the storm (an age old intervention)

It started where it usually starts. A bad rehearsal. There's no use getting in too deep into my post-rehearsal conundrums. They happen often. They last far too long. This is surely one of my top 5 mental quandaries.
This time I found myself sitting in the driver's seat of my car, looking into the rear-view mirror. A simple sight line check became an investigation of my face.
Dark smudges of fallen mascara beneath my eyes.
This lead me to unearth the traces of what I know will become crow's feet in ten years or so.
Which lead me to thinking about my future.

And the future got a little out of control.

I felt my heart beating at a heightened pace as I pulled out of my spot and drove home. The whole way I bombarded myself with questions: "How will you fix this scene?", "what can you do to make it better?", "what if you embarrass yourself?", "can you convey this extreme of a struggle?", "is your scene partner feeling sorry that he signed up to do this with you?", "if you can't do this how are you going to be an actress?"
"Could Naiomi Watts do this?...Probably yes."
Every time I stopped at a stoplight, I had the urge to plug in my ipod and drown out my thought, but I always negated the urge, with a feeling of obligation to keep going.
I felt like if I didn't ask the questions, and more importantly if I didnt have answers, then I lost.
When I got home I shut off my phone and plans and turned on the T.V.

I didn't watch good T.V.

Fuck good acting. Fuck any acting.

This lasted a while.


And then I noticed the rain.

I love night-time rain.

I love the feeling of brief containment.

I love my childhood notion that night-time rain is nature knowing every one's plans have passed, and that it's ceremony of sorts can begin.

My ceremonial response is... smoking a cigarette on the porch.

I sat, and watched, and pressed my legs against the cushions in different positions. And this storm grew wild. Awe...awesome. In the midst of my gaping, I heard the door open. In the lamp light my brother's figure sauntered out, prime time in one hand, lighter in the other. "Whoa. It's crazy, right?",he said. I nodded, and motioned for him to come over.

and we sat together, talking against the storm.

and after a while he looked back to me and smiled

"you left the window of the car open", he said

and my, "oh...shit", and his chuckle, became a dare we were both willing to take up.

and we ran.

past the car and into the street.

with porches of neighbors as an audience to our spectacle.

and I felt brave and small all at once.

and we kept on running until the storm expanded beyond our imaginations

and the sense in our feet

and reminded us we were mortal.

As I plodded into my bathroom to change, sucked into my flower print dress, I turned on the light and smiled at myself in the mirror. I could see my face, without the weight of my thought. And I loved what I saw.

king lear in the storm by john runciman 1767

Listen to these. they work magic on me.

press yourself up against the wall of a hallway and flip upside-down....then stretch and fuck around. 

A Max Poem

The Fourth

on the fourth of her wine glasses
I wrote in permanent marker “say
sorry! you must even if you don’t know why” only
to find that permanent ink is
easily re
moveable when
scribbled on secondhand glassware.
I lay on a bare mattress in
empty room
vacant house
everyone is interning for the summer
sleeping in their old beds
sleeping with old girlfriends
or the old girlfriends
of old
friends.
I am paying utilities for the first time in
my life
the whole thing makes me think
the way I thought I’d feel after a
graduation
or triumphant
promenade or
maybe even a success in criminal
activity (but I never felt this after any photographable event)
costly, I curl and ball into
invisible sheets drawing
invisible curtains so as not to
glimpse the cleared
out room where she used
to sleep
(the room where she never read
any of the obvious signals)
(or
emails
I invisibly sent her) with the
backside of my eyes
and the frontside of my
inexcusable silences.
oh! the hobbies we hope
to tragically acquire from the dealers
of substances we are too
old to pretend
we don’t use.
the fourth of her wine glasses was only a fifth of my
problems, which maybe points to the
idiocy of permanence on glass. yet the promise of
seventh chances remains
intact.

for max

I have always kept my limbs in check for you.
Each month I stamp them with the patch of a picture I found on facebook of the girl that you once sat on.
The girl who was clearly widdling down the pretty personality she scripted out in highschool, shaping her laugh into something that may fit in better to the new-found hip of the Ivy Leagues.

It looked to me like indian feathers and a paper-bag oragami hat cropped into a polaroid frame and skinny jeans.
Whatever,
you like it, and I obviously appreciate the kodak chrome lines enough to envy them.

My legs, fractionally, don't add up against the rest of me. Not like hers.

I never understood this love you had with the small and sweet.
When we drove through magnetic fields up to whyoming, you looked so comfortable against the window that I imagined you loving a girl who looked like the landscape that was pressing against your face.
Simple and beautiful with a long nose, like your mother.
I imagined a girl with a big mind, and a broad laugh, and a bad back.
And glass beads
And a skirt that looked as if the air beneath it had potential for something more than what we could offer up in highschool.
Yesterday you pulled out a picture of another.
She seemed like something new, and her face held an air of something that I think could match your mothers.
and your confederate boots would look good on her.
and I liked your smile when i said that she was hot.