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excerpt.

From "An Aching Sky". 

Pearls can worn with anything. They lay against my throat in a double strand of memory and wealth, slightly yellowed with age but lustrous with accumulated wisdom. They are the only thing I wear besides underwear that never matches and a thousand league stare. That look is too old for the rest of me. 

"May!" The call comes from the other side of the door. "Five minutes!"

Catcher always sounds like he's speaking through a mouthful of bourbon, halfway between drowning and fire. I listen to the bumbling tread of his footsteps as he wheels away from the door and up the rickety steps to the piano lounge. Five minutes. It is not a whole lot of time, but I continue to watch the mirror anyway. I make a hungry reflection. 

The dress is donned with fast moving hands, pinching and tugging until the zipper stops. Frail silk clings to my body, wrapping me up in the color of an aching sky. I don't need to look back at the mirror to know what it does to me. Ellie May Temple has been transformed into a spotlight. Mama would be proud.

ideas.

From a blog post titled little bits of bone, 29 August 2009.

"Ideas happen in a frozen rush. They form always, interminable, and at unexpected intervals pop like match strikes against all of your senses. You lose track of where you are, what’s playing the radio, airing on the television, and God knows whoever and whatever else might be watching. They can paralyze or ride you to your feet, spinning, muttering as though you’re caught in an infinite conversation with the universe, with the hours, and in buckshot-like scatters of language, clips and phrases of coherency, you are abruptly speaking in the tongues of angels even if it is on the devils you are elaborating. You have lost your moorings and, aware of it, grope for both a hold as well as a hand up higher, always higher and so find a pen or cigarette, a keyboard or a drink (the very fortunate find all of these) and because the minutes are mumbling dire warnings of running out and the taste of fear in the back of your throat says sweetly this all may go pew-pew or kaboom or up, up in ashes and embers if you don’t get it out, get it down, right now, before your heart thuds another beat, you write."

Ideas have been on my mind today. Everyone asks where they come from, but what I want to know is where they go. They go to the page or the computer screen or they sit inside of you, waiting impatiently for their turn. Sometimes the last you see of them is their backs as they walk away, fade out, neglected and malnourished. Ideas can take you anywhere and the bad ones do so with elegiac smiles and beckoning hands. You don't always know they're bad until you're halfway to the end or, if you're really unlucky, not until it's all over. 

Sometimes you have to the let idea lead you where it will to find out how good it is, how good it can be. Other times it's best to get a jump on the idea, wrap it up, tuck it in and take it with you.

I'm going to go on and take the one I have now and get it down. More later.