Cocaine & Cab Rides

He comes to me like a gift-wrapped bomb, ticking away the remaining moments of my life. When my mind wanders and I have allowed myself to be happy for a moment, the memory of him explodes in my brain and leaves me shaking. He comes like a nuclear holocaust eating me from the inside out, melting my insides into swirling plasma. He eats me and melts me, just like the old days.
Seconds ago, I was contentedly sloshing Pine Sol across the cold tile and singing “Alouette” for the mice hiding under the kitchen sink. Now the lyrics are traffic jamming in my throat and it hurts. I am the skylark having her feathers plucked. My hand shakes as I raiseit to my mouth to take a long pull from my cigarette. My freshly renovated downtown apartment feels empty and cold. The voices drifting up from the bar district below are reminders of how alone I am tonight. It happens this way every so often. This is my private undoing that will not be reflected on a social networking site. It will not be the topic of conversation with my friends at Happy Hour. Later, in public, this sadness will not cross my face; I will not share it with strangers. I will carry these memories close to my chest with my hands cupped gently around them – the way a child holds a firefly.
There is no reason to fight this flood once the levees break. My bottom sinks deep into the couch. My body is heavy against the blue microsuede and I let it hold me. The rounded whirring of the dryer sets pace with my spinning head, and I sink deep into agitated melancholy. The smell of Pine Sol becomes the smell of beer and smoke and I am there again, the night we met.
I am twenty-three, tan, and tone. My face and tits are filling back out nicely after a particularly bad bender had left me sunken and strung out. Money has been good lately and my clothes are new. It is summer in a college town and everyone is young and understimulated. We are all looking for trouble. In the back room of a too familiar bar I sit talking with familiar faces saying familiar things. When he walks in, my attention is seized by blonde hair and blue eyes and the breadth of his shoulders. Every other female in the room is now a liability. After ten minutes and a few brazen stare downs he comes to me and says, “I’m bored.”
“I can fix that,” I smile and he is mine and he knows it. He smiles back.
“You party?”
Two phone calls later, we’re in the land of brass poles, mirror-paneled walls, and slick black runways. I am home. Reigna is dancing on the round main stage so I lead him across the floor and grab a seat while she removes a sheer cover-up. When her set is through, she makes her way over for small talk and fast business. I buy $150 of fun and we’re off to his place, seven blocks east and twelve south. We are a flurry of getting to know. We talk, we kiss, we grind. I am thrown on his bed and we only get up to do another line. We talk and we talk and we share things that two strangers never discuss. We are three hours into a five-year life affair and our hearts have already galloped off into a clichéd sunset. The rest of me gallops off at sunrise leaving a layer of white dust on his bed side table and my perfume in his sheets.
Fast forward through fifty months. Fast forward through the first drunken proposal. “I want to be with you, be with you.” Fast forward through vacations and graduation and his first restaurant opening. Fast forward through moving in, moving out, and moving back in. “You can always come back home.” Fast forward through red wine, carpet picnics and living room wrestling. Fast forward through doors slamming, dishes breaking and strange names in his phone. Fast forward through orgasms and punches. Fast forward through motorcycle rides in the summer, Christmas trees in the winter and everything in between. Fast forward through a baby that never will be. “It’s whatever you want to do, honey.” Fast forward through my relapse. Please, somebody, fast forward.
There is no love like the love between drug addicts. It is a passionate, desperate, beautifully and embarrassingly vulnerable existence. It is neither for the weak nor the strong. It is for the damaged, the bruised peaches of the world. The thirst for the drug will bring two people together and rip them apart with a sense of tragedy usually reserved for the ancient Greeks. There were clubs and music and friends dancing. There were hours of drug-addled promises and secrets that were lost each time the sun rose, and the drugs ran out, and the demons came. There were unpaid bills unwashed hair and bloody noses.
I am twenty-seven. My eyes are blinking against too white light streaming in through the ice frosted window. I ache. My lips are dry, and when I lick them, they are rough and taste like a dirty dime. It is cold and I am naked, but he is there next to me and he puts his arm around me and pulls my backside to him. He is inside me now. I let the tears stream and they shake and fall abruptly from my face to the pillow each time he thrusts. If he knows I am crying, he doesn’t show it. I let myself be had as I come slowly out of sleep. I languish in him and let his movement comfort me and we don’t speak at all.
When he is through, I go to the bathroom and survey myself in the mirror. I am bruised and scraped and cut. Blood and eyeliner are streaked across a swollen face that looks like someone I used to know. I am glad that the mirror stops under my chin. I stand trying desperately to rewind. To last night? No dice. What day is it? Sunday. Yesterday was… and I am knocked over as Saturday comes barreling back.
We are upstairs at the house on 35th. It is Saturday in January but sunny outside. The vacant house is chilly but the staging furniture makes everything appear warm and lived in. The realtor has just walked down stairs and I grab his wrist and pull him back into what I hope will soon be my bedroom, our bedroom. I imagine new seeds being planted and, this time, allowing them to grow.
“What do you think?”
He shrugs.
“I’m asking you if you think you could build a life here.” I hear pleading in my voice and am angered by it.
“Don’t do it for me. This is yours.” He won’t even look at me. My eyes wander to his phone in his hand and I am wondering if he is waiting to hear from someone.
“You’re such a prick.” I head down the stairs and out the door. The realtor looks startled as I blow past her. She can go to hell too.
Now I am driving wildly and calling and calling. When he finally answers I unleash, recounting all of his failures as a man in painstaking detail and biting accuracy. I am saying horrible things and realizing that I mean them. I am telling him that it’s over and realizing that it has been for a while. The whole house buying thing is revealing itself as a last ditch effort at saving a terminal love. I call my realtor and then my friends. My realtor is disappointed; my friends are over it. Each, in turn, waits for me to agree to meet them and then rushes me off the phone. I don’t blame them. It is difficult and tedious to watch someone you care for repeatedly self-destruct. We make plans to go downtown and celebrate love with a wink and a nudge. One of our guy friends is proposing to his girlfriend tonight and we’re all supposed to be at the bar when it happens. To do what, I’m not exactly sure of. This day has been a shit show and I can’t be alone tonight waiting for a call that won’t come. Inebriation is the only cure for this kind of travesty and I will take my medicine like a good girl.

I am upstairs in another familiar bar with more familiar faces. My friend proposes to his girlfriend, kneeling in the middle of the dance floor and I turn away in disgust. There are shots and more shots, and I am making inappropriate suggestions to boys I have known since high school. I see in their faces that I have gone from desirable to amusing. Screw them, I have a tab and never needed a drinking partner before. So on with the shots. I am stumbling into the bathroom and I barely make it. Getting my pants zipped and my hands washed is hard but I manage. I start down the steps to take a drag of dirty air out by the street. There is a dizzying whirl and now I am falling in to the thick blackness of my own drunk. I have to get home. I sense that I am very far away but there is a nice boy leading me toward a purple car. I smile as he waves goodbye, resuming his position by the door. I see that his shirt says “SECURITY” and I think to myself, “What a nice guy. That’s what I need.” My eyes rest for a moment. When my heavy head lifts, there is only red digital numbers and the back of a man’s head. I am in a cab and my pitiful stomach has had enough of tonight. Vomit soaks into my designer jeans and I begin to cry, but I’m not quite sure why. Still I bawl. A moment later, I am pulled from the cab by a disembodied hand. Someone is yelling; at who though and why so loud? This is all too much too fast and I don’t know who we’re yelling at and I have to get home. I have to get back in that cab, but someone is blocking me. I have to get home. I lunge for the cab door diving past the outline of my obstacle. I have to get home. I am pulled back again by my shirt and the sound of it ripping upsets me and I am begging to be taken home. If I get there I can call him and I can fix everything and the house is still for sale and I didn’t really mean those things I said. So I scream and I beg and I claw and then there is a fist. The neat balled up hand is no longer disembodied. It belongs to an angry cab driver and it is striking a girl who left her credit card at the bar and her lunch in the floorboard of his livelihood. I am thrown, hard across the Baltimore sidewalk leaving skin and lip-gloss behind. There is blonde hair tangled in a gold Persian pinky ring making its way across the city to a carwash. I blink hard and I am back in the bathroom. There’s that familiar stranger again. I take a breath and prepare myself for what is coming.
When I walk back into the bedroom, he is dressed and sitting on the edge of the bed. He doesn’t look at me as he says, “The pigs found you on Fayette, in a ditch.” My mother’s worst nightmare has just been verbalized. “I was the last number in your phone.” Damn drunk dialing. “They called me.” I cast my eyes down and they catch on the rolled up twenty-dollar bill and credit card on the dresser. “I’ve never seen someone that drunk. I was worried you would die in your sleep. I stayed up watching you all night.” I gesture toward the dresser, “I bet that wasn’t too hard.” He says nothing. Five years of familiar are gone. They galloped off into oblivion and now he is following it, leaving behind a layer of white dust and a bruised peach -- naked, bloody, and blue.
The angry buzz of the dryer rouses me and the Pine Sol is still on the floor. I wipe my face and it is healed and smooth. I whisper a prayer of thanks and pick up the mop.

Volga

There are degraded rivers next to thirsty cities
in this world where if you
chose to pick up a branch
on the enbankment
and if you happened to
penetrate the water with that branch
municipal waste and industrial emissions
will eat that branch away.

And there you will stand holding nothing.

Mother Volga in Russia.

Huai in China

To eat a fish from these wastewaters
would instantaneously lower your IQ
55 points and you may permanently walk
in small circles with noticeable jerks.

This is how I imagine my bloodstream
When I watch it move under the thin skin
Of my wrist.

Harrow

My metal fanged demon wants to do me harm.
So I ask him to make me bleed,
do somersaults in his charm.

My slick skulled joker wants to see me cry.
So I’ll let him mark my throat,
He hits me where I lie.

My claw footed courter wants to hear me scream.
So he’ll punish me until I sleep,
then drag me from my dream.

My pale skinned suitor wants to taste my skin.
So I twist and arch the way he likes,
bare everything I can.

My long lean lover has a need to sin.
So I appease sinister appetites,
repent to make him grin.

Saratoga Sang Tonight (in Progress)

Saratoga sang my folly
while I
tamed a bartender with whip and chair.

But I lost that fight and
left at sunrise
with mangled panties and tangled hair.

My crime scene sheets and fingerprinted neck
reminded me of you when I stripped the next
night.

In the three ring bazaar of my bedroom
the aerialists and contortionists sin in
the spotlight.

North Canton

The 4 am pillow talk came easier than the 9 am homeward walk
that always follows these kinds of nights.
And while all the hopes and promises have been lost in a cider soak
I remember his eyes when I rolled over and whispered.

Last Call came hard
and so did I in the blackness of his bed
with an aching lightness I cozied up next to the
one boy I did not move to Baltimore to meet
Who I danced with in a cramped alley
in a crowded bar on a downtown side street
on a mattress turned playground for childhood
neighbors who never know how close the one is.

I am finding that Playlists are the sweet and telling abstract to the modern soul
and that
Life happens in not too terribly awkward car rides back to
the car you were too not drunk, but far too
curious to drive home from this bar or that.

My blackness has always been my badge,
but I would consider hiding all of my dark purple scars
stopping all of my late night hunting
and smothering my vices
for the promise of opening my eyes, heart, legs in his sheets worn and soft.

Headboard

Iron against plaster
has never sounded better.
It raps our rhythms.
allegro
allegro
lento
so slow
I was distracted, love,
but only
for a second.

4am

I blew my brains out this morning,
somewhere between dark and light.
In the cluttered bathroom with the filmy tub I share with
my men, who never stirred.
The only witness stared down,
sadly from the wall, A Mexican Souvenier.
The gaurdian of private time.
The tallyman of embarassments.
I flushed what was left of me and
crept back to bed.

Matt

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when I was 22

5 years ago
22 during Bush's first term
And I was trying so hard.
I was trying not to watch the men watch the dancers.
Trying to stay off the powder, trying to graduate college, trying not to vomit.
I was trying not to love a girl who loved a boy that I could not love.
It was all very painful and exciting, unplanned, chaotic.

So I watched the dancers and smoked in the back corner of the room. The students, the moms, the sisters.
The fatty, the dready, the hippie, the goth. From 18 to 48 they were all women in disrepair who shone for 5-minute intervals twice an hour
then circled with legs hoisted and teeth bare. The meat from their last kill still stuck to their gums. Spinning in the strobe, sliding up and down the clean brass pole while I schlepped Jack, & Jim to bored husbands, bankers, dealers.
Cigarettes were still legal then and the smoke swirling in the red lights was the prettiest thing in my life at the time.

All Better

When your heart breaks
and your stomach revolts
and your fire flees
because you thought your life was
was,
was
decided
and then you get the shit kicked out of you
and then he wants to torture you
because all he knows is torture and baby talk

when all that happens they tell you not to call him,
not to text him
to cry to your girls and eat ice cream
They don't tell you
that
Ben & Jerry are black men, they just don't go down.
That
your friend's were over it three years ago
that
texts send themselves
that
you will lose 15 pounds cried out in tears
that
Xanax and porn will be your only comforts
that
although all hearts break at some point
yours will hurt more than
Juliette's
Mia Farrow's
Hillary Clinton's
that through no action at all
all of your
dreams would turn nightmares
all of your
poems would go flat
all of your
smiles will be thin veils
What they don't tell you
because they've blocked it out
(and good for them)
is that the Xanax gets old and turns to drinks with strange men
who talk like adults
and aren't into self loathing
Porn gives way to late night lovers
who grab your ass and clutch your throat
and give it to you the way you think he did
when he was younger, thinner, and less beaten down by the world.

Vegas

Times get tough
the tough get moving and doing and screwing.
My soul has been set on fire
for 63 days
and although my face has healed
and my ego,
my gluttonous ego,
has had it's fill,
it's time to make a move.
Not on a man.
Not on a woman.
Not this time.

This time I will seduce an entire city.