[Los Angeles, 1990]
Float in white, not touching earth.
Hide quietly.Blurred moments,
sense of shifting consciousness and dreams,
a time that goes in starts and fragments,
processes and gaps, reversals –I hear the mail crash through the door,
the sound of panic: ancient bills,
requests to steam clean unreal carpets,
and most frightening: friendly letters
asking where I’m hiding. No,
they’re safely far away, in the
next room.Sick and in damp sheets, the gorgeous sense
of fever, such a rush, so different, such
an ecstasy. Retreating inward from
the body, skin dies first. The plague moves in.
And best: no caring, only silence.In bed, the white outlined on white;
fair sheets sometimes, and sometimes foul.
The laundry maddening, the shower
too exhausting.And dreams.
Killing murderous pixies on a rocky plain,
with dusty foothills rising all along the sun.
Then it’s back to snowbound shacks and
bleeding, cracking feet.Unconscious, I can barely wake.
Fighting and not fighting.My desk in sight,
piled high with bills,
rent, questions, mail,
the waiting calls –
malarial swamps
too filthy, huge, to drain –Enforced incurious, I
return to sleep
to shut them out...Like taking a tab of lethargic acid.
Shunting through bad cable channels:
chases (car and other), news: another
thousand dead –
Makes sense as silent pictures,
sound muted...
and thank God, remote control.The familiar tangled limbs
of porno tapes, too often copied, fuzzy screens;
old tapes of movies broken into
fragments now incomprehensible...Refuse to watch this anguished body,
riding out the rougher waves
of nausea and cramps.I try to hide in children’s books
behind the Moomins, Mary Poppins, Oz.
We find our comforts where we seek them:
a boy and his tiger.Time torn to shreds, remembered fragments, the
exhausted wish to be asleep, unconscious,
but only flashes, dark spots known between
the brighter areas forgotten...The little girl pulls her stockings off
and puts on her other clothes.Dreams, not leaving, take the time
to tangle hotly with erotic borders
of a rock star’s wild tattoos, the dark and grinning
sense of meat and power...Vast, creaking doors that hold the space
between dark sleep and darker waking –
I push at one side, desperate
to enter or escape, but cannot
move the bronze, the plated iron;
then from the other side,
I try to generate the strength
to rise and push it out; still trapped, again...I lift the weeping children to the window
and cry out with them:
Mary Poppins, Mary Poppins, come back.
[Los Angeles, 5/15/90- 8/21/92]
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