(tonight)

XVIII.

         Two nights before I turned 19, I said aloud to myself: "Tonight I'm shaky and strange and dreaming, my throat is tight, I'm hunched and red-cheeked and cold-handed. The red netted pattern of my blood vessels shows through all of my skin, everywhere. I get a shiver up one side of my back, a million smooth pieces clicking together, mutedly, and like a wave through a sea of dried beans. Then one goes up the other side, then again up the first, then both together with a right-side lead. Bent neck, numb toes (the three right-most). Pulled, squished inside the skull, sad. Don't bother with me, I feel like saying. Tonight is for you, not for me. Tonight is for her and him and her and him and him and him and her and him, and when I was sure it wouldn't be for him, I thought it would finally be, in its own way, for us; but tonight is for him and her, too. I was cruel and presumptuous with him, and I want to take it back, but I never told him I assumed and so I have nothing, of all of the things made his, to reclaim. Tonight is not for me. Tonight for me is nothing, and it feels like everything. Tonight I stumbled shoeless into words that sank in clear and shallow water, words that I threw, for me, and waters that still display the words brightly, but not my pulsating toes, which are buried in settled silt. I wandered everywhere, nervous, loose, laughing; not nervous at first, but venturing and stupid and spitting as I talked, so that the dream turned conscious in another sort of way, an old way, the reprehensible way, and now I am reproachful. I'm slow, I've been so slow, and nobody responds to my emails. I was happy to be dirty and playing in the dust on the shelf by the three-pronged plugs, but in my sleep, without seeing it, I felt the need to build, from the top down. In my sleep all I felt was the need, so I squealed that I was more than dust, and lost it all---everything I was pretending to have, even the dust. Now I have lenses that aren't blurry but do not focus, a hunch born of a shiver, and self-reproach like the air hanged by the wind of my own voice that came and swept it all away, and I miss reveling in the dirt.

         "Tonight I picked the other cake, it had eight candles but I didn't count them. I didn't see my mother light them as I watched her hands. I didn't watch her blow out the candles of her cake, although I remember seeing her make a wish. I said 19 was divisible by eight, I wish for nothing, and blew them out, blowing powdered sugar everywhere. I said gloam and floam and Dad said loam, and he was right, and I didn't sing Happy Birthday with the others. I let them sing to me, and for me to her. Like I was too focused on the skin that separates me from the rest, too focused to sit at home and care for her from me. I said I'm sorry to my grandmother as she left; she was in pain and I've been everywhere else but home and not visited her this week. I spent this week in my house, not leaving it much, but never settling, always with my faces planted to the walls, looking outwards but only seeing the in-side, the walls. And the daffodils we got for her and me bloomed all at once, without anyone to love them with time and mind, and my daffodils will all be dead before I notice them, and hers will all be dead before she receives them. We are too busy.

         "I am wearing my favorite black tights and black boots and blue dress and eggplant cardigan, and my favorite scarf around my hair makes me feel like stealing out into the night. Because I could be Robin Hood and Peter Pan and still a girl. But I dressed up for dinner, not for playing pretend and climbing fire escapes to rooftops downtown."

         I said, "Tonight is not for me." And yet here, it always is.

(boomerangs)

XV.

         There are other nighttime bends; corners that I round and never keep, loose recollections of the places I've been and hardly been, even in my head where, more and more often, I don't choose to stay. Dirty alleys, pissing behind buildings; walking along an array of empty streets, some cracked and crumbling downtown, some sweating and slanting by the waterfront. Walking forever and ever—pulling myself hand-over-hand down a conversation that's like a rope made from bedsheets tied together, directing my feet. Tired, flat feet. Indifferent self-thoughts, looping; defensive and neutral, looping. Dancing with myself, rocking and twisting and writhing to a beat I never let in, or a beat that walks right past me, so that when I wake up in the morning with circles of grey makeup around my eyes and flecks of black paint on my nose and cheeks and temples, I remember absolutely nothing, save that I had fun. It's not even a deep and true knowing, either.

         Other nights I've walked beneath planes of leaves, whose silver-filmed bellysides flash like squirming silver-scaled fish, silverfish; let my skin crawl away in fear of spiders in the black-dark park; taken pictures with my eyeballs and left the poignant feeling behind with the drunk who pukes behind the building where I pissed. Or I've danced with long lost acquaintances, danced away down half lit streets, to a children's park or a crime scene, donning only a sandlot shirt, my lykafur coat, my running fishnets, held up with mismatching bandanas tied at uneven heights around my thighs. A butt that says PEACE, a sharp engagement ring made from a red plastic twisty-tie. The kind of ring that I lose before morning and don't miss, the kind of engagement that's as serious as skipping pantsless down a street to the dock and singing the manifestos of a pantsless Anybody, a sharpie-colored vandal. That's as serious as the barefoot vandal herself, thieving temporary parking signs, staked in the Earth, and enlightening her shine-eyed pupils on the sneaking oppression that steals blank slates and canvases and feeds minds with pig chow and the desire for more input.

         There are the silly jeans that ripped in the middle, of the ass; the lounge room ash trays into which I've projectile-purged two hours of my night; the excited shouting and inconsolable, angry yelling of young hearts in younger bodies, across ravine-cleft streets, and towels on the floor. Beer moshed down my shirt in a wayward pit of punks, water-flavored tongues that find their own way into my mouth and send me away from bittered arousal and running towards a list of embarrassing acts, laughing sadly with The Way Things Look.

         Tackling another teen, a favorite, a trickster, during a soccer skirmish after school. In a violet construct, on a lucky hill; jumping on his back in a violet fervor. A hundred and forty some pounds in the moment, he not, and not cool and not calm either. Drawing the heat to his cheeks, drawing the flint of confusion across a stone-cold barrier, sparking an awkward fire. Obliging him to carry me to the slowly rolling ball, losing momentum. Whispering in his ear, losing momentum. Obliging him to answer, drawing out his confirmation. Shutting my eyes, beating my head, losing again what I've already lost: the favor of my fervor.

         A missed kiss at a vending machine, a hug that let me go too fast, that pushed me away and pulled my tail between my legs.

         Some things are like boomerangs, for years and small lifetimes.

         "It's all gone in the blink of an eye. How fast life's gone by. How fast it will go by." These words came and went, as fast and as memorable as the pain in three whitish potholes on my wrist. Holding the butts there, to my arm; feeling the details without the agony, paying attention with an attention that school never earned.

         All of these are things I've lost, things I lose because they return to beat my head and pull my tail between my legs, and beat my heart, free the flow through my heart and distend, birth circulation for the realm I write.

         Do I lose them all in the end? Even this I can't ask. Even if there is an End.

(forty winks)

VI.

         Reclining on my bed I look into the Karate mirror that runs parallel to me on the opposite wall and see that all is in order in my room. No Peter-Pan-shooed thief is dismantling the storm windows, no disturbing skeletal cat is crouching against the ceiling in the corner to my right, no mouths are shutting in any of the pictures posted up behind the lamp. None of the canvas-skinned subjects have left their painty backdrops to sneak into my sheets, no brother of mine is on the roof outside the window with a bagel for my breakfast. Forty-winks and I'll be on my way---Wink number one: Was that a three foot hairy-legged centipede resting on the wall above my head? I blink. There are tears worn into my lykafur coat, ripped from my blinky eyelids after naps in crowds of beer and sharp grass, ripped and sewn in with a needle of grass at the world's weakest seams.

         My door pops open in a demonstration of manhood, proof that no one's helping hand is needed to turn the knob. Blink blink---I lost count already, unless that makes five. I poke the latest self-infliction in my mouth with my tongue. It tastes tender and savory, and painful. A finger travels to the space between my legs. Then, a moment of self-consciousness and salty guilt precedes and endures a vision of Anyone everyone regarding me, Everyone offended and feeling forced to live their disgust at me. So I do exactly as I don't-know-what-to do:

         I stretch myself on the torture rack between thinking one way and another and listen as my muscle tears under grueling strokes of "yeah buts." I listen to sinewy rips that sound like wet pulpy construction paper pulling apart, canvas on a hot air balloon bursting open, rupturing in the middle of the canvas, far from the seams. I hear the wet, fleshy tearing under my skin until I get to the end, reclining on my bed. Reclining on my bed is the dream, and I recline into its comfort. The dream reposes there, as fantasy, as gettaways, as entertainment, consolation, inspiration. Occasionally just as sleep. Cozy sleep boiling over with emptiness, so empty you have to put a lid over it. But right now I'm still blinking. I must not have reached forty yet.

         I listen to the song that's noising my room; the noise is all about a lady In London So Fair, and I like the story I'm imagining. Soon I snap out of it and realize that my sister is driving me somewhere. It's a car ride from hell; there's highway as far as the eye can see and Everyone knows: it's pass, kill, tailgate and be killed. I see cars full of children go down from crooked tricks and despicable stunts, and I keep my eyes on the red sky until my sister drops me off at a small theater with peeling frescos. I'm told by the cooperators that I've been Commissioned to Rectify their building Through Art. My fingernails scratch at the fresco, scratch away the crumbling plaster, peel and scratch 'til I feel the cement structure behind it, the architecture of the 1970's, heavy at the bottom. There's not a lot of light but there are red-orange rugs, and the trapezoidal walls and dead vines on the cracked cement suggest the building used to be an underpass. If I walk up the stairs I can take the slide to the central Prada store in the city. I take the slide. It's not a store, just a building. It's chic on the outside, black and white and skyscrapery. On the Inside prada is lost; it's black like an arcade and there are kids there, kids my age and older. Some are sitting in a jeep, others in a blue and red Porsche, wearing pricey sunglasses, taking photos of themselves and rocking back and forth because the cars shake like their miniature versions—the mini cars, planted in front of grocery stores, that little kids ride on for a quarter.

         A familiar-looking kid my age takes off his pricey sunglasses to assess a photo of himself. As he adjusts his stylish scarf he spots me and beckons me over. I look around. On the right towards the back of the room the black wall is missing. There are three long steps where the wall would be and three walls surrounding the long steps, it's dark inside because it's an arcade for kids much younger. By the time I look back at the familiar-looking kid he's engrossed in his project again. I go and join the kids much younger; we play life-size Hungry Hippos. But the game costs $6.50 and the supervising carnivalman shakes his finger at me, wordlessly accuses me of sneaking and kicks me out, so I wander past the Photobooth-in-a-Jeep and Porsche Rock 'n Ride and outside of the building where scores of kids my age and older are loitering and trading and chatting and grinding the toes of their shoes on the cement to put out finished cigarettes. Some are sitting in butts that are old and stained by the street and the dirt on the ground is probably ash. The grass that sprouts through the cracked cement is coarse and sharp and tougher than plastic; it's fibrous and dry and bends though it's stiff and it'll papercut your finger if you grab it from a sneaky angle. It's impossible to uproot, even if you tear up the fibrous blades; the scores of feet my age and older trample the dirt and pack the ash so tight that they form cement and that's how the streets are made.

         I make my way to a harlequin kid who is chatting it up with Anyone near the side of the Prada store, on the sharp grassy lawn of the park where loitering is abundant. I borrow an ice cream bucket full of cash when he isn't caring. I just need to use it to pay off a game of tug-o-war for the kids much younger. But the bucket is from crack deals and suddenly there are shouts announcing that "it's the po," "the pigs are here," "the fuckin' boys―the fuckin' po-lice" have hit the scene, and it's a dry, sunny day for the scores of kids my age and older to scatter like mad in every direction. Some continue to sit on the sharp grassy lawn and picnic on tattered, ashy tablecloths; they stay where they are because they know they can't get arrested if they're clean, or because the police have black batons to bring down the runners. Others run because they won't get away with staying, and the heavy policewoman near us is distracted by the runners just long enough for the Harlequin Kid to slap my shoulder and tell me to run. We take off. It's inevitable that she'll come after me and as I follow the Harlequin Kid, who doesn't take back the ice cream bucket, I look back and see her brown face, heavy at the bottom, chasing me. We sprint across the park and there are so many kids that she loses us, and I look at the Harlequin Kid and his eyes are so red and so tired that he stops to lie down under a tree for 'night's sleep. He hands me a pamphlet before he knocks out and I read about a kid my age or older who died with blood in his red eyes and coke dusted on his shirt and hairy arms. There is a picture.

         I wonder how the Kid got this pamphlet in my dream and what is he trying to tell me by giving me this. I wonder is he showing me that the world of law-abiders, the parents, the publishers of the pamphlet are ludicrous, Or Is he warning me, Or Is he laughing. His language is ununderstandable, and with no answer it is pointless to keep the speculations, so I delete them and the situation is feelingless. I delete right and wrong before I leave him to sleep under his tree, before I leave the tree and the pamphlet and the park and the world of highway as far as the eye can see. In forty winks I'm on my way, I wake up and remember I was sleeping.