sweetheart redux

Sometimes my body feels like a rattrap.  I can feel some small animal, hardly a morsel, sickly and slowing down inside my skeleton.  Every day for a year and a half straight I pondered the meaning of every inconvenience. Was a flat tire a sign that I shouldn’t leave the house?  I walked everywhere.  I was always seeing something I thought I should write down – a violent protest to end the war, a cop throwing his cigarette butt on the lush green grass of a public park.  Eventually, I tried to help homeless men and women and even children decipher a meaning to life. I approached it like a math problem: this one person has to suffer enough to cover a sadness deficit so some other guy and his girl can live in a decent apartment and both own cars. You shouldn’t describe the meaning of life to a sick person unless you are also sick.  My body is a rattrap but I feel okay, all i...

Framed beneath the smoggy, pink sunset, the gray frankness of lonesome smoggy streets lets Angelenos know that the city is a heartbreaker. Good and bad and mean and nice and happy and sad. Why does there have to be so many people? How can there ever be enough attention for each of us? Dear Native Angelenos, I have no siblings. Can we be brothers and sisters? Do you like me? Am I pretty? I like dangerous streets  and safe ones, too.   I like attention but I also like being ignored.

prelude What did you do in the dark and the cold? I smoked and I shivered with no hand to hold. Where did you go when your teeth got fucked up? I slept on the stairs and I never woke up. Who was the girl that you used to be? Nobody much,  Just little ol' me. *************************************** Dear readers, I have  been in a psychiatric hospital since last Thursday and just got out today.  I would say I just got sprung, but it was nice in there; the food was okay and sometimes good, the nurses were nice, Christian, pretty Armenian women who wore a lot of make up and who I would have written off as being dumb and mean when I was a teenager, just for being pretty and religious.  I had a nervous breakdown.  I haven't gotten over the summer's heart surgery and my new ticking heart yet.  I take too much stuff. I am moving to Florida on Friday, to stay with my dad and stepmom for a few months.   I just wanted to let you k...

sometimes I feel so old I feel like a woman  instead of a girl.

Ain’t We Got Fun In my darkest hour of need Still I reek a bit of greed Hands that shake and legs that lock A heart a lung a cunt a cock Who’s that sleeping ‘neath the sun? Why, it’s me! Ain’t we got fun?

I work exactly across the street from the school I attended in Kindergarten and First Grade.  Another biographical fact is that I used to live with my mom in Pasadena on the weekends, and with my dad and Stepmom on the Westside the rest of the week.  Mom was poor so I lived poor on the weekends too, giving “You wanna start something?!” scowls at people in line at the grocery store who sighed exaggeratedly as she fished out wads of food stamps from her pockets.  The rest of the week, when I was middle class, and happened to be in a grocery store, I always made sure not to scowl at people in front of me in line  when the fished out wads of food stamps from their pockets; I always tried to make it seem that I wasn't noticing anything. Some people think it’s nice to go out of their was to smile and fuss over someone who is feeling embarrassed, but I usually find it's kinder just to act like whatever disaster they’re undergoing is the most natural thing in th...