"Irena not only opens the door, but falls through, and the door only leads to one place, home; and home isn't safe."

Declan Donnellan, The Actor and the Target

Visa

This is how the hand off went. My fingers faintly so faintly held the plastic square, and then the Starbucks cashier applied her fingers faintly so faintly to the other side, and we each for a split second held the card like daisy chain or a banner or bridge between us that would be incorrect to break. Like both of us believed the other had cooties that we didn't want to contract. Like touching the plastic was somehow more embarrassing than touching the other's body. This is the pattern of these transactions. And sometimes in these transactions myself, the purchaser, and the cashier of whatever business will both grip the card so faintly that it will flip between our fingers like a fish, like we had slapped it, beat it around, and then it will clatter on the counter. But when it clatters, it is such a soft sound of the plastic, weighing some micro metered amount. There is no damage done. I imagine that others' transactions can be different. Yet mine are all like the card: commerce and purchases, faintly so faintly mediated by light plastic, and if the eagle in the corner catches it, oddly pretty in the light.

beach black nights-- Hamptons, L.I.

Change

my favorite word used to be cathedral; my new favorite word is crypt.

Tonight I saw the moon

And I could not number the weeks it’d been since that last time I saw it. Is the world indifferent to the moon? As long as it’s there, does it matter if we see it or not?

I suspect all the things inside of me are dead and that’s why I can talk about them. Brave is only a way of saying callous. I think all that’s left of me is a museum, resurrected over the village of all the things that mattered once but are gone. And the museum is getting dusty and worn down with too many tourist visits, not enough upkeep and exhibition swap-outs. That is the pattern of things that grow. They must, by law, grow, diminish, then be faux-revered.

Jack 'n Jill

It's true we all know Jack 'n Jill to have both worn leiderhoesan. There may be small discrepancies over each's hair color-- both blonde? Or did Jill have damp brown locks curled clockwise from her face like, well, the supple clock towers of her tiny Austrian home town, and did Jack's green cap have a feather stuck in it posing as a charming afterthought? And did his chubby hands grab Jill's or did they instead hoist sail on his own leather suspenders as he said goddammit Jill I ain't going for no more fricking water? Was their hike up the hill a metaphor for a life journey or a quick run and endless plummet where crown doesn't mean a metal monarchy but actually a bloody coxcomb? If the hill is a metaphor for life, I hope Jack and Jill were sweet and gray when they got up there to the stone well sheltered by that little rooftop, pointy, with a wooden bucket underneath. Maybe they started the walk as baby betrotheds but by the top they were brother and sister, arms lattice-linked.

And I hope they admired the setting sunset there at the summit-- the sky embroidered the color of an old children's book page, and I hope they finally got a drink of water before setting back down the hill again. And I hope when they did fall, Jack's mouth softly O-ing and Jill's toe finding the same tough patch or banana peel or slick spot from the slashing water, that they had the gentlest of tumbles like lazy roses somersaulting, barely loafing the grass-- pulling down from the clouds.

tonight

The moon is half full...  thank you everyone one for getting  me to this point. chaucer once said (i believe) that man is aways keeping appointments that he never makes. For example, I am going to the  beach tomorrow. It's like I'm on that moving sidewalk at the airport and I just get off whenever it lets me off like it's saying "here is your activity go enjoy" and I say, "yes thanks."

POST SCRIPT

after David Bailey' Drun Sonnets

REFLECTING NOW, ON HOW CLOSE WE WERE,

I DON’T KNOW HOW ANYONE FINDS ANYONE ANYMORE

ITS LIKE PINBALLS SLAMMING AROUND

UNTIL PROXIMITY MAKES A COUPLE GROW 

COMPATIBLE 

AND THEN THEY ARE ALL LIKE

“WE ARE MADE FOR EACH OTHER” AND THAT’S BULLSHIT

WHAT’S ALSO BULLSHIT IS MOST OF THE INTERNET

AND THE SUBURBS.

BUT GROWING COMPATIBLE IS IMPRESSIVE IN ITS OWN RIGHT

WHEN YOU THINK ABOUT IT

AND ALL THE TIMES YOU HAVE CRUSHES ON SOMEONE

AND NOTHING HAPPENS. OR IS THAT JUST ME?

I DON’T THINK IT WAS MY FAULT, THEY HAD G/FS

This is Coming a Little Late

after Drunk Sonnets by Daniel Bailey

AND I KNOW LOVE MAKES YOU DO CRAZY THINGS

I HAD A FRIEND WHO CLIMBED A CELL PHONE TOWER FOR THAT SHIT

BUT MAYBE I JUST WANT TO ELECTRICAL POWER OF THIS FEELING

TO HOLD ON TO LIKE WRESTLING WITH A DRAGON

DOES THAT MAKE ME ROTTEN? SOMETIMES I THINK YES

MOST TIMES I CAN’T THINK. BUT NOW THAT I CAN

I WILL LET THE DRAGON GO, WHEN IT LEAST COUNTS OF COURSE

AND ILL TRY TO BE A HUMBLE OLD WOMAN

WHO FREES FISH CAUGHT IN LITTER, OR MENDS

THE CHIPMUNK WITH THE BROKEN PAW

I ONLY EVER WANTED TO DO GOOD.

FORGIVE ME, FOR ALL THE TEXT MESSAGES I SENT

ESPECIALLY THE DRUNK TEXTS

I’M SURE YOU DIDN’T WANT THEM.

translated wiki page: franz paul

"Having been his sister Mary Herbert in 1803 , which is also in love with the Questions Immanuel Kant corresponded by suicide was divorced from life, so did Herbert."

babies

And then came the online obsession with early mothers. The girls from my grade who have birthed and raised kids. I click through their Facebook pictures,  the whole timeline as if maybe I can see some map of cause and effect.

compound words

voice mail box

voice mailbox

voicemail box

voicemailbox

I had a voice that I shipped in the mail via a cardboard box. Passing by, I heard a voice inside the mailbox so I left a voicemail about the cardboard box. Take the voice I mailed you in the box outside of the the mailbox with the voice in it so it's not threatened in there all alone with a disembodied echo talking to it.

Social Suicide

I would like to jump off the Facebook building to my own Facebook demise. But I'm scared.

re-do?

Maybe it's better to go through life like a knife blade instead of an empty basket.

Lost 'N Found

I.
My sister built a tree fort with her own bare hands. she rigged a platform and a rope ladder to scale the trunk, climb to the top and peek into the far off ocean. Inside the fort, a kettle sits at a small wood stove, but it's just for show. There is no fire in the tree fort. There is also a fake bathtub and a fake fridge-- a fake gaslight and a fake hose. About the only thing that's real in my sister's tree fort is a rug that we both curl up on, and of course the view.

II.
One summer, I went up to visit my sister in her tree fort. At first she would not let me in. She drew up the rope ladder like a draw bridge and said, "No girls allowed." I didn't say anything, but curled up at the base of the tree, right in the roots, until I looked like one, and cried and cried and cried. Then she let me up and fed me circus peanuts.

From that day on she let me tend the imaginary fire and send imaginary smoke signals into the air. (We weren't really trying to find anyone.)

And no one tried to find us.

III.
And things were fine, nay great, until my sister's drinking problem led me to sit up from my corner of the rug one pale, lukewarm night and exclaim, "Sister-- it's me or the booze."

She muttered that she didn't know what I meant, that I was naive, ungrateful. We shuffled around each other for days in the tree fort. Tequila dripped from the floor boards to the thirsty frogs below.

IV.
I am not a large girl, but I do not fit so well in my sister's tree fort. I stub my toes, and thwap my forehead, and rake my knuckles. The mini mirror, should it shine, reflects only my waist. The mini rug, should it have tassles, tickle my lip. The mini shower, should it work, wets only my shins.

I have some leaves but my sister says I wasn't born with those.

I like my hands; I order seven pairs online. My sister is going to show me how to fasten them all with her sewing kit. I have a squirrel tail which, to keep clean, I lick, like a cat. My saliva flecks the air and catches the light. I am very pretty.

V.
I don't know why I came here. I don't know why I show up anywhere. If I leave, I'd like my sister to throw her arms around my knees and beg and beg for me not to go.
"It will be terrible here with out you!" She'd say. I do not tell her my secret wish.
"Narcissist," she'd hiss.

VI.
Today my sister is kicking me out of the tree fort. She says I have the drinking problem, not her. I don't think that's right. Before I leave, she pulls out a brown cardboard box. LOST 'N FOUND it says on the side.
"Give back everything I gave you," she says, but I don't know what she's talking about. She shakes the box at me so I take off all my rings and bracelets.
"Such a selfless martyr," she says, and I am ashamed.
"The car keys too. You can't drive drunk." I throw them in there.

I peer one last time in the box before I leave. Little mice crawl around my things.

VII.
Down in the forest, I weave among the trees and miss the parties with imaginary tea I had with my sister.

Cloth in the Sun

I don't want to write about Childhood, Autumn, or Morning Smells.

I'm pretty sure I don't want to write long hand on paper when, my whole life, I've typed poems on the computer. I get what they mean about distractions and the internet, turning your phone off ect. BUT at the same time, why would I ignore digital technology? Yes my attention span is impaired... but it seems untrue to write my observations down in a hand-made journal in the woods rather than pluck my ideas out of my iphone notes and type them out to my blog. The critic in me is persistant.

So today, in the workshop, I am writing (long-hand) my page-long shpeil about a charged kid memory about a kitchen, but it doesnt interest me, no matter how "real" or "honest" I get. It might be interesting, but not to me.

Instead, I want to write about this folded cloth on the porch across the street from my sister's apartment in Bloomington, Indiana. It met the sun just so, that I thought it must be a cat-- the intention that it sat with, when the rest of of the porch was shaded.

But instead of just saying that-- I am qualifying it with contexts and complaints because I feel the creep of preciousness encrouching in from these workshops about The Senses and things we Remember.

Maybe it's becuase I'm looking out whats coming out the end of my pen like its some fecal dung thinking "what the fuck is this? is this my voice? so lame" I'm thinking that because its not actually terrible, or great. It's fine. Which is unnacceptable. I want different standards.

I missed my blog today.

Who are you?

I'm...

Who are you?

I know who I am.

Yes?

I'm. I feel weak.

Spit it out.

I'm a season that hasnt been invented yet.  I'm spring falling backward into winter. So sudden, I feel the rug pulled out.

Don't say that, you have websites and blogs to remind you you are beautiful with confidence, mascara, and a few well coordinated clothing items. Repeat after me: silly, fierce, beautiful.

This might work.
(and
I think this these words, once well meant, have fashioned into commercial vultures-- or deer (over run, and stripping off the bark of unpecked, unscathed langauge)).

Until I wake up at age 85, as if untucked from my bar booth. I'll look around and rub my eyes.

I'll wake up my husband, but he wont wake up no matter how hard I try.

Don't die. You can't die.

How did I get here? I'll say over and over to myself. How did I get here? I can't believe it. I'll hold my pale arms up in front of my face turn my hands around and around.

My husband wont wake up. How did I get here? I say.

I bang my knees on boudair furniture as I clamour,
crawl away from the bed. It's not morning then.

But it's not dark--
Just dark wood.
I am an umbrella with sun on the inside, I wash
out nightlights left on for passed out drunks.

How did I get here? I just can't believe it.

Is Jess in a Cult?

Three girls sit in a living room. Eva has just had her wisdom teeth taken out.

Eva: I am not seeing him. I am seeing him insofar as that we are hanging out, but we're not dating.
Sal: But you're kissing him.
Eva: Ya'll! He's kissing me with my puffy cheeks.
Sal: Post-surgery? Ewww.
Eva: Yes. He's like looking in my eyes and kissing me, but my face is swollen and my lips are numb. I couldn't feel the kiss.
Sal: That's weird.
Taylor: Jess is in a Cult.
Sal: Oh my god, Taylor.
Eva: What?
Taylor: She is.
Sal: No she's not.
Taylor: Jess is in a Cult. I yell it out like I'm joking, but I'm only talking about it all the time becuase I'm worrying about it. 'Jess is in a cult' haha but seriously... Jess is in a cult.
Eva: Why do you think she's in a cult?
Taylor: I looked it up online and what's she's told us about her "group therapy" fits almost everything. Loss of ego... cutting ties with friends and family.
Sal: What I think is going on here is Jess is doing something not considered normal. But that isn't bad. We just don't know.
Taylor: You heard her talk about it when we visited.
Eva: This was going on when you guys went up there?
Taylor: Yeah, and like, people can change a lot and I get that, but Jess has never been a "group" person, and now she's relying on this group-
Sal: We don't know that.
Taylor: Yes she is! They told her to give up photography, and she did. Giving up your passion for the group is a sign.
Sal: But was photography really her passion?
Taylor: I think she really liked it.
Sal: And they didn't tell her to give it up, they told her that they didn't see her passion in the photographs that she brought in and then she decided to set it aside for awhile.
Taylor: This isn't a photography group. So why are these people even telling her stuff about her art? They aren't even real physchologists-- they're like people who think they know how to help. But they're not even educated--
Sal: We don't know--
Taylor: They call each other names like Laughing Dolphin and Red Bear.
Sal: This might be a positive thing for Jess if she's feeling lost in the city.
Eva: I mean I know the difference between doing something different and outside your comfort zone and... drinking the koolaide.
Taylor: Jess is more... susceptible... now, to this stuff. she's way wrapped in it. They told her to cut her ties to her friends and family.
Sal: No they didn't.
Taylor: Yes they did, didn't you hear her say that?
Sal: No I don't remember.
Taylor: Look there's a deer.

They all look.


Taylor: It ran away. She told us that they straight up told her to stop talking to her friends and family back home.
Sal: I mean her mom is actually crazy.
Taylor: My mom is actually crazy, but I don't need somone saying, "you don't need to talk to her anymore." Friends wouldn't do that. Eva wouldn't do that.
Sal: Yeah.... We just don't know how they're talking to her, what they are saying. We could have found out if we went to the meeting. She asked us to go. She wasn't being secretive. That's not cultish, being... unsecretive.
Taylor: I'm glad we didn't. I asked like can we just listen? Because in highschool if I went to those bible studies where people talked in tongues, Maggie told me I didn't have to participate. Maggie is the one who brought me. But Jess said that if we went, we had to talk. And I was like, I don't want to talk. I'm freaked out that they would... like attack me. Like whatever I said. And I'd probably just blurt out oh my God you guys are in a cult. And if I said that I don't want to talk, then they would talk about why I didn't want to talk, and ask me questions about it--
Sal: Like "Why do you feel uncomfortable sharing with strangers? Why do you assume that you will be attacked or critisized if you talk about yourself?"
Taylor: Yeah...
Sal: (to Eva) Do you think its weird, to make everyone one-- strongly encourage everyone, to participate?
Eva makes a face like 'thats drinking the koolaide'.
Taylor: I am just freaked out if I went to something like that, they'd make me feel like the crazy one and they'd be the sane ones.
Sal: We just don't know. We don't know what's going on.
Taylor: You don't want to know what's going on. You are not thinking about it at all so you don't have to worry.
Sal: There is a thin line between cult and... say in Eastern philosophies, in Buddism, when you have a spiritual guide or a guru, they run your life. That's a path to enlightenment, and brainwashing to others.
Taylor: I've read that book too.
Sal: What book. There's lots of books?
Taylor: In highschool... Mrs. Hughes, Siddhartha.
Eva: This is like Waiting for Godot, except it's waiting for a cult.
Taylor: I hate that play.
Sal: The cult is everywhere, the cult is nowhere.
Taylor: I just feel like a bad friend, the cult thing makes me want to run away and have nothing to do with it. If we were closer I could talk to her. We used to talk a lot freshmen year right when she moved out there, but in the last two years we havent hardly at all. And I can't come out of the blue and say hey we haven't kept up with eachother, you are in a cult.
Eva: I've got to run.
Sal: Okay, see you soon?
Eva: Yeah, I've got a job interview tomorrow, so after that. Tylers driving out there with me. You know, just pecking kissing is getting boring. We can't do more than that because--

she gestures to to her mouth.


Eva: You know.
Sal: Ew.
Taylor: Tyler is a racist. But I love you.
Eva: I love you too.
Sal: See you soon.
Eva: Okay bye!

End.

my new BFF

My petsitting ward, Oli the teacup poodle, occassionally makes little growls. Today, while working at my desk, I heard him growling behind me. "Why are you so grumpy?" I said. And then-- ohmygod. I just completely had that moment when the herione talks to her companion animal (which happens more than people realize). Like Alice conversing with her cat, Dinah. Or Jasmine sulking to Raja. Life imitates art (or Disney), and how did I get here-- being the cool teen girl in the cartoons, Sabrina scolding Salem? I'm so lucky. Oli is more than just an accessory. He's an accomplice. Who occasionally farts.

Do you get it?

If I wiggle my eyebrows at you and say "do you get it, do you get it?" Would you get it? If I nudge you and open my mouth, shut my mouth, roll my eyes, flop my hands like soft hammers, huff a frocked and frilly sigh and stare and stare and stare would you get it? Do you get it? You either do or you don't.

Maybe one day you didn't get it, but that can change, and you can get it. Sometimes it never changes and you will never get it. Once you get it, doesn't mean you always got it. But you can never forget it. But dont trust remembering it. Try to forget it. And get it again. You can't get it from a person if you don't have it. But you can't have it unless you get it from a person. Sometimes.

There should be an eyebrow/handshake code so those of us that get it can find others. We can take turns running towards each other, then running away.

"At first I wasn't sure, but now I have no idea"
--Dr. Dog, Drop Me Off

Shakespeare Beginnings

I am noticing something new about Shakespeare. In terms of play making, he hides catalysts. In Hamlet, the Ghost is the clear catalyst to get the story started, but Hamlet's melancholy, rebellious state has well begun when the curtain opens. The cause is shrouded... and while there are plenty of factors for Hamlet's internal state (the death of his father, the remarriage of Gertrude to his Uncle blah blah) not one cause completely encapsulates the effect. Hamlet's cause remains off stage, unrepresented.

In Winter's Tale, Leontes's jealousy loses him his family and best friend. But what caused the jealousy? It was disproportionately engaged after Hermione convinced Polixenes to stay longer on Leontes's behalf. Like a switch turned on, Leontes turns completely away from his former character of restraint and reasonableness and into a paranoid hater. In my book on playwriting by Lajos Egri, this sort of "jump" in conflict is bad writing: "between winter and summer come autumn and spring.... there are steps which lead from one to the other. Every step must be taken" (Egri 155). Leontes's steps are compressed-- and as unnatural as time moving backward: he is spring, then winter. (The overall play structure, however, moves nicely from winter in the first half (I-III) to spring in the second (IV and V)). The catalyst is on stage this time in Act I, but something is missing... hidden from the audience.

I think Shakespeare was an early Logician. To supremely capture humans, as he does, one must acknowledge cause and effect,but also flout it. There are certainly a ton of cases where Shakespeare builds steady action-- but there is a signature, jarring effect. I would illustrate with more examples but its summer time and no one reads this blog anyway. The highest degree of conflict comes from pattern breaking, disruptions, unpredictability. Steve Martin, before he became and comedian and a playwright said this of his undergrad program of study: "I majored in philosophy. Something about non-sequiters appealed to me. In philosophy, I started studying logic, and they were talking about cause and effect, and you start to realize, 'Hey, there is no cause and effect! There is no logic! There is no anything!' Then it gets real easy to write this stuff [stand up routines]"... (from Wikipedia).

I always made an unexamined assumption that I was like Writers. I must be like them... because I read so much! But reading about writing is causing me to think that writing is different from reading and that writers are acutally totally different from readers. I wish that reading and writing were the same thing-- as interchangeable as breathes: breathing in, breathing out, breathing in, breathing out. And that I could switch from one to the other just as effortlessly. Of course there is a component missing from reading and writing which completes the triad... and that is "thinking". But reading, writing, and thinking do not divide so nicely into the dual nature of breathing. If thinking were to fit into the schema, it would be the hesitation between breaths-- because thought is inaction, and eventually we must stop thinking so that we will not suffocate and die.

I am very pleased with this metaphor.

"Rematch"

I have a movie idea. Its called "Rematch"-- an indecisive woman re-dates every boyfriend she ever had in order to double check she didn't miss The One. Can she learn to trust fate before bringing the wrong man to her best friend's wedding and second-guessing herself into oblivion?

The B-story: Indecisive Girl has an assured best friend-- confident in her engagement to a handsome, successfull Indian man. The wedding finale takes place in Calcutta.

The premise is that indecision leads to misery. Of course the protagonist will move from indesicion to certainty... while the audience should move from certainty (they know how these movies go, they know what she needs) to uncertainty (IS fate working in our lives? IS the protag better off moving on to the next catch?) The B-story is the surrogate audience. Best Friend is the foil/reversal  of Main Girl.

Drawback: The main girl won't be likable enough and the audience will boo and throw popcorn at the screen.

Found Poem-- Craigslist Pet Ads.

HARLEY IS 4 1/2 MONTHS OLD PUPPY

You are his life, his love, his Rabies Vaccination

This girl will be a big girl
I would prefer she have a playmate
I have one

Would like to trade her for pr of parakeets
but thats just something I want

The dogs below are in need of more information

He LOVES men,
rough play,
being able to run/hunt freely

and just laying in the shelter

He is a very good boy and needs a very good sliding lid and overhead lamp

Forever Home.
but thats just something I want

potential adoptive families

I will not give him away to the first person that asks... I have to be sure that where he is going is a good place. to ensure she is going to a good home

small rehoming fee of 100 (cash only)
to ensure. i need to be sure

i need to rehome
but thats just something I want

I do not have "papers" for him

That is really not as big a deal as some folks think it is

Purring is just one of the things she does best

but she kills chickens
That is really not as big a deal as some folks think it is

THANKS FOR LOOKING

Winters Tale act IV scene iv

Florizel:                                      What you do
Still betters what is done. When you speak, sweet.
I'ld have you do it ever: when you sing,
I'ld have you buy and sell so, so give alms,
Pray so; and, for the ordering your affairs,
To sing them too: when you do dance, I wish you
A wave o' the sea, that you might ever do
Nothing but that; move still, still so,
And own no other function: each your doing,
So singular in each particular,
Crowns what you are doing in the present deed,
That all your acts are queens.

tales of nola

This summer, I went with Terra and one of her friends to the New Orleans Public Library. Its right on St. Charles. It never seems to be open, but we went this once to see the inside. Of course when we got there, it was closed. It was raining. Walking around the building, we circled all the way back around to the front veranda.

And out of the rain was a homeless-looking man laying down on the tile. Terra's friend asked him first if he was okay. Terra's friend was the saddest sort who was always extremely shy-- the sort of guy who always thought he was being an idiot.

The homeless-looking man asked for us to call an ambulance, so we did. But we didn't know what else to do, but stay there until it arrived. And the man started crying about missing his wife, who had died. And Terra's friend told the man that one of his best friends died a couple years ago. Which made me and Terra feel additionally sad and uncomfortable. And again not knowing what to do, Terra read a poem out loud from her book of poems. And the homeless-looking guy yelled out what was surely the truth, "What the fuck are you doing I am dying over here!"

The weird thing is, I was relieved at the time that I, for once, wasn't the one doing the completely wrong thing.

I don't understand that when distopian worlds are protrayed in science fiction-- they largely consist of the same qualities of medieval social structure. That is: rigid social classes, injustice, unenlightened thought, unquestioning subserviance, even a sense of sameness and uniformity (all the peasants and the preoles dress and think the same. The noblemen dress and think the same). Yet these same science-fiction hypotheticals, contradictingly, regret the loss of an earlier, pre-industrial time. The movement away from that period in history has created a strange inertia. Are we are paranoid we are still living in that restrictive/oppressed time? Is it that the less we see oppression/control in the infinite variety of liberalism we encounter today, the more we dread that oppression/control is operating invisibly in our lives? At least by depicting a distopian society, or by shallowly visualizing the past, we can see clearly what it is we fear. Of course some authors, such as Philip K., complicate that projection, and decenter our conventional moral judgements in these mental/literary/imagined places.

I did not sneak from bed. I did not steal the fries, or your dog. I did not wait until you fell asleep to pull my skin back on over past my hip bones.

Mulch Fire, 2012

It is not the ecological disaster of imminent global warming. Nor is it the corporate negligence of the Exxon oil spill-- the inky stuff refracting rainbows in the gulf. No, this is a mulch fire in Knoxville, Tennessee. But the message that the hanging particulates intone in mid-air (code red for respiratory health) is of the most foreboding sort-- demanding that attention be paid. The message is to do what the haze cannot do, and that is to leave, flee, expel from this grabbing valley, like an exhale that rolls as current, dissembling and dismantling from its origin.

Besides that, the whole outdoors smells like barbecue and the air irritants make my eyes water, which confuse me into thinking I am sad.

What I find interesting is not writing a paper about the play I wrote, but why I am being asked to write a paper about the play I wrote.

A woman covered in snails.

A grown hick man drinking Pediasure.

Play Ideas

short play: Guppies.
Little girl fish panic when they learn the biggest of their brood will turn into males. "I don't want to be a boyyyy!"

long play: Murder Ballad Play
A young sociologist researches women in abusive relationships. The history and confusion of violence and love  wash over her. Celtic couple 1700's; appalachian couple 1800's; modern day researcher 2000.

short play: Bears in the Snow, Kite Flying Stoned
Two roommates discover they are dating the same guy. The Ice Queen visits and turns the guy into a statue.

short play: A Girl Turns Slowly into A Tree
A girl turns slowly into a tree. Football Dudes litter.

The hiking poem

We reach the hemlock mast of the mountain peak,

to peer out our two seperate windows. Faced with space

we all wish to transform: him to something huge to

fill up the distance. Me to something small, to get lost in it.

We dont get our wishes. Instead we remain in human-scale,

to spiral up Mt. Lacount like heavy smoke,

like big dried out salamanders, like walking trunks of ivy,

like flightless hawks, like people.

The trail cuts back and forth.

On the heads below, we drop

boulders.

Shakespeare and... Science Fiction?

I was looking at my friend's book, and just really fell in love with the cover design. It was a sketch of a circular building. The view was from an overhead angle, so you could really see the curved shape supported by cross-hatched rafters-- it looked like a giant wheel, or some whimsical wind mill, or best yet-- a flying saucer. A week later I realized the illustration was of Shakespeare's Globe Theater.

If we let ourselves imagine Shakespeare staging plays inside a UFO, what other other-worldly correlatives can we find in The Bard's text? Themes of isolation, alienation, loss of identity, the uncanny... all themes of Shakespeare, all themes of Sci-fi. It is worth noting that (who we think of as "timeless") Shakespeare was socio-politically lodged in a important notch in history: the Protestant Reformation. It was this event that set the stage for our present industrial, globalized, postmodern circumstances. This event was the birth of the new world and the new human. Shakespeare wrote science fiction.

song

There was this man. Who owned a zoo. He did not know. What to do. He let them out. Of all their pens. The animals are out. As if free men. And once let loose. Into the streets. They were killed. And shot and beat. And tribunals went. To get this man. They found him home. Dead in his chair. I heard this story. Yesterday. Stupid man. I heard them say. Stupid man. I heard them say.

Spending so much time showing I use my brain instead of using my brain.

a vehical of language

-The rhetoric one uses is like chain links of armor that bolster the speaker.

-Yet I'd much rather take my links and make scales. Words that, lattice-like, shimmer as a quick and fit fish.

weird/normal love.

When a boyfriend types to his girlfriend on Facebook chat, and his girlfriend types back, and the boyfriend and girlfriend both have profile pictures of them together, then the chat box looks like a two-bodied, hybrid creature is having a conversation with itself.

Advice for a Young Woman Who Suddenly Finds Herself as a Mermaid Without a Man Or, Between Us Girls

They say the whole world is carried

on one turtle’s back. This weight might be kinder

and lighter than a man’s guilt

which fills me— in this case, I’m the vase.

His eyelight looks out my eye holes until

I can’t see the horizon—

far off and clear, as water

in a light bulb.

Dry your eyes, Precious, water counts for

less now—

where currents take us up

as indifferently as a cat licks its ear.

Maybe I’ll put it this way—

I don’t know how to talk to you about you

as I can hardly talk about me, because

what we are now is something as delicate

as an achew

that bursts into the world,

unsure where it came from—

dumbfounding the fish.

That isn’t funny.

What I can tell you is:

it’s dark out there. Don’t mistake the yellow shoreline

for safety; it’s just a place for whales to beach.

And,

This isn’t the creek

you first found your feet in.

Proteus and the Scuba Diver

Super Bowl commercials make sports cars out of women,

& the remote yeilds 10,000 static-ether surfaces.

Peter is channel surfing.

Candy shapes,

ribbon-legs, and Old Spice clamour to spike

the dumb stone we are carved from, to

crawl right out from the screen and kiss

us on the lips. In

the mean time, we hump beer kegs.

& Later,

in bed with Peter,

his arms go around-- what?

While he pulls in breath

so sleepy & desperate, as a red man tanked & hosed underwater,

I flicker as a sentinal of shapes: a bird, a jug, six

dominoes, sedge along a creek bed. click

like a t.v. set.

click, click click.

I got shot in The Fort for my beauty.

will shakespeare

Is a double entendre.

It means lust and penis,

as well as

desire to move the pen.

THE SNOW QUEEN: I loved a man once. But somehow the man slipped away... and instead I loved the love... and nursed it like a babe. For two millenea I tenderly looked after my love: took it with me places, wrapped it up warm in the wintertime, pinched it if it grew too sleepy. But how can a child like that grow? It was a spoiled, pitiful, and stunted thing. Last month, I threw it away. This love, that was barely larger than my thumbnail... and too smooth and too soft from lifetimes of hiding, sheltered from the wind.

bedroom scene

It is a bright bedroom in the morningtime. The furniture is white, refined. A bright quilt messily covers the bed, underneath is a sprawled, sleeping person (TOM).

Enter MISSY, carrying a tray of breakfast food, carefully. She hesitates at the door, surveys the room. She goes to the window, adjusts the blinds just so, nudges a pile of clothes on the floor. Spying a bra on top, she with the tray, bends down and hangs it on a desk chair.

She crosses to the bed.

MISSY:

(a whisper)

Hey. Heeey.

TOM:

(Head emerging)

What.

MISSY:

(still whispering)

Baby cocooooon.

TOM:

What is that?

MISSY:

setting the tray in his lap.

Breakfast in bed.

TOM:

This is a baking sheet.

MISSY:

We dont have trays.

Tom wordlessly picks up a flower stuck

in a small vase of water. Looks at it, still sleepy.

MISSY:

With cheerful energy

AND!

Missy reaches in her sweater pocket,

and pulls at a new pack of cigarettes.

MISSY:

Tossing them to him.

For you.

TOM:

What?

Waking up more.

I can smoke.... now?

MISSY:

In bed.

TOM:

already peeling off the plastic

I can smoke in bed?

MISSY:

In bed.

Tom forgets the breakfast tray for a moment and lights a cigarette, setting back into the pillows. Missy, still standing, leans against the bed post, watching Tom.

MISSY:

Its just this once. And use an ashtray. That empty dish.

Tom exhales slowly and happily, and lets

the smoke curl fat and gray from his mouth.

TOM:

Smoking in bed is so nice.

Another drag, another exhale.

TOM:

closing his eyes.

It's so nice.

Missy holds out her hand.

MISSY:

Here.

TOM:

You want to...?

MISSY:

Yes.

Tom hands Missy the cigarette. She takes it and subtley tries to pose with it before taking the first drag. She coughs, she sputters, she tries once again to take another drag. In a second of chaos, Missy coughs again and accidently drops the cigarette on the bed quilt. She gasps, Tom jumps and pulls part of the quilt over the cigarette to put it out, knocking the baking sheet and food messily to the floor.

(beat.)

MISSY:

Oh no. Oh no. Oh no.

she mechanically paces.

MISSY:

Oh no oh no oh no oh no.

Tom rises fully out of bed, he is only in his boxers.

He follows her, doesnt touch her, except for maybe lightly, on the shoulders.

TOM:

Its okay, its okay. Its alright.

MISSY:

turning on him

I hate cigarettes.

TOM:

I know.

MISSY:

No. I'm mad.

TOM:

I know. But its not my fault.

MISSY:

Yes it is.

TOM:

Okay.

MISSY:

But its okay, this is our 'moment in the woods.'

TOM:

No its not.

MISSY:

Yes it is. We have a problem. I hate--

TOM:

I know, I know. But I dont think its a problem.

MISSY:

We have a problem whether you think we do or not.

TOM:

Thats not fair.

Its not a problem. I think that. Shouldn't that count for something?

MISSY:

You not thinking its a problem, is a problem.

I have to go to work.

TOM:

I'll clean this up.

MISSY:

I'm sorry about the mess.

TOM:

Its no one's fault.

MISSY:

Its your fault. But I'm sorry.

(beat.)

TOM:

Have a good day at work.

Missy glares at him, stalks out of the room.

MISSY:

from the other room

Just... stop being nice!

(beat.)

And get a fucking job!

A door slams. Missy is gone.

Tom throws toast at the wall.

chicago impressions

In Chicago, Jess's two cats mreow and get tougher than most dudes.

I went to chicago for four days. I went there. I went to Chicago. I stayed there for four days. I stayed in Chicago for four days. I stayed in Chicago for four days. I went I stayed I left. In four days. In Chicago. I shopped. I Shopped when I said I wouldnt as a resolution. I characterized Jess's cats. I stayed with Jess in Chicago for days. This is what I said about her two cats: Jane and Chick Pea make up Jess's family of gorrilla fighters, so the fly by dangers, the peter-pan-boys, are minimized. They hiss at the door. Thats what I said about those two cats. By which I meant that the two cats make up some special story about Jess. I think the story insulates her in my mind against the dark parts of a city pressing in. And to me, dark parts of a city can be the men you date that dont know what to do with you or themselves and make you sad. And you make them sad, but its all over so fast. Then theres cats. I like to imagine that Jess is the cats' ward, and they use cat kungfoo to protect her/ their indifference that makes life feel like it goes on.

I will not sleep through time's passage explains Chick Pea and Jane's ward,

I am like the original city builders,

who saw block by block,

track by track, how Chicago grew up and out--

Maybe if everyone could see how each second goes

instead of one day saying, how did all this get here?

Thats my Chicago story for myself.

Imagining backwards from the future

If my future progeny, one-hundred years from now, want to imagine their granny in 2012, they have to imagine a young woman, tense and worried, sifting through a vintage antique shop housing plates furniture clothes figurines hats candles light fixtures paintings and jewelrly from the 1950's 60's and 70's. She picks up items then sets them down ten or forty minutes later, asking herself questions like, should I buy something to justify the amount of time I spent here? Does indecision plague me on every detail of my life? Should I get this silk maroon dress because the price is low and I like it? Or should I put it back because I don't love it? Does anything matter enough to feel certain for? I should either get the three beer steins, gold evening bag, and dress, or nothing at all. Is everything trivial? The young woman leaves the shop, agonizes over the wording of a text message, rifles through all of her recycling to find one Important reciept, goes to bed early. Before she falls asleep, she thinks of presents she could get for her roommate, who is moving away soon. The golden age.