantrums are fractals of experience - my grasping is your pulling is my scaling is your falling is my attenuating body is your breadth is my love is your love is my love is your love is existence repeated in winding strands alike to glinting tinsel on a tree.

And whether my nose is snatched off in the beak of a blackbird, I know you and I are both flecks of gold and silver. Transient. Illogical. Wild.

We are each a kind of crescendo.

 

To His Coy Luco

Today I am reading homework responses for the poem "To His Coy Mistress," by Andrew Marvell. The poem was published in 1681, which I find hard to believe, much less conceive of. 1681? It seems perhaps a different dimension.

What would I do in 1681? Mouse, I suppose, or dart desperately from booted feet. There would have been, of course, no outlet for my lamentations, my creativity, my grasping at shadows.

How did creatures do it? Existent avant l'Internet?

You might have noted the wine, the glass which reads Paris (an obsession, I will admit - the cemeteries, churches, nightlife, ennui, le metro - Paris, je t'adore).

And perhaps I have had too much of it, but really, Marvell? He writes (a strange aspect of MLA, is it not? The use of the present tense so that the written word, no matter its age, is constant, alive. We are always of and in the moment): "My vegetable love should grow / vaster than empires, and more slow" (11-12) as he attempts to convince his maîtresse effarouché to, you know, "like amorous birds of prey, / rather at once our time devour" (37-18).

He is so, pray pardon the expression, lame. I would love you forever, blah blah blah, but we are going to die one day, so love me now in a carnal way (ah, see? I am a poet approaching Fremlin's caliber now).

I do love "vegetable love," however. It makes me swoon a bit. Perhaps I would have been convinced by his syllogism. 

But what must the maîtresse effarouché be thinking? Does she feel special, or does she see that  Marvell is manipulating her, that whispers of "though we cannot make our sun / stand still, yet we will make him run" (45-46) are meant to win her complicity and (although maybe I am simply a lonely cynic) nothing else?

Does she believe their love blurs time, speeds life, perhaps even feeds existence itself?

Is it really only one or the other for her - tenderness or manipulation - could it be both? And, you know, I do not believe I can read another of these responses - I am too perturbed at Marvell to take him seriously at the moment.

Perhaps I shall take this wine more seriously instead.

Please. I need just a moment to gather myself.

Marvell, you crazy carpe diem lover, you are right, let us "roll all our strength and all / our sweetness up into one ball, / and tear our pleasures with rough strife / through the iron gates of life" (41-44).

"Rough strife?" "Iron gates?" Is Marvell hinting some kind of BDSM thing here?

No, I jest!

The wine is not helping my homework-headache, it is not easing my solitude, it is not gentling my tiger's heart; if anything it is singeing my "every pore with instant fires" (36). Alack! A rare kind of fire this, and intense. I certainly feel less serious than I would want - a lesson: take wine too seriously and it will seriously vous fera bête.

I should get back to grading, back to reading. Give me some Daphne Gottlieb or even Sylvia Plath (maybe my favorite line in all of poetry: "Love set you going like a fat gold watch" from the poem "Morning Song"), but I shall instead finish this glass.

Why not? Even though Marvall was consumed by natural lust, and I may lust thusly no longer since my "fixing," still I might make my sun run. Yet I might abandon myself to this moment, and none need convincing save my own gullet.

 

Carpe vinum.

Mingus is Bummed

It has been a long day.

A long day for me, for the lizards I chased and didn't catch. For the barking dogs who won't ever, oh my god, stop barking. For Luco, who hides in the laundry room because the air conditioner fixing guy is here, ostensibly fixing the air conditioner. For MR who who feeds me, but not the food I want. For her boyfriend who lives here and who is made to toil, cleaning the house, fixing leaking pipes. For Fremlin who has ventured into my thoughts as of late, unexpected.

She's there, hiding in the kick drum.

Creeping past the kitchen cabinet.

Batting at my tail.

Nosing her way through the Tubby Kat Door.

She sometimes looks as lonely as I feel. Why do long days make me wistful? I glare through the window to the Outside and dream my stupid, impotent dreams.

In neon I catch and kill rats. Swirling prisms of blood and of screaming. Trees arch into the limitless sky.

If I could climb one? I'd never stop - always moving up, up, up. Taste the clouds. Claw my way into the sun.

Burn there, alone again but purposeful. Stretched out across the horizon. Mingus-Sunset. Mingus-Glory.

Fremlin tip toes. The dogs wail with ambulance sirens. I stalk flies and imagine myself a moth.

Oh, how I'd cling to the window screen. And how I'd careen through atmosphere.

Imagine me: Breath bursting in my ribcage, extended to wing filaments - perhaps the other animals' dreams dusting my body, cascading hail cracking sidewalks, rooftops, splintering lizards into fractilized pieces.

Sometimes I hate this.

It, me, everything. Feeling like I'm waiting when I'm not, because no one is ever going to open that door for me. Only Outside brief moments I shoot past legs, through grasping hands.

Moments Outside feel like a lifetime. Like briefest dream.

I grapple with the memory. Taste of breeze. Tree limb. Mud.

The dogs get this freedom every day. They don't, however, seem to understand that which they have. Perhaps a truism for all of us, but still.

I mean, I know I have it pretty good here. Better than the lizards crushed between open window and closed. Better than ants marching for poison. Than mold sweeping its slow way across the patio.

Perhaps to be alive is to yearn. For movement. Excitement. The heat and the crash of chance, of chaos. This a type of entanglement - you and I and everyone bending to reach for the slip of a hook that will pull us up, out, away. That will us liberate.

I sound like Luco, don't I? He's been reading Sartre aloud for days and days and days. “I am alone in the midst of these happy, reasonable voices. All these creatures spend their time explaining, realizing happily that they agree with each other. In Heaven's name, why is it so important to think the same things all together. ”

But we do, don't we? I think we do.

And it makes my loneliness all the more bitter.

The Dog Contemplates Luco's Snide Remark of Yesteryear

I'm trying to curl up into a small ball. I'm tall so it's hard because my legs are long sticks that poke out away from me when I'm trying desperately to be tiny.

And this blanket isn't helping me either because I want to curl up so I can hide and the couch is tan "cappuccino" says Lucy and the blanket you can see it it is green and white and a lighter green than the other green.

Why do I want to hide you ask me? I was just reading Luco's blog and I came upon this one which I understood some more of the words than when I read it last time and it made me a shaking dog that can't really stand up and a dog that doesn't really want to look into anyone else's faces a dog who wants to hide and to not be seen by anyone of all the others in the house where I live and where I sleep when I am tired.

He writes "Suicide is too easy. It is ignoble. It is an act the dog might consider if the dog could become aware of his own existence in any meaningful sort of  way."

Which is meaning what? I know the word ignoble because I looked it up it hurt my heart like an ice cube pressed into my muscle fiber which burns and stings and is somehow cold all at once a thing like that that doesn't make sense that is so cold it is somehow hot and my face is burning and I can't feel my tongue in my own mouth and what does he mean when he says I might consider it?

Does he think I should?

Am I such a bad dog such a terrible entity (which means like a thing that exists which I do I do I do) that I am so stupid I shouldn't be here in this house wandering around with my long bent over legs and my drooling mouth trying to lick Lucy or whatever and how does Luco know when to say I should kill myself?

When or why or how or where or who so what does that tell me about him who I thought was my friend who I stayed with him years who I held onto him sometimes when he let me and him who I looked and looked in his eyes and decided not to eat him who is warm when he's sleeping and sometimes soft who wants to be pet but can't let himself who wants to love but can't let himself and him him him who writes and thinks these terrible things which I respect so much but don't understand so much sometimes but when I do again it's like the ice cube but all over me and he's the one saying I'm ignoble? 


That I should kill myself?

Maybe he didn't mean it. Had a bad day and thought I was a dummy creature with no feelings just cloth inside me but that's not true I have this horrible heart.

It's horrible because it's so strong and you know the word intense? And it beats and it beats and it beats and when I think of cheese it beats faster and when I think of Lucy the Scarecrow and hey Luco I thought you were my family but now and now and now you don't know me at all want to say to me these things like I'm a black hole sucking in all everything that was good and just killing it so I should kill myself?

Don't you Luco remember any of the times I licked you?

But I am aware of myself anyway which is different from what you said which I don't get because you're supposed to be so smart and here you aren't being smart because I know of a thing you don't know and my body gets hot in the sun when I lie Outside and look in at you with your pointed feral face and you want what I have maybe but you can't admit it.

Or you admit it but not really with some words that hide what you really mean and so I hide here in this curled up sad ball that isn't small enough because here is MR anyway taking my pictures!

I want to love more and I want to feel more sunshine and so even though I'm aware of my own existence in something that could probably be called a meaningful way no I don't  Luco want to die and I don't want to be dead and away from my Lucy and my Mingus and the other ones also who skitter through the house and who never say to me they'd prefer I was dead.

Because I can quote Hamlet too Luco I can say words from it like the verse that is my favorite: "Let Hercules himself do what he may the cat will mew and dog will have his day."

So but I understand if a better word for how Luco feels is jealousy and jealously and jealous but he should be nice to me! He should try to be.

Remember when we were a family and you didn't love me maybe but you didn't act this way? Remember when I was as good a dog as I could be? Remember when everyone says stupid things sometimes but maybe not that someone should kill himself because really that's going past some kind of a line I think which I know I don't know as much as Luco does but am I crazy?

Tell me am I?


It's just that I think of the taste of sand the grit of it in my teeth Lucy's sharp bark in the morning the songs of cane toads and delirium a flash of Mingus' tail as he whips around the hall the steadying pressure of MR's hand the cool of water and clouds whorling a hundred millions of things I want to still tell you and tell to Lucy who is my shingingest the green of the morning when it's hazy too and the sound of traffic every yell from a happy kid and babies screaming their little cries so distinct the taste of meat and the softness of it between my teeth when I bite and I chew and saliva fills my mouth so delicious.

And when I think these things? No matter what you think I'm worth?

Then I don't ever want to not be alive.

Mingus Enjoys Sleeping, Dreaming

I dream often and intensely of other worlds. Science fictions where cats reign as kings and queens, the inside is Outside, and our current masters become our kin.

I dream whirlpool worlds of color; places on the laminate that sink into other dimensions; voices crowd and crow in the dusk a chorus of love, of hope, of dizzy joy; rustling bones freed of skin; days I sleep and never see the color white.

Upon hearing of my recent, nearly somnambulist sleep (nearly so because it's been five if it's been twenty separate moments I move to get up in my sleep, gesture to a shadow friend, leap into the air), Luco asked me to write. 

But language fails me and it does so exponentially as I work the words around and around; what this shady glen, and this? Myriad flaming birds alight on my body-not-my-body. Taste of copper. Of anchovy. Of sugar sweat.

And I don't sweat though, so what is that? And why this infestation of imagery?

I've got it like a flu. Shivering alone in bed, but shivering in a kind of luscious glory (luscious because it is sumptuous, plunging, all-consuming; the kind of glory not of pride but born of deepest felt emotion).

The dogs watch me jerk in my sleep. Do they laugh?

Do I care if they do? And if I try to tell them, morons, of these impossibilities, will they grasp even the most delicate thread of my meaning?

Luco said something about how I'm not alone, he goes through this too - spends whole "fortnights" (so tired of having to look up his antiquated language, jeeze) awestruck by his dreams.

His are, you might have guessed, darker. More morbid (he jokes he is moribund, so this morbidity "makes the clearest and most logical sense").

I could continue to list for you these images, these dreams, the conversations I have had and the epiphanies, but I fear I'd just bore you. What is worse than someone trying to tell you about a dream? And anyway, I bet listening to a cat's dreams (a mere cat!) seems all the more absurd.

"To sleep, perchance to dream," etc etc etc!

Luco tells me my dreams are meaningless. The frantic workings of a brain harried by the trials of every day life. I disagree. I tell him to just let me have my other-worlds. To leave me to revel in my sleep.

But you know Luco. He's kind of a jerk. He won't leave me alone.

You know? He probably had me write this blog just to distract me, because I'm pretty sure he dumped coffee in our water dish.

 

 And now I can't get back to sleep.

Luco, Desperate, Now Sleeps in the Closet

I feel I am too tired to speak. Too exhausted. Too old. 

So I hide in this closet. Away from les chiens dangereux. Les chiens terribles. Monstrueux. Le chiens que je déteste...

Is it true though? Do I hate these dogs. Apparently a construct not worthy of a question mark, but regardless, hate is perhaps too strong a word.

Does their incessant barking drive needles into my forehead? Yes. Does their smell churn my stomach and dizzy my brain? Yes. Does the sight of them frolicking together Outside send paroxysms of  jealousy through me? Yes.

And that, reader, is perhaps the thing. The basement, if you will, of my ill will.

Its foundation.

Brian Spears in a poem titled "Florida" from his book of poetry A Witness in Exile writes: 
"We cannot build
retaining walls to hold back
the sea - ocean percolates
through our limestone bedrock
and will drown us all one day.
Mangroves will survive,
sawgrass: that which salt cannot
desiccate. All else collapses,
but not yet. For now we build
bubbles; flipping is in our blood.
Land pulled from the swamp;
land the sea will soon reclaim."

I find my weary, sodden, dopey, recalcitrant mind fixated on this idea of my peninsula, my own entire prison, enveloped by water, overtaken, consumed by salt and by sea air and by les poissons.

Do the dogs think of this? Is it shuffling inside them as they play? And if not, do I covet them their ignorance?

Their affection for each other?

Because here I lie. Hiding in a closet. Some of that which the salt will desiccate, but then, I suppose that is the point of everything.

That we are dissoluble, ultimately. Ashes to ashes and all of that which you already know. A fragment of a melody stuck spinning in your inner ear.

We are so brief as to be invisible. And our own lives so full of gravity; as though you are the sun, reader, as I circle you, and we chortle, or we fill with anguish, or we love, but we nonethelsss circle, circle, circle. 

 

And those horrible dogs, they do this together. And they are satisfied to never wonder where Florida may move. How it might sink. How my heart breaks to see them embrace, doggish, in the Outside, halcyon fields of flowers and lizards; perfect in their pure happiness (and I am not one to believe in "purity" or "perfection," but one only has to watch them - the complicated geometry of their bones and muscles working as they dance together in the dirt); Hyperion's own daughter and son; and I am from their union and their joy kept, a cat in a closet, trapped in the closet.

Or I slouch into the prison. Glance around me. Fall asleep. Watch the prison guard. Read. Fall asleep. Gaze out every window. Dream. Imagine Florida just a tip of rock jutting from the water. Eat - each pellet of food exactly the same in taste, texture, size. Fall asleep.

Dream my prison guard staring into my eyes, finding something like a soul (I do not believe in souls); dream her understanding; dream her riotous; the dogs insects balanced on stick legs wrapped in paper, shipped off somewhere; dream my own blood a surging tide, my heart the moon balancing all of gravity, my center the center of everything - more than heat, more than fire, more than all-everything, and this: an admission of guilt, and then the caress of forgiveness; my mother's eyes on me. Ocean waves licking my feet.

And I wake alone.

 

 Because I am always-already alone.

Luco & the New Dog

I do not have to tell you the life I lead is one of misery. You have known me long enough to see the anguish in my eyes, have you not? Can you feel the way it blisters inside me? Forced to hide behind a bathroom door, surrounded always only by those who despise me.

Oh, and how they must despise so fervently - so fervent is the prison guard in her loathing she never tires of conjuring new punishments, new torments.

I cannot think what I have done to cause this, to call forth this life (if one can be said to have ever called forth the life one inhabits. I believe this to an extent only - those who posit "the Secret" and snicker to themselves behind their palms horrify and sicken me).

What have I done, dog? Please, Mr. Pawsley, I can barely form sentences. You write this vile blog tonight. Take you up this torch.

Luco he sounds mad because of the other dog who lives here with me but not just in the bathroom where we go to get Luco when he is hiding in there like a big grouchy gus which is a kind of an annoyed person who doesn't want to say anything but complaining which is what Luco does most of the time I think. Except when he's sleeping!

Actually I heard him even complaining in his sleep the other day when he said aloud real loud in a mean voice "those are my cat treats!" but when I told him about that he said no that's not what he said. He said he woke his own self up from a dream when he "cried out" something more like "lo! Yonder fields are fair and green" which doesn't sound anything like treats but Luco can be the boss because he's in charge so I guess that's what he said but I don't really think that very muchly at all.

Anyway, that little pointy guy over there is another dog she's a girl her name is Lucy aka Big Pointy Face Dog aka The Scarecrow (my favoritest of her names) aka the Angry Dog aka One of the Two Jelly Dogs aka Lucy Lucy. I'll let her say hi now because I think she really wants to she's got that look in her eyes like she's about to say something and since Luco already left the room I don't even think he minds about it what can he say anyway?

Hello.

Are you dangerous? You look a bit dangerous. I will tell you this -  one must be careful. Very, very careful. For instance, there is a man who stalks the prison. He comes almost every day. I've gotten the sense of his scent and it's bad. He is called "The MailMan," but I imagine it must be short for something else. Perhaps I've misheard and really he's "The MaulMan." That makes more sense to me.
You see, I see him looking in at me. And I know he's going to drop off... things... Of an indeterminate nature. What things I cannot say. Weapons, probably, or poisons. Bills of course. You should hear The Prison Guard howl when she slits open his letters of malfeasance. "I can't pay this," she moans. And "where will the money come from?"

Not that she's a pauper by any means; she is, I think, a touch melodramatic. But it could be that The MaulMan has her in his clutches, and although she smiles, opens the door, and always says hello, she senses in her gut his evil. I've counseled her on this. We've had discussions.

For what could this MaulMan want but trouble? What other prize could he be after? I've hid the toys and their squeakers. I've dug holes in the yard to bury my every possession, and yet still he lingers. A villainous fellow if ever one I spied.

I worry he's made a key and will come in this prison as he pleases.

I worry he has a taste for dog-meat.

I worry he watches me, all sinew pumping as I run and run outside with the other dog, that Mr. Pawsley, my idiot friend.

I worry his nose is as good as his eyes for sniffing out dogs.

He'll pack us up in burlap and drive us into the night. Come back to the prison with bills and more bills. He'll harass and he'll hound and he'll weasel his way into something like the secret heart of my Prison Guard and her People.

I say my because she is. Mine.

And but hey, wait! This is the Slippy Pawsley dog and I have to say she's mine though too because I saw her first and I licked her face and chewed up her every shoe and socks too and I sleep next to her legs and when she looks at me then she gives me a treat and I love that so you can't write on here anymore, Scarecrow, and you can't have the all my things that you want to take from me and personally I like the MaulMan Mailman because he's nice I think it's that he smells like potato chips which I can eat and eat and he lets me have the salt on his hands and I like that because it's nice so that's really everything all that I think.

But also I like you Lucy Lucy and Luco doesn't but I think your barking is so loud and so fierce and that you're a force like lightning is and like the thunder is and if I could catch you I'd want to have you in my mouth because you'd also taste like salt and like dog food and also dog treats which are delicious things for me to snack on when I'm snacking and also it's nice to never feel alone with you and your loud face around that makes me comfortable and that I can chase and chase and show you my dead lizards and remember that day when we found a mole and we threw it into the air and it arched and sailed like a beautiful bird in the sky? Even like a vulture which is a bad bird but which is so very beautiful when it just hangs there like it doesn't even have to move like it just floats of its own gorgeousness.

I wish I could fly like that like more than I can when I'm running so fast to catch you in my teeth and bite on you and have you near me like I always want you to be. Can you be closer to me? Can you get any closer? How can I have you so near me but not near enough and I'll take all the space Luco doesn't want you in and I'll look into your beady eyes of brownness and goldenness and I'll love and love and love.

 

And love and love and love you.