Alley Greymond
Self-published 2002
Dedicated to Lauren & René
Street Smart
Somewhere else it is Broadway and two a.m.,
parties spilling onto the street like stale wine.
Somewhere else it is Disney World, all the rides shut down,
bulbous gray rats, visible, invisible, in neon pulses.
There is a barren Alaska, a snowcap melting. A Sahara
captured in an eternal noon. Somewhere else life is filled
with poverty and sadness. But here is where I am:
pinned to something like hope by a two-hundred pound man
trying to convince me of love with every failing thrust of his cock.
It is so useless I could cry.
I recount and recant all the streets in this city:
the intersection of 156th and NE 71st
where the window storm knocked out the stoplight.
Mine were the only headlights illuminating fallen boughs
on the ice. That road, so lonely, as I hurried to a home
even colder than winter. Did it ever matter, really,
if I arrived or not? I served no purpose but to add body heat
to quilts hemming my restless husband in.
In the bar on the intersection of Pike and Tenth a beer
was as good as a friend. I stubbed cigarettes and loneliness
both out in a laminated, black, ashtray: smoke stinging like a yellow jacket.
Who can forget McGraw and the McGraw Street Grocery
with its gritty men willing to pick-up a six pack
for three fourteen year old girls huddled underneath the awning?
It was an easy walk to Lee and 7th where we drank ourselves oblivious,
hoping for anywhere else to go.
I saw a raccoon in the yard where I stepped outside to smoke
the party on Lakeside; saw a seal thrashing Salmon on Wharf Street.
Three black crows followed me down Greenwood, swooping at my head.
A snarling Sheppard cornered me in the alley off Nickerson.
I have never been sure what they were telling me
if they were telling me anything at all.
And what was the point of waiting for the bus on Third
night after night for years? I am no richer now for the life of wage-work,
for the second jobs on Boren and Sandpoint.
The years, themselves, are a blur of vacuous pockets.
What is this essay this man attempts to tattoo right into my skin?
The only confidence I own is that he, too, will find a suitable night
and be gone. He doesn’t live on my streets so he will not even need to pack.
It is that easy: to abandon me. A million streets, most unlit,
and all of them, in their own way, empty.
Voices
For months now I have awakened by voices.
After much contemplation I realize these voices are angels
here to deliver a purpose for my life.
They have directed me to grow our generation’s longest fingernail.
This will be a sign, however odd, that another realm exists,
because when that nail reaches ultimate lengths,
people will ask what possessed me even to start then I will tell them.
I will be a suitable witness as I am articulate, honest, and I do not imbibe.
A compulsive bite as far back as history,
this will be a major accomplishment.
Fingernails grow at the rate or .02 inches a week.
The current record of 46 inches is held by a man
who last trimmed his nails in 1952.
By the time I catch up he will be dead.
Whether I hold the record by default or duration is hardly an issue.
I have plans. Right-handed, I have selected the left small finger
for it holds the least possibility of damage. My nails are brittle
so I expect several false starts. A typist by trade,
I sense this requires rewording correspondence,
omitting words using A, Q, or Z. It will not, however, interfere
with my ten-key calculating, although the added reliance upon my right hand
may cause cramping. I could plan this so much better if I knew
at what point length quit factoring and the nail began to curl under.
I don’t image you can sympathize. After all,
we are not all chosen for greatness.
Angels have commanded less feasible tacks.
One woman was instructed to swallow 947 bent pins
along with pennies, thumbtacks and nails. Her mission
was to illuminate how painfully cold and inorganic this world has become.
One man sat motionless on his motorcycle for twenty-four hours.
I think his act was an artistic protest against mechanical technology
and the breakdown of farming. He wasn’t god ordained.
Proof of divinity is difficult to establish.
I rely upon your belief in my sincere faith and upon my character
which I feel I have already established
as healthy and whole and not easily mis-lead.
Take the Car
I used to think evolution was a slow process:
that when fangs receded, when beasts unhinged
and stood erect, when brain size increased,
that it was all trial and error, diversity narrowing
over thousands of years, but an acquaintance
convinced me evolution occurs within decades.
“Take the car,” she said. She meant this literally.
You see, the angle of the seat tipped the pelvis
into a permanent gesture of desire; fecundity
simmering on cheap vinyl. Skewed by wheels—
for wheels turn, turning is movement, further and faster
than bodies were meant to go: we strap babies in
infant seats and bring them home at accelerated speeds
damaging intestines so that they can’t hold spiritual food.
Those wheels spin us away from all that is family, the car
altering us as significantly as fire had.
My friend has never driven. Her parents never drove.
Her parent’s parents walked twenty miles in the snow.
They witnessed America’s evolution
from chaperoned courtship, from hard-work with little reward,
from extended families stretching their rations to this:
wild, indiscriminate, fornicating teenagers
over-stimulated by the stench of new cars.
Evolved along a divergent path
similar to our striking off from the ape—
so quickly she has been left out. Not one of us,
her pelvis is aligned dead center, sheathed
by the connection of torso directly to thighs,
the last un-accelerated gene of chastity.
For Her Children
Sensing her sacrifices already were not enough
she decided to remove her bones and give these, too,
to her children: her femur to support and protect
in the manner of a crutch, or a baseball bat.
Wielding patience and a fettling knife, her humerus
could be the flute to lull them at night; her skull
a fruit bowl; her ribs a lampshade once draped with lace.
She began at the bottom, a slit on the heel
breaking out each phalange, like stones
trapped in stockings—one upward pinch at a time
to keep fro tearing skin.
She worried how she would stitch up the heel
without carpus, metacarpus, her finger bones.
Reflecting upon the collapse of her lungs,
heart suffocated by an unstructured life,
she realized then the fullness of this sacrifice:
how her children could dine upon her organs could
braid her arteries into rope strengthened with hair,
master the brittle, short nails as guitar picks
string teeth into ornaments, or pearl buttons;
boil down her fat for perfume, soap, for candles;
her eyes, backed with Styrofoam, a pincushion;
the whole of her, picked clean, perfectly useful,
and still, not sacrifice enough.
Repossessing the Babies
Someone is repossessing the babies.
A large man in a bill-collectors cap
is taking them back. His pockets
are full of warrants, his trunk stuffed with diapers.
He’s rounding up the babies;
the loved and unloved, the hungry and fed,
grabbing them from strollers, from mother’s arms.
I am one payment shy and two weeks past due
and I can’t believe but he’s come to take my baby.
What do they do with all those babies?
With the sickly ones they can’t auction off
with the crack-addicted babies they can’t lease?
They ship some to South Africa to mine diamonds.
They donate others to research labs.
There’s talk of sending babies to the moon
for an experimental colony. Others end up in stew.
Once they’re gone, no one talks about the babies.
Even though you’re allowed two, no one asks
what became of your baby. Once you’ve reached your limit
and it’s time to stitch you shut, only the doctors say
“shame” how the government erased your job
and you couldn’t afford to keep the baby.
On the Moon
You land and discover your calling:
Fifty theologians in compete isolation re-edited the Bible
This has been microfilmed. It is in your hands.
You hold a shovel. As you dig you think
“Women did not make this.” It is blunt and cold
used for tearing earth’s skin. What must be revealed, you know,
is already at the surface. What is beneath is sacred and secret.
You busy the can of film, not too shallow,
for winds shifting gold dust will expose the film
before it is needed. Not too deep, for this is your future’s
Dead Sea Scrolls, the Ancient-the True way.
In your bones you feel the weight of this.
The Sky-god finally dominates the Moon-Goddess
or at least wounds her.
You look up from your work and see earth rent in two,
a sign, like the Holy of Holies torn at Christ’s death.
Turning to the spaceship you find your legs
disconnected mid-thigh. This is certainly awkward.
You remember when you first joined the church,
how unsettling, the way your genitals withered
and closed into your body. And then, shortly thereafter,
your brain altered—you began denying things:
theories, desires, fossils. And here, now, your limbs
are falling off, legs, arms you can’t gather up, your ears,
and your lips which were never much use.
Obligated to lie in the moon’s dust you tell yourself
she is merely a symbol turn her abstract
as you wait to become a translucent angle,
one who neither covets nor climaxes.
You return to the soil, the mother
who knows your betrayal.
The Eighth Wife of Bluebeard
In the fairy tale you find me
curious as the first seven and no more cautious;
forcing keys into locks, opening all the doors, even that one
Bluebeard forbade I open. It opens
into a slaughterhouse: wives slung on meat hooks,
blood mired with flies and one fresh pool at my feet
as though my own had already spilt.
I dropped the key—or it leapt—and married to blood
couldn’t wash nor scrape it clean.
What is assumed here, readers, is a castle maze
of velvet tapestries, glittering candelabras, the quiet,
normal, beige sheets of everyday. But you see,
Gilles de Rais, Marshall of France, Bluebeard
was busy transmuting lead into gold.
It should have been alarming, that rate
at which our town lost boys. Hundreds abducted,
run-away, or hired out. They all disappeared
into our hallways. Lean field hands and soft
whimpering babes, choir boys singing.
Bluebeard poured ashes behind the wall,
muddied our cellar, the moat clogged,
our house dusted with parings of life.
In the fairy tale I am saved with much screaming
and at the last possible moment
by brothers who gallop in on golden steeds.
Truly, they did not come. Nor did I skirt through the hallways
clutching that tainted key. Not I, nor the cook,
not even the maid—there were no women in that house.
Storytellers have created me
only for your reading pleasure,
to make this evil history, finally, palatable.
Time Alone
“Instead of delivering the body to the cemetery
she decided to spend some time alone with the corpse.”
Usually we rendezvous in the mortuary but this time I drive us
to a wooded area where we won’t be noticed and open his casket.
His family is cheap. You can tell by their choice
of pine and the burgundy acetate.
A body speaks about its life more eloquently than any monologue.
This man was active. A scar races down his chest, the needlepoint
stitching in place the wayward, over-worked heart.
His callused hands have toiled. You can see that.
The worn elbows decree that labor pleased him,
for he stayed with it.
I am already fond of the mole on his throat
and have re-combed his hair to better suit his face.
His cock, however, is smaller than I imagined,
but I only play with it a short time. I prefer to rub against a thigh.
The hair bristles and pricks my skin. “I am alive,” I whisper,
about his mouth and imagine he seeks me
for the dead desire life.
I’ve brought wine and fried chicken and later,
related childhood anecdotes.
If his mouth still worked he would not talk back. He listens
from the other side and I am sure he appreciates this bon-voyage.
I had this old dog that died when I was seven.
Since our town was small the Mortician offered to embalm it
and afterwards we buried it—a complete ceremony
with miniature headstone and pink carnations.
I wasn’t frightened of death, even came to enjoy embalming fumes.
In their neat little boxes cats are instantly de-clawed. The canary
no longer nervous and flitting away.
The full delicacy of critters was realized.
I’m not a murderer by any means. Pets die.
The smaller they are the more frequently
they get under foot or hit by cars.
I buried them all. That’s it. You can see I’m hardly abnormal.
I reach again for this stiff chest. I find it powerfully erotic
that blood the body purges through the mouth.
The surrendered body giving itself up. The final wet kiss.
*Based upon The Unrepentant Necrophile: An Interview with Karen Greenlee
By Jim Morton, Apolalypse Culture, edited by Adam Parfrey
Opposable Digits
Of our prehensile digits it is the well-developed thumb
which sets us apart from the animals. So I’ve heard.
Because we can, we pick things up. We ponder the twig
until it is replicatable; a tool, a plank, or club.
We apply the thumb to art, to pressure points.
Our whorls are our passport, our inimitable identity
which can imprison or absolve us.
And so when I, in childhood, slammed the car door
on my brother’s thumb and that thumb hung tenuous
in it’s torn sleeve of skin, my brother became an animal.
His tendency to stand erect lapsed as pain took him down.
The doctors gave my brother a metal splint
and a series of exercises to relearn to command that thumb.
They pulled him back from a kingdom of grunts,
fleas and maggot meals, of huddling beneath trees to keep dry.
The hand contains fourteen bones
and any series of breaks can alter us.
One night I danced with a one-handed man, self-conscious
about snapping my fingers. I couldn’t, any longer,
locate that primal instinct necessary
for movement unless my fingers were tattooing
a pulse copied from the drummer.
But that man, whose instinct was distant aw mine,
he had evolved time’s dark measuring deep up his arms,
his heart beating akin to the centaur.
I both feared and envied him.
I rely on the accomplished thumb and have cultivated
ambi-dexterity on the ten-key and in typing
so that the loss of a hand won’t mean the loss of wages.
Gloved when not in use, I keep them indoors and air-conditioned.
I would box them up if I could, store them in the drawer,
clean as bleached shells. These opposable digits
are thin threads binding me to humanity.
They could never survive the wild.
The Apocalypse
I was once a believer in the apocalypse—
that final reckoning where the abstract forces
of good versus evil become tangent, clearly defined, separate.
In my worst nightmares hydrogen bombs
displace entire civilizations and scroll sky like a window shade.
Shaken from our high-rise towers by this planet’s contractions
we are just so much after-birth tossed in the corner.
We are found lacking.
Once I believed in the Rapture.
All god’s baptized children would rise to heaven
in the blink of god’s eyes, and the remnant behind
would construct elaborate explanations of UFO abductions,
government conspiracies, spontaneous combustion,
anything but the implausible truth that Jesus Christ
had begun his final Holy war, that his good followers
had been plucked to salvation whereas we had not.
In chance conversations I overhear
the mark of the beast, the 666, is being tested
by the World Banking System, that Humanists
are marketing godlessness in the public schools,
preparing our children to willingly love, honor and obey
the Anti-Christ. He could be Marilyn Manson,
or another Hitler, right now gathering
his cruel constituents, or even the Pope,
who single-handed controls immense populations
through his guise of infallibility and his ruby-studded icons
that cause even the proudest among us to genuflect and quake.
Once, after my eavesdropping, there was a period
when I held my breath, when I catalogued my failings,
so certain that having left the church I was aligned
with the wrong side. Damned. Unregenerate female at that.
Yet, there are so few truth-seekers among the pious
and I find I have no sins to repent.
It is time we let our intuition guide us.
Therefore,
to the Angel of the church in Smyrna, to the Angel
of the church in Thyatira, in Pergamum,
Sardis, Ephesus, in Philadelphia,
and to the Angel of the church in Laodicea,
I write this:
These are the words of her who was never first
and who shall not be last, who has lived as though dead
and without full use of her senses:
I know the clenching of your sphincter,
your abject horror of pleasure unless it is performed
in secret and with shame.
Do not be afraid. You will continue to suffer.
These are the words of a daughter of man.
You are robed in the white of hypocrisy
for you have openly fed your neighbor
then quietly condemned him to live as a liar and a thief.
You shall sleep behind bars with the midnight squalling
of car alarms and sirens, you shall huddle
underneath the impractical protection of bed sheets
to escape gunshots outside your window.
These are the words of the whore of Babylon,
Innana—Ishtar—the great prostitute who sits upon many waters.
I salivate. I sweat. I bleed. I piss. I ejaculate.
You multitudes of righteous who condemn the luxury
of breast, belly and cunt: god will not long suffer
your castrations and will turn your loves into weapons.
The Millennium is already upon us
but this is no thousand years of peace.
We have reached a reckoning where our inaction
and mindlessness is being considered in war rooms
and in the very womb of earth. This is
our spring cleaning, our late night cup of tea
discussing divorce and coupling, our indecision
about the complexities of desire.
Let us resolve to lose ourselves.
Let us resolve to accept that we are lost.
Let us resolve to regain Mesopotamia,
to bring heaven back to earth.
There is no Apocalypse except one mankind designs.
The war being waged is not between good and evil
but between sensuality and mortification.
Let there be a Rapture. A great accumulation of clouds
with Christ on a white stead with his scroll and scepter
and let his nail pierced palms lift up the self-made eunuchs,
the stewards of wealth and land-rapists, those pure
and proper prudes who will not circulate among us
lest we taint them with ideas or contagious lusts.
Let the rest of us remain in a new Eden, enraptured.
Eating apples. Fucking in the dust.
Finite
Early European saw the sun rotate around this world
which was a fixed point in one small universe.
Enthroned behind clouds, God
created and counted human hairs,
monitoring starlings released from palms
not large enough to re-contain them.
Earlier still, the world was flat
because mankind could not feel it curve.
Set in time and place, no microscope is powerful enough
to witness these atoms constructing our desire—
yet, so ardently we profess that our souls are as infinite as the sky.
We forget that there is beauty in the finite,
in the limitations of legs and arms,
in the lack of a complete language.
For, the universe is finite—
there is an end to land where no wood,
no non-woody plants grow,
a circumference containing gasses,
elements, a conclusion to the human race, a location
behind the edge of what we see darkly
where our hands and perhaps
even our hearts are irrelevant.
Surely any omnipotent being could take no offense
at our ignorance
Rocks
We could have been rocks.
Impervious to all except the highest shifts in temperature.
Our hearts a crystalline ion arrangement
resisting the tender cosset of wind and water.
We could have been plants.
They breathe in measured time,
bearing elements, reproducing without intimacy.
We could have been beasts, articulate
in grunt and growl. Surely animals have souls,
for what the cat gives me I call affection.
We could have been fish, or fowl, or reptile.
Our molecules could have gathered
into shifts of cloud, or the yellowing pages
of a treasured book, or the clear, cool face
of glass. We could have been…
we could have been…and we are blessed.
We are born human.
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