Stephanie Online

Arrival

This is birth day
and again I find myself
inside a fluid-filled machine,
a glass-fragile framework fitted close,
draped over with a million eyes.
Inside this form of bones and skin,
this is where my being spreads.
The interlocking universe
belongs to me.
Fingers.
I will dance if all I have are fingers.
Fingers are gods; they build brilliant worlds.
I will build pyramids with mine.
When I woke, found myself here,
I could not move at first for fear
of the power in each bone.
The carnival swings around my feet;
it takes the breath to know that
this is home. I will leap into life,
and rise,
calliope horses against my eyes.

A Story About Drugs

Across the street in the phone booth surrounded by a vibrant smell of piss I punch the numbers, "uno medio," I tell him in pidgin Spanish and he sends out the runner, brown kid no more than nine with eyes like a rabbit, I eyeball the block and cop the half and get back on the bus sweating but it's all clear, it's another day of freedom.

City city. All of downtown rising surreal around me, the city is my box of chocolate, squares of chocolate sprinkled with windows, dribbled with columns, long caramels down by the water, I want to open my mouth over the city and swallow it whole but it's already inside of me - at night all night I feel it like constellations in my bones. The bus lurches down Haight Street through the Filmore, the street signs a song of names as familiar as my fingers, Filmore, Steiner, Pierce, Scott and in a grey mist with whispers of sun, black children chase cats, orange workmen stand by vats of evil smelling tar, paint peels everywhere, Do not park in driveway sign, an incredible tattered woman in an army blanket, three punks skateboarding through traffic like crumpled Christmas wrappers blowing.

Sergio and I nodding out in Buena Vista Park can see over the web of bus cables over the houses the drift of fog rolling and breathing, Eugene a street nut passes down the clover hill giving us a snot symphony all the sounds that can be made with mucus, and the turning earth lies under me like a lover, mysterious and infinite and precious, waiting for me.

Home

Home is where there's a cat who knows you / sounds of drug abuse - a chart for mothers to tape to the fridge along w/ emergency #s and poison antidotes / what's wrong w/ this picture?/

Brown Mexican

This brown Mexican is all right, it is actually opium oil though they call it heroin, it comes brown and sticky, cooks brown and sticky so even if you draw on the syringe you can hardly see the red of blood. White Persian is so much sweeter and never makes me sick, but where to find it? So instead the sticky brown goes into the deep dip of the spoon I cook it and draw through cotton, take the cotton out and throw the solution in again add cocaine, draw again. I'm doing this because I want to die, if not permanently then temporarily.

It's no longer a lesson for the sensual self, as it used to be ("educate the rational and the sensual") it's simply a means of throwing my mind outside my body. Life is sad.