Steve Scafidi
------------- For Kathleen
When we are old one night and the moon
arcs over the house like an antique
China saucer and the teacup sun
follows somewhere far behind
I hope the stars deepen to a shine
so bright you could read by it
if you liked and the sadness
we will have known go away
for awhile - in this hour or two
before sleep - and that we kiss
standing in the kitchen not fighting
gravity so much as embodying
its sweet force, and I hope we kiss
like we do today knowing so much
good is said in this primitive tongue
from the wild first surprising ones
to the lower dizzy ten thousand
infinitely slower ones - and I hope
while we stand there in the kitchen
making tea and kissing, the whistle
of the teapot wakes the neighbors.
Sometimes being on a poetry mailing list is so much more rewarding than it is silly and melodramatic.
This morning is rediscovering the taste of deep coffee and the brightness of a cloud-white sky and looking in the mirror and finding that my pupils are as I once remembered them.
This morning was sleeping in and waking up the best possible way, just a step up from being kissed on the eyelids by the sun -- an even softer kiss on the forehead and an affectionate basso rumble of "so are you just going to lie there all day?"
Suddenly the satin of my nightdress slipping along my oversensitive back is a far sweeter caress than the usual hasty untangling of myself as my bladder screams for the BATHROOM!
This weekend broke so many of the sharp corners of the lattices that I had been precariously tangled in.
Sometime yesterday shortly before morning slipped into afternoon I dared ask myself why I did this to myself, and some handful of breaths and heart-thumps later I new exactly way.
To shatter my own stress cages, my own lucite bubble that slowly squeezes the hope from my heart the way confused fingers once tried to squeeze the breath from my throat.
Friday night broke the first bubble, the terrified "I'm new here don't know no one and I'm throwing myself to the wolves and the cliques with only MC's warmth between me and the frigid glares, first by Jazz's growing grin and then by this or that response as I wandered into an empty club out of the rain, and without thinking offered to help set up something or other just because they'd let us in before opening.
When the scummy manager dude (Lance) decided to egg us all on with threats of eviction, and my Quebec ID card put me in the spotlight, my inner automaton pulled out this or that posture and this or that lopsided grin and the lucite ball and the checkerboard stockings and it's so much easier to stay in the spotlight than it is to fight your straightbacked way into it.
The dancefloor was just empty enough and MC's choice spot of the BIG GOLD COUCH (and we all know my affinity for big gold couches) just off from it and the surprisingy familiarity of the fists in the music and when she turned to me and raised her own clenched fingers and grinned her understanding of
"this is music you can dance to with a fist"
the dancefloor became my living room and it just didn't matter whether I was off balance and off kilter because it was just nice
just like Ezra
and the people at the tables staring at the dancers just like the ones at Ezra too
and they didn't matter either.
And when you had to climb an iron-runged ladder to go make a request, making it up and down undrunk and then skunklike as well and when the DJ asked if I was going to be around a lot and put his hand on my shoulder that way, I looked over at the freshly arrived Mr. Pyke weaving his way two heads taller than the skulking dancers and it was all just so right in time with the beat of my slowly flowering ego.
I drank just enough to be happily drunk and happily dizzy and the four of us were a band against the world.
Saturday's meander in Chinatown and Kensington market was blissful and beautiful and if I'd had a hangover it would have disappeared in a random hug with a new friend in the middle of a crowded street, that same little part of me that is always surprised when people want to sit down with me trilled in glee as Adam and his outoftown friend wandered into the coffeehouse with us and chattered intelligently about nothing of consequence but everything of interest.
A pefect Saturday afternoon, finding the spices I'd never been able to find before, the market and Chinatown and that little dumpling restaurant and the store full of every wok and cleaver imaginable and that tiny little thrill of being in a town where someone in the street might actually smile for seeing me.
Toronto keeps surprising me, with its richness as well as its utter unbigcityness - it is so many things that Paris forgot how to be.
Saturday night I was worried somehow, raves being so large I was afraid that the tiny Ezra-ness of the night before would be washed away in a sea of stern faces but Dan-O and Johnny Bender and Thom were there are more huggable than mashyness should allow for, Mikey's perfectly smoothe hair and Julia and her friend and Good Dennis proving his good-ness after all.
When Mr. Pyke looked over with that question in his eyes, that "are we going to do bad things to our bodies and give up our plans to go climbing and houseimproving and brunching tomorrow" I didn't even have to swallow hard, the chillout room and the rolly chairs and my goodness but my pupils were still immense and black by bedtime last night.
Bedtime on Saturday never came, but I rolled and flitted and unintentionally kicked Mr. Pyke between Sunday's ten am and noon repeatedly while watching the bookcases melt and waver.
Sunday was a day entirely lost to vegetation, staring at the television because at least the pictures were supposed to be moving that way.
Today my heart is free because I broke everything and twenty four hours of chemically induced insanity was an old friend reminding me of emergency defragmentation methods.
The afterparty was being back at Gunny's place again, seventeen and overdosed and letting myself touch and cuddle everyone not because of Mary Anne but because that's what I'd always like to do and when Mary Anne is in your brain you're allowed.
A lot of bonding went on in there, as well as quite a few moments of watching a beautiful young seventeen year old girl wearing too little clothing and too big a smile begging some overly intense looking guy to let her run "errands" for him.
I was there too. But she's smart, and every inane giggle of hers proves that she's smart enough to hide it too.
I was so much like her once...
And right now I am remembering Mikey shouting BIG BLUE! BIG BLUE! and a suddenly huggable and utterly open Larry pointing at Big Yellow and muttering that he wasn't ready to move or leave.
So much familiarity, and the strongest one of all is this feeling in my chest that
it's all alright, I can do anything, inside my brain is more strength than anyone can counter.
The thousand insecurities in my heart are still trapped in their own shattered lattice and might just stay far enough away for me to start doing things about them.
Hope springs from the darkest shivering hole of a swaying moment at ten o'clock sunday Morning.