bbycrab

[bbycrab]

i do not need more than one pair of ear muffs

eight crab rangoons is dinner kind of

[bbycrab]

no one swims

no one barbecues 

[bbycrab]

short lecture on portals

If you are like me you are always standing on the opposite side of a window. There is a match slowly burning down to your fingers. If you are thinking that there is no opposite side when it comes to windows, then you have an accurate understanding of windows. I urge you to abandon it. Stand there cold and alone with blackened finger tips. Decide that you are there and also not. You are posing for a nudey magazine. You are composing a a piece for a string quartet. This quartet is made up of a child, a badger, a ghost, and a scarecrow. While you write the viola solo, you are also defaming property in a long forgotten library. You are making a very important call on a red phone. There is no answer. You hang yourself with the cord. 

[bbycrab]

i can be both gentle and devastating 

i will not pick at my face

my roommates appreciate when i scrub the floor

it is ok that i don’t crochet

i would be very good at tweet but i don’t need to

the dirt will smell like summer again

i do not want to die just because i do not love to live

i will find something beautiful on the sidewalk

[bbycrab]

no part of me i wouldn’t kill

if you asked me to

[bbycrab]

i will buy a truck and it will work most of the time

i will date an older woman who smells like lotion

i will quit every job i ever have

i will drive myself crazy until i don’t or i die

i will do hard drugs and shout things i very much mean

i will have a large collection of scarves 

i will ride in a rodeo

or maybe a demolition derby

i will sway in many many basements 

i will cry in many many bathrooms

i will find something very beautiful on the sidewalk

i will fight a wild rabid animal

i will get lost in my hometown and knock on the church door

i will choke on a piece of gum or a small screw

i will be in love with a thousand strangers 

[bbycrab]

feeling less like myself and god why does that feel so good

listening to the bands someone showed me when they loved me and i wish

i knew how to stay

cause man i hate running , i don’t know how to count steps 

or how to cook meat

i’m drinking all the time 

and putting the sharpest things i can find in my mouth

[bbycrab]

notes from the rafters

I meet the proprietor from the funeral home for drinks, still wet between my legs from an earlier appointment. I discover I have many earnest questions for him. He seems pleased with my interrogation. There is a carefulness to his answers. Like he can see already how one will build upon the others. 

He orders scotch. I get something on tap.

I want to know why the reception areas of funeral homes are always the same. Where did each business go to source the exact same dusty pink love seats and glass-topped side tables. Curtains that seem to hold a week’s forecast of rain. 

“Estate sales,” the proprietor says. “It makes sense when you think about it.” 

I am pleasantly drunk at this point. I tell him I do not much care for things to make sense. 

I tell him that if life is a house I want to spend my days in the attic. With the old and discarded. All the nonsensical groupings. I want to rummage for treasures that mean nothing which is to say something; I want to forget about time and towering buildings full of people or not people. I want whatever I have to go missing, whatever I am to change like a petri dish of spores, exposed to invisible agents in the air. And if I find anything at all in the mess I want it to make me cry.

The proprietor from the funeral home watches me speak as though I am a church and he, a jazz pianist. He nods. He has not removed his coat. 

“I have three birds.” He says. “Would you like to meet them?”

Yes, I would, yes. I had once been a bird, after all. 

[bbycrab]

The shadows on my window of the branches outside

look like great long eyelashes

blinking against the glass

kissing the condensation

The lashes of a great big eye

on a great big lady -- or just a lady, some bit larger than me

I won’t make assertions of size, only scale

She must be crouching, peering somewhat awkwardly

as I might peer into a doll house on the ground that is,

for some reason, buzzing with electricity

although this sounds like quite a fire hazard

And the woman who is some bit larger than me

with her eyelashes kissing my window must wonder why

we are taking ourselves so seriously in here

She can’t hear us laugh, so I make sure

she can watch us dance

It is not everyday that you have an audience for your existing

Maybe this could even mean a reason for existing

When there never seemed to be one before

I’ve become self conscious -- I don’t want her to see me

writing about her like this

I am content with her believing I know nothing at all

So the blinds will stay open -- hoping she comes by again sometime

when the moonlight is right

to make sure I am still being a dumb little girl

[bbycrab]

please

i asked to be a siren

i asked to be a boy with skinned knees// scatter like rodeo

i asked to be a solid wall of sound// chase like highway

there’s something moving under the bridge -- just a breeze

wearing rite aid bags

and keeping the secret of all our meanings

[bbycrab]

me and my body

we don’t know each other very well. there are plenty of things that feel more like my home, or my container, or my reflection. than this crustacean shell. 

my life has been about finding these things. trying them on, letting them wear me in return. gardens and mountains and blue metal bunk beds. bottles and albums and really good leather gloves. 

my body feels like the t shirt of an ex-lover. left behind like a taste in the mouth. its presence mutating, transforming in the night while my mind tosses in its sleep.

me and my body

we are speaking different languages most of the time. except when we are swimming 

(it’s summer but the river is icy. we float, feeling the swells of the water, feeling a part of the water. feeling the sun sparkle and skip like so many millions of diamonds. feeling ourselves breathe, ears below the surface listening to everything moving, everything except us. feeling everything because we feel like nothing but space. nothing but an energy existing. a hive of molecules dancing together on the waters’ face. just like sunlight. like summer when we were too scared to dive. when we got our first x ray and didn’t care to care about our body ever again.) 

[bbycrab]

Mom doesn’t trust you to buy an alarm clock. “I’ll find one that’s not too complicated for you.” You don’t know how to explain that there is nothing complicated about seetting an alarm clock, and everything impossible about keeping your whole soul from retreating. Back to the pillows and breeze in willows, empty oceans of sleep. 

Your mom’s new puppy is teething. Pin sharp puppy teeth pushing through flesh and cartilidge, to be found one day on the rug or in the bedsheets. And you realize that this woman, your mother, once watched your own teeth wreak havoc on your little infant mouth. Until they came loose and she confronted the choice of what to do with them then.

You wonder -- a half-fanged puppy stretched out on your legs -- if your mother is ever bewildered. If she wonders how, in any right world, could she have given life to a life -- one programmed with teeth and speech and a nose worn by generations of stout freckled women -- 

and to have that child/ gift of her womb

rather sleep through the sunniest spring day

in contact lenses that are several months old, alarm clock

sitting in a box

than wake up and open her mouth

wide

to the world? 

You are terrified of this idea ever crossing her mind. 

[bbycrab]

EP!

There is a little spider

who’s made a house of my bones

He is recording a noise album in there

and won’t take any criticism

When he’s discouraged he’ll take off all his legs --

says he’s giving up music for good

But then I will open my mouth 

and the light will cast shadows that delight him

and the little spider will pick up his legs

give himself a new name

and ask to DJ my morning commute to Dunkin

[bbycrab]

it was bad and now it’s good and i have to be Writing

[bbycrab]

underneath my skin

I keep things. I say I have no choice. that my reflex for collecting is too sharp. (the feminine urge to gather, maybe really. )

what do I collect? all sorts. I’m not picky: the song that played in the grocery store and made my dad cry. pages and pages of the way my babsitter would write her Zs. the thick smell of the neighbor’s garage. 

underneath my skin

is a whole lot of junk. i could pay someone to sort through it all

but I’m pretty sure it’s calcified by now. 

even the good things I’ve kept have started to turn rank. soon people will stop calling, dropping by. and I will still find more things to keep

beneath my hungry skin.

they sit like tumors, mostly benign. and 

somewhere amongst them is a secret I once learned -- in a language I once spoke -- about how to float, or fly, or forgive, or find, I don’t know I’ve forgotten

the way you lose something 

that was in your hand all along. 

[bbycrab]

i woke up and the world took a little longer to unfold around me. time slipped in like a walking bass, i almost did not notice. there are crumbs in my bed. fine company. i left the window wide open last night. i was hoping winter would come to perch on the sil, turn her secrets into a tune. for me. 

i tried to take my medication but it rolled under the dresser. i tried to pay a bill but it caught on fire. on the very last day of time’s great coil, i would like to paint someone’s toenails. i would like to bathe myself in wax. i want to run on all fours deep into the woods. 

[bbycrab]

short lecture on drowning

unless you are drowning you have not drowned, but there are some exceptions. I guarantee you are the exception. crying too much will not lead to drowning although it should feel as such. you cannot sing and breathe or drink and breathe or experience some four hundred different emotions singularly and still breathe. this makes it a miracle that anyone is breathing at all. the science is still out on phenomena and miracle. so keep crying into your oatmeal or a floating collarbone. listen to your neighbor laugh through the wall and get over yourself.