If fucking’s all that matters to Bobby,
Marge could stay. But La Puta is his own
warm womb. She sleeps there the rest of that night.
She attends to him, they talk, and she goes.
They will not see each other until time
to meet without warning and die small deaths.
She is waiting for Jim to get paroled.
He got her started, pimped her, she’s his whore.
Her red hair is tangled, needs to be washed.
She drops by Rose’s place for a long bath.
In time she may move in with Rose, should Dave
abandon Rose. For now, he sleeps over.
Marge’s regulars each have their schedule.
Meanwhile, Bobby works until time comes
to play. Sometimes he folds what he’s written,
Xeroxed of course, and seals the envelope,
writes Henrietta Murphy, La Jolla,
and sends it south. She answers when she can.
(31 January 2013)
copyright 2013 by Floyce Alexander
I DON’T KNOW ANY BODY SEES YOUR FACE
LIKE I DO, ALL WAXING, WANING, I AM
THE SAME, BACK OF ME AND ABOVE, A NEST
SAVED OVER FROM SUMMER FOR THE EAGLE
YOU LOVE, BUT HOW CAN YOU FLY WITHOUT WINGS
LIKE THAT CROW USED TO STRUT AROUND OUR HOUSE
(30 January 2013)
copyright 2013 by Floyce Alexander
Sky is white as snow when I look, I dream
nothing someone, you, have already dreamed.
All this is a language I never learned.
I meant you dreamed what I saw was white sky,
but if I never ask how could you know
the sky was full of snow and not a dream.
Cristina smells Marge on me. I explain
nothing. I go to La Iglesia
where Marge has stayed to sleep without vermin.
Snow never falls in this city, but now
the rain has frozen and blankets the floor
of this place. I let her sleep. I go out.
I call on Myra, who I know sleeps less
of the night, but home, not in theaters
showing third-run movies no one watches.
Bodies entangled or too hot to look
for what the damned call love, they masturbate,
they need nothing now but their own small death.
Myra buzzes me up. She’s with Paula.
They pass a joint and I drink the water
after I’m full to bursting with reefer.
As they talk I go to sleep in the chair.
I dream I am where no one’s ever been.
Shangri-la maybe, where snow always falls.
In the morning I tell Myra the dream,
someone else’s before my own, they are
the same dream but how could she know
the way I tell what happens there on tracks
running parallel and therefore nowhere
I am, she is, we were, in white weather.
(29 January 2013)
copyright 2013 by Floyce Alexander
Nobody’s coming who’s not going, you can bet your paradigms and raise the stakes with Derrida, but it won’t come out Foucault, and you’ll be lucky if it’s not a priori and is what Kant calls ding an sich, reminding me of Husserl and his student Edith Stein’s einfuhlung and meaning something like things in themselves, which translates for me into each so-called thing being complete in itself and only what comes before is nothing to be thought about–earth, sky, sea etcetera (take that up with Genesis and spin your thread, Ariadne, all the way to Revelations, this St. John’s nonsense vision no one can believe who isn’t a priori her/himself.
Nobody–nothing–is coming that will not go, presumably traveling the way it came, this it that you and I are, whether God created us or we were merely the spawn of sperm and ovum–so if you’re born you start dying with the first breath.
I don’t read Barthes, I believe I’m the so-called author of the nonsense you may or may not have read to this point (no one’s going to read it to you–I stutter, I have stuttered, I will stutter, that must have been the way I was born, that stuttering gene already plaguing my stint in this world. I don’t know if Derrida’s Plato has it down, I don’t even remember what this it is: if writing came before speech, what mattered to me was the syllogism I cannot speak, therefore I write. So, for me, Foucault’s institutions–madhouse, prison, inter alia–make sense. I was in the former, Wall had been and is now in the latter.
Jimmy Wall’s Marge is running her own show again. She has no habit she needs to feed except sex. And obviously she needs the money. She doesn’t trust men other than those she knows beyond the bedroom, and so she insists on complete independence, meaning she’s a crime, that’s how the city turns its corners and enslaves you to follow . . .
Marge shows up one night I’m out for a walk, an unusual event, mind you, I’m either in bed with Cristina or at the Congress with the combo, so when I happen to meet Marge on the street I insist on taking her for coffee and giving her the hundred she charges for fellatio and fuck, two hundred for rear entry and orgasm there. She’s out for a stroll, she says. You’re walking the streets now? I ask. No, she says, I live off regulars, I’m home all the time. Come see me, she finishes her coffee and says before I begin walking her home.
She lives in a hotel that was once called fleabag, now it’s more like cockroach. She has traps set everywhere. Once you see her in the buff you know why she has regulars who don’t mind the vermin so much they would even think of staying away from such a body and, I like to add (because it’s my own signature), soul.
She proceeds to insist I stay, and knowing her from the days when she did me for free, I do, only to realize I can go up the back stairs to La Iglesia de La Puta, take off my clothes and remove hers and suck and fuck and come all night, though Marge will have to go before Cristina gets off work at two.
Afterward, she listens to me rap about Kant, phenomenology, Barthes, Derrida, and Foucault, and does her usual ritual of keeping me going, happily, a guest in my own church, the one that’s truly named after her and . . . I catch her up on the life I’m leading. She says, You’re doing well. Jimmy can’t stay out of prison, I can’t get my daughter back, you know, not after doing time myself. I tell her about Cristina’s desire to have a child with me. She says I’m crazy if I think my responsibility ends not only with conception or birth, but ever . . .
So maybe I have it all wrong. What’s coming will not go as long as two are involved in the making of a life, and Freud, I must finally admit, there may be four people in the bedroom but two will go eventually and the newborn third either learns to talk or off she/he goes, to, say, a foster home, which is damned well one institution Foucault never named in his archaeological reports before he died in his abattoir of pleasure performed by fellows in leather hoods and wielding whips, the dominants who give you what you ask for in becoming subordinate and leaning on the underground to keep you going above the ground. Foucault was there to prove, no matter what his genius, he was the flesh and bone he was born, the kind, no matter what you call it, dies, whose only hope is coming back, coming home.
(28 January 2013)
copyright 2013 by Floyce Alexander
Bobby goes back upstairs, working days, partial though they are
these hours are his. Nights he’s with Cristina, to make a baby,
she no longer says, she wants him to want the baby too.
By noon he’s dreaming in La Iglesia de La Puta.
At six he meets Cristina before her shift begins. They dine
for an hour before she leaves to don her working uniform.
He stays for a cup of coffee. Paula arrives, kisses
his brow. Not his lips now. She cannot stop to talk,
Tony’s already here, playing intros to Lady Be Good,
Ain’t Nobody’s Business, and her signature, Angel Eyes.
Cristina says late one night, I see you’re friends with your wife.
She’s not my wife, he replies, we work the crowd together now,
and smiles feeling like Humpty Dumpty having taken a fall.
Or so he imagines Alice’s Egg Man would feel, if feel he could.
Thus Bobby rose, attending Cristina’s needs of their moment.
If you were looking through their third-story walk-up window,
you might wonder why he said a word with such pulchritude
filling the space he could not fill himself. Wonder on, but you
didn’t have to be here to see who Bobby loves. Or did you?
Did nobody care about love with so much money in America?
What of music? Words? Images? Who could say, clinging to walls
that would collapse with merely a shift of tectonic plates . . .
You climb down, you who thought love’s everywhere
America is. That’s why men and women do what they do.
Don’t tell me there’s no money in love, Bobby likes to muse.
I loved two who loved for money. Maybe that makes me a whore.
Cristina is not one. Nor was . . . he ticks off all the names
of those he knew who loved for money. They are not many.
He should worry if loving two makes him a pimp? He knows
by noon he will be on the job, in La Puta, dreaming.
(27 January 2013)
copyright 2013 by Floyce Alexander
Bobby met Paula for a beer in a dive off First Avenue.
It was O’Neill’s, named for the great Eugene,
which made tourists think it was a classy literary joint
that served hootch and sands, though it fed the hungry
free rather than let them disappear into oblivion
or go into the life, the only one that paid immediately.
Paula had come from visiting Myra down the street.
Myra was playing Dexter Gordon’s Body and Soul
on the stereo Doug had used as his textbook, his pony,
his gutcheck machine. Myra damn well knew Bobby
cherished the piece and would lead Paula to the story
of what Myra needed to know to keep a man alive.
The story was anything but a primer to resurrect
a love affair. Paula told Bobby she didn’t sugar over
a thing. He listened intently. He liked her neck’s arch
and the way it seemed to curve over her ample breasts
when she leaned into her rap. It’s your almond eyes,
he said. It’s your horny cock, she smiled, you devil.
He sat quietly taking her in through the portals of
both eyes. She looked at him as she went on telling
about visiting Myra, who was translating Montale,
whom Bobby thought he would never unriddle,
the poet a pure soul with all but ordinary desires.
He thought of floycealexander loving Pavese, and why.
floycealexander came from a farming community
over the mountains. He had that in common with
Pavese’s Piedmont, and the city girls he saw twice
he began to love, or so he said. floycealexander
was the last romantic, not a Byron but a Shelley
whose Ozymandias lay in a desert inside a valley.
Paula asked Bobby if he’d like to go for a stroll
down to the pier, see what was on sale at the market
and have a taste of the oysters of the day at Ivar’s.
She loved to see the totem poles. She loved them all,
the Y at Third and Yesler, the downbeat cabarets
where she and Bobby had danced after closing time.
(26 January 2013)
copyright 2013 by Floyce Alexander
Myra Jacobs stayed in the apartment where she was married with Doug Harper when he overdosed and died. She tutored Italian on the university campus and lived on First Avenue, among the junkies, whores, and other hustlers. They were her people, after all. She also kept playing Doug’s Dexter Gordon albums and wishing there were recordings of his own work as DG, especially his stint with Sanchez & Company.
She was a small woman with light skin, a fast walker. Her paying gig with the Romance Languages department lay half an hour’s bus ride away. It kept her eating, clothed, a roof over her head, and for kicks going downtown to see Rose and Dave at the Penthouse now, when there was no Getz, Gillespie, or Davis coming to Seattle for a limited stay. Or Myra would go uptown to hear Paula sing with Sanchez’s combo.
One night Paula told her, between sets, of her life as a junkie, turning tricks to feed her habit, ending up living with a man who left her alone too much and that’s how she met Bobby. That’s where, that night, Paula’s story ended. Myra saw she was still delightful: smart, street wise, an intellectual. Paula liked to read Homer and Sappho and those she called “the big three,” Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides.
Myra knew she identified with Electra and Antigone, but could never read Euripides, yet after listening to Paula she determined to read his Dionysian play, whose bacchantes and maenads, she said with surprise in her voice, most likely influenced Orpheus and Eurydice, and wondering aloud, she settled for saying nothing more while Paula treated her surmise as hypothesis for another reading of The Bacchae.
(25 January 2013)
copyright 2013 by Floyce Alexander
