coming back

Too long since I've posted.  Never too late slip back into blogging with a forgotten rant and current craving:

October 1

On the red line again, throat aching beneath the collar of my purple and white striped shirt, shoulders tense beneath red suspenders.  I disguise my queercircusfreak aesthetic with a hoody and a leather jacket.  No one fucks with me on the el tonight.  I question the ethics of invisibility (only for a moment).

Everyone is sick.  I have the chills.  Even my toes can feel the cold through cracked Converse.  I need new shoes for winter.  But I will let snow collect beneath calloused heels for that extra two dollars and twenty five cents to carry me north again. 

And again and again.  Slow, slippery summer has hardened into something more viable.  I don't know if I like this routine, this jerking back and forth on a red line leash.  Time divided by crisis, by location, by too many cups of coffee. 

Part of me wants to go home, take a quarter off, curl up in bed and travel from the library to the coffee shop and back again.  Routine and simple.  Serving drinks to papa on Thanksgiving, singing for supper on Christmas day, grandmother's request.  Order, ordinary.

I remember my eight-year-old Christmas, the year I wore that ribbed sweater with the blue and orange stripes, the one that stuck to my skeletal frame and gave me awkward, elvin breasts.  I thought I looked so mature, glitter dust smudged in a purple haze on freckled cheeks.  I’m loud and boisterous in those family videos, singing radio songs I was too young to understand.  My mother wants that version of me to emerge from the mouth of the city that ate me.

For all she knows it was this city that scraped the girl out of my skin, poured stale cigarettes into precious lungs and wildness into bones.  But The How and The Why don't matter here and the Ordinary is out of the question.

October 13

So I will ride the red line again and wait for early summer to pull me back, back to a house full of condoms and cats, back to metal through skin through winding highways and conversations, back to endtables and an imposing block of bison meat.  I will dance and desolidify.  I will play my songs on nylon strings.  I will curl up in paper nests of radical thought, thaw and let liquid dreams tangle in tentacles.