Water sheets and slides, down from the clouds, along the ground, skipping and pearling and pooling as it insinuates its tiny floods into each corner. Street light drops to the road and is flung back against the wall; hapless reflection off the water cruising by, adding its decorator touch, with slicks of shine a counterpoint to darkened soil, damp fabric, hair once silver dark and slick against the head.
Skins gleams and ripples, horripilating in the sudden chill beneath the tropic sky now drowned, a deep twilight sapphire shot with grey silk and pink shards of sunset low in the west. Eyes, uplifted, blink and push the world's own tears along the line of cheek, running to the corner of the mouth where tongue tip, pink and stealthy, lurks to taste the air.
Soft, sweet water, born of clouds, of dust from Africa that swathes the skies and brings the taste of harsher sunshines rich with blood to titillate the modern savage dancing here feet bare, skimming over gravel with smooth and practised grace; linking steps to heartbeat, throb of eldritch frog sound while the hiss and thud of rain song sets the rhythm with fat smacks of lucent impact on the ground, the walls, the metal, plastic skins of cars and canopies, man's mark on Nature's compound.
Arms and body stretch and coil, scribing shapes and sigils against the palette of the sky, dance mindless and directed by archaic rules laid down when time first dawned and bared feet marked their tempo on an uncomplicated ground. Souls flung into movement with fierce and wondering joy celebrating life.
Another Friday night, another show filled with music and information that ranged from reviews of Astronaut Farmer and The Last Time, to stretching exercises and ways to show yourself love. As I do here, I mine my life for happenings and moments that hold meaning for me or that caught my eye, held my attention and spin them into words and spit them out a gentle froth of nothing much that floats, alighting here and there, dandelion fluff, a mass of tiny seeds that may someday take root and grow to a thought, an idea, an ambition or intention to achieve...or maybe not. It doesn't matter. I am a messenger, not the message.
I noticed today my show is getting longer as the days shrink and sunrise makes its shift to later on. This will continue to the solstice deep in winter, and my birthday, nine months to the day after the wedding on the equinox. Then the shift will move the other way, clipping minutes off the time I have to talk, to play and weave my tapestries of tangent thoughts and instincts.
Sausages and egg for breakfast, spicy, hot, all brown and gleaming; cholesterol heaven because I am ravenously hungry burning adrenaline full power through the night, no other way to do it for me. I like it here. I don't talk to many, but there are people who I look for, feel concern for when their profiles go to sleep or if they do not post for a couple of days. Others will engage me with a topic or a post that speaks to me of humanity in its myriad forms of pain and confusion and right now the crash is beginning, the tumble from the high of extended performance is turning off the light behind my eyes and sweeping me close to oblivion, light headed and hollow to my bones. Sweet Morpheus has the number to my heart and is pulling at its strings hand over fist to reel me down into his dark sweet cloud the dizzy promise of his kiss outweighs all pretension to literary merit. I must sleep.
I was on my way out through the door yesterday when a reflex reach for my car keys in their designated section of my handbag came up empty. My heart sank. I had tidied up the house, clean sweep from room to room which means I no longer know to the millumeter where everything is and a quick scan of memory did not see the orange tag of the keys on any surface. I did the obvious.
Checked the pockets of what I wore last time I drove the car. Checked the yard just to be sure the car was there for either car or keys without the other is useless and I had told my sister she might use it if I didn't need it. Went downstairs and checked the car, stopped by my mother's place in case I dropped them there on the table with the newspaper. I searched. And searched again. My sister brought her eyes up also to help me look. When I found myself opening the freezer I realised I had no choice, the garbage must be checked because I have been known, when carrying in groceries to drop the keys into a bag for later retrieval. And I had thrown out all the emptied bags, filled with the results of my marathon clean up session.
Thirty smelly minutes later I had no keys. I also, finally, had the start of panic throbbing in my skull, dancing in my rib cage. So I showered once again, reclad myself in controlled corporate suiting as if that could make a difference, just having faith that I would actually be leaving,and scanned the room. And there, hanging in an insouciant curve on the doorknob, was a pair of blue cargo pants just like the cargo pants I wore on the last time I drove and had already checked. The keys were in the pocket.
I just gave myself a serious brainfreeze! Mango sorbet, soft and succulent , icy cold and golden, so sweet sliding down my throat then my! the instant and exquisite pain behind the eyes in perfect tempo with the ice cold shock behind the lungs on the way down; and now, pulse pounding, I want to do it all again!
Pain is an odd thing. If unseeing, you touch something hot or something severely cold, nerve endings just react, they cannot tell the difference and both will blister skin. Hypnosis can suppress the skin's reaction both in feeling and in injury while pain consented to is an unending pleasure. So is it all a judgment on our part? Emotional pain is still another story. Today should (I hate that word) have been my youngest sister's birthday. She died at thirty-five, aneurism in the brain switching off the lights instantly, no one at home. A brain freeze pain then nothing.
Five minutes ago I was down stairs installing a new internet connection for my mother and as she leaned into the light I saw her skull beneath the skin and her aura filled with greys and black and then it cleared. So I came up here to lose my self in sweetness and in cold, to hold the moment close and memorable and to feel pain shocking through my nerves, an anchor into life.
I have a choice, renew the flavour on my tongue more slowly this time or wash it away and have a cup of tea with a boring chocolate biscuit not even big enough to pose a threat to my waistline...or I could see what happens if I follow mango sorbet with a hot tea chaser, will I even notice if I burn? Life is always sweetest as you wander along the razor's edge unflinching. It only cuts and maims when you stop moving. Or that's my take on it.
I stretch and gaze at the ceiling through the mesh of pale green netting. When I first came back home every mosquito in the neighbourhood sent out an email...Fresh blood! Now two years later, I only get bitten when there is a crowd of them or during the day by those pesky dengue carrying critturs with white banded legs.
I still share my bed with piles of books, of magazines I use to coax my mind to focus, or sometimes to direct a dream to solve an issue I am struggling with. The knowledge is all there, just sometimes the pages seem stuck down a little. I prime the pump with words and concepts borrowed from others and let the miracle go to work.
I watch the ceiling and wait for thought to start, to find the flavour of the day. To settle my soul back into flesh - how do I know if I am alive? I am awake and when I sleep I dream or live a bright alternate life of conversations and impossible tasks accomplished, sleep is only rarely the dark well of unconsciousness I know from anesthesia and I believe my soul immortal so if at night I just change one state for another how do I know if the flesh will move come morning? It is always a moment of wonder when I feel that breath, that movement, that tiny ache or irritation of the skin as I rejoin the world of day.
The bed will move no more, I found a weakened brace that let the corners of one end splay just enough to shift the balance and position, a tilt that slid the mattress in fact but not to casual view. Details and attention hold the key to much in our quotidian patterns woven moment to moment in our doubts and exuberant discoveries, question and answer that lead and lead to more questions if we dare.
I get out of bed, feet split by sharp knives of arthritis on their first touch to earth, sweet agony that lasts an hour, maybe less. All the bones I broke and cracked while dancing make me pay and I pay gladly for the joy and passion that I drowned in daily over many years. I wander from the bedroom to the bathroom, hand through hair grooms my head, toothbrush wet and pasted, tap turned off, and I brush on the way to the kitchen to fill the kettle. The feral cats look up from the chaise and stretch in flirtatious curves, their daily dance for breakfast, squeezing their eyes closed in kitty kisses to seduce me. Already done, but their self serving affection for me is a welcome balm against the waking spirit.
I shall go to work today, the clamp of illness has eased its grip around my ribs and when I say good morning to the cats I do not croak. Yesterday it was four hours before my voice held a shape with any certainty. So, I am well and will shower soon, exchanging simple cotton casual for corporate black over a flash of sea shadowed turquoise and ballet flats in pewter.
My first cup of tea has warmed its way down, around and hunger stirs, demanding my attention. And I must feed the furnace of my being to support the words growing in the channels of imagination waiting to be born here or there on paper, to be spoken out loud and carried to some waiting ear, somewhere.
I remember New York amazed me in so many ways when I first moved there. I found it hard to believe that one could not buy codeine without a prescription when here in Barbados its OTC. Of course in NY they don't have flowers of sulpher and tallow candles on their pharmacy shelves either. Mix flowers of sulpher with ponds cold cream and use on tinea versicolor; tallow, you heat and pour over splinters or sea egg spines to help draw them out, although one can use vinegar on sea egg spines, it will dissolve them eventually. I had to take some esoteric ergot for my migraines where codeine swallowed at the onset of the aura stopped them in their tracks. Acupuncture works even better.
I also sought in vain for Friar's Balsam in NY. A dark aromatic liquid that you pour into boiling water, turning it milky like a fine latte, although no latte ever smelled like that, next you hood a towel over your head and the steaming bowl and inhale deeply. I used to ponder the possibility of actually cooking my lungs in my efforts to clear them and one side effect is the inadvertent facial you give yourself in the process. Then there is the aftermath: the actual purpose of the performance to clear the lungs of congestion. And let's just say it works. Really well.
This morning my breath will not carry sound above a croak from my larynx at all, a minor disaster for one whose job involves the audible spoken word. My lungs wheeze and moan like bellows with a puncture and there is pain and weight that sits on my upper chest, an evil toad with heavy clawing feet. I avoid allopathic treatments as much as possible; after all I am as biotic as the germs that plague me from time to time so anti them is anti me as well, not a reassuring picture. So I will bathe my lungs in near scalding vapours, open nasal passages with salt water, boost my immune system with garlic and cough and spit my way to renewed vigour and health.It will be an interesting morning.
Something very strange, last night when I went into bed I hit my leg on the corner of the bed...strange because this is the first time in two years that has happened. Anyway, I completely forgot about it until it just happened again. This has completely driven any thought of sleep away so I have to coax myself back to the edge of the abyss and what better way than to ponder upon a nonsense here?
Now I have a double scrape on my left leg just below the knee that will probably become a bruise as a result of the second impact. This time I looked closely and the whole bed has moved..very odd since I am the only person who lives here and usually the only one who comes in here as well. It's a solid bed that sits flush with the floor so my first thought that I had a really restless night and tossed and turned it awry is illogical and probably impossible.
The second thing is that the mattress does not appear to fit any more which is why there was an exposed corner to flay my tender flesh. The mystery of the incredible shrinking mattress. It is not really a huge problem, I shall simply pull out the bed skirts and put them on which will eliminate the unbuffered corner and arnica will take care of the bruising. I just would like to know how it moved; if the mosquitos are trying to turn me into take out it becomes a real challengebecause I am not sure even the magic of white lavender will repel those suckers!
Of course there is a winnie the shit (I'm a grown up now and will use grown up words) and another bear my mother insisted on gifting me. She loves stuffed animals. And there is Shrek, a gift from my NY boss. It was his treasured possession and he gave it to me so I cannot very well dispose of it however if any or all of these stuffed creatures have succumbed to "Chucky" syndrome they will be banished! But it seems unlikely. I also think I would have noticed an earthquake, not a regular phenomenon here unlike Trinidad. The fact is the bed is moved and I don't know how or why.
And I don't think it really matters very much in the greater scheme of things but it is a puzzlement.
There are six apartments in this complex, several mango trees in the back yard and a profusion of bougainvillia in the front as well as the obligatory coconut trees. Weekends are usually noisy around here as everyone digs out the lawn mowers and the weed wackers but today it is quiet apart from the occasional passing car and bird song.
My personal space always looks as though a high wind whirled through it, a feng shui nightmare, with stacks of books, CD's, production charts, painting and pottery supplies expanding to fit the available space. I clear it all away and organize it weekly but by Sunday it is always out and scattered as I flit from one project to another, some scheduled to be finished by tomorrow, some not past the bare bones of conception. All working, all growing, all taking up room and generating clutter.
My colours are orange, brown, oatmeal; spiced with blues, with teal and crimson. A handmade sandalwood fan painted with crysanthemums hangs open on one wall, another sports three straw mats, all circles, which balance the thrust of the green triangle with drawers across the room.No pictures at all. My bedroom is an oasis of white with cool greens and turquoise counterpoint to earth tone sheets and a throw of hot orange, no closet no chair just a bed draped in a mosquito net the limpid green of woodland water, one handcarved table to hold a lamp and the only clock I own.
My kitchen and my bathrooms are models of inefficiency, designed without a thought of function, the drains a direct line to hell, spilling forth immense cockroaches at night - shiny glossy 'mahogany birds' two inches long - if left unstoppered despite frequent applications of boric acid and pleas to the landlord. I do them harm whenever I see them and absorb the sin, the karma for future incarnations.
I think in tangents, each thought bouncing off at an angle, ricocheting forth and boomeranging back along new paths and I live in a sprawl of artifacts delineated by this process while my Moon in Virgo wrings her tidy hands dripping with labels and with order doing her best to tame the swirl of Jupiter's immense attraction and the delicate intrusions of Scorpio that lace my chart. And I sit zazen, observing and acknowledging; releasing what I can and recognizing the familiar landmarks of my journey as I pass them one more time with feeling, still naming them mine.
Sometimes the ultimate pain and pleasure is seeing what I do and how I do it, seeing the ruts in my internal eternal carpet powerless to deviate as I drop another pencil and let it fall, just reaching for another one so close to hand. In the course of my lifetime I have shattered the bonds of habits only to replace them with a new behaviour, distorted mirror in an echo chamber that I need to acknowledge as progress for it is a change. Dilute, dilute a thousand million times each thought, intention, motion and direction until, distilled, I become my own homeopathic remedy and the cause will heal the symptom eradicating the interruption of the natural perfection we are all intended to be.
A year ago I attended an artists' workshop held at Lancaster Great House here in Barbados, one of the ever dwindling plantation main houses that are all gradually losing the battle to greed for land and condos. A heritage unravelling.
Before I arrived at Lancaster House thoughts of red and white roses jostled for position with visions of spirals, winding paths, DNA, past present and future coming together and exploding outwards from the gathering point that is a Great House.
Roses were roughly shouldered out of the way by the gleam of polished mahogany, the layered bite of bark on my hands, the evocative shapes of the pods that launch the seeds on their way to new life.
I became a gatherer; of images, of objects. Words left me and my gaze became my link between the internal and external. My blood sang to me of history, my personal present informed my fingers and vision became concrete.
The vivid generous energy of the workshop, gently guided and directed by Sonia Boyce has been a crucible in which I flamed, melted, reformed and emerged with a new awareness of my own vision, the elements of self reinforced and expanded.
The elements exist, I did not, cannot, make them I merely present them in a pattern that has meaning for me on several levels; that may resonate for you.
I have never understood the appeal of drugs.
Oh I smoked pot with my peace corps friends and broke out in huge red itchy patches they called hives so I never bothered again; my new husband gave me apple juice with what he called magic mushrooms chopped in it - easily the most revolting thing I have ever consumed, I would almost rather eat liver - and nothing happened. Then almost twenty minutes later I was watching my roux bubble in the saute pan and it was the most tremendously funny thing I had ever seen, the mushrooms had, as they say, kicked in.
An amazing experience which almost matched the LSD I took in a medically controlled experiment. Imagine, getting paid to spend the weekend in a hospital tripping on medical grade acid with a full staff there if anything went wrong. It never occurred to me to say no. And there is my drug use history. I decided, much to my husband's disgust that drugs were not for me. I can create those same worlds in my head and better without interference or the addition of foreign substances.
My glands all manufacture wonderful highs, adrenaline, pulsing through me right now (which is why I am writing this) because my system is gearing up for performance. Serotonin and endorphins can be coaxed into the bloodstream easily with their attendant pleasures and release and I never have a headaches or loss of memory or a bloody nose bleed as the price for my mad indulgence in mind altering substances that cost me not one red cent. I make the cake, eat it and have it all at the same time.
Barbadian)
See me here, now!
Friday at last. The culmination of a week of research and information gathering, stuff that has been simmering in between my brain cells while I went about the rest of my job to be turned into a tasty stew ready for serving tonight.
Last evening I blew joining the BBC for the news, twice. Instead of a smooth 7 pips, time check and the news starts I couldn't hear the pips at all and missed the time check. Second time the timing on the commercial was longer than the advertised 30 secs so I couldn't join until it was over.
Next challenge was the weather forecast. How hard could it be? You call the met office, they give you the info and then you announce it ten minutes later. Except every radio station is calling the Met Office for the forecast (why can't they print it out and fax it or email it?) and they rattle off things like "clouds 4/8 low" barometric 1015.3 todays max 30.0 today's min.25.2 and go barreling on with never a pause while you write so fast your carpals wince and consider developing a syndrome.
Then you put down the phone: look at what you have written on a form too small to hold all the information and realise you haven't got a clue what you wrote. Random words come back..partly cloudy, brief showers, dissipating tropical wave in the Northern lees and Southern windwards, it may not be the weatherman who is wrong - the announcer just makes it up as they go along (just kidding...partly)....and now oh shoot time to start the sunset theme...a practise I hope to eliminate as it is so hit and miss just like the darned sunrise theme.
Start a piece of music and when it ends the sun is either up or down. Hah! One Saturday I ran in horror back into the studio after closing my show because when I got outside the sky was pitch black and I thought I had inadvertently signed off an hour early. No, the clocks all made me right so it was the weather, so overcast the sun just wasn't taking a bow that morning!
All this and yesterday the windscreen on the mic had been treated with a disinfectant and reeked of chemicals, a scent so strong I could taste it in the inch of air around the microphone; so after an hour my head was pounding, my lungs adopting an asthmatic wheeze and my tongue was swelling in my mouth making the finer points of articulation beyond my reach.
This morning my throat and chest have iron bands around them and my voice breaks on the fifth note of the scales instead of the seventh in the fourth octave. Well, I have fourteen hours to get it working again. Go for a walk, sit in the sun tossed by the breeze I can hear lashing the branches into a frenzy while the five wind chimes in the apartment downstairs sound as though they are hitting against their neighbour's chimes as well as their own, melodious cacophony, antiphony to fill the morning's silences. No poetry today.
Indifference draws a veil
across vision
Eyes turn, unseeing,
to the wall
sinking into white
oblivion
avoiding the day.
Well, I guess it is in there somewhere but no gentle wafts of love and romance or even the salty tang of passion are tugging at my roots to be born.
I gone.
I am allergic to cats. My eyes swell, my nose drips, I itch dreadfully for an endless three to four days whenever I meet a new one, and still I have been owned by a wide selection of them most of my life. Even here, in a complex where pets are not allowed, there are five who have designated me their person. They sleep on the chaise on the back patio or the chairs in the front patio. Of course the white one has chosen the black chairs for his hang out.
I had a great cat carrier once, a bag with a transparent panel on one end so the occupant could see out, and despite the airholes, it could double as a weekend holdall if needed.
Malkin was another cat who lived with me in NY. Grey and lean and very bright he hated the carrier and would howl in sweeping crescendos, sounding like a tortured child, whenever I had to take him to the vet. So much so that I would spring for a cab rather than struggle on the subway subjecting the world to his annoyance.
One day my usual car company had no one available so I walked up to the avenue to hail a yellow cab. After some minutes I rested the bag with Malkin down - amazing how weighty a fifteen pound cat can be! I spotted a cab in the distance - light on, so available. Up shot my hailing arm while the other hand shot down to grasp the bag...that wasn't there!
I looked around for someone running off with my cat only to see the bag itself, soft sided, rolling off along the sidewalk at top speed as Malkin found hamster in his family tree and played treadmill. Chasing a howling, animated, bag at rush hour in Brooklyn makes people look for candid camera and makes the chaser - me - pray for superb bladder control because trying to run while doubled up with laughter is a challenge in itself.
I'm not sure why all these memories of Malkin,Pye, Little Beep, Zeus, Chevar, Ming, Tiko,Tant Pis, Whiskey, Dusty and Mouse are popping up.Whiskey lived with me when I was a teenager and she had kittens, Eeny Meeny Miny Moe Ugly and Ginger. I found homes for all but Moe who stayed with me, a boneless drape of fur around my neck. He used to DEMAND food at dinner time and one day I was late home and my mother snapped at him "Get lost". He walked out of the house and never came back.
Cats! Gotta love 'em.
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