whipped-up: a five-minute foray.

The New Demographic

A squeal rounds the corner. The leaves fray

Beyond the dull street lamp’s commands.

Beyond, a fire escape zigs into a row of tins

Of vegetables, one clay pot towering empty

Then up to the roof like a swimming pool.

The black paddy hat set atop a steel drum

Doesn’t smoke, enjoying the view. Seagulls

Fly over Williamsburg. The gear behind

A green awning remains unaffected as flaps

Ripple in the breeze. Cyclists with ducktails

Of plastic glide serenely toward small futures.

An artist obscures someone else’s boast

A wisp of cigarette smoke bisects the day

Bicycles laze against everything with chains.

Portfolios swing alongside soft leather boots

A bridge sticks out its tongue, hard to see.

Cement plaques stuck into brickwork flower

So that even slick with rain they lend cheer.

Violent gusts rain petals into carpeting

And a bathtub squats defiantly on the sidewalk.

COPYRIGHT BETH SZYMANSKI 04.13.2012

seagulls fighting vultures

Pas de Deux

     I’ve tried writing you letters. They litter my dining table, my bedroom floor, crumpled they trail my mind, mint stained fuchsia. Little strands of memory attach themselves, transform the balls of pulp into stalagmites of blurred ink. I feel a tug, skirl edgewise, buffeted into flushing the toilet or crossing the street. Sometimes the mirror shocks away, my face rearranging itself from my face.

     I’ve tried weeping, squalling, crumpling with tears so hot they evaporate before my cheeks. My glasses, crusty with salt, speckle my gray city with pride. The pain, purged for days, hovers like an echo squeegeed into a sudsy waterfall, always on the reverse: a riptide on display. My fingerprints daren’t fist a smash or the rush of anger will prick my face with the shards.

     I’ve tried working. I’ve crafted you into jewelry, smithed ropes that strangle. There are those draping themselves cool and gemmy into my breastplate without burning. I’ve caught a few drawling to snare my hostility, my generosity. There are colorings I can’t forge into expression, lines of apology where I don’t owe a thing. Sometimes I stroke my sewing machine and think of how thin I should be to feel you around my waist.

     I’ve tried therapy. To unstick the bad from the worse, to peel the fine strands of love you’ve snuck into my life. To convince the steely-edged woman with shrewd picks that you’re worth loving; I can’t bear her frowns. There must be something that would make her smile to hear. Hollow victories, the moments she allows that loving you is my business…the advocacy that you’ll someday return with a head screwed on right—knowing that she means that I’ll know you for what you are once my heart closes with a stitch in time, coarse black thread disintegrating into protons and neutrons, swapping electrons with pulsing.

     I’ve tried everything. For years I thought that trying meant that you were having a positive effect on me, that being your whipping girl was my salvation. After all, I wasn’t directly lashed. You’d wield the rod and I’d put my hands on yours to soften the blows, strengthen your awe. I believed that the snippets of torture I shared from my chambers, pumping fear and grit, would convince you to one day drop to your knees and apologize.

     I’ve tried everything but my fingertips. I’ve tried everything but my heart: word processing. The secret is to take back my story but your disdain for me now that I’m cracked raw so your fingers can paint my face with my own blood…has vetoed my own grip on what I’m worth. Doubloons from a pirate trickle karats. Doubloons from a rascal break through enamel into root canals.

     I’ve tried nothing like this. Writing the story that matters most: ours. Rape is nothing like a man who turns you loose for someone else’s haunts. It’s your hands I remember on my wrists: it’s my ghost that returns to them for lacing into rampages that end in exorbitant bills and your credit card on the table, the kisses after dessert that your lovers don’t get: warm pressing kindnesses heckling the umbrage my heart is always given, always takes, for my body’s imperfections. Your hands in mine give way to two children grimy with hunger and forbidden liasions between one beautiful man and one average brunette.

fuck.

this shitty excuse of a webcomic, represented by the FAQ that's all OOO I KNOW SPEECH THERAPISTS is honestly getting my goat.

i will not weep to read of the creator's death. SHAZAAAAAAM!

how many of us have had our voices mocked? hell, CLINT used to tell me he wished i didn't exist because my voice was grating. i vividly remember standing by the stairs in the star gallery and being so shocked to see him tearing me apart in yet another way...that it just became another reason to fake a suicide attempt in 1994--all my reasons had to do with him mocking my body, pimping me out, kissing me and pretending he didn't know me, dragging me by my panties (which were thus ripped and bloodied)and the hair...and pelting me with objects heavy and hard...

--and i still get laughed at. sometimes people just burst out laughing...then if i deign to explain that i'm deaf i get, "oh, i thought you had a speech defect!"

AT LEAST I'M USUALLY ASKED WHETHER I'M BRITISH.

ah, racism is NOT racism when it's deaf people. we're just cutez and dumbz!

scheiss for the wise:

i've written some Mighty Excellent Verse on new york city. i'm still postulating excellent works. i realized today that i'd like to see what others have done, whether anyone's decided to take my approach. all i can think of as a true poem about the city is (the often weak poet) millay's

Recuerdo

    We were very tired, we were very merry—
    We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry.
    It was bare and bright, and smelled like a stable—
    But we looked into a fire, we leaned across a table,
    We lay on a hill-top underneath the moon;
    And the whistles kept blowing, and the dawn came soon.
    We were very tired, we were very merry—
    We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry;
    And you ate an apple, and I ate a pear,
    From a dozen of each we had bought somewhere;
    And the sky went wan, and the wind came cold,
    And the sun rose dripping, a bucketful of gold.
    We were very tired, we were very merry,
    We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry.
    We hailed "Good morrow, mother!" to a shawl-covered head,
    And bought a morning paper, which neither of us read;
    And she wept, "God bless you!" for the apples and pears,
    And we gave her all our money but our subway fares.

a truly peurile site has collections of corrosive poetry about new york city, one of which is this steaming *ahem*:

Robert Clairmont

HOW PRETTY GIRLS ARE

Pretty girls are selfish, little things; Darting in and out of plate glass windows; Walking prettily all over city streets. A pretty girl stood so near a street lamp, Hair coiled and shining and O, she didn't even smile. Pretty girls are selfish, little things; They'd rather read a magazine.

From Quintillions (NY: American Sunbeam Publisher, 2005)

really? ...who told you this was a strong finish? it doesn't even go with the rest of the poem. reading a magazine is a vacuous act, if it's a beauty rag or a tabloid, or even maxim or gq and its ilk--

--not selfish. and anyway, it's like the poem is a little Chinese empress with her feet bound. no matter how hard she tries to stand, she's too top-heavy and topples. and topples. and topples. 

also, news flash: post-berryman, the dreamiest and henry, "O" had better lend impact, absorb velocity from what's before it and knock the next bit dead.

o! how dreary this new world order, where everyone has a "reason why [sic]" and thinks that "that being [sic] said," something new can crawl across my eyes.

to be pissenlit

scheiss. i miss sebastian. HEY! YO! you, the crippled german who lived as one of us for months, who made us cry to see you go...

...hey! you! the one who got what i realize now was my terrifically LOUD ass out of the car and into the tent and just snuggled me all night HEY YOU and the sex you had with me still in your arms in the morning AHEM yes anyway...that made me die laughing. it says everything about me that i giggled inside and was horrified but preferred to let you finish than sit up and go OMFGWTFUGUYZES all four hands are still wrapped around me, JUST LET ME GO FOR FUCK'S SAKE!

LOL see this "hottie" who was so fake and everyone was all OMG HOW EXPENSIVE and i was like see dat's why you go to tjmaxx and they all OHHH. this total rooted-out a&f cunt met me and did the thing a lot of guys we meet do at first. only he had a bad heart, broken somewhere, and our eyes clashed, snakes at opposition.

he was adam's friend, and adam is hot. and CHILL. got out of the marines and went all hippie. so sunuvafitch is all pissed at me for being the one ugly person there. TRUTH: all the rest of them, jane, sebby and em and jason and adam&amy. you'd fuck 'em all in an orgy. so.

i'm triggered because when nobody's looking he snatches a bag of munchies out of my hands. he makes sure he glares and glowers. when he's advised to come hang out with me and see why i'm so cool but have to be able to lipread etc he just goes stony. dude. we've all drunk into the night and he disappears, and the tent is crowded and we're all passed out.

he's exactly the type to either pretend to hit me and snarl that HE doesn't see anything special about me and i'd better watch out...or do all that, then grab me somewhere deeply private/rape me and then threaten me. i'm triggered as fuck and asleep but not quite, meandering a good buzz.

and he comes in. i feel something on my ass. i realize that it's sunuvafitch with his awful highlights and idiot shoes. i fantasizes all day about taking a piss all over them. they look like shoes that get accidental drips out of neighboring urinals. they BEG to be sloshed. Brown suede shoes that flare out and then taper in and down. what flair!?

so just before it sets in that he was falling asleep ass-to-ass with ME, too drunk to care, i was having raped-awake flashbacks and was UP AND SCREAMING and locked into a car, unable to shake myself out of the convulsions. shaking and screaming and crying like my heart was about to break. months into our friendship and not one of them knew i'd been raped, except POSSIBLY em. but, no, that was the following spring. no; this was nearing halloween. THAT was a fun campout too! SQUEE!

SEBBY of all people is recruited to get me, and comfort me enough to get me out he does. i can't help myself but i'm hyperventilating too badly to do anything but gasp words over and over again until each has been repeated into enough intelligible syllables to get them out.

and he's the first person i've told outside of marci and josh who's got the decency to be horrified. but he's not just shocked--he's sad. that, you know, gets me calm. into the two-person tent with just us three.

and it is precisely this that makes me love people.

in the morning a little sexual assault is lookin' mi-ighty fi-ine.

the boy was full of himself. sexier than most, as i had the privilege of seeing a few pix he'd sent, and flinging through girls. too big a shot to keep from drinking and recklessly motoring--on his cycle. flung through the air and a lucky bastard with broken legs and all--well, he said, eighteen years was enough of that! he was the most handsome, adorable teddy bear of a pretty fit, strikingly sharp man with a cane.

so the old sebby never would've had a chance in hell.

i miss walking into sitwell's and seeing him at a chess table with some beer. a
and being greeted with a brisk cane walk and big tumbling hug, a seat and a guinness. and i know that all those crystal-stained moments helped save a life.

good-guy-moment collage: PRETTY MUCH ALL FILLED UP.

meeting floyd got me calmed down enough to sit at that bar and put dad and clint aside and pull out my postersoul and sift through all my good-guy moments and keep them permanently tacked to it.

spinal tap

must've been too big for [toys in] babeland to keep restocking. it's nowhere to be found. I just don't feel like taking the ruler off the floor and deciding where the base really ends. the tape measure and circumference shall never meet at this rate.

i just want to send someone a photo; it really does have a spine printed into the back. i have to hang on to this; what if the MoSex batters down my door for it!? poor spinal tap, unstretching things since 2005.

it has no anchor.

preying on a dime

shilling for time.

to say little to nothing.