Living the After Party - flipside B

Living the After Party

I get up to pee and I'm sitting on the toilet
when I remember, for like the third time, that
there's no toilet paper in the bathroom and
I realize that I seem to be living my life
backwards. I used to have six months of
tp on hand in the pantry and I labeled all
my pictures and colored in the red eyes
as soon as I brought the film home
from the store. And now? Well,
I'm sleeping with the laundry and I've
bounced more checks in the last four months than
in the last 10 years and it wasn't all that long ago
that I drove 160 miles to fuck a porn photographer
I met on the internet.

I seem to be living my life
backwards. Most women
my age are getting a little dumpier,
a little frumpier and they're giving up
on trying to cover the gray and they're
transitioning to that part of life when
they have both the time and the money
to take vacations and most of them
seem satisfied with their mini-vans
and this week's specials at Trader Joe's.

And here I am, giving up
on being a grown-up,
a job I've been doing since I was
four years old and every day, I find
pieces of myself that I'd hidden, wrapped
them in handkerchiefs
and tattered newspapers and
tucked them away to keep myself safe
during the kind of childhood you know
other people have, but you don't really
want to hear about. Well, too bad for you,
cause I'm a poet and I can fucking tell you.

I can tell you exactly
what it's like to sit very, very
still while your mother throws
one dish after another on the floor
around your feet and you sit very, very
still, breathing without moving
your chest and running without moving
your feet and ignoring the bright, bright
sparks of feeling on your skin, brought alive
by the flying dance of glass shards,
because, if you sit very, very
still, this may be
as bad as it gets
today.

Maybe today,
she won't gag you with your dad's
handkerchief or set anything on fire,
not even your clothes. Maybe today,
it'll be quiet soon and you can start
sweeping up the mess and hold your sister
while she cries and you can take
another piece of yourself and
put it where it won't
hurt anymore.

And here I am, at 37, holding
on to a rock in my pocket to remind
myself that I'm actually here, and chanting
honor what you did to survive
over and over as I open those musty cupboards
and unwrap all those little bundles because
I finally figured out that no one was going to be able
to make that little girl feel better except
for me, not even the porn photographer, who is
actually a fine art nude and graphic sex photographer,
not that I'd blame you for failing to notice
the difference when you look at his work. He's got
his own shit to deal with, which is fine, because
I'm busy living my life backwards.

I'm experimenting with my wild
youth, hanging out at after parties where the pot
smoke haze is so thick I can barely see
across the room and I'm glad, really profoundly
full of joy that I have this time to myself
to play, because I've figured out that
I'm not living my life backwards.
It's simply the first time I've been
living it at all instead of just
surviving.

2005

Thoughts and Comments

As of mid-July 2006, I've yet to compete with this piece, though I will no doubt use it in the upcoming Salmon Slam in Seattle and Vancouver. I performed it several times at the 2006 Oregon Country Fair, including the the Midnight Show.

Addendum October 2006I performed this piece in Seattle at the Salmon Slam, stepping on stage directly after Anis Mojgani, and I still pulled a 26.9 (I think, high 26 something). I competed with it again at the All Oregon Slam in August and I used it in the final round at the October 2006 Poetry Slam in Eugene.