.......     Her Dolly impersonation was the best, the spark of glitter in the lights. The sway of her hips, how her lips would purse in pain. 

            “If you’d meditate more and stop taking all those Meds,” her manager tells her. Hiding beneath her bathrobe in a dark corner of the dressing room.

            “I mean it’s only a couple of nights a week.”

            She could barely handle two nights a month; a tour would be impossible. Not at this state. Two yippy dogs left unattended and an obsessive fan sending her everything from dog treats to flowers, shoes, t-shirts, from all over the world. Apparently this guy travels. He’s an oil baron’s son, surviving on a tight trust fund. Like his father and his father’s father before him – only cigars, the finest cognac, and bridled women in leather. 

oddities

 

Brian

 Co-Vid but why? The nightmare of a year and a half gone, literally, I've lost count of days and stopped caring if I live or die. 

(To Brian, my high school sweetheart):

We were skipping school, smoking cigarettes, and on occasion joints. 

Our middle class homes on the edge of industry alienated by a petrochemical channel. 

(You brother's a redneck now; eating beef, BBQ, beer, fishing, wife beaters – he became one of them...

the ones who chased us into isolation, tried to run over you skating the 'spaghetti bowl' 

in their oversized truck.) 

Pot, skateboards, growing your hair out, hiding your face, 

your indifferent lanky body, pale skin, veins, the vines – 

we made out in the woods at the bowl, you got poison ivy on your ass.

 

Summers were morbid, sweaty – we cut off our jeans, barefoot and thirsty, concrete 20 degrees hotter. We met under a table at your brother's party, (the twins - we called you). 

A year later you went metal. 

It was easy for us, natural to love, to laugh, daring and – 

I sat on the floor in your room, you'd hand me Iron Maiden album covers, our first high. 

 

'Let's go downtown', you'd say, in some beat up old red 81 4-door model – 

your friend's name never mattered. Hanging our hands out the window, 

muggy and damp air, diesels roar past; weave through the back roads of a subdivision along 

the Beltway, the second loop around the city. 

 

A subdivision of streets with green signs named after trees. 

Brick and tan, 80's muted rust and tan. 

2 car garages, larger kitchens and bathrooms, 

high-waist jeans, owl glasses, color television, slim and sleek microwaves, 

boom boxes, cassette tapes, three way calling, coiled phone cords, 

Indiana Jones and INXS. National Geographic, Rubik Cube puzzles, Atari and Australian bands. 

Cable TV, Black Flag, Iron Maiden, red-hot, anthrax – 

You – 

you taught me the words to life - and then you took your own…

I will never know why.

yedi

About this time 2 years ago I lost this precious doll - love ya Yedi

L.A. first date

there's something eerie and sexy about this vacant canal in Orange

creeky

passive agressive

and just how passive ?

austin

and while they build a capitol, dinosaurs run amuck

road trips always fun

i know most people post while on the trip themselves --- but one thing i noticed over time is the 'later on'... sometimes i miss the little things in a photo on a trip until months later when I'm scrolling through - only to find penis graffiti or Zane flipping me off...
so here they are - Austin, Seattle, Portland, New York, Colorado, Los Angeles a couple of times, and all the in betweens

the bumble catalog

maybe I need you -

to be your writer, your groupie, your roadie escorting you cross country. Photographs with elms at restaurants, tourist attractions, buying sushi and fizzy sodas at the grocery store. Candy cigarettes and record albums; vinyl across the street from stoner hipster taco bars where 30 something waitresses are unshaven and braless.

need you

we could build libraries and renovate basements in northwestern old homes selling for a costly price.

To play your music late in the evening – before the fire, beneath the moonlight – hanging lanterns on patios. Kittens that rub against the ankles. Sip my wine, book flights to New York or overseas, going on castle tours in the Scottish Highlands – to make love in the halls against the damp walls of dungeons as the tour guide leads them all away. We linger longer... smoke pot in coffee shops along Puget sound, the musical water fountains of Seattle.

need you like juicing after yoga, pay day paycheck spent on shampoo, underwear, and kitchen necessities.

We are building a utopia in our bedroom, snuggled tight beneath the amber Edisons, legs twisted like chain links. Like long halls of laser tag, pinball, confectionary etiquette of elite – (winning) wining and dining, hors d'oeuvres, candlelight and the head of the table proposes a toast – to us, to new beginnings and every party we walk out on, every day left...

need...

buy art or else

http://tracy-lyall.portfoliobox.me

It Loves You

check it ---



https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=dp_byline_sr_ebooks_1?ie=UTF8&text=Tracy+Lyall&search-alias=digital-text&field-author=Tracy+Lyall&sort=relevancerank



(soon to Ebook photobooks)

intro to all my books

One of the many novels all dedicated to Brian, aka Bhead – so much for that 'never work at a gas station' crap; looks like we've both paid the price.... F them.

Many thanks to my babies – K and Z (you're the loves of my life), Memaw (aka Wanda), Aunt Suzy, Mr. Kangaroo, Yedi, Rebecca O., Bucky Rea, Flynn, Natalie, and all those literary people and band guys convinced I was a 'great writer'.

oh and suck it

we win!

i wish we'd hung out in San Francisco

Thomas Strohm is the antithi-slut. He's the guy in the back of my mind who I assume I can always call when I need a one-night stand. The one from my teen years ended up a meth head, blowing up a lab and scarring his face, then died just last year. So Sarah says…Thomas is around. In between jobs, in between coffee shops, I check his Facebook periodically to view his swimming pool girlfriends and bar girlfriends and am amazed he doesn't have multiple venereal diseases because he's the Burger King of weekend romance; fling romance. Sometimes I think the cops or the scientologists are following me around and I might end up the crazy lady arrested at the skate park for 'running away from the devil man' or the lady who stands in the middle of the intersection while my overweight black dog rolls around on the sewage grate. And traffic passes and no one says a thing because that’s how Montrose is. That's how it’s always been, which is why we gravitated here years ago, dropped out of high school - punk rockers, gay, artist, dike, titless, overweight, the wrong size, the wrong mind; inappropriate and insecure. Lost and shunned. Sarah was a junkie and I was a poet. Andy dropped out of High School for Performing and Visual Arts to drink himself to gay bars. Every night, gay bars. Transvestites and punk rockers. Now they’re 'cleaning up', bringing in the metrosexuals, the families, and the upperclassmen. Cyclists, coffee shops, people hanging toys from trees, thrift stores and Wal-mart.

I write 'f--- you Houston' on the walls of the Art Guys exhibition. Jack and Jim Pirtle and Pat, god that was an awkward evening of cocaine and weird, and all those pictures of people I was standing next to. And John, I wrote for his paper, he lived at Notsuoh briefly. Cocaine brought them together. Black and whites side by side, telling my story of the people I knew and the places I lived and maybe I thought I saw my shoulder or the back of my head in one photo or I just wish I did to get over it. Nestor with his write up in the magazine, now residing in an 'undisclosed location' it says…I know where he lives and want to call them, bribe money to tell all.

Remember that summer? The summer I came back from California, hell I can't even remember why I was in California except I was stoned and pissed off, decided to take what little money I had, around 500 and take off to find 'something'. Something, it's that void of something again. Lead a poetic lifestyle, write the great American novel from the aisle of a greyhound bus, a Louisiana swamp novel; 'looking for love in all the wrong places' like an old country song. Like Texas. Too many faces. The place I hate when I'm in but love to say I'm from when its time to leave. I loathe remembering things. Because I never have the answers to impulsivity. The second time I landed in Los Angeles at the greyhound station was in my early twenties, maybe 23 or 24, and those men, you know the ones waiting for their next Sally does porn victim all gathered around as if I'd never done this before. As if I was that naïve small town girl rolling into the big city for the first time.

“Nope, you're too late,” I told them,

And I woke up one day to realize he'd handed me all his rage, all of his insanity. The war in the mind - the masons, this mad mad industrial city – this stupid hot state of Texas. 100, 100, 100 degrees day after day after month after month for half a goddamn year. Where are you going? He'd always say –And the race is always on the streets. I drive crazy the way you taught me you angry old man, I drive that race on the highway, I weave through traffic, I scream and I burn.

I never knew what caused those nosebleeds.

The Houston ports bring the ships in, the tugboats create rifts along the San Jacinto River, polluting the shores with their industrial chaos. The oil industry and petrochemical dump. The art scenes flourish, to create a gifted community beneath the ancient elms and oaks that droop with humidity, which cough each breath, each wind stagnate. The metro buses putt putt along down aging streets, Westheimer, Montrose – throughout downtown, its reflective windows erect buildings into the sky. They construct stadiums with a removable roof, new high-rises, condos and more parking garages to accommodate. We are greening a nation, greening the city, a city park complete with sculptures from 1983, a yard for yoga, a playground for the children and a basketball court two blocks down. They are running away the homeless people, the leftovers from Hurricane Katrina, the Louisiana scragglers with nowhere to go. New Orleans has rebuilt itself without them. Their voodoo and Mardi-Gras permeate our barrios and Vietnamese doughnut shops. The Heights of a hundred years has a bike lane, as they plan to build trains to cart us back and forth. The east side is regenerating artist warehouses and tiny eateries for the eclectic; the modern. The art car parades are dying down but they still chalk up the streets, close down the highways for the big race.

The grand prix.

The dog walker lesbian told me the mayor was a bitch. I don't believe her. She's the first lesbian mayor, with adopted children. I've met her at public poetry readings.

I need a one-night stand or at least something similar.

Thomas' new apartment is only 6 blocks away so I stop by. His “roommate”, where have I heard this before – she has beer bottles stacked along bookshelves, shelves and shelves of collector bottles. And mirrors, beer labeled mirrors hung on the walls. The dog hair from three dogs clumps and gathers along the stairwell. The house smells of dog. He's shorter than the last time I saw him, lost some weight.

----So this is your new place, huh? How do you get these people to take you in?

----I don’t know.

He grins. The dogs are barking upstairs. I inspect his “roommate’s” bike to see if it could be my bike, painted, still looking for that amazing light blue Raleigh someone stole from me over 2 years ago. I'm like that. Always wondering who stole my stuff and who keeps following me around, and why guys leave or don't leave. And have nothing to believe in anymore.

He's skinny.

It's gone.

I've lost him.

He's sleeping in this woman’s bed, calls her friend, won't admit he's having whatever he's having with her – calls her “roommate”. He's lost that shine, that glow, that neediness. He's just skinny Thomas now, that guy whose back bike wheel is flat and lives with a strange tattooed woman who collects hundreds of beer bottles. I tell him I need a drawing for an art class.

'Naked?' He asks. He's forgotten how to communicate beyond putting out to live.

You smell like dog, smoke pot, look amazing for your age, yes, but like old gay men who never rehabilitate and end up kicked out of gay bars they spend years in and into coffee shops where they read books, not laptops.

(Wouldn’t it be just like that? – I put out to a guy who never gets me out of here, a guy who brings me back, a guy who traps me. Not that I have some magical pussy or anything – there’s no place like home, there’s no place like home; withholding like Neverneverland.)

Willie Nelsons' stoned and crooning voice overrides the coffee-shop silence at Black Hole today.

'Its seventies country day?' I ask.

Yes.

I wonder how long before the headphones hit the ear. The days in the fall always start off slightly cloudy and cool then gradually work back up to sunny, humid, and miserable. For about an hour, sometimes two - a soft blue hue overrides the usually warm and orange taint. Yes, taint. Not tint. The silver grey of cement, the gradual flow of dew damp traffic just before sunrise, just before exiting the freeway. The roads shorten. Bucky texts me, says he hates Houston and wants to move to Cleveland. After all the poetry festival marketing and carrying Sal through Fringe Festival for three days; I'm sure he's burnt out and suicidal. Before the sun becomes that pervasive red ball of flame; just behind the clouds, it’s a burnt moon of silver reflecting off poles, off rails, off street lamps and puddles. When the rain comes, when the sky darkens, when the lights are out and sky is clear – the stars beyond the lightning. The flashes like 'I wish I was in another world'. Like a silent bomb beyond the horizon, like a mystical orb – a pulse. There's that one moment. Like a shock. Like the light bulb flicks on in the middle of the night. 2 a.m. Shock. And for three brief seconds, you know everything there is to know. The past, the present, the future – all together at a stand still. Breathe.

Look away.

Don't look back.

You can never return.

It's over. Move on.

If only you could remember what happened, how it came to this.

Black Hole. Like an intentional community, like the substance of Houston; try to get out, ha, fooled you. It will bring you back from the Portland crisp falls, from the Colorado mountain winters, from sunny California; it will suck you back like a crippled mother, an ailing father; a disease. Texas. Hot. Texas. Suck. Houston. Swamp oil industry bog bayou pig face cement trailing on and on mayan and incestuous northern and gothic southern charm, its wit about you, its wit about you – to grandmothers and smoking cigarettes to hot rods and porch talk with lemonade or hot coffee with an ice cube. Just a little sweet to take the edge off. F--- you Houston…No more summer trips to Kerrville. Nana died and left memories of the hill country, of bullshit religion, of her crazy Scotch-Irish Brit grandmaster mason husband, and of those hidden springs outside Austin.

“Sometimes the machines and the steel sound like music,” Kira says as we pull out of the driveway this morning. Darkness, the car covered in overnight dew, lights from the building behind the house shine through the vines on the fence, through the brush and reeds and decay.

“I don't hear it anymore,” I tell her.

The steel scrape, the layer of inorganic matter, metallic dust that settles across everything, and that smell – of shit of metal of butane of random stink. That sound, the scrapes like monster claws on chalkboards, the clank of metal hammers and steel construction, of valves opening and the hiss of emissions releasing, the whirs and hums and overall ugliness. The grass grows strong; the trees last decades and droop an exhausted wilt. The industrial river, the port of Houston, is hidden behind the city backdrop. They create art to forget; to look away and pretend it's somehow beautiful – the willow along the faded skyline, the tattooed lovers and foreign immigrants, the Texas flag and Menil collections. Punk rock, hipster, hip-hop, professors, yuppies and Macbooks in coffee shops across the freeway from the universities – of engineering and science. From the space shuttle of NASA to the port, we will erect mutated statues; build a green space to make up for it. And rent-a-bikes.

I don’t believe in you anymore.

I look for jobs with chains, so I can run a search and find all their 126 other locations not here. Not here. This is not Marfa, this is stink.

As we drive along the loop on the way to school this morning, Kira tells me how they'd had a discussion on religion at school, that the atheists and Christians had split the room, and how the Christians proceeded to tell everyone about Jesus and god. Well, god made you, and this and that and all things god.

So Kira says, “Really? Well, who made God?” and the room fell silent.

And the atheists snickered beneath their breath.

And everyone was stumped. Those preteens are suddenly at a loss again - for meaning and substance.

“And that's how Kira makes friends at school,” Zane interjects, “yea Kira.”

We laugh.

Would I be wrong to say that I taught them to believe in nothing so that they could see everything there is to believe in?

'Big city set me free'. He makes presidential heads at summer street studios - I have photos, blurry digital images from years ago. Next to files of Kate Bush music in Andy's car – those cold front nights of driving at 3 am, the streets are vacant and slick. We are no longer waiting in grocery lines, we are no longer shopping for comfortable slip-resistant shoes, we are no longer smiling smiling for the public to make everyone happy and pay those goddamn bills; we are just alone at the top of parking garages and wandering through the maze of underground tunnels beneath the hotels. All those hotels we sat in lounges and drank seltzer or smoked and hoped we'd meet someone with a ticket out.

When I feel really spiteful and haven't eaten, I throw trash out.

Its 9 am, Bucky still doesn't like Houston.

He sends me a text, 'I can't get killing myself out of my head'.

For the past month maybe. Incredibly tall, short ponytail and magnet blue blue eyes. I hope he's not gay, so I avoid being attracted. Maybe he will swing. One day I nodded, one day a grey murky day I think I mini-snarled, one day I spoke to him briefly saying something stupid like, 'you're much taller when you're standing up'; and then there was the day I nearly fell off the curb. Well, I guess that’s better than getting stuck in some fashion craze of golf visors, tennis shorts, and aging gum smacking blondes.

I tell the kid sitting next to me that I'm going to go see if he has a house in Canada, and if he doesn't I'd be right back.

Neville; a name given to him from his grandfather of Luxembourg. His tall sturdy build, high cheek bones, and those eyes – disturbingly romantic and eerie at the same. Vlad the Impaler, Dracula, wet cobblestones on misty days and dungeons. It's Czech, it’s the Jewish ghetto of Prague, its French cemeteries and German death camps. The ashes of the dead as they rise over the skies to block out the sun, a plume of thousands of scorched bodies – I feel so nauseous, crawl down from the bunk in the back of the silo – we will escape before they take of me again. I hear their boots shuffling along the ground, I hear their vicious language and so seductive in Lux, with French accents. We die over and over.

1943.

1971.

1882.

2014.

Here we are again. In between jobs.

He works down the street, says he enjoys his job and I've done most of the talking. Same job eight years. He needs to get there early today to set up candles, he says. That explains why he's always wearing black, every day.

--- Do you have a house in Canada?

--- No, but I have a house in upstate New York, close to Toronto.

I need a heart to heal me; someone with passion. I have forever, now go away all – goodbye exes and Texas and stinky barrio house and morbid nursery rhymes from hot summer daycare on the ship channel. Maybe I will join the P.T.A. and the kids would be able to play outside again, in the fields, in fresh air. This city is for people not from the city.

I go back inside as he leaves, watch the girl with the turquoise blue leotards – she doesn't look the slightest bit uncomfortable, and tell the guy I'm sitting next to, 'He does have a house near Canada'. 

1995

In 1995 I longed to return to the fold.

So I took a Greyhound bus for a hundred dollars, a pack of Marlboro reds and a few backpacks stuffed with belongings. Leaving to make change. The radio station stuck on oldies since 1975. The neighborhood never cleaning up as they pour in. just a house on the hills – a simple wish list. It’s been two weeks of sleepless nights before the long bus ride. I left a typewriter on my grandmother’s spare bed in the “guest room”.

36 hours, mostly night, daytime desert and smoke breaks. 2 naps and 3 meals late I arrive around 10 p.m. to wigs and heels on the L.A. bus. It’s Halloween and the boulevard is blocked off. I hope I blend in and they never find me. After checking into a hotel a few blocks over from Sunset Blvd., the hotel room is dank and quiet. Helicopters scan the streets at 2 a.m. I am alone.

“Who do you talk to when you don’t have a god?”

“I write,” to no one in particular.

A strange guy my age lives there with his blind grandmother. He brings me in; we sit on the couch. He’s smoking crack and his mother is tapping her cane against the kitchen table.

“She’s blind,” he says.

“What about the smell?”

She’s sniffing. It’s sunny and breezy; the sunlight shines through the motel window. “What are you burning?” She asks.

Andore al inferno, I don’t even know. I took German with 2 exchange students from Norway. Frankie and Yan, Yan the cute one and Frankie obnoxious.

It’s November 1^st and the air is cool so we walk down to a corner café where we meet Jerry, the taxi driver. He goes on an anti-drug rant as he apparently knows this kid and doesn’t want me to get involved in anything “dark”.

“Like porn?” I say. As if I would.

The roots grow beneath the hot concrete, wind their way into a foot or two of soil atop the pipe, the tunnel system they built beneath downtown years ago. No one uses it. They erect billboards of smoking cowboys…. Jerry sits near the back and tells the waitress to keep an eye on me.

The bus to Nu Art Theatre winds through Beverly Hills. Fountains where homeless girls wash their face and feet. Someone is drying clothes on the hot cement. It’s quiet and no one makes eye contact.

Jeff, who’s about 6’4 is crammed in a tiny box office built for preteens at the front of the theatre. There is room for a fan and place to kick up his feet. They are breeding for perfection in the hills, prepping their kids for selection. An astronaut wives club, they send the men off to work, to war, into space – they are toasting champagne and curling the blonde curls of their lovely daughters. Fiona shows up at the theatre to take me around the corner for coffee, tells me AA would be good for me. After the late night Rocky Horror shows I head back to the motel, pack up and roll my luggage to a room closer to the beach. A 5-minute walk to Venice.

For Christmas Fiona invites me to an AA party in a church basement, then to her apartment after party for gifts where she gives me a carton of Marlboro reds. I’d rather have a pool, a little bungalow in the hills beyond the old suburbs, the glam, the progression falling backwards in time with a cleaner graphic.

nightlight

An hour later she's passed out and they are lifting her into bed, turning the audio book down low, and plugging in a night light; a little bear. Mel bought it for her over 5 years ago and its still in the same electrical outlet. Next to a really pathetic sketch of a suspension bridge they crossed over one summer on a quick vacation to Louisiana. Just past Baton Rouge, a cute little swampy college town. When they arrived in New Orleans, Mel was terrified and refused to get out of the car. Memaw leaned on the trunk and smoked a cigarette while people stumbled past, tossing her beads and showing her their boobs. So she did too – and the younger guys, maybe 25, got a kick out of that, yelling for more, 'shake it granny'. 

Worse than Vegas, no glamour, no glitz, no flashing lights or feather outfits just partial nudity, the scent of alcohol and vomit and something similar to burning bamboo and seaweed. That almost salty scent of the swamp heat. Back roads of drooping willow trees and colonial homes with large porches. They sit out at night with hanging lamps, fanning themselves, drinking tea or something rocky. The young girls keep to themselves, the men fixate on theatrics as there is a fashion of theater, of playing drunken dress up and bar dancing, of pool and balcony people watching. By midnight everyone is a lover, a medicine man, or a voodoo queen. That passion to persuade, to lead one off into the night for love making, heavy sensual sex. The hole damn town smells like hot swampy sex and tears. 

burning

The car door flew open over the Sidney Sherman Bridge,

½ mile high in the sky

mom was angry I was going to jump out.

I wanted away from that stupid day-care with rusty slides

where little blonde girls cut their legs open

and we played Bloody Mary

in the bathroom spinning, spinning around.

And that school where our pervert principal pulled our pants down to slap

our bare white ass with wooden paddles.

I made it to spelling bee champ, practiced words they didn’t use in our income bracket.

Houston, you cesspool of an industrial town.

Death - your toxins, your Liverpool of alcohol and pedophile tendencies.

I went to your churches in search of God and found metal head boys

living near the port who’s fathers smoked and drank and worked long hours

at the chemical plants only to come home to their fat sweaty wives.

Pretty, pretty faces and blue eyed fat sweaty wives.

They beat their sons down as the factories spewed

and we were never beautiful enough for their elite disease.

We were stick figures with fuzzy-headed hair balls.

We were pale freckle faced freaks hoping for something more.

Maybe we would get out of this town one day; maybe we could break the chains.

I remember the bomb shelter we found, walked in, dad and I.

It all went black. Dark and red.

The stinky death beneath the monstrous toll bridge

high over the ship channel. The barges boat in their goods.

They tear down the amusement park - after many summers of season pass,

of smoking Marlboro reds like tomboy summer camp.

Hoping I’d meet that rebel boy, you know the high school drop out

who plays guitar beneath the street light outside his 1960 cottage home

while mom and dad fight over the phone bill or electric

or who gets what if there’s a nasty divorce.

‘I get the f*&king weed-eater.’ ,

‘what if you move into an apartment which is all you can afford on your restaurant salary, you won’t have any grass. I get the f*&king weed-eater.’

‘You’re evil.’

I hear his guitar like my own personal soundtrack.

I wish you’d hold me at the drive-in… God never came,

only white vans and selling newspaper subscriptions or waiting tables until a decent job.

I waited in line for the Gunslinger, and it twisted a knot in my gut.

rode the Texas Cyclone roller coaster until I vomited, over and over,

dropping from a mile high in the sky until the bladder lost its senses,

won the big stuffed animals from the hula-hoop toss.

For Lucky Strikes and my stupid friends whose tits were bigger and maybe

they were more Germanic or more complacent or didn’t mind if they ended up barefoot and pregnant with some ignorant east side guy in a trailer home park.

Through cigarettes and midnight Denny’s and 24 hour coffee-shops down the street from the airport, playing “Wicked Game” by Chris Isaak over and over again.

Thinking maybe someone will fly in any minute for coffee - boots on the bench and snap-open suitcase.

So I got on a greyhound bus and rode off. To Lodi, to Los Angeles with a drunk roommate. Losing my record collection of classic rock, rock operas, garage, and punk, to San Francisco. Met couples on the run, lonely mothers who’s children moved out or went off to college. Lonely men on their third divorce. There were swamps and beaches and deserts and novels. The trees bent over the roads and bar bottles clinked outside pool halls while we had sidewalk curbs and sandwiches for dinner. They were silent.

Black.

Disgust your sex.

Blood.

Disgust your porn store and wooden swinging door like an old saloon and watch you bring girls in one by one, entrap them with promises of a new world. 
We used to sneak into the Hyatt Hotel downtown in the late nights, right before they closed the underground tunnel and play the baby grand piano, pretend we could play, pretend we were meaningful, weren’t just one more mouth to feed in a city of millions, pretend we wouldn’t be trampled.

Blue eyes sparkling with hope.

Pale skin glowing like ghosts we climbed ladders and ran through parking garages.

All these years

I lied in bed until a rash, drank and puked until I ended up in rehab,

ran and screamed until I lost twenty pounds, hid away for a year.

midnight beach trips, camping in the woods.

The cedar trees hover over like Sasquatch.

The closest to warm to hold me and blankets, buy more blankets turn the A.C. up and cover with piles of blankets until the sunlight goes away. Until the day is gone.

They break in and steal your Les Paul when you go to the movies.

They steal mail and bikes and hearts.

We roasted marshmallows and I realized after all of that, I didn’t feel like telling any stories. Only Memaw rotting away in an old folks home,

her skinny body and hanging skin in a ball like a little child

talking to her stuffed animals as if real babies.

‘You’re a pretty one’ she says.

I just don’t feel pretty any more, youth cute, like high school prom.

After all these years, after birthing two children,

their big fat blue heads popping out and into the world to breathe life.

I want to go back – back to the beach and the tunnel and the drive- in.

And when I’m buying popcorn you’d invite me to your car,

the one you finally saved up for after working for 5 years at that horrid video store cause your folks were suburban types.

You’d invite me to your car, I’d lean the seat back and think on all those years -

the Masons and their Rainbow girl ceremonies with basements

wearing wedding dresses while reciting Masonic verse.

You’d reach for my hand.

Hell, we’d make out, crazy mad style like adults.

Like Bonnie and Clyde and Jesus and Mary harlot

and it’s like long hot “where the stars at night are big and bright

(clap clap clap) deep in the heart of Texas”.

Deep inside it all.

And if they come with flashlights or security guards, we’ll speed out stirring up dust

as an old race-track pro would, the guy who never won the trophy

because he was boozing it up in the pits for two hours,

and always came in second.

At the Drive-In, the drive-in movie.

You and I.

20 years later.

I’m going back to Cali, I’m going back.

(I don't think so).

no, I'm not a metal head, and I never have been. once I went to an Iron Maiden concert back in 2003 and it was questionable

making plans

It’s time for Plan B –

Elope to a quiet mountain retreat with a guitarist…I shouldn’t have left him alone at the show, will probably regret walking away until I’m 65. Was going to invite you to my hotel room and realized I didn’t have one, could’ve gone mute, dumb and retreating. His white shirt held the glow from a black light.

10 minutes.

The punk rock poetess idea was a fail, twenty years of poetry readings, creative-writing workshops, thousands of dollars of debt, and depressing jobs.

6-foot-3, they have to be at least 6-foot-3 or more.

Old medicine bottles dug up from the creek in Nacogdoches line the kitchen windowsill. Back when the kids were younger, biking on trails with Mr. Kangaroo in backpacks. Frisbee golf, piney woods, and the million dollar art gallery. The dishes are piled up in the sink. Two days of flooding in the city. Newscasts and emergency alerts coming through on cell phones. Stalled cars abandoned in streets as puddles rise beneath overpasses, bayous overflow and trees fall into the raging waters rushing through the streets. As the rain subsides, the mud remains and wildlife leave tracks in the mess – birds, rabbits, and dogs. A little bunny lies on the edge of the trail along the bayou. I remember as a kid, a brief craze of dyed rabbits’ feet hit the streets. A foot. They were purple. Pink, green, all colors – key chains you could clip to your belt loop or backpack. Rabbit fur coats for kids. How gruesome it all seems. How clueless I was, on the river beach with a cut off foot watching boys rev their four wheelers up and down the banks.

Blood trails from its mouth.

I think about the mountain cabin I should have (with the guitarist), just up the road from a truck stop/convenient store of souvenirs – magnets, post cards, t-shirts and knickknacks. An ‘Only you can prevent forest fires’ poster of Smokey the Ranger Bear staring you dead in the face. He grips that axe tight.

Candy and soda machines.

Outside, elderly couples photograph themselves with mountain backgrounds. Forty years of kids, grandkids, and now retirement. No more running the steel mill, no more part time storage unit office. This is it – arthritis, a pocket of Tylenol, social security (what’s left of it after the kids college fund) and a long road trip which includes a greasy dinner of chicken fried chicken and mashed potato at the Smokey the Bear Restaurant where the middle age waitress takes smoke breaks in between bringing plates.

You and I. it’s been years, bars, coffee shops, apartments, traveling, isolated in rooms, sitting among circles of intoxicated friends, steel bridges, dropped calls, and fights with a fellow office employee trying to get me terminated. Our social security has gone to shit. Our lives have passed us by.

We cling to screen doors like flies, like summer camp cabin bugs. I wind the water hose like I learned at the State Park when I was 8, with Nana in her flip-flops and owl rim glasses. Renting a summer cabin and covering ourselves in sun tan lotion, watching the piles of daddy-long-legs gather up in corners. Clusters of arachnids all legs, a web of elongated legs like alien creatures. I stand against the wall to have them crawl across me. Swim until nightfall then collect fireflies in tea jars.

Plan A and Plan B.

I was fifteen when I knew – we lived in a quiet suburb at the circle end, woods spiked behind our house near a winding bayou. Collecting frog figurines, National Geographic animal cards, Australia posters, Garfield books, and gumballs on my bed frame. Read Whitley Strieber’s ‘Communion’ book and waited for the aliens. Night after night waiting for aliens. Night after night waiting for something to twitch or move. No god, no aliens – become a artist and date punk rock boys. When a dog becomes your best friend you realize there’s no use pretending you’re cool anymore.

They poke sticks in hallways next to lockers so we bring rats to school in lunch kits to crawl on the floor of the cafeteria and urine in Dr. Pepper cans. As they write fake love letters to show their friends – pointing, laughing, saying ‘who would be your boyfriend? Gross’. No date for prom - only tall freaks from other high schools across town, in trench coats wandering the halls yelling my name. Like the Nina Hagen song, “Paul, let me be your baby doll”…So the art teacher taps me on the shoulder to tell me someone’s roaming the hall – hurry. We skip school and walk down back streets to an abandoned building where we made love in a closet and I called him ‘Johnny’. He didn’t care but he couldn’t play guitar.

So I found another boyfriend with a car and friends who lived on the 2^nd floor apartment complex. A friend with spiders, lesbian moms, bootleg copies of ‘The Wall’, and punk rock cassettes from floor to ceiling like a wallpaper of culture shock that took me to underground coffee, skate spots, bus stops, and overseas catalogs. Cassette tapes and T-tops – Firebirds, and meeting guys in bands who worked at bookstores or sandwich shops who saved pennies to go on tour.

Sometimes, they’d make it to New York but most the time it was halfway and a stalled van. I had too many words for them, too many words and not enough to drink. So I tried to drink them under the table and ended up in Austin with blues bands downing $2 pitchers, stumbling down the street only to be kicked out of a theatre for urinating in a sink because the line was too long. And I thought back to a time when I sat in the Laundromat down the street from my apartment reading Tolstoy or Chekov, my favorite Russian storyteller, and watching the Lucky Cat kitty’s arm wave up and down. Up and down, a metronome arm on a plastic white cat surrounded by pennies, nickels, and dimes. And I wanted to be surrounded by pennies, nickels and dimes – I wanted to be Lucky Cat.

Who could make me Lucky Cat?

The dryers spun, the whir of red and black, purple and white – eyeballs – Chekov, quarters, detergent, and lucky.

A scriptwriter online tells me how his parents moved to Vegas, how it’s just a strip of ugly and disgusting in the middle of the desert and then just suburbs. Planned communities with no trees, no grass - house, driveway, house, driveway. The cement heats up to over a hundred degrees. They are elder; they shrivel in the sun, wear sandals and panama hats. He’s envious of their 40-year marriage and just won’t admit it, makes a joke about Echo Park and wives with machine guns. Sells jokes in scripts, hides his uneasy loneliness, gives himself nicknames and surnames, a stage name, a page name, and online identities. The only way I know it’s him is by the area code - his atheistic Jewishness and his 310.

3-1-0…

And we are stuck here in a time gone by, hoping someone writes our Wikipedia article and coming up with a Plan B.

(you play guitar like my imaginary lover)

If you were that guy, the one to skip school, flashback, we are young and stupid. You had this grayish black trench coat you wore over an old t-shirt. Converse, sometimes you’d untie them on purpose, on convenient store curbs where we drank 6 packs of soda or maybe snuck a beer every now and then if Charles gave us one; we entertained him, played mime games. I did the talking while you pantomime a theatrical success. You took to smoking one week when he gave us free packs of cigarettes. So you smoked an entire pack then threw up behind the dumpster. Then the buses began to run late – to midnight - one to the beach, one to the valley, listening to boat ventures or selling it all ventures, backpackers, and German girls homeless beneath the lifeguard stands. Heard their screams at night. No big thing just keep it quiet. Ganged at the pinball machine, pushed to the back corner of the game room.

The flashing lights, dinging, hear the clack of pinball paddles, laser killing flying ships, hair pulled, and learn to fight. Learn to bite or at least try. It’s an animalistic game of domination. After that smoking gay clown attempting to get a hit at you. Damn, it seems we’re always ducking – is that what teens joke about – how they escaped fondling drunks or gang rape? – our survival skills developed . The men who want some fresh teen girl ass and the women who snag husbands early, hating away the competition, giving wrong directions, denying jobs, forming catty little clubs like gay bars with dancing cages; drunk and lonely. Marring faces, creating indiscretion - the trolls, the elite, the barrio back roads.

We found a record store curb next door… then the years came and they pulled you away somehow, from shop class, from the curb. You holed up in your room with acne breakouts, with depression and Joey said it was because you had bad Ty-stick or windowpane, I told you not to touch the windowpane, but you did anyway and went too far inward. Stopped talking, expecting me to read your mind and hear your thoughts. Like Andrew – and we’d sit around in a shade drawn apartment while his mom was out and go through thrift store t-shirts playing mind games, ESP with colors, numbers, and animals, playing remote viewing or government experimental madness.

How the TV shows and media perpetuated youth, young boys playing doctor in closets.

You hate me when we enter into each others thoughts and there you are again with your hands at my neck, I lean in with my breath against your lips, you always flinch – torn between hate revenge and lust.

Just once.

--- make out in the bathroom stall, warm night, little sweaty and dirty like candy grabbing from a bucket trick or treating middle school rooms. Tiny white paper sacks filled with dum-dums and mints.

(p.s. thanks for the 2006 show in houston B-Head.... great dance...  p.s.s these are ALL yours... get a lawyer.)