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.

Family Portrait

Some of you have been asking the prison guard how many of us prisoners there are and how we are all related (none by blood, I can this tell you truly), and so I thought I would do you the (dis)service of making our "family" clearly known.

My name is, as you may have already surmised, Luco - Luco de la Cabeza Grande is my full name, although my head is mostly average (perhaps smallish would be more accurate) sized now; when I was a kitten, it was so like a balloon as to tip me forward on my paws.

The prison guard suggested I list "likes" and "dislikes" and other such nonsense on here, so here we go, reader, on a journey asinine and superfluous.

Birthday: February 2001
Birthstone: Amethyst
Astrological sign: I am not even going to look this up. My astrological sign would be a bookshelf next to a comfortable couch and my astrological traits would be as follows: prone to melancholy and scholarly endeavors. Rarely satisfied with life outside of literature. On a constant quest for self and societal advancement, but only in the most passive manner imaginable.
Likes: Tuna water, books, the Outside, open windows, books, quiet afternoons, spots of sunshine, books.
Dislikes: Dogs, other cats, loud noises, ignorance, and more so than ignorance I think willful ignorance, intellectual dishonesty, long walks on the beach.
Relation to the prison guard: MR had a stray cat (my mother) she cared for and was planning on "fixing," but before she could do so, said stray had me and four brothers and sisters. MR kept me. I do not know what happened to my kin. I assume they are all dead.

And now I will move on to the other members of the house. I have transcribed their answers to the best of my ability, but in some cases (see: Slippy) I am simply at a loss as to the true meaning of their utterances (I have chosen to use punctuation as I am the transcriber, but please note, some of the below animals [see: Slippy] do not believe in punctuation. I, however, feel it improves reader comprehension).

Name: Slippy, Slipperson, Slope, Slopey, Yopey, Slipper, Slip, and any of the other things you say to me that you say in a nice voice that might also be my name like good lookin', cutie pie, baby boo, and other stuff also maybe the words like ham if you say it the right way which means it would soon be in my mouth.
Birthday: I don't know which on one of the days I was born on, but maybe probably it was a Saturday, which is a great day because then MR is home all the time and she hangs out with me and with her boyfriend and they take us Outside on long walks in the sun and everything feels great - like it's great to be alive, you know? So my birthday was probably on the best day because it was so lucky for me to get born.
Birthstone: Ham
Astrological sign: I check my fortunes every day by reading the Internet when if Luco lets me (please excuse the authorial intrusion, but no, friends, he does not do this) and I always pick the best fortunes to be mine, which I think the ones that have the best fortune every of the time is the astrological sign of the Dragon of Darkness, which is my astrological sign, which means I am very tough and dangerous, but I have a sweet side too. Also, my other astrological sign is Pepperoni Pizza.
Likes: You, ham, you Luco, food, My Scarecrow Lucy, corn muffins, MR's boyfriend, butter, the other animals, ice cream, MR, every of the food, sleeping, calzones, going Outside, rice, squirrels, cookies, MR's sister Anna, Chicken Meatball, bread, peanut butter, bones, chicken, ham, ham, ham, and ham.
Dislikes: None of the above! I love all of it and every of you! Every all of the things are what I love and I can eat all of everything too if I put it in my mouth really quickly!
Relation to the prison guard: Two years ago around this time MR saw me at a place called the Animal Aid where they are really nice and aid animals and she saw me being sweet and wonderful like how I do all the times, and then so she took me home to be living here with her.

Name: Lucifer Elizabeth Poops, Lucy, the Scarecrow, Miss Lucy
Birthday: I prefer not to remember my birthday, thanks. I'm one of those "lucky" dogs rescued from a puppy mill... So, for me anyways, birthdays are more painful than not. I'm happy to celebrate every other day, you know? But not that.
Birthstone: Since I've chosen to not know my birthday, I have no idea what my birthstone would be, but I choose the heliotrope, i.e. bloodstone, because it sounds the most terrifying, and we all know that in order to survive, we have to be terrifying to our enemies (like the mailman/maulman, amirite?).
Astrological sign: The bloodstone puts me in March, but I don't like all this wishy-washy stuff about emotions and the water for Pisces, so if you don't mind, I'm going to take a cue from Slippy (of all creatures!) and Luco and just make up my own. My astrological sign is the Fire-Chainsaw. No one is going to mess with the Fire-Chainsaw. Do you think the UPS guy is going to try to break in and serially kill everyone in the house of a dog with the astrological sign of Fire-Chainsaw? No, no way. He's, like, going to be running away from this prison as fast as those stupid brown shoes of his can take him. Fire-Chainsaw.
Likes: MR's boyfriend, Hiding, food, MR, Slope, patrollin', studying to be a police officer, reading up on conspiracy theories, any kind of food (especially if it's on the ground outside - and it's been there for a few days to ripen), going for long walks, connecting the dots, surveillance of all kinds, sleeping with one eye open, getting pets, barking, hiding.
Dislikes: Stupid people walking down the sidewalk who I don't know and who could at any moment throw grenades at the house and kill all of us inside, loud noises, anyone knocking on the door- ever, doorbells, people trying to get into my house which I personally own with all my teeth, lack of food, lack of walking, people talking outside my windows at night and so I want to kill them, anyone ever that I don't really know at all, all the things I want to eat and can't.
Relation to the prison guard: Something like six years ago, I can't keep track of dates any more, MR's boyfriend picked me up from Tri County and we've been together ever since. I've lived here, in this prison, for just about a year now. I love having a big back yard to chase and try to kill squirrels in - it's really quite lovely.

Name: Dr. Meena Claw, Fremlin, Dr. Claw, Old Lady, Meena Meena, Freemie, Da Grouch
Birthday: I can't be expected to remember when I was born. They call me Old Lady because I am old. 16, which is something far older than what it means to be 16 as a human, I can tell you that for certain.
Birthstone: I don't care.
Astrological Sign: Well, this I do know, because I once had my astrological charts done, back when I remembered my birthday. I believe I am, yes, I'm a Capricorn with a Libra rising, which if you know anything about astrology shows you I'm a very even tempered, fair kind of creature. I mean, I know that astrology is a pseudoscience, but you should've seen my chart (I wish I had kept it, but I lost it in one of the many moves I've been through in my long life) - it was so accurate as to be rather creepy.
Likes: Not being alone, tuna water, cat food, drinking from the toilet bowl, knowing more about life than Luco, creeping outside - really low and slow? -- and then coming back in before anyone realizes I've been out, watching lizards, large patches of sunshine on the terrazzo, sleeping on MR's pillow, getting pets, going wild at 3:00am, precision, contemplation, pillows.
Dislikes: Closed doors, being alone all of the time, closed doors, loud noises, strangers, closed doors, lack of cat-pets, getting picked up, being ignored.
Relation to the prison guard: Did I mention I'm like 16 years old? As far as I know, there has only ever been this prison I'm living in now, and only ever this prison guard to feed and to pet me. I dimly remember, as I stated earlier, moving again and again in my life, but the past is to me as a shadow. I can't touch it, it doesn't seem real. All life is ephemeral - devoid of characteristics outside of our perception - and therefore this life I live now is, to me anyway, the life I've always lived. I've always-already known MR. I've always-already slept close to her head, purring into her hair.

Name: Charlie Mingus, Mingus, Mingy Mongy, Mopey, the Goose, Gooper, the Mayor of Scruffy Town, Mingy, Mingusy, Mingleson
Birthday: Maybe September?, 2003
Birthstone: If we're gong with September, then I choose the sapphire.
Astrological sign: Either Virgo or Libra. But, wow, how boring, right? I like how Luco, Slipper, and Lucy all got to choose their signs, so I'm making one up too. My astrological sign is Jazz Music, like my name, but it's an ironic paradox because I really rather hate music. Seriously, as soon as MR starts playing the piano I'm out of the room like a brisk ocean breeze. Anyway, and so Jazz Music represents my essential nature, which is passionate, curious, mysterious, free, and wild - also sometimes atonal.
Likes: bathing, keeping myself and my surroundings clean, going Outside, stalking birds, sleeping with MR when stupid Dr. Claw isn't taking up the entire pillow, Roland Barthes (for what he has to say about literary theory - really interesting stuff, his), Chicken Meatball, sleeping, escaping.
Dislikes: Loud noises, music, strangers, people coming to the door, closed doors, the other animals, dirt, grit, grime, dust.
Relation to the prison guard: MR rescued me from Tri County (hey, Lucy! We have something in common after all) back in 2004. We've moved eight times since then, so I kind of like it that she has a prison now, even if I sometimes feel over-safe, that is to say, trapped; it's better than all that moving.

Name: Alfie, Alfonso Tupelo, Alferson, Schmalfie, Alfonso, Tubby Tubs
Birthday: My origin story goes thusly: a happy young couple purchased me from a Siberian Cat breeder as a gift to themselves for their engagement. After a few years they had children and had to move closer to their parents who were deathly allergic to cats, so the couple found a home for me. That home was with MR's mother, who kept me and loved me until she couldn't anymore, and then I moved in with MR. So my birthday is I don't know when. Maybe I have papers somewhere?
Birthstone: A black diamond (I don't actually know what my birthstone is, but I think it would be something as unique and incredible as a black diamond, don't you? Let's just use it as an apt analogy, okay?).
Astrological sign: Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights. Because shut up.
Likes: Cat food, other food, meat, going Outside, reading, Wuthering Heights, sleeping, pillows, blankets, laps, all people, every person, children, people coming over, getting pets, looking in the mirror to behold my own beauty, being beautiful, style, being stylish, love, hope, anticipation, gifts, beauty, poetry, my cool attitude.
Dislikes: Um, bad hair days?
Relation to the prison guard: See my origin story above - don't make me type it out again, please, as my paws have become painfully sore. I need to go get a manicure now.

Four cats, two dogs, one prison: another way to name hell.

The Many Alfies of the Internet

The Internet is, maybe you know this already, a weirdo kind of place. Maybe I'm a weirdo-ish kind of cat, but the Internet, it appeals to me. To my sense of myself as rather very much larger than life. And, I mean, don't we all feel this way sometimes? That we must be bigger than this moment, than our own ability to comprehend the everyday. That we transcend the mundane.

It's not just me, right? Anyway.

So I found this Web site, PhotoFunia.com (well, a FB friend of MR's, Colleen M. Dougher [read her excellent blog about South Florida art) made her aware of it, and she told me about it, and I got Luco off the computer long enough to mess around with it a bit), and basically I love it. I can live new lives, represent myself to others as I see myself in my brain and in my heart and in my superb dreams.

And listen. No, I've not been imbibing wine. I haven't. I'm just... Relaxed. And energized. Excited. The below series of photos and what they manage to communicate about my innermost makes me happier than the last time I read Wuthering Heights (just finished it up last night). Call me Heathcliff, friends. We can all drink to that.

Not that I'm drinking.

What was that? I felt a tentacle of ice wind its way down my throat. Was that a note of derision in your voice? Of disbelief.

Prevaricater I am not, and I will tell you this: yes, I enjoy a fine Merlot, and no, the movie Sideways didn't make me fall head over heels over head for Pinot - it's just rather too dusty for my palate. Which, please, do not interpret as juvenile. For one I love other French wines. I love champagne. It's just the Pinot does nothing for me.

Anyway. So you see, I've told you this: I've tried wine, love it, sure, but this isn't a drunken confession of asinine mind-wandering. No. I've been driven to distraction lately by my need to feel as though I more fully fill the air around me. To feel as though I'm being taken seriously by my prison-mates and my admirers.

MR's father, well, he moved out, and he was my only amigo in this desolate place.

Listen. Don't judge me. When you've been alone as long as I have, when you've been dragged from one house to the next and then threatened with abandonment again (sort of as soon as you're settled in a place) due to "bad behavior" or some such nonsense (I fail to see the cause for irritation at my gato agua, if you will, when it's spritzed gently around the house), and then you meet a man who you feel really, finally gets you. And he's gone? Well.

There was only some Pinot left on the counter and you know I hate that Pinot, so no no no, I didn't have much more than a sip, a swallow, I wouldn't say I've been drinking.

There was another soul I loved dearly, and I can barely speak her name. MR's mother. We were also parted due to circumstances beyond either of our control.

And now I rot here, in this prison of pests who do not appreciate great literature! Or at least who do not appreciate Wuthering Heights, which if they don't appreciate that, the very idea that they even know how to read is suspect!

Oh, I could weep.

What was I talking about?

Yes, yes, I found this Web site, MR found this Web site, I mean, Colleen M. Dougher found this Web site and I love it. Let me give you some examples of the many and wonderful lives I lead in my glorious imagination. Come, be free with me in a world devoid of regulations and parameters. Together we'll become more than we ever could've conceived of before.

We'll be truly free.

Here is the picture I began with. Handsome, right? Doesn't hurt to be beautiful when embarking on myriad new evolutions of the self!

I think this one is inspirational. Add it at the end of a poem. The poem would be elegant and never over-wrought. Imagistic. Something like:

Slow, I lift my head

it smells in here of cat nip

but it won't be found

Imagine what that man is thinking: My god! The sheer power of aesthetics! Here, a cat, finally, who has become a kind of tinder inside my bones. The warmth of his beauty will keep me through the winter.

Fame! Imagine what amazing actions I've taken to get on the cover of the Annandale Advocate. Maybe I saved a child from a burning building. Perhaps I kept a world power from declaring nuclear war. Or I invented a cure for each disease.

Perhaps I climbed a ladder. Saved a mewling kitten from a too-tall tree.

And here! What an interesting movie these kitties are watching. Why, it's me, Alfie, as Heathcliff in my directorial debut remaking Wuthering Heights to be more accessible to a modern audience. Ah, they're thinking, this is the best screen adaptation we've ever seen. Give that cat an Oscar.

Like I said, I've not been drinking, really, but if I had been, this would be the wine, friends. Chateau d'Alfonso, 2013, a refined vino if ever there one was.

And with all the vampire craze of recent days, I thought why not get in on that. So I did. And who more debonair than me? More lovely and more seductive than Alfonso Tupelo.

Yeah, I can't think of anyone either. I love how the Internet lets me transform. How it helps me communicate my true, multiple selves.

How amazing, this age we live in. That I can experiment with such abundance.

Even if it's really mostly isolating because I'll never have the courage or the ability to act out these identities IRL. Even if I can't actually even open the front door and exit this prison. Even if, in the end, I'm a poor, sad player, performing my lines, and badly, to an audience of nil.

Even if, even if, you don't love me anymore.

Even if I make bad Don Henley references for no apparent reason. Gah. Excuse me. I'm going to find that terrible Pinot and go back to bed.

Out, out, brief candle!

Lucy Says Happy New Year and Resolves to Fear Less

 

Did you hear that? I think it was a firecracker, which seems to be shorthand for the most terrifying thing happening in the sky that is larger than all of us and will probably consume the world so that it's our own blood that shimmers across the horizon in nightmare arcs of red and more red yet.

I see why they made a shorthand for it, haha.

But seriously, folks, it's 2013, and I, Lucy, am here to wish you well. I wish you wellness, I wish you health, I wish you safety.

Safety from every scary thing like mail/maulmen and murderous delivery folk, dogs with teeth sharper than your own, loud noises, very loud noises, very very loud noises, thunder and lightning, debris falling from outer space and flattening you on the sidewalk, thorns in your feet, unexpected noises, expected noises that don't go as planned (like a burp you thought would be maybe subtle, but is in fact resounding), broken bottles in the street, cars driving by your window, unsavory characters walking or rollerblading or biking or skateboarding by your window, dogs off leash, very tall people, mayhem in the streets, etc.

There are so many things to be afraid of. So many things to guard against! And here I am and it's 2013 and still I'm listing them, going over their every detail, the fear not just imaginary but cerebral, imbedded in my cortex.

It's funny but I think the thing I ought most fear is not, as FDR famously said, fear itself, but rather it's myself I think I fear truly.

Who I am. What I want. 

I look around and imagine myself invisible, safe, but there is no real safety in invisibility, is there? There is only falsity - the faux-dog who fake-licks your face. Who fake-barks because she is fake(?)-afraid to be herself.

That is, I am afraid of myself truly. What if you don't like the real me?

What if you reject me? The letter the mail/maulmen brings a letter of final notice, of get-the-hell-out; the thunder and the lightning seeking me, Lucy, me out of all the creatures in the world to crush and to grind to bits; loud noises actually a harbinger of death; or loud noises actually death itself, not stealthy or skulking but stomping towards me, Texas Chainsaw Massacreesque. Really it sounds ridiculous when I say it this way.

Funny how feelings and logic don't always align. Often don't.

And yet there is a knock at the door and everything inside me turns to ice. How difficult to not react in terror. How difficult to just even picture myself sitting here, quiet, letting it alone.

Well, have you guessed it? What this is, I mean, and what my New Year's resolution is? 

I want to be less nervous. Less scared, less attached, less worried, less over-thinking, and more resolute, more loving, more compassionate, more trusting, more able to listen, more patient.

To take a moment before responding to breathe and consider my options. To maybe sometimes choose to be still instead of reacting. I want to remember there is no difference between my head and my heart and my body. I want to be genuine. 

It's been such an amazing year with my Slippy and I have much (much, much, muchly, much) to be grateful for. This fear cannot rule me. It can't - in each thought, in every action I banish the tyrant Lucy who doesn't trust herself and invite in the Lucy who does; who is willing to wait. Who will stay.

The Lucy who would hold a potato chip on her nose without whining. That's the dog I want to be this year.

Well, that and a more potato-chip-eating-dog in general.

Mingus is the Shore

 

You know me as Mingus, but I'm thinking of changing my name to Prisoner.

Prisoner or Poisoner, I don't know for sure which is more apt. Maybe Interloper? Shadow-Thief? Night-Knife?

I like Night-Knife, maybe, mostly - it sounds ridiculous and threatening, which are fitting adjectives.

They are.

Don't think I can't see your shoulders shaking in silent laughter, your mouth twisted upwards in derision. Yes, I look the fool, yes, my kingdom this Mazda Miata. Yes, a dog's shirt and woman's scarf are wrapped around my torso.

But I am free. Outside in the darkness. Night-Knife stalking his unwitting prey.

Or prey rather too wary, really, what with this ludicrous bell the prison guard has fasted onto my collar - just another in a series of torments.

I know, I sound down, don't I? Is it the holiday blues, you ask, or something rather more substantial?

Read on and I'll tell you, but my sadness today is due in no small part to just having finished Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, a lovely, but supremely sad, memoir. Well. I suppose there are fingernails of hope in there, but I'm struck by the father - blindsided even - and his eternal fall.

Nick Flynn discovers, in his own life and his father's, that a fall is something that can be unending - alike to a dream wherein you start from sleep to fall again in another dream only to wake shaking and fall under again to fall and wake, startled, alone in the darkness, temples throbbing and am I asleep or awake falling again, the bed soft beneath you, every feather reaching to cradle aching body and sleeping, dreaming, falling.

So you think this is the bottom but there is no bottom, there is only the fall, just as there is no destination, there is only the movement itself, the traveling in whatever direction one starts off in.

Falling further and further forward, tipping your chair in school, chided, continuing back, back, until you find a  new fall, dizzy, bleary-eyed.

The shirt, the scarf - testament to my self-destruction, self-impairment, self-immolation, self self self careening forever forward, inwards, splitting into funhouse shapes of my body, my face, and chipping away at that reflection with all-that-is-within-me.

The wound, my friend, from posts ago, never allowed to heal because I cannot leave it alone.

I have been stitched, it has been set, I've taken antibiotics, been rubbed with creams, worn dog clothes, petted, spoken sweetly to, rubbed, I've been vet-taken multiple times, I've been sighed over and fussed over and I've been kept in and I've stolen outside and I've pissed the countertop and I've crawled out windows and I've never stopped moving.

The wound is okay. It's not infected. It's even healing. But I can't seem to leave it until I leave it shiny with blood.

My kingdom, Mazda Miata-dom. My world shrouded in darkness, I, the flame that flickers and will not be put out! I will not be shut out or kept in - neither.

I am a zephyr, belonging only to desultory whims which overtake me.

I am overwhelmed with them. Over-full of longing.

If I was a human, maybe I'd sleep in doorways, hallways - maybe I'd press my back against a steaming grate. If only to escape that-which-would-contain-me.

The all-everything-ness of our ties to each other, to ourselves. The interconnection which is as true as the wound on my side. And am I Jesus-like, here, suffering because I suffer, because I choose to, because this is my life, or am I a silly self-aggrandizing kitty cat who foolishly rolls around with a ball of yarn, kitten-forever, manic with my own agony-of-stupidity?

I breathe in and I am the universe. I breathe out and I am you. I breathe in and everything is possible. I breathe out and there is nothing. My life a series of moments strung haphazard along a clothesline.

Holiday blues? Prisonyard blues? Self-pity? It's the same. I am the wave crashing.

I am the shore.

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.

 

Luco d'Hiver

There are some who scoff at the holidays, but please, count me no longer among their number. Oh, not that I have become tinsel-brained, but it seems to me there is a certain potential existent within holiday traditions.

Thanksgiving. Exuberantly dead turkey. Cranberry sauce and stuffing and more cranberry sauce; green bean casserole the dogs ogle with eyes big as tea cups. Pies and pudding and homemade whipped cream. And no prison guard this year - she traveled for the holiday to some other dimension of time called South Carolina.

I jest. South Carolina is a place, I am sure, that actually exists within this dimension. It is merely a truism that I have difficult imagining any place save this prison. I might read of faraway locales but to me they are dreams. Vast ephemeral kingdoms; entire Carolinas of bejeweled mountains, oceans, forests shadowed by a haze of disbelief.

I digress.

There are some who scoff, etcetera, etcetera, and I who is made rageful no lenger by les fêtes d'hiver. Please do not become fussy; we are moving from Middle English to French and back to English - such is the quivering sort of joy that takes hold my heart.

We are a culture of excess, a world, even, of excess. Where one has not "made it" until certain measures are met, but then, how lovely these brief weeks where we might think of other things. It is the moral of every holiday story that we should care for each other, not material objects, and yes, I see you rolling those beautiful eyes of yours, most everyone knows this, and knowing it does nothing change; however!

There is in that seedling inchoate transformation.

And what better metaphor, reader, than a seedling shooting its green-self past and through dark soil, past and through doubt and fear, even past and through my personification of a seedling; ridiculous, miraculous.

The prison guard many Carolinas away, dogs' mouths saliva thick, glowing incandescent lights in green, blue, red, yellow. Lines of people, of course, in malls and big box stores, and the sadness of that truth; its smallness, the meanness in their eyes.

I saw a video of shoppers at a Wal-Mart fighting each other for new phones of some sort. What is it about a steep discount (or even semi-deep, subtle-deep, pseudo-deep) that whirls brains to frenzy? That quickens ferocity? 

And why did this video not send me to bed for days? Why did it not compel me to despair?

I cannot say except to say this: the seedling growing green, wild, shooting roots like spider webbing; dreams I have of fragmenting vision; blacknesses and whitenesses that fill and fill and fill me to bursting; a shade of purple so pale as to be nearly white; the spinning of my own treacherous heart at the hope for connection; the way I am moved to tears that you, reader, persist in reading this, my ranting, my idiocy.

The feeling I have that although I cannot push a pin into that which makes my life meaningful; despite the fact that there is no logical fact I can name; there is not biological evidence I can display; I am regardless a kind of cup and the cup that I am is one that is full to the brim and over-filling, running over, gathering speed and charging through the dark into the greater darkness inside of which we are all cradled.

I need see only the barest echo of starlight and I am transported. This, reader, is where we are, and what an unspeakable joy that fills me.

What abiding sadness. To know you and not. Hold you and not. Communicate and not. And yet, the fact that we have the ability to try and to fail and to try and to fail; the potential to meet, finally, that-which-is-of-us; that this potential hums in our quiescent bodies; this gratifies me.

It lets me look up into vast skies of every color. Allows me to feel love.

And, okay, to try to stay on track here, reader, I feel these things in les fêtes d'hiver. It is true. In all of them. Even in our distressingly consumerist culture there is, at the very heart of everything, a single drop of the immensity of life. Of joy. 

Of every whirring thing springing to life. Germination. That which is itself and also its opposite. Burgeoning. Time lapse videos of flowers unfurling. The infinity of stars that crowd the sky. Our own bodies: fractals. 

And you reading this. Sipping coffee. Checking your phone. The infinite within you.

Everything else: artifice.