Noon

Trying to write at noon on a Tuesday, is like trying to drive my truck without gas. It just sits there in the bold sun, sweating. The words were all possibility two hours ago and now they have retreated like morning glories at sunset.

I want the words to come out before my family arrives, before the dogs come home, before the afternoon gets away from me, like water in a drain.

Seattle isn't suppose to be hot and still, we should be packed in by clouds and a west wind. We should be drinking drinking black coffee and brooding.

The windows are open and the curtains are doing a modified tango with the breeze and yet the words are not wandering in, the stories about my mother, a fourth of July gay bashing, group homes and California's fault lines, are not willing to sit with me today.

Writing at noon on a Tuesday calls for an iced tea and private conversation with Sherman Alexie out among the sunflowers. No notes, no pens, no keyboards. Just whispers stitched on to the underside of my heart out in the bold and rare sunshine.

Thoughts on Pride

As we zig zag though side streets, she turns and says "You know, I go to the Cuff to sort of make sense of it all". I suppose that's why we go to gay bars--whatever we are trying to make sense of. I think about the history of pride month, the various uprisings, lifetimes of an up hill battles, the gore mixed with glitter. It's three days before pride and you can feel it rising, the bigger smiles, bigger drinks, it's a little bit like the rise of rainbow feeling acid reflux. Our bodies are trying to digest our once a year gorge on the beauty of our experience, despite whatever it is we lost. We all have lost something/someone-- in battles there are always losses.

I grew up a little bit east of everywhere, where one small town bleeds to the next. Pride mattered, the internet was still stuttering and the winters were long. There was no corporate sponsorship. Just people, in park, on a summer day. I was 16, I didn't know about uprisings, I didn't know what love felt like but I knew that I belonged there some how, I didn't yet know what it would cost me to belong, or that I would end up on the outside anyways.


********

It isn't true you know.
That rainbows and glitter
some how make it better
it doesn't get better
it gets different
its like growing up
and looking
at that old bike with training wheels
and somehow
it looks smaller
and we forget
that we got bigger
I think a photographer
would say
It's about perspective
no one talks about the storms
that blow in the rainbows
or the glass that was shattered
to make the glitter
there's a story here
that we just can't seem to remember
but it's etched into our bones
buried in our veins
covered in cobwebs in our history
and we forget about the pain
because rainbows
are rare
and beautiful
but fading with
ever breath, step, march.

Bones

People talk about
the bones
like it matters
I always imagined
steel bolts and solid wood beams
a heart buried among
the sawdust and spiders
A soul crushed between
dry wall and latex paint
I thought character was about bones
and foundation
and there's a wall
laying haphazardly
in the back yard
chucked out a window
200 lbs of bones
melting away in the rain.
I asked about why we add
texture to walls
my guy tells me
to hide the imperfections-
industry standards.

It's the imperfections
that grab me,
the plaster that wasn't quite even
in my inexperience
and the nail hole that was missed
in the caulking
the slight chips of time,
it's the scars that make the character
not the bones

the bones are what the scars
cling to
in a summer storm.

Scars

You asked me to tell you about a scar. Instantly I thought about my chest, the bilateral scars that snake along the underside of my pecs. Then I moved lower running my thumb along the scars in my abdomen from my hysterectomy, following the path downward I settled on what I tend to imagine as the old man in my knee. The cadaver ligament I acquired last spring. But these scars get plenty of attention.

Two scars come to mind. One is not mine and the other not yet real.

The scar that is not mine belongs to my sister. The upper corner of her lip met a flaming marshmallow, just after sunset, the winter we were practically kidnapped. It was cold, we did most of the cooking on a grill outside the double wide trailer that rested among oak trees in central California. Some how she got bumped just as she went to blow the flame out on the marshmallow. I remember screaming before she even realized what had happened. My father grabbed a wet towel and put it over her mouth, trying to cover up her wailing more than ease the pain. Today she's 30, and the old triangular scar the size of a lucky charm is no longer visible, but bodies them selves hold memories, and they even sometimes hold memories that don't belong specifically to that body. I don't like roasting marshmallows, when I see them, I see her 8 year old face full of excitement catch fire. The image is burned in my memory like the California's landscape after a wildfire. Still smoldering, black and strikingly empty. I asked my sister about the scar, and she said, "What scar?"

The second scar is a currently a figment of my imagination. Sometimes in some cases this is how scars are born. I am still debating whether I want/need surgery on my ears again. This new scar will not be hidden like the others. It will rest on my temples as if my ears will forever be held at gun point. It could cause a whole host of problems, it could be the tombstone for my sense of taste or my ability to feel my face. It could also be a memorial to my time that was silent and now only sound will always exist. I will not be able to remove it and move through sound or silence at will. This theoretical scar will pin me down forever as one or the other. I have never been very good at one or the other.

Bacon

I have always been afraid of bacon. Really afraid of bacon.

It took me years to put it together.

Sometimes during the weekend, while I was little, my father would make breakfast. This is the only time I ever saw him cook before my mother died. He would get up early wearing only a white t-shirt and BVDs. A while back, my sister had her only Puerto Rican boyfriend who upon looking at a photo during this time period said, "He looks straight out of Watts". He did. Dark brown skin, thick muscles, the slow gait of heavy lifting and light pay. Some times he was gruff and as monosyllabic as a Spanish speaker can get. Sometimes he was kind, taking his time after breakfast to brush out my waist length hair from the bottom or letting me cling to him after yet another ear surgery facing uncontrollable vomiting.

During these weekend breakfasts I never knew which side of him we would get. I liked watching him cook. I liked watching the bacon shrivel as if by magic, the ritual of putting down a paper towel and laying each piece out dry. Without my hearing aids in and even then before I "needed" them, I cannot hear bacon sizzle. I get the concept, I can see the concept and after two very recent kitchen fires I am very aware how heat works in the kitchen. I wasn't aware then. Maybe I was five years old. I didn't hear him tell me to stand back. I remember distinctly what it felt like as the oil and fat hit my arm. It leapt out and grabbed me, burning a hole into my memory. My father told me it was my fault and to never go near cooking bacon again. And I didn't. For years and years, I was afraid and despite my love of bacon, I shunned it. It began to represent my fear of my father, the oil just grabbed me like one of his bad moods and I didn't even see it coming.

I suppose that people are resilient and my love of bacon has led me to being able to fry it up, keeping the parts of my fathers ritual that served me. The early morning wake up, cooking the entire package at once, black coffee and paper towel for the final lay out. I still stand back though, still have the fear of oil, fat, anger-- reaching out and grabbing, pulling me back to a snot nosed kid, with a several burn marks and new void in my world where the magic of frying bacon use to be.

Red Ribbon Hospice

We play Skip Bo
Like we are in a Casino,
It's fueled
black coffee quick
and the minutes tick
by
hours,
ticking by days
washing up years
and Lucy died yesterday
with her favorite red nail polish still wet
and it's Pride month
and I am sitting with forgotten ghosts
People talk about AIDS like it happened
and George tells me about falling in love
with a soldier
in the Vietnam war
They tell me about their lives
like they happened
like the story is at it's epilogue

Here, among the florescent lights
hangs
every Tuesday,
scattered coffee mugs,
left overs from lunch
and lives
that aren't
quite
history.

The Sound of Silence

It took losing my hearing to fall in love with Yo Yo Ma. It happened on a Wednesday in rush hour, riding in a the picturesque modern day cowboys truck actually named Truck Noriss, skirting downtown traffic, with a Texan who had beat thyroid cancer twice, who had years ago fallen in love with american sign language, and was taking me to a bar where we would huddle in the back with just enough light to almost make out our abc's. He wanted to introduce me to this album he had fallen in love with, I wasn't sure until he turned up the bass so loud the dash board shook and his coffee cup was practically leaping out of the holder. This is the only way to listen to Yo Yo Ma. I put my feet on his dashboard and fell, completely in love. I let the bass notes tumble up and down my spine, let silence rest on my sternum until bam -- my heart woke up. I now know that it wasn't exactly Yo Yo Ma that I fell for but the the curves of the cello. Some days I can hear the whisper of the notes but mostly I just feel them, it was the cello that taught me that there IS sound in silence, and that there will be another world, another way of being, new unexpected love randomly and mismatched just around the corner, the cello makes me less afraid of letting my hearing go, the cello has shown me that life is not what I have expected it to be, and deafness isn't either, two years ago with 60% of my hearing intact, I couldn't hear a thing.

*****
There is something about a sunny day, a Chevy pick up, and rock and roll. I was half way through listening to "Free Falling" when it hit me. I pulled over, along side lake Washington and a late spring breeze. I pushed up the volume as far as it would go. I tapped gently on the steering wheel, I let the bass vibrate all the way up my spine, I could feel the clash of the symbols on the left side of my ribs, just beneath my heart. And the words jumped off the windshield gently nibbling the back of my neck. My hearing aids were tucked safely into my front pocket, I wasn't hearing a thing. Not a goddamn thing. I have wondered what sound feels like in silence, it feels like the rush of Christmas morning as a child, the excitement of a first date, an earthquake, an orgasm, it feels that my body is a boat on an wild but tender river, it tastes sweet and metallic, it feels like success.

I have been mourning my loss more and more, trying to get my self to a place where I can treat my hearing as essentially a library book. It was good for the time I had it, I loved the story it told, a perspective of the word that I experienced but now it's time to give it back, of course it's a loss but there is a whole new world to experience, and this world is all new and totally mine. So here I am free falling into the sound of silence that is so loud and full of a million vibrations, it's deafening.