other lives, dimensions, and finally a love poem.

in another life we live, perhaps my favourite one, you really are the heir to all faerie, and i am a perpetual drifter, drawn to you and kept by you. this is not the way that i would ever have written this story; me, the vagrant and you the second daughter of the faerie queen, whose name sends shivers down the spine of fae and human alike; you, the unattainable; you the strong-willed and rebellious, smelling of autumn and the world in the long, long ago.

in this life, i am centuries younger than you, more years than we could conceive of counting because time is so insignificant here. the important thing is that when your mother was pulling new life from the ether while your family looked on, you stepped forward the moment i came to be, holding me in your arms and claiming that i would be yours, forever, if i would have you, knowing all along that i would. they tried to warn you, to convince you that all that would ever fill my head would be dreams, and you replied that you hoped i would dream of you.

and i did dream of you. i wandered through all of faerie, dreaming of you, collecting stories and telling them to you while i rested. we were married at night, the event heralded for days by rainbows, the sky pouring forth and melting away our previous lives when the ceremony was complete.

now we go for long walks through english gardens, holding hands. we travel and you bend space and stop time while i pull stories from rooms as a magician pulls that never-ending handkerchief from his pocket. we listen in on court proceedings and watch jousting tournaments, leaning into one another to make a comment, or whisper our love. we laugh together almost constantly, and we rage against one another when our moods, ever mercurial, darken. in the briefest flash of moments we are lovers, snuggled close and smiling and the next, we tear at one another, shifting into something else entirely-- large cats sometimes, sometimes something far less mundane-- and we are all claw and fur and feathers and blood and fury; but the next instant, our bites turn to passionate kisses and we are lost adrift one another once more, hands brushing, touch kind, familiar, gentle.

there is no anger in our fury, no need for apologies when the storm passes and all is quiet once more; we are light creatures, our love the gift that allows us to move beyond our mere temperment. in this life, each time you touch me is a reminder that you have left a permanent mark on me, that your essence is embedded so deeply in mine that no one would dare approach me with anything but the purest intent. i love this sense of belonging, knowing that your love is this deep and so limitless that it can be seen from miles away.

in this (perhaps my favourite) life, i have offered you ever word that i may ever come to know, have sworn myself to you and begged the gods that watch over love to abandon me forever should i ever turn from you.

in this life, as in all the others, you have always been my everything.

i'm not much of a dancer, but my girlfriend is.

i read a book that said that all gay people dance in public, which bothered me somewhat. i don't dance in public. i've taken dance classes, and i know every move to every ABBA song ever written, but i'm certainly not going to dance in front of a bunch of strangers. i always thought that the message that this sent to the rest of the world was simple and clear: i'm shy, or even i'm afraid to make an ass of myself in front of people. but all this time, perhaps everyone else reads the message as something more like: i'm not really gay, no, even though you might think i am, i'm clearly not, because i'm not dancing.

the book was even written by a gay man, so i can't just curse those pesky straight people and pretend that the whole thing is one grand stereotype (which it is, but some stereotypes have a basis in truth!) and a culmination of sheer oppression. i ran through my mental list of all of the gay people i knew, and to the last, they dance in public. and i know a lot of gay people. hundreds, if not thousands. seriously. but the one thing that sets me apart from the rest of them is this: every last one of them dances in public, regardless of whether or not they can dance well. hell, i've seen some horrible dancing in my day, and a great deal of it was by well-meaning gay people. but at least they got out there. at least they danced, as if to brazenly tell the world that they couldn't care about their idiotic standards and social pressure. they were out and proud, and damn it, they're going to dance anywhere they darn well please.

but i still don't dance.

and in retrospect, i wonder if this is perhaps the cause of no small amount of undue tension in my life. perhaps this is why men grow strangely attached to me, no matter how many times i voice my preference for women. it's like they don't believe me. and perhaps this is why men approach me in bookstores or libraries or on a dance floor with what i can only assume is an attempt at conversation, but usually more closely resembles an off-putting statement showing a total lack of insight into what i happen to be doing, or, more importantly, who i am. once i was standing in an unnamed corporate bookstore reading a copy of the new ellen degeneres book, wearing doc martens with rainbow shoelaces and wearing a soccer jersey, and it happened. the slow glance around the corner. the approach, subtle at first, as though they're really looking for a book in the russian history section, then the contact. i see this happening a mile away. sometimes i run and get coffee and try to hide behind magazine racks, all the while sporadically blinded by flashbacks from Jaws.

and the problem, really, is that i'm too nice, and that i'll usually talk to people for a while if they seem particularly pathetic and desperate, all the while searching for an exit, and populating my conversation with comments like "that's really amazing, have i mentioned that i'm gay?" no one ever seems to believe me, though, and i know well enough not to attempt conversations about sports or cars or hardware or anything at all remotely stereotypical, because i'm quickly made out to be a complete fraud. i have a stunning lack of passion for all things mechanical, though i can talk for hours about flowers and cooking and animal rights. for these reasons, i try to avoid talking to strange men at all, because apparently, unless i'm dancing down the aisles of the bookstore while i'm trying to read, i just won't be sending the right message.

to the library, we vote YES.

two things have occured to me of late, the first being that i spend far too much time paralyzed with fear and avoiding the things that i should be doing, and the second being that i'm a bit obsessed with the library.

really though, think about how amazing the library is. it's like they're just giving the books away! though you do have to give them back, which was always my weakness, unless i don't like them, or even find them mediocre, and then i'm more than happy to return them, because i have no room in my life for poor writing or mediocrity.

the library is home to many fine things, including: a coffee bar with beverages i currently can't afford; many of the dvds on the AFI top 100 list, so i can one day proudly boast that i am, in fact, a film guru; people of all shapes and sizes and flavours, many of whom seem to be suffering from some sort of mental disorder and lacking in medication; and loads of middle schoolers trickling in from the campus in the next plot over, all brimming with deep and insightful junior high gossip about the average number of squats a person can do, whether or not Jeremy really likes Jessica, or is just pretending in order to look cool in front of his friends, and whether Mr. Stubbins' breath smells more like cat food and pickles or lima beans and grape soda.

with all this to offer and more, who could resist the library? who could turn away from its thralls, resist gasping in its clutches and passionately crying out for more? who could cast the library aside, discarding colour-coded charts mapping out when each portion of each book would be read? who could look the library in the eyes and say, "no, library. you hold many treasures, but you're just not the one for me?"

the library. show it your tired, your hungry, your poor. it will eagerly outstretch its arms, hold them closely, and give them a paper cut of the kind to make them realize that being tired, hungry, and poor isn't such a bad lot after all.

black cats and blacker days.

my mother, terribly blase about friday the 13th, would proceed to grow anxious and refuse to leave the house on the following day, stating that saturday the 14th was by far more unlucky. i don't know if this was due to some bizarre happening on the ship as our people came over from ireland, or if she was simply (and this is the much more likely of the two) a bit melodramatic and was flailing about, trying to be unconventional. as is, i tend to ignore either day outside of the humour that triskaedekaphobia usually brings into my life. i don't believe in luck.

please, don't be ridiculous. of course i believe in luck. no irishman or woman in his or her right mind could honestly claim not to be lucky. we have, after all, the luck of the irish, which may be the greatest and longest-standing curse in history, because after all, no one ever said all that luck that we have was going to be good. a genetic predisposition to alcoholism, the highest rate of child abuse in the EEC, repeated decimation... these things weren't so lucky. but we have lore and green hills in our hearts, and by god, we're all a bit touched by the fae, and what more could one ask for? we're one of the few people with the birthright of an interesting life, should we be daft enough to chose it.

last night, there was a black cat keeping vigil outside my back door. i know that's why it was there because that's what it said, though in a very matter-of-fact kind of way, a bit like those guards in england with the funny hats who can't break character, no matter what you do. like that, only more serious. strange, nonetheless.

on the talking cure: or, how i learned to stop talking and love the bomb.

every time i go to see my therapist, it's after about six months of not going, and i expect this to be met with a certain amount of disappointment, perhaps a slight frown and a comment that i'm not really all that committed to the therapeutic process, it seems.

in truth, i'm really not all that committed. i like to think of the therapeutic process and i as casually dating when it's in town for the week, or even like that ex that everyone has that they don't mind shagging every now and again when there's nothing better available. mind you, i never had an ex like that, as i was far too busy burning bridges and starting the fires with rocket fuel because i knew that nothing short of a triple oxygen bond would destroy the thing utterly. but you know what i mean, just the same. i mean, it's not like i'd seek out the therapeutic process. it's more like this: we bump into one another in a bookstore, and we decide to catch up on old times, since i have nothing better to do anyway than perhaps preserve what little grasp on reality i have. so we have coffee. we have dinner. and the next thing you know, it's back to that blissfully short-term fling with the therapeutic process that i've come to love. besides, it's free, due to the fact that i was fortunate enough to be terribly unfortunate.

so we sit and talk and come to the stunning conclusion that i'm in possession of no small matter of disquiet when it comes to what appears to be routine malfunction of my brain, and that i'd like to fix this neurological seizure, and that the therapeutic process would like to be of some assistance, but when it all comes down, i'm just wired like i am, and there's not a damned thing it can do about it. we go our separate ways, not complicating our relationship and allowing for that fond recollection, rather than a bitter departure because we always hold on too long.

memory of a scream.

the mottled red of my skin, long minutes after, in the places it still screams hot, too hot, are perhaps the only places on myself that i trust any longer, that i believe to be clean, left unstained.

i feel as though i should be locked away in some private camp, my personal germany inside my head, for crimes that no one dare speak, so that kafkaesque i stand waiting for a trial that never needs to come. perhaps the only crime i was ever guilty of was forgetting, even momentarily, my own guilt, and so i stare into the showerhead, eyes stinging from the steam, skin crying hot, too hot for all to hear, only no one's listening.

in my mind there is a kind german woman, austrian, even, with children to feed and a husband who spends too much time away. she waits outside the walls of my brain and wordlessly begs her need. her children need clothes, food, soap. and i stand, water running and running and all i can think to offer is my flesh, flesh that i would happily peel off for her, peel off in thick wet strips because it cries too often, because it will not stop saying hot, too hot, even when i have long since deafened my ears to its cries.

long after your throat has lost the ability to make noise and your ears have ceased to hear you scream, i would imagine that it's the vibration, that strong firm intent that lingers in the air-- i think that's what finally takes you in the end.

in other news, the cat is finally growing into his face.

there's a caterpillar on the back door, one of those black and brown stripey kind, and i think that he'd just as soon eat me as look at me. according to my local entomologist, he's actually not poisonous, though i remember someone telling me that they were at some point in my youth, quite possibly so that i would leave the caterpillers outdoors.

when i was in ninth grade, we had vocabulary lists like any normal freshman english class. and one of our words was "misanthropist," which the charming kids in my class, when called upon to define the word, defined as, well, me. this, of course, isn't to say that any of this was true, or even that it wasn't, but it's something that i remember. but how can you not have some measure of distrust for mankind when those are the kinds of things that stick out in your teenage memories?

i think about my grandmother a great deal these days, though for reasons that i can't really approximate, though i imagine it has something to do with the season, with watching the trees change for the seasons, with being in love, with both the world and someone in particular. these were always places where my grandmother belonged, where i align my memories, as my mother was a bit 'the effects of gamma rays on man-in-the-moon marigolds,' ever asking in one way or another how it is that one could fail to hate the world.

my grandmother loved the world, despite the sorrow that it contained, despite losing a son, losing a brother, despite seeing wars and falling in love at the exact wrong moment and almost losing the love of her life countless times over to carelessness, to circumstance. my grandmother loved the world and it oozed from her, poured forth from her in everything she did. she filled the bird feeders every day because she loved the world. she tended to my grandfather when he fell down stairs or grew tired, and she did it because she loved the world. she so loved the world that she offered her son to it, offered herself to it, fought daily against anyone who would malign the idea of a greater good. you have to love your mother, she'd say, even when you don't understand, even when she sets out without love for the world.

none of this, mind you, is meant to paint my grandmother as a wide-eyed optimist. she didn't believe in tears and she didn't believe in losing faith, and sometimes that made her seem somewhat hardened. but she loved the world. and the thing about people who love the world is that you never really have to wonder whether or not they love you. aren't you a part of the world?

on solitude.

something about laundry relaxes me.
the whirring of the washer, the tumble of the dryer, the smell of an entire room permanently permeated with dryer sheets and the hint of Tide. the sound of rustling, water draining from the tub where things are hand-washed, the psshhhh of spray starch and the hissss of the iron when it hits moist fabric, the smell of heat, the look of steam.
when i get most tense, and my jaw remains clenched whether i'm awake or asleep, when my muscles knot up and my brain overloads, laundry is the one thing that i really want to do. i want to wash everything, dry everything, fold everything and put it all away, and if that doesn't do it, i'll compromise my slacker mentality and even iron. no one likes wrinkles, after all.
somewhere entangled in this are memories of times spent with my grandmother, or of hiding away in the basement, playing hide and seek in the laundry room, going downdowndown into the dark to read, or to think, down creaky wooden stairs into the blackness and darting from the landing to the coolcold laundry room, bare feet on cement floor, then whole body, sitting on warm dryer or stretched out across an icy detached expanse that battled the tiny splash of sunlight that came through the small window at the top. i could sit and read and see when visitors came, watch their feet passing above, past rose bushes, grass. i was the herald of every new guest and the first to retreat, back to a white noise world of fabric softener, summer linens.
more than sharing orange popcicles with our husky or making a jungle fortress out of azaleas, more than goldfish crackers in a bowl or blocks on an oriental rug or exploring every last corner of the house and creating stories about everything i found, more than walking to the bookstore or hopping over sewage grates or chicken salad sandwiches or late night card games or poetry readings, i miss this simple thing-- the gift of silent, cool solitude.

four and twenty

four and twenty blackbirds, scattered around my yard, on the eaves of my house. it's raining and cold, and still they're here, out of season, out of climate, populizing urban areas that have little to offer them.

i would tell myself that it's because i'm a little bit Raven, but who isn't? in that case, then, i suppose my blood is simply poisoned, such that i rattle off tales and rattle off tails until i forget that all this time, i was supposed to be carrying the sun. and there it goes again, plummetting to the earth until that mangy dog takes up with it again, holding it in his mouth while he chases after his own tail. and all you children, they'll teach you in school that Raven is always a little too busy singing and telling stories to ever really appreciate the truth. but the thing is, baby, we don't do anything BUT tell the truth, and sometimes that pisses people off. like that mangy dog down there. how long you think before he starts some fuss about how he's too dignified to chase his own tail, how he's smarter than that? but every story we got, even when there ain't nobody around to hear it. it's the truth.

and if you're listening in, then i guess maybe it's a truth you're itchin' to hear.

so i walk out into that yard, thinking of that nursery rhyme about that old white king who thought that some scrawny corvidae made for good afternoon snacking, and i laugh, the sound sending my black-winged brothers into the sky. i can be cruel, without a doubt. sometimes i can sense weakness, can smell it on the wind long before it drags itself into town, tail between its legs, and some little switch in my brain switches or something, and it's like i'm out to search and destroy. but these little black brothers of mine, they're anything but weak. you never know when a pissed off blackbird's going to remember you down the road and peck your nose.

fact is, spend all your time collecting stories and then sharing them, and you find yourself knowing some pretty good roosts, annoyingly strong.