elevator safari

Ready, Set, Go.

elevatorpoet — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 18:26:16 +0000

Alright, so here comes 2012…! The world is supposed to end again. Time to make this blog come to life. Most days I do take an elevator of some sort: actual, metaphorical, emotional, magic.

New Years is three days away…and we all know I’ve lived vicariously for the last two, through a certain Italian musician. His attitude toward me being questionable. But more on that later. More on the nature of love and Art. So this New Year’s eve, or new year, will be mine, whatever it will be. The whole year for that matter.

Resolutions:

Write this blog. Be it a diary, a creative work, whatever.

Take care of your body, you old woman.
Write TONS.
Learn 12 songs on the guitar and take piano/guitar lessons.
Don’t live in the past.
Be treated like gold…or Jesus.
Make lots of money.

I love New Years Eve! champagne, kissing, what is not to love?

what goes up

elevatorpoet — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 20:31:43 +0000

pieces of light, deflected light, absences.

what you can’t touch, is it real?
four hours by plane, and me with $20 in the bank.
no words for what you are to me.

master

elevatorpoet — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 16:13:10 +0000

you take a leather belt, crack it across flesh,
and it has nothing to do with a body,
red, bruised, ready to bleed.
the leather wants to break you in two, the way it tries
to dig through the meat toward the bone and when you can feel
the bone through the skin, the sting of tears rising instantly…
you see yourself, this world
again, has it changed or have you?

(lucy?)

toxic people

elevatorpoet — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 16:14:10 +0000

There are thirteen people on my list of toxic people. I should probably have a lot more, and there will probably be ten more tomorrow. Making the list was supposed to make me feel better. It’s not. I suppose everyone has their lists. I wonder whose I’m on, if anyone even cares that much. At least I know when *not* to pick up the phone.

draft 2

elevatorpoet — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 14:51:40 +0000

We drove by Sleeping Beauty mountain. You always tried to be
the first to spot her, just outside Superior, Arizona.
Every year, the radiator boiling, windows rolled-down
in the baking heat. Every year, slag heaps along the road grew taller,
more storefronts were boarded-up, more houses for sale.
The copper slid down from the slag hills, toward the miner’s houses.
In McNary, the old Apache women from the reservation shopped,
dressed in long skirts, skirts adorned with bright designs,
designs like the patterns on broken, ruined pottery, a tradition
given by the pioneers and changed, a design, an adapted history.
McNary’s General Store offered a genuine pickle-barrel, candy, cap guns, chalk,
fireworks and night crawlers for sale, everything a child longed for.
The hot summer air of the desert drifted into the cool
mountain smell of juniper & sage. The tumbleweeds stopped blowing across the road.
A storm picked up, lightning striking the same time as the sound, a tree caught fire, became a snag in a ragged forest.
Apache men sold firewood beside the road, glared at our car as we passed them.
You turned completely around to meet them with your eyes
from the backseat out the rear window of the car,
until the road curved toward the Salt River Canyon,
and vanished quietly into that moment, like the dark of night descending
first into a valley. We drove down toward the bodies of semi-trucks
decomposing along the sharp cliffs, a trail of wreckage behind them,
streamers of engine parts and bumpers spread across the canyon,
sparkling like silver and green still-life comets. Lying on it’s side, each semi carried
the image of the driver fighting to control his terrifying descent…the brakes out,
the passing lane that speeded unexpectedly to guardrail
broken in front of his groggy blue eyes.
At the top of the canyon the mountain ranges staggered
across the valleys from the tail of the Rockies into New Mexico.
Pine trees after that, starting out as a slight scattering
beside a little airport with its orange wind sleeve bouncing in the air,
whispering the promise of snow and water.
Trips grew fewer and several years you didn’t go,
your father failing as did his health, his job, his memory.
Coming back then, like walking into a party where you didn’t know anyone.
Coming back to one you love so long ago.
The mountains, the pines, the Apaches, the antelope frozen
over the rise forgetting us from year to year. The tree, struck by lightening, removed
an patch of grass marked the place.
Sleeping Beauty Mine closed, and the town emptied.
A tunnel dug by the miners marked the halfway point.
After a while, deep pine forests darkened on either side of the car,
patches of light in the clearings. Large boulders emerged from
the sides of the mountains you saw from the distance.
A miner’s tunnel blasted from the mountain, exciting as in childhood,
the lights out, dark, and then a new bright world.
The last trip, the McNary General store stolen from the road,
a black skeleton burned forever in our past.
You pull off at the highway sign, an overlook to the valley,
where you see the trout stream and the willows,
old Wiltbank’s cabin, horse stables.
You hear your brothers chasing you across the meadow,
all wrestling fishing poles, your hands
muddy from digging in the streambank and your pants rolled up at the knees
like Tom Sawyer. You can see the pine needles brushing toghether in the wind, cold air blowing down from snowy mountains across the swollen streams.
John wrote your names on an aspen, you were afraid your brothers would see…
Wild garlic and mountain geranium a purple smudge dangling from your fingers.
Like the secret hiding places of the rainbow trout
resting in the shadows under the roots of Ponderosas
In the Little Colorado River, you wish to hide there,
that memory not taken
by the littered soda cans and multi-unit condominiums
barbed-wire fences with the “No Tresspassing” signs dotting the stream,
a post-modern disease. Your father painted pictures
of bears and cowboys, with their white Stetson hats decorated the knotty pine,
lariats flying through the air… real cowboys
just down the road, and the stampede their cattle made
when they caught scent of water at Tunnel Lake.
You saw them often, in a cabin you once loved.
You were never afraid of their beards and boots,
the quick summation of your character and your gender.
Only wild things were frightening, bears only in town one summer,
but turned up in your path twice, about the time things
started changing. When you couldn’t cross
the stream that summer without dodging fences
and someone diverted the water
to make a private pond. Mountain lions were spotted,
your best friend’s dog found some kind of skull up the mountain. You told John to cross out your names,
never dreaming he would lose
his parents, or sell his property…
or grow old.
You did not know there existed people who wanted money
more than beauty, or hotels more than trees. People who wanted
to have a second home, not a cabin, and didn’t like to fish, or had forgotten how
genuinely time passes near the water under a clear sky.
You did not know people didn’t care
if they knew the names of flowers, or which plants they could eat.
They came to the valley and could not see it…
drove through Superior and did not order the chocolate malts from the drive-in,
or the tamales from the roadside stand. They did not see
the way the Indian boys looked with the icy pride of hatred
glowing in the beautiful embers of their eyes.
Graffiti flowers decorated the boarded-up windows
over the cracking sidewalks. The land developers looked through
and beyond, into a future with hot-tubs and martinis,
and the streets paved with dead memories displayed
like the stuffed pelt of a mountain lion over a flagstone fireplace
near the deep French windows of the new, million-dollar lodge.
Playing scrabble with Mrs. Wiltbank’s invalid son,
she told you stories of ghosts out near the riverbank,
picking potatoes in the meadow, as though time had broken a hole
through the blue sky…
Afton Wiltbank talked too about the peach tree in front of
her house, the post office she ran, the tree still bearing fruit after a hundred years.
Her grandmother planted that tree when she was just a girl.
How you listened carefully to her stories, knowing already
you would write them down because she was too old and time
was stealing it from her, and already from you
taking your memory, like the memory
of your father who could not recall your husband or your children
as he faded away, like the meadow, the cabin he built with his own hands,
the place that was once, but is no longer, although the trees
dance in the wind. The sound of thunder through the valley is the same.
You can hear that sound, the frightening crack
of lightning, thunder that waved and bounced from one
mountain to another…the wind rushing and the stream at the bottom of the hill,
holding it’s secret shadows, where trout will still wait for you to find them. Time
is gone and you walk past them, past the fences, looking for the wildflowers
you picked in your youth, when the sky was more turquoise and the clouds
whiter and the grass stained your jeans, and memory and place
traveled along the ridge of the mountains and the words didn’t disappear with distance

GO!

elevatorpoet — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 17:17:58 +0000

He folds tiny leprechauns from green tape;
rests them on the edge of the wineglass where they
balance like tiny drunk Irishmen. He declares
the superiority of orange to green,
Cheetos to leprechauns–hard to dispute,
it’s a game of rock, paper, scissors
you say guacamole, he says peppers
You say limes, he says poppies,
Ireland? orange-prison-jumpsuit!
After midnight and wine, and he’s packing for New Mexico, boxes
and belongings strewn about. Color somehow interrupts
all your talk, math, randomness, philosophy, the duality of the universe.
Color and prisms. Green packing tape, red box-cutter,
blue-stemmed wine glasses, yellow highlighters form a circle.
Oh, and that explosion of orange he says rules the world.
Cheetos crumpled in a little pile.
His apartment offers nothing: bread gone brown with mold.
Brown boxes, brown furniture. A lamp, black vulture hovering
in the corner, watching darkly and waiting…reminding
of the blackness he’ll travel through, the headlights hitting
the green mile-markers that take him further from you,
the million stars hang hot over him in the open desert.

This then, the way the greenback dollar changes your fate,
takes those you love into the orange sunset… sure, maybe
to a land of enchantment, the candy pink skies of New Mexico.
Orange construction cones slow his journey
to a bright brash future, and you want to tell him–just plow through them,
bust them up like a green teenager with a red Camaro.
F*cked how the dollar, hardly green at all, almost black and white
changes the destined, pulls towards chaos, shifts spectrums
from orange to green to the past. Time maybe, all that’s green
gone gold, will somehow come back, bring one traveler to evening,
even with the sun growing colder and flaming out fiery toward
the tiny satellites that spin around our blue Earth…does the green
of the valleys still shine the way it did once, with thick golden
trees, leaves brushing in our hair, our hands and knees stained with crushed grass
and our laughter ringing out across the old subdivisions?

Did we drink the green wine, did we do
what we were supposed to?
We’re children in bodies slowly falling away,
time and wishes held deep in our dark blood.

Protected: resume

elevatorpoet — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 22:15:33 +0000

This post is password protected. You must visit the website and enter the password to continue reading.

full moon and fever

elevatorpoet — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 21:15:52 +0000

The English author Francis Quarles wrote in Emblemes, 1635:

Wee spend our mid-day sweat, or mid-night oyle;
Wee tyre the night in thought; the day in toyle.

dividing

elevatorpoet — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 21:25:48 +0000

some men say their ex is nicer when she doesn’t have a boyfriend. maybe that’s because, when she does have a boyfriend, she tells him how you treated her, and the new boyfriend becomes protective, and although he wants to beat the shit out of you, he doesn’t. She is telling him not to hurt you. Therefore, she seems nicer.

product placement poem

elevatorpoet — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 16:10:30 +0000

The geek squad, stuck in traffic ahead of me, inches forward.
I inch forward. I gaze absently into their car.
I see their pale faces, the absent girlfriends, the video game
hands, the stereo and GPS the best Best Buy brands.
It takes me back to childhood, my absent father,
sitting at the yellow formica kitchen table,
Corn Flakes and milk, sprinkled liberally with C & H sugar.
Cane Sugar. Later it will be Kraft macaroni and cheese, or grilled cheese and a Coke. A Kleenex in one hand,
a Coppertone sunburn on my face…..