Esme Writes.

…That One Thing I Did…

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.