composting

I remember the piano room at Huffin House, I remember the chamber reaching to the ceiling, Josue's sound lives there while his body shudders far away. I remember that dark room, closing the door and stumbling to the piano. The piano shivered alive when your hands contacted it for your blind eyes. I abused that piano, I drove my fists into its keyboard, I made the piano thunder and shake that blind box of a room. Then the piano would nakedly be quiet and I went for goosebumps, to pluck a nerve or stroke a tendon became sound enough.

The piano was banished to the confessional cell about a year ago, but it used to sit outside our first room. Michael would love it in the morning while burning a skillet and drinking a smoothie. Now the piano has no home, the confessional room is now a sturdy practice room, and the piano sits askew and staring, like a kitty trying to get into a kitchen.

I went Christmas shopping at a street fair outside of Amoeba on Telegraph and I picked up a wooden whistle and blew. Saw dust covered my lips. The merchant girls selling the incense and drums laughed and told me just to take the whistle. The little whistle was a present to Michael, and as we listen to the recordings from the last couple of months, it is my favorite surprise in all of the sounds.

The last couple of months. I sit in my room and think about it. In Spain, in November, on a huge stage with the biggest speakers my voice ever touched, I ran around the stage with the quilt as my cape and yelled into those huge sound bodies, "Me gusta el cucuy! No tengo miedo! "

I think of Arizona, face to face with Grandma's watery eyes, she calls Michael "Mickey" and sometimes she will remember the time she won a Mustang convertible at a county fair and collected her prize in her nightgown, and sometimes she will say, "I don't understand what you are saying," and ask if I have met her husband. She doesn't want to take down her Christmas tree.

Then I will think of the Mexican ladies in the mountains feeding their babies in the company of their mothers and sitting around a cooking fire, they watch me in my cutoffs and red sunglasses and laugh with no cruelty. "Infertile people!" they think.

I went around the world and collected many ingredients, laughs and open-mouthed disbelief, and I panted in my nightmares and ate cakes in my dreams. I loved more, and hated, I sat in a tree and did not let the bees bother me and stared at the horses before me, and ran with the grandmas to avoid the bulls in the street. I collected the wings of butterflies and the water of Lourdes, I visited the villages of only men and their billiards, prostitutes and beef. They asked if I was a missionary, if we were brother and sister, if I was a wife, if I was a mother. What a life. I sit in my room and think about it. Did it happen, would I remember the distance I went if Michael was not also a witness?

Jail in Norway, cradled on the Oaxacan seashore, all in one year. Singing into the sea and in the tunels under the freeways and wailing in the echo chamber of the devil's rectum. All the glitter and jewels of my mind, I can barely keep it straight, it is an impossible mission but I must take everything out of the cubbies and purses and baskets, and mix it into a mortar of experience, and make that mortar a towering tribute, and then chip it away slowly, in sheets of parchments which I will paste onto paper. I am saved by expression, I am saved, because without it, I would drown in the poetry of every moment, in the absurd conditions of this existence, in the strange bitterness for we have it all at the end of it all and we are infertile orphans!

We all should pray that we, legacies included, biodegrade!

Michael and I playing at ATP in December

Spain

Oaxaca