Filed under: Esme Writes, Little Joy Open Mic | Tags: Echo Park, Elephant, End, Esme Writes, Like, LJOM, Loss, Love, Wasted Afternoons
At the more recent Wasted Afternoon at Silverlake Lounge, I came to just listen and should have known that I would get called on by Keith to read. I pulled from my notebook this short that I jotted down a few weeks ago. It’s about a boy. A man. A friend who I have recently had to let go. And I miss him, ya know. So. Here is the edited version, for your consideration.
Pale Blue Wonder
by Esmé Wright
I lost the broken glass elephant on a Tuesday. I didn’t mean to, as these things often go, there was no way of knowing that the threads at the bottom of my left jacket pocket had worked themselves loose that morning. A hole just large enough to allow two pieces of a broken in half glass elephant to slip through.
It was mine. And his. And ours.
It was yours.
The very last thing that I had left of you, and on Tuesday morning, just after 11 am, it fell from the safety of my pocket to the concrete sidewalk somewhere on Sunset Boulevard between Echo Park Avenue and the route I took home. Somewhere from Sunset to Lemoyne to Scott to Lucretia to Grafton, two little pieces of blue glass escaped.
When my searching fingers reached for the familiar comfort of two pieces of pale blue glass and found nothing in my pocket but the impossible hole in the crease of cloth, I immediately re-traced my afternoon steps. My feet re-travelled my path home, my eyes glued to the grey below me, looking for two pale blue smudges, two pale blue lumps, two pale blue anomalies or even the slightest brush of pale blue smithereens that would echo a careless footstep.
There was nothing. Not a trace.
And so it always was with you. There never had been a hint that you had ever been there, between the folds of my pocket or in between my arms- it’s the same thing anyway. Then you would always vanish without a trace.
It should not have surprised me when my last remaining clue of you, of us, of our friendship, did the same.
Two pale blue pieces of glass with eyes and a lopsided smile and uneven tusks. He made me laugh when I dug him out of the bin in that shop in Ann Arbor. My pale blue wonder, he matched the sky that day, one of those sudden, rare, bitingly perfect Michigan spring days.
We left him in the shop and you bought me peach ice cream that coldly stung my lips. I dripped a round sweet puddle on the concrete between our feet. I laughed as it ran down my fingers because you never could take me anywhere without a mess. We were like that, messy peach ice cream puddles and laughter.
You grabbed me napkins from inside as I attempted to lick away the sweet stickiness. The mess of paper just stuck to my fingers and we laughed as I resorted to rubbing it away on my jeans.
Then you held out your cupped hands, asking, telling me to, Guess.
This was our game, a secret between smashed fingers cupping…something. We had guessed old pennies, feathers, a stone almost green, chocolate kisses, tiny folded flowers, mix tapes, and a shell.
An amoeba.
-Close, Bigger.
A red double decker bus from London.
-Not. Even. Try animals.
A sparrow?
-No. Bigger.
But still in your hands? I laughed. A Tyrannosaurus Rex!
-No. This guy still exists.
A blue whale.
-Smaller.
A hippo.
-Right continent.
My blue wonder!?
He revealed his palm with a slight flourishing ta-da the lopsided grin and mismatched tusks, and pure blue glass skin. His eyes followed mine as I looked to you.
You have perfect taste, sir.
The elephant then tumbled from your palm to mine and further with gravity into the peach puddle on the concrete between our feet.
He split along the line as King Solomon intended, head and tail divided, two pieces of pale blue glass, an elephant swimming haphazardly in sweetness.
My heart dropped with him and you laughed.
-Thats the way it always is with you kid.
You wiped off the sticky and handed me the lopsided smile.
-I’ll take the tail, so you know I’ll always be right behind you.
The peach flavored laughter was on my tongue this Tuesday. I took a longer walk home.
The day you were no longer there, gone without a trace for two years, the day I received a simple white envelope addressed to me in your handwriting with no return address, a pale blue glass piece tumbled onto my counter.
It fit with the little blue glass piece that sat on my window ledge, a perfect Michigan spring sky blue glass elephant.
My little halved elephant became a companion of sorts, a sharp reminder of you, gone.
This isn’t a love story to you. This isn’t a sorrowful plea for you to come back. It’s about me. It’s about my habitual neurotic loss of things.
Or not.
It’s about sweetness and laughter.
It’s how I miss sudden spring Michigan days marked with peach ice cream and guessing games. It’s how I’ll miss those pale blue glass pieces reassuringly between the folds of my pocket, and how my little blue wonder, he was here once, but now he’s gone, without a trace.
Filed under: Esme Writes, Love | Tags: changing, Esme Writes, For Esme with Love and Squalor, JD Salinger, Jennifer, my real name, Nitty Gritty Dirty Band, Ripplin' Waters, Truth
Oh little Jennifer
Id give a penny for
What you’ve got on your mind
Seems like most of the time you’re lyin’ there dreamin’Maybe in your vision you see how
Our mission is slightly less than divine
Cut the telephone line
The story’s the same
Ripplin\’ Waters by The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band
The stories sometimes are more important than the actual word itself. My original name was Jennifer from birth until the fall of 2007. For 22 years I lived as Jen, Jenny, Jenni, Jens, Jenn, Jennifer, basically any and all variations I could possibly use. I think my parents began to become entertained at my flightiness at the spelling and amused at how I would decide that Jenni was more artistic than Jennifer and Jenn was more mature than Jen. That fall I began to entertain the idea of changing my name altogether. It was not an impulsive decision.
It is an interesting moment where suddenly all the names in the world are at your fingertips to call yourself by. The possibility of anything and everything from colors to places to people you admire creates these moments where you try to see yourself identifying within the parameters of what calling yourself by something else creates.
Would I be a Blue? Or would I be a Daphne? Would I be a Charles?
Immediately, I found myself knowing my name would start with an E. Me, who I am, is someone who starts a name out with a strong block of a vowel. A tone that brings the tongue forward and lips at the ready. I think, even then I knew I was Esmé.
I had forgotten about my copy of Nine Stories at that point. I read it my Senior year of high school and tucked it away on a shelf in my childhood bedroom, until something compelled me to pull it out and toss it on top of my laundry basket as I was returning back to school after the Christmas holiday. It traveled with me, unread, until during a phone conversation with my brother later in January. He talked about reading Down At The Dinghy and as we were talking I rummaged through the mess of my clothes and pulled out my orange and blue softcover copy of Nine Stories. I flipped the pages open and stopped when my eye caught “Esmé”. I jammed my finger into those pages and finished my phone conversation. I read all of “For Esmé With Love and Squalor” cross-legged on the floor of my room. It ended,
You take a really sleepy man, Esmé, and he always stands a chance of again becoming a man with all his fac-with all his f-a-c-u-l-t-i-e-s intact.
In May, 2008, I moved to Los Angeles, California.
“Hello, my name is Esmé…”
Filed under: Echo Park, Esme Writes, Little Joy Open Mic | Tags: Esme Writes, Little Joy Open Mic, Poetry
This is the first piece I read at the RETURN of the new reincarnation of the Little Joy Open Mic. Wasted Afternoons are now every Sunday at Silverlake Lounge. Sign up at 4:30, starts at 5p. More details on the LJOM Blog.
Radios.
We wake up in fragments, carrying the thoughts we want to remember at the front of our heads.
Our foreheads lead us into days made in silk or organza or duct tape.
Who’s to claim the difference?
We all make the same fucking decisions. We all destroy and attempt to patch up the same remains.
We grow our own flowers from the same seeds, intention, care, growth all stems and buds and blooms or not
Because we choose to.
The clarity of the ocean is never clear for all.
The tides and waves churn and surge at souls standing on sandy edges, edging closer.
We just imagine there all the romantic and seductive secrets the depths seem to hold.
Depth or seduction or chilling murkiness
it’s all the same and who’s to claim the difference?
Nothing will ever be simpler than a full tank of gas, a straight line shot of a road into darkness
empty pockets and music that assails ears and hands and hearts.
Who’s the say the difference anyway?
We all ache for the dreadful simplicity of these nights these nights
Of blindly traveling forward with so much force
So much velocity so much energy shared be it in
Lips or fingers or the streaking flash of fireflies in peripheral vision.
These nights that once burned so brightly.
Burned so stellarly bright.
We were on the verge of super-novic discovery.
We were all so naive
the destinations the things we were doing the words
spilling from mouths aching to kiss and fingers fumbling with windcurrents or the thick
buttons of Levi’s flies.
They were all the same anyway
We weren’t the ones to tell the difference.
These broken days and nights spent in cross-legged reference
to something we only raggedly remembered from dreams.
The fade and wink like far off lights through a forest we had become rooted in.
This forest that borders the same road that crept into spaces that we allowed to
become gapingly apparent after winter’s freeze.
The cracks the gaps the sink holes we’ve become are all the echoes of the crackle
of a radio left on a midwestern porch well past midnight.
A man dozes beside it, head down, slightly snoring
his cigarette fell from his lips hours ago
to the smooth worn boards of
the past or the present or the invented
Who’s to claim they know better?
His dreams call like the darkened fields of crickets and frogs
and rustling arms of grass, open and wide
that one summer was never cut
and allowed to go wild.
Time is kept by the step of children’s feet
who never really existed, their laughter and footfalls
from the yard to the steps to the door down the front hall
into thin air.
They all speak the same language of the frogs in the trees
and have eyes the color of…
something…he remembers was in a dream…once.
His hand grips his brow, where all these things have settled
built themselves a nest mixed with cracks and creases.
His fingers absently rub at these margins,
these rule marks
these rings
their substantial weight apparent, even in the smallest fragments
or pieces
or moments
and who’s to tell him the difference?
His slow shuffle leads him into his home as
a car’s headlights sweep from one corner to another
for a moment erasing everything with
pure white light
Our eyes turned to the
Straight shot road ahead
Foreheads leading the way
Ignoring the winking eye of the radio
on the porch
Behind us.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: 2010, Echo Park, Esme Writes, Friends, Grafton Place, Happy New Year, Holidays, Hope, Impromptu, Life, Living The Life, Los Angeles, Love, Music, Passion, Poetry, Take Away Show, Yeasayer
About 4pm on January 31, my roommate and I agreed to host an impromptu New Year’s Party at our little Echo Park place. Some sequence of events prevented our original location from hosting the soiree and since moving into our home we’ve managed to host quiet a few successful little shin-digs.
As we prepared, we wanted to share with our friends the questions that she and I have been asking ourselves lately:
Where have you been?
Where are you now?
Where are you going?
What will you carry with you?
We taped up some paper on our walls and invited our friends to share their own responses with us.
We are so blessed to have friends who wholly accept our quirks, and who participate with their hearts, and also who are all so honestly poetic. The papers are still on our walls.
Here are our answers.
Where have you been?
- I don’t remember my first address in Los Angeles. This is intentional, I think. That place was forgettable.
- To the pit of my stomach, to hell and back to the dark and dreary den of my dreams. Just below rock-bottom. And all the while, still quite lost…
- Everywhere, somewhere, & most places. I have been where I was & where I was is where I’ll always be.
- Infinity~ & beyond…
- Always was which never was which always is.
- Nowhere.
- Everywhere! Anywhere is where you are!
- I’ve been walking in the shadow of my imaginary self.
- There.
- Hate will get you every time.
Where are you now?
- Two solid legs, grounded feet, head to the sky, heart open.
- Home. Atop my two legs. Standing with an open mind and open heart. Living in a West Coast fantasy, following my dreams with passion and vigor. I am here. Now. In the moment. Moving with a forward momentum. I am powerful. I am ready for it all.
- I know now what I knew then but I didn’t know then what I know now.
- In Love.
- On the moon.
- Exactly where I am now….now.
- Juggling happiness.
- Somewhere.
- Here.
- Stepping out of the dark.
- Living in love, living poor as shit, living to really live.
Where are you going?
- Up! Up! Up! and out! All over!!
- To the sky, to the top, with those I love. Onward. Upward. To uncharted territory. To places beyond out wildest dreams.
- Where I am.
- Anywhere that looks nice.
- Anywhere I want to. Stay focused.
- Who knows?! I don’t, but it will be great!!
- Anywhere
- ?
- Into the light.
- Only into good- wherever that is. We have our minds & we have each other.
What will you carry with you?
- I carry with me, all day, the deepest gratitude for the ability to share so much LOVE with those around me.
- Each and every moment. Relished and saved. Love for myself and those wonderful souls in my world. The strength and peace and warmth and love I feel. I carry it all.
- My core star! : – ) Always.
- A hand gun.
- My wallet & my t-shirt. Make it til you crash your U-HAUL.
- My AK-47 in my pocket. Don’t really have a choice anyway.
- An everlasting chord to ring for all eternity. What will it sound like is up to me.
- My rythm.
- Love. Always love.
- Confidence.
The following morning, I remembered this video by a band who has become embedded into our daily lives here in the apartment. I cannot explain to you how much the simplicity of their lyrics makes for completely and hauntingly accurate songs.
This is Yeasayer’s Take Away Show and it’s just the most beautiful way to spend a few minutes.
“It’s a new year, I am glad to be here in the first spring so let’s sing…”
You ain’t never seen nothin’ like this before
Filed under: Esme Writes, Love | Tags: 2009, 2010, anti-recap, Esme Writes, Happy New Year, Hope, Love, NOLOOKINGBACK!, Passion
This morning my roomie and I sat our our living room couch for an hour coming up with comparisons for 2009 and 2010.
This turned into excessive facebook posts:
And we got a little vulgar
The point is, that everyone spends this time of the year recapping what happened, griping about the junk that didn’t go right and just putting a lot of pressure on the upcoming year to be THE BEST EVERRRRR!!
Here’s my deal-
Yeah, 2009 was not all fun and games, a lot of messed up stuff happened. I lost my big-girl job in a cushy office that paid for my lunches and since then I’ve held a variety of positions from bartender to compassionate collective receptionist. I make coffee now two days a week and live on unemployment checks, but honestly and truly, for the first time possibly ever in my life I can say,
I. Am. Happy.
I. Am. Confident.
I. Am. Filled. With. Love.
So, already, 2010, you ain’t got much to worry about.
And as much as this sounds like hippie freak peace and love nonsense, I have been lucky enough that the past few months of 2009 blossomed for me. My gratitude for the people who have appeared in my life since my heart grew wings cannot be expressed in anything other than the hugest smile and knowing that tonight I will have a chance to transition from the here to the now with them.
With that, may I present:
A Collection of Hope, 2010.
Adventure…
Passion…
Poetry…
Love…
A Few Fun Nights…
A Few Fun Days
A peaceful heart
Filed under: Esme Writes, Love | Tags: Art, Cancer House, Echo Park, Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeros, Evolution of Words, Family, Growing up, Home, Los Angeles, Love, Mid-west, Music, Passion, transformation, Vanaprasta
The definitions of words have been transforming for me lately. More specifically the words “home” and “family”. I understand quite literally the meaning of “going home” especially since it is so close to the holiday season. Home for such a long time lived within the parameters of location, mainly the area in the world where you spend your formative years and develop, maintain memories and establish your identity.
Howell, Michigan earns the distinction of this title for me. Howell was and still is an extremely middle class average mid-western town. Nearly smack-dab in the center of southern Michigan, it was never a terrible place to grow up. Home was also the structure, the nearly 120 year old Victorian house, the Red House on the Corner. For me, as well, I established a deep sense of “home” attachment to Hawaii, and the Pacific Ocean due to spending nearly every summer there.
I would never refer to my dorm room in college as “home”. It was my room or my place or 403 or 115 but never “home”. My houses and apartments were also rarely referred to as “home” as well.
Something happened though, since moving to Los Angeles. I realized my deep cravings for a base, a center, a place of my own, a Home. My first apartment was hardly this and when my room mate and I decided to move we had more than just two bedrooms in mind. We had making a Home effect our decision. We wanted a place that was ours, our Home in Los Angeles. This changed everything.
Once we had a place that was ours, we took ownership of the area we lived in. We started speaking of Echo Park as Home. This then extended to Los Angeles being Home. I unintentionally made Los Angeles, California my new Home by centering myself there in a room in an apartment that is mine. Home is no longer Howell. Yes, I do still say I am going “home” for Christmas, but it is with a slightly anxious tone. I will leave my Home for a week to return to the place I grew up, to see my “family” at “home”.
The word “family” is another word with a mutable definition and one that has very distinctly evolved, especially more apparently since moving to Los Angeles. My parents and brother and even cousins, aunts and uncles have all played various important roles in my development as a Real Person, but to my life here in Los Angeles, they for the most part have no real relevance in my day to day existence. This by no means diminishes the love that I feel for them, or the respect I have for their lives. It does mean that I rarely talk to any of them on a daily basis and ultimately because of the infrequency of interaction their opinions and values now have minimal impact on my life. The “family” of “home” no longer is relevant.
My Family in Los Angeles has extended to the people who I feel a strong sense of identity and support and love from. They are musicians, artists, writers, actors, most of whom face the same daily struggles as I do, and all who are ready and willing to share their life experiences with everyone aound them. It is the desire to re-create the acceptance of the “families” we once knew and extend them further into the community that surrounds us. It is the bonding nature of passion.
Passionate, positive people exponentially expand horizons together, sometimes without realizing it.
Today, despite my intense anger at myself for being hung-the-fuck-over for a majority of the day, was lightened by hearing the Music of Vanaprasta on isgoodradio.com.
Vanaprasta has made a vast difference in my life in Los Angeles. These lovely gents have yet to even approach their one year anniversary as a band and already they have not only produced some beautiful music, but they have also grown and evolved in a mystifying manner. It gives me chills to hear the lyrics of their songs and the chords and beats literally bleed with a passion that is hardly paralleled in Los Angeles. Their passion has attracted a circle of brilliant people who mean the world to me. It’s been such a beautiful thing to feel welcomed into a family that cares so deeply about their art. It’s been a blessing.
I’ve also been thinking a lot about the fact that since the definitions of words can be so easily altered based on life experience, that there must be so many more words that have done so since the past year. “Love” is one, for certain. “Love” since it is such a malleable word and a word that can change in weight depending on situations is such a unique word that continuously ebbs and surges with different meanings from practically the first moment you learn of it’s existence. The “love” that you feel for your parents is not the “love” you feel for your friends or your first crush. My father’s “love” for me is not the same way he “loves” my brother. My “love” for Cape Cod potato chips is not the same as my “love” for garden fresh tomatoes. The manner in which people display “love” differs vastly as well as the words used to express thusly. I know that when my father says “Be Safe” he is saying he Loves me. I flat out tell my brother that I Love him. The Love that I feel for my friends, I express in meals cooked in my Home and in hours spent counseling or just laughing.
Love is easy though. Even with all these varying definitions, it is so easy.
I like the idea of Home being in someone. It’s a scary idea but it’s a beautifully simple idea as well.
If Home = Someone,
and Someone = Love,
then Home = Love.
Edward Sharpe, you might just save the world with your music.
Filed under: Esme Writes, Love, Sweet Little Something | Tags: Art, Cancer House, Desperation, Friends, Hope, Horoscope, Love
Monday, November 16, 2009:
You’ve always had what you need to do anything you want to do.
Now, just fucking do it.
It’s the perfection of desperation.
So I’ve stood this guy up three times in a week, and it’s not like he’s not inviting me to fun things, it’s just that I don’t really have the time or interest in doing anything that remotely involves a “date” or any of that wholesome traditional bullshit that seems to be coming at me from all sides lately.
I do not want you to be my boyfriend. I do not want to be your girlfriend.
What I want is to make every single day the best day of my life. And those people who want to do that too.
We Will Make Every Day The Best Day Of Our Lives
(for Justin)
1. Society Sucker (Agnostic Front Cover) – Walter Schreifels
4. Vacationing People – Foreign Born
5. Blow Away (Demo) – George Harrison
6. West Coast – The Roadside Graves
7. Catch The Wind – Donovan
8. Lolita – Throw Me The Statue
9. Haunt While I Sleep – Right Away Great Captain!
10. I Don’t Know – Lisa Hannigan
11. She’s Gone – Langhorn Slim
12. Chelsea Hotel No. 2 – Leonard Cohen
12. The Falls – Hudson Bell
12. But For You Who Fear My Name – The Welcome Wagon
(Eventually I’ll link to all these songs but right now I am about to go eat a delicious buger and then go see a friend’s performance at hyperion tavern so this will have to suffice)
Love, so much love.
Filed under: Esme Writes, Poemme Fatales | Tags: Esme Writes, Fuck, Honesty, Knives, Little Joy Open Mic, Los Angeles, Poemme Fatales, Sentiment, Truth, Waltzes, words, writing
He always told me:
Avoid political gestures and coughed mock sentiment.
Avoid religious drudgery and spoken gritted tooth lies.
Avoid steel barrels and the nights where alleys are most dangerous.
Avoid flour, sugar, high fructose corn syrup, mascara and limp wrist handshakes.
Avoid simpering smiles and nights burned into oblivion.
Avoid sharpened shards of glass and the fingers they slip from.
We wrote the same lists over and over.
It was always the same the same the same, a residual haunting on fast forward, retracing the same steps and same path repeatedly.
The one two THREE four one two THREE four one two THREE four of quickened high heel pace.
She was always making music with him and I was standing behind a curtain watching through moth-eaten holes.
Then I would sit down and write.
PART TWO OF MY POEMME FATALES PERFORMANCE:
There is an aching that stems
from the lack of creation
The lack of movement
The stagnant air of a city
The blood not flowing through my veins
The sameness
The people
The sameness.
The ideas that swim in the same lukewarm water.
There needs to be a difference and it needs to happen soon. There needs to be something unbroken and re-broken and things need to bleed.
It needs to be more than just papercuts this time.
It needs to be bruises and black eyes and broken bones and it needs to happen swiftly before the concussion sets in and sleep is here.
The distraction the distraction the distraction the distraction the distraction
The words the noise the words
The prying the emptiness of interaction
The sulleness the fleeting moments of nothing and everything
The sadness crept in at night and I didn’t see it coming but I left my window open.
I did that.
I was sleepwalking again. I ended up standing in the street. I was staring south.
All the empty interactions and the years that have taught me what? Taught me to be angry or mostly just deeply dread and fear tomorrow and there are words to mask it but in the end it comes down to my heart beating at night before I go to sleep and the cold chilling fear that I will one day hear it stop.
And I’ve almost killed myself so many times and you would think that taught me to be fearless but it taught me to be more frightened and to treat myself so much more gently.
An illusion of fragility.
Scarves and the swaddling of lies.
He asks me about the scars on my legs and I smile and open my mouth in the same rehearsed monologue.
Something about snow and drunkenness and streets and falling and sleeping.
The sameness.
The sameness.
The scars are with me forever until I hear my heart stop but the lies. These lies don’t have to be my shadows.
These lies. These fucking shadows.
I lie about my numbers to seem more imposing. To seem more experienced.
I get frightened when I don’t talk to someone.
Matching stares.
The broken heartedness of it all scares me.
Once a man stood with me and told me a story of being unable to love.
I am him now.
There are walls around me.
I want to call him and question him because I still have his phone number.
We spoke a month or so ago.
I painted pretty fake horses with my words so thin he could see through them but did not comment on their lack of opacity.
The world keeps spinning.
The walls are still blank.
I haven’t written anything substantial in months and blame it on everything except that I am afraid.
I am afraid.
I don’t know where these words will take me.
I once thought that I could do anything with them.
One day I doubted that.
The next day I played with knives.
Then fire.
Then I got burned.
Then I got quiet.
Then it was silence.
Such silence.
The words stopped coming because I turned them off.
Like the department does when your bill goes red for too long.
When you ignore the red bills for too long.
When the zombies come to gnaw at your legs.
They leave teeth marks.
And you remember an afternoon in the rain. And skin touching skin and impossible conversations.
The moments where I was not there.
Where I can’t remember the things I want to.
Where I was so much more important than sharing
Where I couldn’t share
Where those walls were built and could not be knocked down
And then there was the day where I teased a man I thought was beautiful and it was perfect like a waltz.
Then the music stopped
and because he stopped leading I forgot the steps
and then got embarrassed and then got frustrated
Then got lost then got angry
Then got lost then got angry
Then got lost then got angry
Then got lost then got angry
and the sullen faces still stare at me
I was building a stronger wall and a world behind that wall where I was precious sunny sunning everyone and they admired me for the simple bravery of providing light.
The bravery of being.
People wear sunglasses and complain that it is hot now.
And my head hurts right this moment.
We talked about napping and he is sleeping.
He is my best friend and my moodiness is sharp knives to him.
My selfishness makes me scared and makes me silent.
Makes the words stop.
Like kids playing with a garden hose, kinked between shining hands.
Nothing comes out the end.
Waiting for them to let go.
Waiting for them to let go or for me to let go because the act of just letting things slip through your fingers is not something I do well. The loss.
The never-come-back-adness of it all. The moment where you cannot control it anymore.
Control.
Ha.
Its just a concept. Everyone can fuck a concept up. And when something is based purely on perspective it is sure to get fucked up.
Then the swearing starts. I am sure I can hear my father cringe every time I let a fuck sail flying through the telephone lines to his ears. But at least I let that go.
Fuck.
Filed under: Echo Park, Esme Writes, Little Joy Open Mic | Tags: Drunk, EsmeWrites, Little Joy Open Mic, paper, Poemme Fatales, Poetry, spoken word, Story, writing
A few months ago I was standing, semi-drunk (OKAY, A LOT DRUNK- probably a few bottles deep) in my kitchen and a certain Man Of Note (The ONE, the ONLY, Keith Niles) asked if I would be interested in participating in a little idea that was hatching inside of his brain. He ran it by me, and I literally jumped at the offer (Yes, I think I may have scared the Man a little). Anyway the idea evolved into Poemme Fatales and consisted of 6 Los Angeles Poetesses, 2 a night, 3 Saturdays in a row, taking center stage and reading.
We did a photo shoot:
And we all prepped for our nights.
What we read, did, anything that happened that evening was up to us.
I chose to write all new material for the show and here is the first piece I read that evening:
LABYRINTH LIBRARIES
The beginning is where we are all supposed to start. A story told in a succession that commences with Once Upon A Time.
We open books and their bindings creak as the first page is sought. Chapter 1, or the prologue, the background story, the things we want to know about the past that will catch us up to speed, illuminate shadows, open doors and crack windows, fill rooms with light so we don’t have to try. Launch us into the future with sentences and paragraphs.
Except the future is now. And the past was now. And it’s all the same if you never had a clock or a calendar and these blank pages do their damndest to intimidate me.
It’s the promise of emptiness. It is the endless possibility of creation. The limitless fear of the endless possibilities of creation.
I find myself climbing into bed with my notebooks and taking a nap, nose smushed into pen marks. One time I actually woke with the imprint of blue on my cheek.
I sit down at my computer and stare at the blankness and the flashing of the cursor and decide to check out the new guy who added me as a friend on facebook who I try to not be giddy about because the one time I met him last week I really thought he was devastatingly attractive and wanted to talk to him more but now all I have is the façade of a facebook profile and the cutesty little coy post on his wall and now I just do the thing I do where I can’t concentrate.
So mostly its like stringing along an ADD stream of consciousness that refuses to wander in a straight line- like herding fucking cats.
Mostly it’s like
“So what to say? What can I say? The beginning is always the hardest, sitting down and thinking on myself like rock hard, ice-cold introspection (and shit) I don’t want to think that hard about me..”
There is this learned fear that acts like a speed bump. Somehow the judgment potentially passable on anything that pours out from my head causes a catch. It catches in my throat or at the base of my skull where the impulses are sent out and down and around and my fingers are unable to translate the mess.
In my head it is the day after the New Year in a library where we celebrated by tearing all the pages into oversized intellectual confetti.
At the time it seemed like a good idea.
It’s the morning after and below my feet there are now strewn collages of everything I once knew or felt or filed away for some later date of importance. Pack-ratted miscellany, blended with booze, laughter, spilt on the floor. Dried in puddles. There will always be a stain on the hardwood where I let that glass of wine tumble from my fist. It is all mixed with those sparkling shards.
We can sift through and make piles of papers but I have no idea where they go, what book they belong to, which author wrote what words. The collages of ink-laden memories mixed with the vague cartooning of comic books illustrative enough to illuminate but this chaos never seeps down my spine, it doesn’t translate into simple neurotic firings.
Single letters spit out in bursts. Kidergarten morse code.
Blips like radar.
Fuzzy glimpses of what could potentially be.
Mysteries from the depths.
And this page still stays overwhelmingly blank.
And then something might flip and the gears will twitch and I might get one true thing out.
I try to think about the truest thing that I know in any moment and it usually revolves so deeply around love or sex I find it embarrassing and try to change it into something more eloquent or at least less obvious.
At the time it seemed like a good idea.
It was that change that built walls of wheat paste and torn up pages. I can’t see over them. I can only claw at them.
Grab a fistful of paper.
The loss of what once and the inability to find it again the feelings of holes, holes so wide and gaping you can see through me and people liken that to swiss cheese but I find it to be far more dis-tasteful.
Grab a fistful of paper.
The fingerprint smudges and the rickety clatter of the brown line to diversey. My brother so much taller and with a hair cut made him almost unrecognizeable. He hugs like a bear and laughs like me.
Grab a fistful of paper.
Reddened eyes as my friend watched a needle pass through the open wound on my leg. 9 stitches, still drunk. 6am. Job interview at 10.
Grab a fistful of paper.
It is a night of dreams and sweet songs long ago in car rides at night watching the flurry of light from fireflies as we passed woods and wilderness and turned our lights off still flying 70 down the long empty passes.
Grab a fistful of paper.
Searing sun and silence. Staring at empty paper that lined the walls of a library turned labyrinth.
These were the corridors that lead me to where I find myself now.
I know, I so truly know that st the end, as my prize and winning glory is a solitary and beautiful room with a type writer and a window with a fire escape outside.
There are months of work, and letters in the mailbox and a pretty paining above the sink of a bird with words and music floating from his precious open beak.
There will be bare feet and a hardwood floor that doesn’t leave my soles dingy.
There is a closed wooden door and light summer curtains and pots with tiny things that grow and reach out to me.
The labyrinth seems endless. There are trick mirrors and wrong turns and so far it seems as if I have taken every single one of them.
At the time it seemed like a good idea.
The story is long and tedious and heartbreakingly funny.
