Poem: Windows scare me. "they h-h-h-hover and rub their pantyhose wings"

 


from the site: http://oudmusic.wordpress.com/

 "Windows scare me." qualifies as an excerpt. It's from my novel {unpublished and looking} The To-Do List Manifesto.  I dedicated the poem to the heroine, Sandy Rees, and one of the oddfellow seekers in the book, Wm. Budd Philbertson, when I included it in my poetry collection, The Future Is Happy.

In the novel it's written by Wm. Budd's neighbor, Bitsey O'Shannessey. This poem is a bit of an oddity, a nightmare, appropriate to character and novel, and for that I like it.

Windows scare me.

{by Bitsey O'Shannessey}

for Sandy Rees and Wm. Budd Philbertson

i.
no curtains!
who watches?
what will it take to lift me carry me
to the ship?
I’m alone & hid.
they will cop whatever they want, those forces.
my toys; my panties.
aliens laughing. ha ha!
stretch that mask, Mr. Martian, it fits my face perfect.
ii.
ratty wool blanket covers window this week, parents dead.
I am shielded from their Keene saucer eyes.
half a chipped China face snaps off.
they watch me on the couch
eating and sleeping
and watching them on TV. so many movies,
they are out there. they h-h-h-hover
and rub their pantyhose wings
so a fine crackle pops
the window like a run.

iii.
dang, they’re here.
brown wool blanket scratches curtain rod
as I grab it. Jesus H., they’re hauling me to the ship
parked by the snow peas and basil; they’re bony,
translucent; got bodies, heed physics, like me.

iv.
three-foot fingers squeeze my chest. “Ouch!”
the vaginal inspection a reminder:
a doc at County General bunched my white gown
and ripped
to examine an upper arm bruise.
this here inspection is as pacific
as a small stroke.
I hear an oud, do a belly dance,
hum wildly like I’m feverish
and happy.
minions of the planet from afar
wheel me to the door, saturate my cells
with light. and then,

v.
but my folks still dead. still hid.
the windows have changed their color
from night to day. I paint friendly people
like snowflake stencils on the panes.

______
Sarah Sarai; included in The Future Is Happy, BlazeVOX [books], 2009, available at Amazon and Small Press Distribution.

And for more information on The To-Do List Manifesto, click on the title.

Picture link: http://oudmusic.files.wordpress.com/2008/10/oud2.jpg
or to learn more in general about the oud, a very cool instrument, exotic if you're not a world music person:  http://oudmusic.files.wordpress.com/

In Praise of the Laptop Dancer: writing and loneliness

When I was in grad. school I asked a professor to help me work with loneliness, a curse on writers or certainly on this writer. I felt pain when I was alone and concentrating, waiting for creativity to put me in a necessary trance. Writing fiction eats hours like crumbs, days like appetizers, years as if they were a first course, the main one being Your Life. In an earlier blog I mentioned the huge and ridiculous stretches I’d devote to book reviews, as if they were the ultimate Elizabeth Bishop sonnet. Something was amiss, friends.

The prof. said she could help but we never returned to the topic. I could have pressed but didn’t; and clearly all manner of this-es and that’s-es barnacled my psyche.

Could be the ability to live with, even love, loneliness may be one of the self-selecting factors for being a writer; if you can’t stand the heat step away from your typewriter, to paraphrase. Or not every writer feels what I did. All sorts of authors happily tell you their characters keep them company. When I hear that I generally think they’re in denial. Even if so, so what. I tend to overlook denial’s benefit, the ability to carry on despite real hardship or personal angst. Certainly booze and drugs, fabled buddies of some artists, have given a hands-up to denial.

I am a baby boomer and like my generational peers fascinated by my process, the every feeling of Sarah Sarai, and, like or unlike my fellow Children of the Corn of the 70s, unable to step away from introspection. So denial was no aid to me (not to say it hasn’t helped me avoid other things).

Since transformation is the greatest healer I know, the True Philosopher’s Stone being one that helps us change hate to, if not love, then acceptance or dispassion, distance, equilibrium, the ultimate goal might have been to transform my great aching loneliness, which bespoke of so much more than that I was a writer, to acceptance, or something spiritual.

H.L. Mencken wrote, “The writing profession is reeking with this loneliness. All our lives we spend in discoursing with ourselves. . . . The loneliest people in the world we writers are. Except that, while we are conversing and laughing with ourselves, we manage to shed our loneliness . . . to scatter it as we go along. (What a Life!)

Shed loneliness? Loofah it, exfoliate, metamorph?

It is possible and I’ll give you my routine, how I learned to live with necessary aloneness.

One major aid has been to work in public. As if helped me to read Henry James novels in the college cafeteria, shutting out the noise made me concentrate, it helps to work in cafes. But I couldn’t do that until I had a laptop, and I didn’t have that until roughly two years ago. SUCH a long time to be without.

But now I’m with laptop. When it failed I got a notebook, same thing, smaller screen. If that fails, I swear I’d get write on a Blackberry. I haven’t healed myself of discomfort with loneliness or identifying that as what I'm feeling (I'm a little more sophistication than I'm letting on but my psychological innards on the table won't help you or anyone). I’ve learned to work with myself. Yes, I still write at home and do much editing at home. Since I borrow, so to speak, Internet connection, piggyback, I can justify buying coffees and the occasional bagel.

This isn’t the ultimate essay on writers and loneliness or the ultimate solution. It’s mine and for now it’s working. I still need to find an agent for my novel The To-Do List Manifesto. I need to spend not much time at all finishing other fiction. I swear I am impetus-impaired. I am one lazy writer but at least no longer alone. The kids at my coffee house of choice know me, know what I’m doing. It helps. I’ll take it.