The Big King

To know I could wind my way through campus, under the interstate, past the golf course and through Park Boulevard completely absent is nauseating. I tell myself I can’t pass that house again, pass that stoplight, pass that crack in the sidewalk one more time- only because it doesn’t matter if I do or I don’t. The trip from point A to B is flush with the passionless air that moves this car, moves my feet, my hands to grab the groceries. I could cut through dangerous neighborhoods to catch my breath. I could drive to New Orleans and get drunk in a bar I’ve never heard of to remember myself.  No, I should say, I could have done such things and I used to.  I used to walk a tight rope in four inch heals with a cigarette in one hand and a man’s dick in the other.  And if I fell, what was the loss? Absolutely nothing of value; nicotine, cum or otherwise.  Now I am pregnant with my second child and have taken the long, anticipated crescendo down beyond the floor of beer bottles, below the mattress. Back to a self that cannot mask inadequacies with superficial entertainment, that cannot take the car off of the Mississippi River Bridge for laughs. I can’t walk around aimlessly in a place I’ve never been. I can no longer make excuses for not tolerating the gross repetition of the crack in the sidewalk.    He’ll read this and wonder why it isn’t enough to be where you are now. The only explanation I have is that “where you are now” is always a pending disappointment. Everyone knows this.  He, in his place, will be a disappointment, if he isn’t already. I will be one to him, this house, this job, this weather, the groceries will be a disappointment. The quickest and cheapest remedy I have found is to parade round all the misery-in-waiting in a false sense of novelty. You may argue that this gets you nowhere and to that I would say, “isn’t it enough to be where you are now?”

Aerophone

Today I looked at an accordion and felt so ashamed for not looking at him before. Not for the music, I don't know that I was meant to have any opinion on music. I had the sudden realization that the accordion breathes his own air. And despite the unflattering flapping required of the player, he hums with considerably more suave than his handler.

I think he has always wanted to be a violin, saxophone and piano. I think that the accordion has always wanted to be so many things at once, to everyone.

To have lungs you cannot balloon on your own, a diaphragm that rests between someone else's sweaty palms must be a complicated feeling. You should love this thing if you don't already. Pity may be the first step, but then you sway into empathy and finally you're just trotting around and forgot that you were concerned, and it feels like a minor love. One that will open and close as you will it to. Like a body that exhales never full sadness or elation, just the perfect sigh of one who has too many aspirations and no one really to please. One that houses reeds, grilles and bellows only to make a singing sound from a box.

One that must look toward the organ from time to time and wonder why he never had the baroque vestments, the 75 voices and centuries of reverence.

Aerophone, today, now looking at me like I owe him something. I can only give him the consideration I didn't gift him before. But that will inflate and escape him just as fast as all the false acts of respiration.

It's not me you want to love you, Saratovskaya Garmonika or whatever your name is. It's not me, is it, Trikitixa? I don't know for sure, he doesn't seem to say much if you don't fondle his buttons. A minor love it must be.

Four Ways to Avoid a Book

My problem with writing is that it often doesn't make anything physically useful, except for pages and by the pages, thicker bonds of paper find purpose as covers and by the pages and covers, the glues and ink have a reason until, finally, the wood and nails of shelves know their own lot in life
And I guess, somewhere in the very beginning, before any other pair of hands and eyes had their way with them, the words must have made use of the writer. But no matter which end you start with it is only ever bound by very short spine.
So in some lingering sense of pity for writers and their words I have always wanted to turn them into paintings, t-shirts, plates, seat covers, airplanes, cough syrup. Magnetic poetry, that you painstakingly peal off a half inch at a time and place on the right shoulder of your refrigerator, that gives those poor little suckers a chance, doesn't it? Free from the darkness of a closed page or mutilation of a crumpled note. But they don't carry their own story, only hint at the very typical one in you, like a clever but useless therapist.
I might look at graphic design and see some freedom there, but it is often a slave to mass production and its independence short-lived before the look, words and purpose are co-opted to appeal the largest market, and by that we lose our story again. So I have to find a way between the pages, refrigerator magnets and glossy alpha-vectors, I have to find a way to physically mobilize my words in the most authentic way.
Right now I have come up with only four ideas:
Stitching on vintage hats
Mini typed books attached to retractable string that hang off of walls
Scratching black letters on mirrors
Large silk cut outs, sentences at a time, hung like Cristo...did I spell that right? I want to say Christo- like Jesus's office buddy name, "'ey, Christ-O, making copies..."
anyways, like him but fabric words across an open field right off of I-10.
I'll just leave it at those four and see if I can do it.

It Seems This Way

It seems this way.
Through the various liquids every where, that we are taxing our bodies with our constant exchange. Poor things not quite capable of taking on more than a liter of wine. No, not on top of bellies swelling with pools of tears, saliva and cum, each from their own origin of love.
Then
swimming down through our inner seas
are the limitless reflections of our eyes, yours in mine, mine in yours and back again,
Deeper than the surface holding our long brown hairs crocheted together,
Bouncing past the buoys and their red flags marking where we climbed a tree, rode a train, paddled the bayou, danced for a while.
Weaving in between sounds and images we've given the other to make real how unworldly it is. So there should be no surprise when something unnecessary falls out; that the leaner of our words manage to suddenly free themselves or the thoughts which were never docked drift into sight.
Something black rising between us longs for a kiss goodbye, to give way to the rising good.We are so full, you and I
For that we must welcome and bid farewell the less weighty notions and worries as they make their way to the exterior.It seems this way.
That we are finite, but the ocean we carry is ever shoreless.

Thing About Writing While Drinking is You Never Finish Either One

I didn’t vomit from the keg stand and I didn’t suffer any psychosomatic burn wounds from wearing the purple and gold t-shirt. On October 10, 2009, after nine years of this place, five of which were spend on LSU’s campus, I went tailgating for a LSU football game. Inadvertently, I had selected the Saturday heralded by ESPN as “anything but just another game”. Not knowing or even caring what that meant I set out, vodka concoction in hand, to face the legion of enemies who had so wronged me over the years. They kept me from getting to my beloved apartment off of Dalrymple Drive for weekends on end, they prevented me from hosting any cultural event that might coincide with the home game schedule, they had pervaded the national conception of what Baton Rouge looks like or cares about and they have fueled the criminal appropriation of university moneys. I was sure there was not enough alcohol or free BBQ in the world that could turn this sour relationship sweet.
My first goal (that’s a football pun, that’s what they call it when the ball goes through either giant pitchfork at the end of the field. Then every one watching strikes a pose as if they were going to do the Robot, but could only remember that first move), was to just break the ice. I found the most obnoxious Tiger fan I could without venturing too deep into the fray. He looked just like I imagined; beet-red face, protrusion under his lower lip from a stash of chew, slightly weathered baseball cap, khaki shorts sagging with reserve bottles of Abita Amber.
“And what is your name?” I braved to interrupt a game of beer pong.
“What?” he didn’t break his concentration.
“What’s your name?”
I attempted to guess before he answered Travis, Jackson, Trevor, Kurt, Cole.
“Lee,” he said.
I asked him how long he had been coming out to tailgate and it turns out Lee lives in a temporal dimension that most of us haven’t seen, because he said, “forever”. In fact, the 32 year-old was not even going to the game, his only reason to be there was to obviously perpetuate this never-ending, never-had-started act of tailgating.
“So why, what’s the big deal?”
“Just fun.”He was a man of few words, but precise action, as he sunk yet another ball into the awaiting cup of beer.

Lucien & Frenchie

As she flattered herself with an unoriginal song he stood patient like a good editor who knows just when a line has run on too long. His head bowing to the future, hind limbs cocked on a hair trigger.

The misleading stance must have appeared a humble, deep-seated curtsy. And from such a high perch, made use only by her, what other gestures could she have seen?
The sun that morning painted greens along the length of her neck, and the conditioned air whispered through the yellows and golds. These maids-in-waiting warned of nothing, just brought in this day as they would have the next.
Singing the last notes of her phrases, wings opened, her head twisted slightly to the doorway and she remembered the young woman who called her by name.

He knew everything after that was superfluous, he took out his red pen.

"We don't need these commas, exclaimation points and conjunctions!" he hissed. "We don't need these cliches and dangling participles! We don't need the redundancy of this feather over that!"

He stripped her story to the bone and left only the dust jacket to thumb through.



I wrote this after hearing that Elise's parrot had been killed by Georgia's cat. No one was there to see it, only Todd had documented some evidence. So I thought a crime report should be created.

My Day Job

Department of Culture, Recreation and Tourism
Contract Creation and Approval Flow Chart, Tourism
Updated 10.26.09

Beginning a Contract
When a service need has been identified and confirmed by management, the Contract Monitor then communicates with the Contractor regarding the services that will be provided and the amount of funding. Then the Contract Monitor initiates the agreement with the assistance of the Contract Review Staff.
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Composing the Contract
The Contract Review Staff will provide the Contract Monitor with a template to begin composing the contract, as well as a checklist for additional documents at the request of the Contract Monitor. The Monitor will need to know the following in order to complete the agreement: Scope of Services (What the Contractor will do) Goals and Objectives (What the contract is to achieve), Deliverables (what must be produced in order for the contract to be fulfilled), Performance Measures (how the service will be evaluated) and Timelines and Payment Terms.
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Negotiations
The Contract Monitor will send the first draft of the contract to the Contractor for additional input. When the two parties have agreed upon the terms of the contract, it is then send to the Contract Review Staff.

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Approval by Tourism Review Staff
The Review Staff will then make edits, suggestions and changes to the contract. Edits are tracked electronically in Microsoft Word and all Contract Monitors should save the copy with notations as well as the copy with notations accepted.
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Office of Management and Finance & Legal Review and Approval
Once the Contract Monitor has accepted the changes made by the Review Staff the Monitor will forward the contract to the Office of Management and Finance Reviewer and the Deputy Legal Counselor for edits, review, suggestions and approval. The Contract Monitor will make adjustments as advised. Correspondence of OMF and legal approval will need to be saved and printed to be submitted to the OMF Contract Reviewer for processing and submission to OCR (see checklist).
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Contractor Final Approval
Once OMF and the Legal Counsel have approved the contract it should be sent to the Contractor for final approval. If any changes were made or not accepted by the Contractor it will need to be resubmitted to OMF and Deputy Legal Counselor. If fully approved by the Contractor additional documents will need to be obtained by the Contract Monitor to submit the contract for signatures, see checklist.
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Obtain Additional Documents for Signature Submission
The Contract Monitor Review Staff will request any additional documents needed from the Contractor for approval, when the contract is submitted to the Contractor for signature. . with a checklist of additional documents needed to process the contract. It is best to get this checklist during the initial phase of creating the contract so all components are ready at the time of legal approval. Items required are contingent on the type of vendor involved in the contract.
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DCRT, Assistant Secretary Signature
Upon the completion of contract negotiation, including reviews, adjustments, and revisions by the Monitor, Reviewers, Contractor and Legal, the Contract Monitor prints (3) three copies of the original contract, prepares a transmittal memo and attaches the additional documents needed per the checklist, then forwards the documents, including the contract to the Deputy Assistant Secretary for the Assistant Secretary’s signature.
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DCRT, Secretary’s Signature
When all three contracts are signed by the Assistant Secretary and returned to the Contract Monitor, the Contract Monitor forwards the documents to the Secretary for signatures. Secretary returns the contract to the Contract Monitor.
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Contractor’s Signature
The Contractor is the final signature on the contract, after signatures all three originals are returned to the Contract Monitor with a document (bylaws, or letter) confirming signature authority (Board Resolution if corporation), and a complete W-9 form if the Contractor is a new vendor. At this point all three signed contracts, with additional documentation attached, are sent to the Tourism Contract Review Supervisor to confirm documents and that the contract is complete and ready for submission to OMF.
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Final Approvals
The Contract Review Supervisor will send the contract to OMF and then it will be forwarded to Civil Service and/or other applicable approving agencies and finally to the Office of Contractual Review for further approvals. From this point it will take four to six weeks for the contract to be returned approved to the Contract Monitor. The Monitor will receive a hard copy of the approved contract and a contract number to reference when submitting invoices.