what has fallen
on the door of the
refrigerator where the list of foods to be purchased is written
the small white, erasable board was carefully
cleaned and replaced on its magnetic hanger
in place of eggs or
fruit
a special green thai sauce
or vegetables once carefully listed
a
new list of
words was scrawled
in its place:
what has fallen by the wayside:
writing
reading
gardening
cooking
cleaning
caring
why?
A CONVERSATION BETWEEN
STEVE AND MARIE:
‘all the poets are liars’, he still ranted
no. ‘lairs’,read the
appropriate typo
or
maybe just all the
junkies are liars, steve… well, that too he remarked…but not all of them.
oh
horseshit! of course they are! the poets lie about
how the drugs bring out the creative process how it
sparks their muse, boosts the juice creative…that it’s the driving force that
keeps them pounding away at the keyboard
keeps them covering the
canvas
stepping onto the stage or
filling chapbooks and
broadsides with
the hippest of the hip
… the drugs ability to fuel
the words, the art
is the lie, maybe it’s an
initial impetus
behind any art…and maybe its not just
all the poets who lie about
it
i had known marie since
high school….straight a student. hippie mama. kauai
midwife.
lost
mother. childless mother.
once she had
untied the baby carrier from her chest
to set free
her dead, month-old-to-the-day baby boy
she was
gone
and just as quickly as the
flood waters of waineha valley
had captured and spun us
through pele’s
wrath
just as deeply as the
barbed wire had torn into our skin
and terror had left us numb
her beautiful
eyes
had
deadened
her spirit
vanished
and she was never the
same
marie was the only one i’d
ever known who blew off a
scholarship to ucla med school right out of high school.
she only lasted a semester,
forsaking such a golden opportunity…
the trade-off was to leave
for the
islands. to finally be free….
marie, of the no tell
hotel poem.
marie, who returned from kauai and from the death of her child
was now hellbent on kicking
aside her path of enlightenment and hippie creedo.
punishment and self loathing were the new streets she traveled on.
marie the hooker, marie the on-call lady of the night.
marie the junkie,
half-dressed in a lace teddi,
chased her dealer’s car down haight
street late one night, desperate to keep
the sick away.
marie, dead in a donut shop
in san francisco’s tenderloin
district after her sunday dose of methadone, a new baby, six weeks old, crying
in his crib while her pimp/daddy nodded in the corner of their roach infested
room
marie remembered steve from
when she was 16 in venice
marie and richmond, stood face to face,
a long way from
their first encounter inside earth rose
a dream and a lifetime ago
hey old poet, did i hear
you just say that you never felt
included in all that lying poet’s business? c’mon, man,
i know you’re kiddin’ me…
i was the only one capable
of telling the truths at the
time, man! sure i was! even after i lost my pad, got
all that cash and moved up on the hill
i stayed true
even buk was only seeing $$$$$ signs by
then
i was the only one still
keepin’ it
real
and it was about the art,
man! the demons
came to me because of the ar
the shinto gave them life
and power and i let them in
through my eye and out of my shit covered fingers! they were my
fucking muses, man! the art, the words, the real
slammed through me and the drugs were the highway they traveled on to get me
there!
and, at any given moment,
in the days
before i was smoking the shit and getting ripped off at every turn,
i knew the exact contents of my stash:
a little bottle of liquid
morphine to kill the
pain…the
methadone bottle to
either get high with or to detox with (someday)
thirty pain pills tucked
away
half a bottle of dilaudid (just in
case)
oh mama marie…i miss you so
hard sometimes, my sistah…and
now the cancer is ready to take mary away. who will be my memory
keeper once she has left to join you and the others we traveled youth with
you, who guided me with
your voice and antics through my
silence, my wordlessness…as gregarious and outrageous as you were, i was
your
equally shy and silent compadre…the one who was in awe of your ability to
talk
to anyone; in awe of your word spinning and of your magic. the
flood seared us and waterlogged our youth; our ideal-filled hippie innocence was
burned and washed right out of us, just as quickly as those waters had
filled
the lungs of your tiny son…….you, who brought me to the wonders of
kauai…you,
who taught me the lessons of giving and generosity…you of all people,
didn’t
deserve the cruel and unwielding force and fate that destroyed your
life…and
you in turn, destroyed you
the pain was too great, she
remarked.
dealing with grief’s hand around my neck, choking the life outta me 24/7
left me no alternative. my life for sattwa’s became the only
deal. i needed the highs to tolerate the fat, desperate hands of
those tricks that crawled all over my body like roaches in the filthy kitchen
of my tenderloin
apartment. to not feel their desperate urgency when they came in
my mouth…i could never kill that pain enough!
liars, richmond? you think
that junkie lies
aren’t lies but true reasons because life was too hard, too rough, too painful
to deal with? i know you’re kidding me, man! you and
i have slammed needles into our veins until we had no veins left to speak
of! we have smoked and snorted and slammed enough dope into us
over the years to kill a herd of elephants! and of course!
we lied! we lied, we stole, destroyed all possibilities of
letting love in, pushed away friends, lovers and our families who loved
us! and we made excuses and dumped and spewed out every ounce of
integrity that we ever knew of….
we did
anything to to
get all the blame and
false reasoning in line! we
were the lies!
my demons had the eyes of
dead babies,
steven…waterlogged, dead-weight babies
pressed against my naked
breasts, right
above my broken
heart
this is the vision i had to
kill every time i closed my
eyes. who is to ever say whose brand of pain is real…or whose
‘cool pain’ is simply imagined
or made up simply to fill
the poetry notebooks
of twenty or fifty–year old
angst-ridden boys
we used whatever we could
make up
as the perfect excuse for us
and for the sake of
art
i remember my apartment on
cole street off
ashbury in the haight. it looked like a stevie nicks wet dream,
man: scarves and treasures; beaded lamps; fabric billowing off the
walls; everything seemed velvet and lace. and in the early days, i
had my stash lined up in a music box from chinatown that sat on my art deco
dresser;
a little bottle of liquid
morphine to kill the pain
the methadone bottle to either get high
with or to detox
with (someday) thirty
pain pills tucked
away half a bottle of dilaudid (just in case)
it’s the
ritual the game, man!
i heard the call of the
foghorns as they walked together
through a milky, silent shroud
down speedway then
fading into the early morning light
and as i rolled over
i heard the chirps of the
small innocents
the baby birds nestled in
the hole in trunk of the apple
tree outside my window
and thought, they must
almost be ready to fly out of the
mama’s nest
past the watchful eyes of
the noisy crows
who’ve been waiting, vigilant
past the pair of blue jays
that papa bird has chased from
branch to branch for weeks now
under the radar of the barn
owl, who passes overhead each
night
its startling screech
reminding them all that he,
too
has been payin’ attention
maybe they’ll make it out
into this world
struggling to enter get
through and make it in this
life
my eyes opened to the
bookshelf in the corner of the
room
and before i realized that
it had only been a
dream
i wondered even
slightly panicked
worried that one or the
other
or both of them may have
taken it all with
them
from the corner of the top
shelf
the little bottle of liquid
morphine to kill the
pain
the methadone bottle to
either get high with or to detox with (someday)
thirty pain pills tucked
away
or, the half a bottle of
dilaudid
(just in case)
all the poets are
liars
yes, yes you were right, richmond
and
we too
have
all
fallen
by the wayside
