mom

Sometimes I take on the persona

of my mother,

The one who never knew

poverty & insecurity among middle-school peers.

The mother of vacations –

pale flesh, cute fat toes, chubby cheeks, and “perfect family”,

dishes with lids, color-coded and labeled system of perfection,

clothes neatly folded

swim wear, beach toys, and sunglasses.

He wouldn’t keep her at the house by tampering with the car today.

She wouldn’t be insulted at the office

by the old men and the old men’s sons of old money

dominant money of the oil elite

oil, gas, lumber, rodeo.

She expresses her freedom through smiles and “ok’s”

as we wander off with bikes or sand buckets.

Or maybe it was me who was free –

no one to climb into my bedding.

my sister – always cartoons and sodas.

my children crash the waves

sit in the sand

Zane says, ---  “Life is like a wave –

                                       you either catch it or you don’t.”

yum

Crawfish season in Houston - 'nuff said

(excerpt from Antidote)

(His scarf, skinny junky arms, clammy hands, and leather jacket.)

- I remember guys like you. The metal kind, you prefer blondes and breasty beasts while I'm thin and titless, (and they are beginning to ban the physique of women like me in some countries). I'm the English major, you're the rock star and I'm a f*&king clown. Sexy doesn't come easy to girls like me, strutting nipples of a 12 year old boy....

...Like I said, you're a rock star and I'm a f*&king clown…

You'll find me in the back of the bus, off to the side at art shows, on the front row at concerts, in the dark alleys, roaming Wal-Marts at 2 am. People like me don't even go to clubs because we aren't sexy enough. We mar ourselves, maim and war with our minds. (F you rock star.)

It's a junky Christmas; I should have done a background check on this one, the I-pad card swipe in the club - name, social security, and license – hold on a moment. Silent but deadly. My own prefab delusions withstand hurricanes from the Gulf, tornadoes in the Midwest, the wet insulation of the roof causing the ceiling to droop, to crash in suddenly as if a surprise. The shingle needed to be replaced. Programs of the world are designed for lowering expectations. They begin in our youth, in poverty, in 9 to 5 routines of socially constructed slavery, in ads promoting the miraculous drug of consumerism. You too can be happy if you have the finest clothes, the latest technological advancements, the boob jobs, face puffs, lip injections, tummy tucks, butt tucks, alcohol, cigarettes, fastest car, largest home; watch how the masses crumble with anticipation, scrabble with attainment, push and shove for just one more hit of the goods. Then come the guns, the thievery, the medication and the nightmare pill.

We pack up and drive, drive as far away as we can from the negative madness that is Houston. Fuzzy blankets, pillows, coffee, and whatever we can cram in a bag. The house will smell like shit when we return - four cats battling for domination, for control over the litter box, and pooping on floors.

Kira mumbles 'Iron Man'. I'm thrown back to high school, mid 80's, the weekend with the church, the gym, and racquetball. They left a handful of preteens alone in a gym. We snuck off to the racquetball rooms. Yes, I kissed him, my first kiss, it sucked he had nasty breath and chaffed lips, I did it again wondering why television made such a fuss over two people pressing faces; halitosis and slobber. I told him to swallow, chew gum, and maybe we'd just hold hands. We spent weeks on the phone, late night conversations with me doing all the talking. Silence. He'd say, listen to this, play Iron Man. Duh duh duh duh duh... 'I…am…iron man'...the words drag and linger. He always ran out of things to say and Black Sabbath filled the void.

Richee; it’s like high school with a 40-year-old incompetent junkie. He brings 45's of hair bands; those metal 80's of bleach blonde. I'm like a tit-less clown again; guys notice me when I make a scene, scream at someone, get kicked out of the bar. I play tomboy on the yellow bus at camp, smoke cigarettes and try to act 'cool'. Zip the hood up higher and think maybe they'll appreciate me for my voice, my song or my literacy. My freak show is like GaGa without the cute. The prepubescent possibilities wear off after the aging, the wrinkles and cavities – not marketable by Hollywood standards. 

He plays the 45's on my record player, his clammy hands and metal head scarves, his highs. He watches Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, too arrogant for small towns, too deceptive for trust. He doesn't talk, doesn't answer questions asked, doesn't care to lie next to me. Days later, after my constant attempts to text him and connect with him, he says, "You don't know me." 

"No shit, well it helps if you talk."

(R.I.P. Richee - sorry man)

Kira

A mess in the kitchen with the dogs should be the title of my new piece. Of broken promises and forgotten checks. Of slaving for weeks and then denying you promised me anything, denying you could have given more. We were lost in the moment. …. in the home=made gin in clear casks along walls, fruit floating along the top of the clear and forbidden liquid. The wedding party that never arrived. Jim built a fire pit and we gathered around. For warmth, stupid conversation and ways to adjust to the ever changing threat to our meager existence. Where they begin building bizarre inner city planned communities of condominiums and homes side by side like brick pile ons. With their windows open they fake as if they've been there, they can relate to the suffering, the reggae love songs, the temple songs, the songs of death and war and separation – songs of isolation. They deny their existence while their kids play ball in the streets, make fun of other girls, climb into inflatable balls to roll around in the man made park with a man made pond and spouting spring. The taco truck park expanded.

MLK used to be for the underprivileged, for the black americans, and those separated from the whole of white society. It's where my ex and I rented our first house for less than 800 dollars. And I was working at the HEB down the street. My gin and tonics from the Lounge, you know, the Aristocrat Lounge where I drank gin and smoked Marlboro reds until that one day, the day I was sick to my stomach and knew, knew that something was amiss, not right in my body. So I crawled into bed for days, came out fighting, telling my ex that he needed to die and crying over the goddamn entity I could feel growing inside my womb. I could not remove her, knew she was special, was to be born on a high holy day. The first day of Rosh Hashanah. My ever loving egg grown to fetus grown to exploding from my womb in a mess of after birth. And I cried again. For all of us; for those of us born and forced to live in this beautiful reality. For me and my mother who cannot stand me. For you who needs scholarships to graduate from the most prestigious of schools.

And I curse those around me; need you to keep me sane. Need you more than breath. My god child; my first born. Please don't forget me; I'd die for you.

(thank you Chris for being there for me all this time - i'm glad we met last November, i depend on our nightly conversations)

“You make a great Mona Lisa – but you’re not one of us" he says

they will break me down.

Their glitz, glamour, cherub fountains, Vegas strips, and plastic surgery

The flickering bulbs and rush of traffic. Asphalt, high-rise, monuments, pole dancers, slot machines, mixed drinks, and posh hotels. The whirlpool Jacuzzi.

All the glamour of 90210.

The judges line up like game show, like who wants to be a millionaire, who’s got talent –

a specimen of (is this a prize breed?), the cattle prod –-

they’ll inspect my ass, thighs, teeth, stock. Am I prime stock? Grade A prime beef? For your liking or taking. Is my pussy tight and smooth – a playboy model for the mansion. Is my skin exquisite enough for swimming pools and movie stars? My luscious tan and youthful plump.

Comparisons will be made – to blonder, taller, fuller breasts

DNA sampled

A nightmare.

As I’ve grown accustomed to doughnut shops on back alleys downtown, cheap gasoline, and drunk lovers. Learned to take moments watching the sugar dissolve in my tea. Read the books of ‘mon ami’ as I lie in his bed with bugs. Little scars on my leg, he’s out cycling, in a race I knew nothing of.

Grown accustomed to being nobody and no one –

Crushed, overlooked, off to the side for sex or pride and revenge –

“damaged goods”, they say.

Maybe that’s’ your next big heartfelt hit, ‘damaged goods’

The girl left behind like butterfly effect, flies to the body bags of decay, kittens or dogs tossed out on the freeway – thinking, ‘who would do that?’

‘why?’

even the simplest things evade me – that warm bellied body, (full bodied taste) on trips out of town. The lie still why do you need sex with every touch of the hand, the caress of greying hair, the cock ring to keep it sturdy.

Assets, assets, and bank accounts in an elitist world --- I am ill adapted to

(complaining I use profanity while on the phone in the back corner of the coffee shop)

you drive expensive vehicles --- and I have to say, I love drinking craft beer in a dark Irish bar throwing darts, my shoes off – as the bartender lights the outdoor heat lamps, you’re buzzing and staring at me; that look of mild intoxication and adoration. So I throw a bean bag and your glass shatters on the brick. Do you think these people would give a shit if we were living a high school drama; a punk rock fantasy novel? That maybe all the money in the world couldn’t buy intimate pulp fictions of imperfection in their nip and tuck, chauffeur, news articles, reviews, and camera flashes, flashes, expensive tastes and questionable ethics.

Imperfect,

Tainted,

‘damaged goods’

after the party’s over

as if they would understand --- grocery shopping for chocolate at 2 am cuz im moody and sad, beer tasting, sweaty summer on the couch Netflix movie, rearranging the closet, changing pillow cases, throwing out old toothbrushes, cleaning the studio, and awakening in the middle of the night to look over and smile sleepily as we pull our bodies close--

for warmth,

for life.

valentine's is for lovers

Even though you’re just sitting there handsome, silent and motionless,

I’ve created sitcoms for you in my mind –

You – the John Holmes lover in my big, cheesy porn debut,

holding your monster-truck up to my dirty, open mouth

eyes coked up in slits, nude and oily wet.

- A rock-star with your hair slinging

while striking your flying V guitar with the seduction and angst

of a teenage speed-freak rebel. Yea, you contributed to rock history,

so all those small town punk-rock smelly tattooed boys can piss off,

you got a page in Rolling Stone, with your shades on.

You were the schizophrenic staring at walls, talking to paper towel rolls

and Styrofoam cups down and out – need a mother lover recovering alcoholic needle-pusher,

detoxing on 30 year old couches with beer-gutted men and skanks like me.

You were in an Alice Cooper cover band,

harbored in the desert, chasing scorpions growing your beard out,

eating organic, passing around pictures of you and Alice

to other 40something washed-up musicians in hotels,

selling insurance, working at auto-shops.

You sat at the bus-stop in a greasy mechanics shirt, head in your hands,

no ring on your finger and losing your hair.

Then you were that young, skinny and compulsively lying Canadian

cowboy with snap-up shirt and jeans dancing beneath the fog and lights

at the ancient discotheque, with young scenesters hoping to be famous

in an oil town of industry.

Later, you bought Italian shoes, put in hair extensions, wearing polyester

I did not dry-hump your leg; you were everyone’s dance-slut.

You were the peeping tom at the gas-station next door

watching me pump my gas – 1, 2, shove the nozzle in deep

wait, pull it out and drive away.

You take notes near the window, in a yellow steno-pad.

You were the rock-n-roll hot-rod cruising bachelor

in 70’s Starsky and Hutch sunshades. Yea, dynamite –

I play hooker, you give me a free ride.

The beatnik son of god, doing yoga, strumming out a tune on your steering wheel

parting the waters of my thighs with your free hand,

you burn a bush better than Moses.

The wind whips through my hair; sink down,

90 miles an hour on hot pavement.

There’s a big-bang in my gut – I birth 3 uninhabitable stars that become planets.

The aliens create monkey farms, come down to mate with them,

attempt human match-ups and tattoo hieroglyphic messages down my spine.

You are beyond mankind – within the orb of my chakra of … (f*&#)

and it’s been so long for me that your little tiny weenie

is like -- Godzilla -- fighting off gill headed fish creatures,

breathing hot flames and trampling ALL of Tokyo.

Yeah, you’re probably just some stupid idiot,

but I’ve turned you into many things in my mind.

       

(p.s. thanks for the 2006 show in houston B-Head, it really changed my life.

p.s.s. these are ALL yours... get a lawyer.)

people buy art

  http://www.tracy-lyall.portfoliobox.me/tracy-lyall

in the industrial trenches

If I could be just like a young babe, curling my toes on the couch,

playing with keys, sunlight through the window strikes. Rain.

The darkness. The secret sermons in basements

where they hid from the women, the 'eastern stars', the southern hair.

The lodge was solace and deception, You saved flavored tobacco in pipes, in the garage.

Always garages, of metal and trinkets and toys for the elder men.

Always crummy foods of packaged and processed, the spam, the Cheetos,

the canned and waxy vegetables. I look away. You mow the yard.

What is that black, that void when I close my eyes and all is lost beyond the grave?

I must have died during the birthing process.

Left a hole large enough to escape from and yet never returning to.

This flesh born of my mothers, this skin grown in a womb dish like a baby pup,

the wad of goo growing arms, growing legs – when does life begin?

When the sperm hit the egg; it never became anything.

Like snapshots of summer, stacking in our subconscious.

Lemonade stands and death in the streets.

Fire hydrants and 4 a.m. Gunshots, the drunks around the corner up all night

high on cocaine and shooting guns into the air.

My father was never a country boy but pretends he was, on the edge of the mechanical city,

the industrial suburb, the steel nights, the pipes breaking.

The air is thick with working gloves, safety gear, and sweat.

They slave in the factories, like animals tied to posts, strapped to machines to feed their babies.

The lies of the founding fathers, keeping us locked in the trenches, keeping us at each others throats. The sweat of the grandfathers at the chemical plants, the wrench turners, the odorous clouds,

they push me down to their level.

He has a book book cover over his I-pad, tells me how him and his wife still read,

how he carved a hole in the book to propose. She likes science fiction. They compliment each other;

he explains interlocking puzzles.

I tell him how my grandmother has become infantile, her generation of meticulous categorization.

How the twenties bred an organized state of placement.

File cabinets were labeled, coffee cans, labeled bins, bowls with names,

and specific items for a specific purpose.

Back when the goods were sparse and to buy a couch or table or something other meant – forever.

They kept their household belongings forever.

Even their spouses.

Til death do they all part. 

for the love of Oil

( - ode to Houston)

They line up their jewels in magazines,

shiny covers of elitist goods.

So elegant. I need their glamour, their sparkles.

Tell them how you acquired it all. Tell them –

Oil and gas. Oil and gas. I love oil and gas, I love killing just for sport. Just in fun. I love killing just for sport, just in fun. Oil and gas.

“I love the hunt; I need the hunt and the kill. I remember when my father put that first gun in my hand, when I was only 5.”

Fourth generation riches.

With your beautiful wife and gorgeous house in River Oaks.

I live next to your factories, to your chemical plants. That smell from the time of birth. I am your mutant; your plants are my home. Your smokestacks, pillaging of the earth, your greed. I got your toxic waste, your decay, and chemicals.

I receive your dumps, your buried waste, your contaminated rivers, water, and soil.

We play outside while the ‘cloud makers’ make us fresh goods, polys and metals.

You like a good hunt and sport. Your Museum of Fine Arts parties. Glamour.

---Swamp.

---Glitz.

---Toxins.

---Golden

---Deadly poison

---Let’s go for a drive with the top down, lets travel to Europe.

---Shut the windows and doors, something burns my throat

---Shiny black cars

---Eating the paint off, corroding the walls

---Cheese and wine

--Why, mommy, why can’t we go into town and play?

---Theater

---We have a crappy television set.

---America! It’s like God.

valentine

Aunt Sue was the first to marry someone whose parents had a backyard in-ground swimming pool. When Pasadena was beginning to boom, millionaires lived close to the refineries, near the oil-building mecca. We overlooked the stink from the fresh cash. They bought a nice house, guns, hunting dogs, and went out dancing occasionally. Until the cancer. She moved after his death to a condo across the street from my high school and kept a stash of marijuana in the kitchen in a cookie jar in the upper cabinet. She taught me how to country line dance, dragging me to the dance floor of a country dive bar and leaving me to be rustled off by big buff drunk country men. I learned to two-step trying to get away. Then Gilley's closed down, then the metal bar closed down and people began to move away. I’d park my car at her condo, take breaks in between classes to walk across the street and smoke her pot. Replace later with a low-grade crappy kind. We had our first winter snow that year, took pictures and stole nativity scene babies. I learned that kittens crawl into car engines to warm up, by hearing one have its neck cut by a fan when the car wouldn’t start. Carmen, my age, tall, her dad in Vietnam and losing both his legs, and mom a cute hippie, lived next door. Not sure how we met. The library was down the street and an old tree in the parking lot of the condo. It was the post metal days and nineties. I should have stopped dating older men after Billy and losing the pizza job. I’d be a waitress for years to come, wearing thrift store clothes and someone’s dead mother’s jewelry. It was a year of midget Elvira, art class, and setting bathrooms on fire. We called in bomb threats to cancel school and smoked cigarettes back behind shop class; the punk rock girl and metal boys. A time of innocence, of hip hop breakdancing, church friends listening to Christian rock and having birthday parties full of boys, of metal magazines and new wave. Exchange students brought different culture here and there – it was the city, when we got bored, we’d just take the bus to another side of town.

The cul-de-sac was lit up with Christmas lights. For every string of color, I’d buy more black - black pants, a string of lights along the driveway, black shirt, a string of lights along the roof top, black trench-coat, a brightly lit reindeer standing in the front lawn. Candy land Christmas. I make myself throw up the beef for dinner - after I named him Bob and he came home dressed in white packaging and masking tape with red writing. Junior prom sucked because all the guys in school thought we were freaks, wearing stupid clothes and carrying around rats. So we took our best friends, and were labeled lesbian. God, we were hot together. And my uncle’s secretary brought me a hundred dollars party money for the after prom. That Christmas hell, the frat boys yelling obscenities and tossing things over the fence, me saying – I’ll cut you and eat your dog.

He should never have touched me, almost twice my age. She should have been a friend.

After Aaron shot himself in the head at a suburban party, little Aaron I used to drive to school in my fancy Olds-mo-beel. Carmen invited me to a ghetto party of wanna be gangstas, and her Hispanic boyfriend, and I was terrified of them so told her to hook me up with her cousin just to get out. Barry had a car and a job and I had no idea he was thirty to my eighteen. Andy transferred to art school after Melissa left for Nevada, because her mother was a topless dancer, and I made him pass out behind the flower shop. The day we thought we killed him and spent about 30 minutes paralyzed trying to figure out what to do with the body. Where does one dump the body of a teen - Flower shop dumpster, bayou, someone’s front ditch?

The creepy locusts chime in the trees, vines growing over and through chain link fences, water puddles sitting for hours in the sun; we watch creatures crawl to them, to squirm in the dirty pool.

As the snow began to melt, the fires dwindled and school resumed. It always felt as if someone was watching me, as if a neighbor or old man was just around the corner. We never knew who drove through the cul-de-sac, they came from miles around to see the lights. Blinking, moving heads of reindeer, waving Santa’s, and Christmas carols echoing through the dark night.

The garage doors were down; we were tucked away inside in our pajamas watching through the blinds. It was an Mtv New Year with gifts of stuffed animals that turned inside out. It’s a Beaver, and now it’s a yellow ball with writing on it, and you can stuff a t-shirt or pajamas into the Beavers butt.

I’m supposed to start college; creative writing classes, but keep trying to replace my prom date. Have a real high school. Shake that eerie feeling of someone watching.

Barry took us to eat Chinese food. Next door to the gymnastic center of tap and jazz and dance mats, next to the pizza place. The days of tight blue leotards and breasts that never grew in, just skinny limbs and a big fuzzy fro of eighties hair, always halfway between girl and boy. A roomful of halfway teens waiting to bloom, hoping to become something more – but mostly just awkward, too tall or too short or too fat for the parallel bars and high beam. Mats that smelt a cross between sweat, stinky feet, plastic, and cleaner – we did tumbles and flip-flops. It was the year of Frogger and Ms. Pac-Man - convenient stores and city suburbs in sprawl. They were building corridors and beltways around the city.

It was dark in the restaurant, he took us both, Carmen and I, and I took all the fortune cookies. Later that week was Valentines Day, I showed up early and she made snacks while waiting for a phone call, and I waiting for her cousin. So, we both sat in her room all night.

No one came.

Later around 10, she finally broke it to me – that her cousin had a girlfriend, someone nearer his age.

Fires are therapeutic – they’re great for burning old journals, secret letters to guys who fail to recognize your existence, garbage at grandpaps old house, trash-cans in school bathrooms, for writing your best friends name on the bathroom wall to impress her.

And for when you decide your friend sucks balls and you should remove your clothing, spray yourself with hairspray, and set yourself on fire in her room just to piss her off.

So it went.

A brief smelly hairspray fire, some screaming, a tad bit of singed hair, and a burnt nipple - for you Carmen, and your cousin and stoner mom and condominium and the swimming pool always full of leaves and debris and your goddamn O.C.Dism. fuck you.

link to other Blog -

some fiction, some just memorable:

http://tracy-l-lyall.blogspot.com/

where you can stick it - (To Flynn, I thought you were my friend)

there are trees on my curtains,

black and white spaghetti heads on forks bundled

like back packs on street punks

their hats or guitar cases on the ground begging for change; their imperfections from a pedophile induced and fed middle class stigmata

breasts too small, legs too skinny, legs too fat

breeding out the imperfections like death camp exterminations

and experimentation

like you – to the left

you – to the right

stacked in trains

led to mass graves

naked

their beautiful pale tushes facing the sky

ass up, shot by machine guns

the lucky ones

to suffocate beneath

beautiful

beautiful

pale dead bodies

long locks intertwined

vines growing through chain link fences

metal fences of pre-suburban back yards

American border collies happy to see their master

Blanketed by children

Run to the woods, dig through tunnels

Exiled-

And I have no care to write about the stick or the sand or the salt

While I am freeing the dead…

for my grandmother, the late and great Wanda

“April 24”

Just one lucid event is all it takes.

A snap of the fingers in the face, cars slam and the crash-n-crunch of metal; squeal of tires, shattering glass. Post traumatic stress disorder. She’s got Willem Defoe lips.

Gunshots on the fourth of July, falling out of your first tree and landing on your back; what if you die? Tire swings on humid rainy summers… We never saw them land, never believed in anything beyond hot-dogs, bad day-time television, and the train whistling in the night as its metal wheels to track screeched in the silence. That orange Volkswagen bug always breaking down.

Mother let me go, let me go please turn me loose, you’re feeling neurotic and I need to run, to scream, to fly. I did once when you weren’t looking, flew, at Meemaw’s one weekend, jumped onto a passing train car. I held the ladder, rode up the tracks, then let go and flew for just…

Snapshots. Back before the 6 million, before the light rail and gentrification – cleaning up means pushing out. Too many cars, an overgrown stream. We used to catch fireflies, put them in jars, and their squished guts caused our hands to glow. I don’t recall disappearing as they said, on the camp out.

It’s 55 degrees in April; conspiracy theorists claim the government is tampering with the weather. Once there were just lights, and another time a ship which split in two and then returned as one. On a rooftop. We hear many stories, many sightings, matchbooks, untold. Estranged elderly wives on back porches in small towns brewing coffee. Medicated elementary teachers enduring the struggles of their students. Lonely and tattooed musicians – love will not fill the void. We stuff the holes with drugs, drinking, bodies, and babies.

They hide beneath the folds of the universe, tucked away and tampering with our minds. Our gods. Our hours. Snack trays and art parties. Hacking into cell phones and interrupting internet. The new wave of cyber bullies of anonymous.