Saying on my way toward singing, perhaps a music hall is built and I wear a new hat and coat. Swaying on my way to the music hall built over the bones of trolley cars & skins of pinwheels. Say can you say if my tail feathers are falling out or my hands are shaking. A little kohl around the eyes to the guests’ surprise, but did you not know, surely you knew, how grandiose I am inside? I am. That night I was inside-out, taking a break from the belly breathing taking a chance to dance, a tiny chance to take a dancer by the hand.

Beating eggs to make a scramble, I rest my wrist.

The smoke clings to cotton it clings to wool it even clings to steel which clangs inside my bag against a spoon. Eyes and fire, smoke and fears. I think of all the words I can’t pronounce thee. I know them well and leave them be, to be or not or what thou wilt. I’m waiting on a music hall’s being built. From the ground up. My nostrils maybe quiver but too quick to catch on film to catch on fire, ears ring the smoke clings the spoon clangs receipts rustle under the cat’s paw and we’ll walk to the end of the block to hand off the keys.

Was I, have I been, something of a wind-up toy, I installed the mechanism myself and backed into you in a crowded room. That’s how it feels in my hands now that I’ve dismantled it. I didn’t save the world but if someone went free (and he did) then I’ll say, it is only skin. Stolen verse, second to first. I’m still moving moving so maybe it’s me I went free, I wanted to but didn’t make it quite. Not yet.

Soon. Do you hear? The alarm bells have a pleasantness so I stay here and burn, I like the noise so much I forget my physicality and live on soundbytes, briefly, til my stomach interrupts the melody. Say, gee, I was working so hard, hardly noticed, one day you’re grinning ear to ear feeling childlike and safe in it. Next you’re noticing the cold on your march blissful thundering towards death to paraphrase, to pare a phrase. The moon moves over in my sky now a planet lights my path, for the first time I can trace the then-lines and see, oh, they are fading. Nothing to declare, I’ll keep my earnings and my ear to the ground.

Here is a recollection: a red skirt. Only it was yellow. Maybe cans of Dr. Pepper, maybe Bali Shag tobacco and pretenses that dissolved when we looked too closely, we looked away. It’s gonna take a hurricane to get me off the ground. Yeah, what the drifter said.

What drifts in in fits like flot and jetsam drifts out in pieces charred, afloat to be chewed forgotten. Wolf’s head, Wolf’s jaw, its watery ways.

Maybe there were long lines at the Greyhound station.

I don’t remember why it stopped being so important to remember, what let me let the driftwood be drug at last to its watery grave. I do remember that it took four years.

Perhaps my present grief will require as many. Three years to go, can I bear it?

I spoke to my father over the phone he said he’d sent an e-mail to my former partner telling him he’s welcome to visit our family’s cabin any time, god how embarrassing happy father’s day k thx bye. More than embarrassing, worse, the ache startled up from slumber somewhere in my spleen, or heart, or elsewhere, startled upwards to trip through my wires in a flash I was weak-kneed recalling dumbly a story of nevermore, best buried like its predecessors.

Fold up the chairs fold the hands fold the laundry, fold myself neatly so neatly I fit into a drawer and there hide.

This too shall pass
This too
This too shall
This shall pass too

This shallow pass too narrow at times even cut off from itself where trees have bowed to things bigger than trees, winds stronger than any I’ve left in me to brace and be courteous, accommodating, accepting. To be good. Bright-sided and uncomplaining I have braved to be of late, but how brave is it to be when it’s not me, when I contain multitudes and wish to contradict, contradict myself.

Love is a political beast with jaws for a mouth I don’t care.

I said I always admire best those folks who are unselfconscious, unapologetically themselves, who determine their individual boundaries distinguished easily from corsetish limitations the so-called civilized world would impose. Jedi mind tricks only work on the weak-willed.

So if in imitation of the brave and unashamed folks of the world I were to check my self-consciousness at the door, I would say that was the shittiest accidental run-in I’ve ever had to smile-seethe my way politely through.

Three years to go. I wonder if we’ll ever be friends. It seems some lines have been drawn in the sand and I said to myself, last summer, don’t worry it’s sand, we can redistrict. Only we never have and that sand is looking so much like stone I fear to touch it.

I assure thee, I rubbed the shelves with sandpaper. Smoothed the corners. Nobody helped or reminded me. I did it myself. It’s like talk about life, I know where it originates, I am the same as any, grown from a blastocyst embedded in uterine lining.

Red dried petals rose brown circles framed (your knuckles), steamed (your eyes). I like the tune of feathertick clock on the wall next door. I feel gilded and goshy. Mop head, feathermost than the farthest ghost in the lemon grove. The trappings of grief, screams of beams jolt red like light. The meaning is lost on a look.

I feel closest to spring when I lie stone still on a hill because it’s nearer the trees and the sky I suppose. The disorienting sensation of coming out of sleep when it’s an afternooon so comfortable and the sound of spring: I feel my body tremble, my body and the hill have one shared pulse, and there’s more of me or this hill than I thought, between us we have twenty legs and ten hearts each. Coral red mouth of the moon if my privilege were such I’d see closer the stubble that appears, from this comfortable proximity, smooth. At my back a pigeon is hysterical and a songbird narrates the performance. Afternoon in early spring earthy-smelling and cold, still cold even after twenty-some days of longer sun exposure. Spring is uneaten in a coffee cup beside my head. Beyond my reach. Everything I wish to do all at once I cannot do while walking up a hill. Eat yogurt, be naked and warm.

Growing impatient for growth, I want it painful and obvious like the spasms of spring, a violent thing.

There was for me a moment of itching-to-grasp but I wisely (admiring you) put my fingers to work on a drum, on the stovetop, on paper with crayons and in my pockets caressing a little card I keep, I keep.

I’m gonna keep it to myself, this, time.
I’m gonna keep me all to myself. This time.

I have my secret knowledge I smile at, I think beatific dancing dewdrop thoughts and my hands and feet are juggling and jumping on the firm earth of my tensionless present tense, less involved in future possibly maybes but very much in love with the faces in the crowd around the table where we feast on the richness of the present. Our shoulders relax and our smiles widen. Our cheer and tiny aprons and mellifluous voices like ear-chocolate.

Isn’t that interesting, it seems that remember-remember-the-fifth-of-Jack-Daniels/November is the Before-After line of demarcation. Everything fucked, everything coked, everything jacked: the past slaps like gentle lake-waves against the cinderblock supports of the dock against a present where tensed I sit listening to the snores of a tabby cat, too the imaginary rain that penetrates like the imprints of yes-things and known things and one of two things we should have had but never-did.

Naturally that is what I would seek; there must be a shortcut. Just this ONCE a shortcut through grief! I do not expect to find one. ‘Tis why I wore my hiking boots.

Hiking and haunted; graffiti speaks on the door three times and I stand with one mittened hand on the knob. Told over and over not to stray from the red lines that linger attesting to screamed moments, the bloodcurdling best we have to find in bedrooms and bathtubs. But there’s more behind a different door: every time I turn a new leaf I find sixteen more beneath it.

The raccoons forgotten, the acquainting acts, the bullet the bus the breakage. Stagnation and change have twisted like two colors together to form something like horror: a color I have never seen before. I covered my eyes (knock knock knock on the door!) and I will again too, and again, but the bravery is there, ebbs and flows like anything, like anything worth keeping.

Futile to worry whether it is worth keeping as I don’t often get to choose. Sometimes keeping isn’t an option and there’s the grim moment of feeling like folding. Easy to fold but braver to stand and let that cold water hurt me. That’s the only way to be sure I can handle this shit, anything or anything.

Any is safer than yes as anything is vague and accommodating and unpretentious; not every yes-thing is a truly yes-thing. Much of it is possibly-maybe/probably-not. I can’t control that. Wish I could, wished so hard that it almost seemed I made it real. I was haunted.

But only just for a bit, there and here, in starts and fits and stops don’t wanna / stop it. Yes-things have it in their nature to occasionally turn upside-down into no-things into nothing the way the moon is regularly a crescent hugging one side of an empty partial-circle before it’s reversed, only to be flipped again just to fuck with you.

Long ago sense stopped and the heart-throat mechanism was tripped to the sound of slight jazz, more commanding than steam. Subtlety finishes lingering and moves to leave the room and the train stops at a destination I did not decide. But I wore my hiking boots.

If today would bring me closer to yesterday, I sometimes think, and always it is with a wistful way about my eyes. They seem to grow old. I will not take them out dancing.

But be assured every part of me is dancing. However the hell I want.

Straw hat little good in the rain, little good creeks flowering down his face but a face like sunshine. He says, Howdy.

How do you do, I say.

His smile is a daffodil valley crisscrossing rivers of rainflow from his disheveled everywheres.  And he says, Well, and how are you and yours?

Me and mine? One and same.

His mouth makes to whistle without sound.

Mine makes to speak what I have been thinking, which is I am stuck in the indigo in-between, maybe more an object.

My mouth speaks that I am stuck in th’ go-between.

Today’s mouth speaks he is sorry my being is interstituated.

Now the sky’s mouth speaks, in superlative volumes, the rain quickens and thickens, and Today climbs to the dry porch where I have been being pert and purposeless. His denim overall-clasps jangle and creech the concrete, metallic ringing rallying cry of solidarity with the rain’s campaign to unburden the multitudes. Liberate the sky. The cumulonimbi rumble a return, poised to fight; Today and I listen and we meditate on this surge of sound and we are subjects, doing and not being done to.

Same as we are objects, being done to and not doing. Being rained upon and not caring, at least not Today.

Today says, Tomorrow came on time?

Yesterday.

She came yesterday? Today says.

No, I mean, Yesterday came. Still waiting on Tomorrow, I say.

Today nods. Today’s straw hat nods.

Your hat… I say.

Your substance… Today says.

The hat is you. You are the hat.

I’m the hat? But what does that mean? But say, did you get into that existential haystack? Stuff? Things?  He asks.

You’re the hat, you’re weathered and gleeful. Is that a stretch, I say. But, oh, stuff and things… I’m still sorting. Substance isn’t manufactured out of nothing, you know.

Today says, I reckon I agree. About the hat. But I doubt you make progress dwelling on the existence of nothing.

Is it much good in the rain? Your hat? But hey, nothing’s what I got. Can’t make much of it, if substance is matter. Matter is neither created nor destroyed, right?

Naw, no good in the rain but good you know, I like a bit of drops creeping down my crown and in my hair, wash away the old, you know, have to stay with the times so long as I am, Today says so philosophical. He says, But substance, matter, call it what you will, you gotta make out of what’s there.

Nothing there, I say.

Check again, Today says.

We listen to the rain and I think about checking again, think about Tomorrow until Today, the daffodilial beatific, straw brimmed weatherer, claps a hand on my back and moves to move. The rain spiffs to a whisper.

You realize, he says, you keep thinking there’s no-thing you’ll miss the yes-thing. Maybe everything. It’ll sneaker out the side-door and you start hearing echoes. Then just sit around and chew bones, that’s what nothing feels like.

I already know, believe it, I say.

Self-target fulfilling prophecy fixation, he says, real singsong he says it, his straw hat says it, hat and he being one, beaming one, and now they start their jaunting away to the plip-plip percussives of a rain.

What’s that to mean, I call to his disappearing form.

Thunderous upstart muffles his response but I know it, know what Today has said, even as fading from sight I hear him whistling, growing a groove in a new grain of sound.

The lightning won’t strike near here. I listen to the rain. Substance what was unseen appears to me, soundless storm-wrecked and crumbling to give itself to what newness I will make of it. Today I make a yes-thing of it.

My biking life got even better when my friend Erin, a mechanic at a local bike shop, took initiative toward creating a space for women cyclists to ride and repair bikes together. We put the word out to our feminist sisters and drew a decent number of women for the first Grease Rag Ride & Wrench. We had a good mix of new cyclists and experienced ones, some on cruisers and hybrids, some racers and mechanics–and all in attendance shared the common goal of supporting and encouraging each other. I learned how to change a tube and put a tire back on, clean and lube a chain, and identify some of the parts on a bicycle.

We made Grease Rag a regular event, riding casually as a group and then meeting at the shop to adjust and replace, grease and lube, true and tinker. Erin started up the Grease Rag blog and recruited a few volunteers to help organize and facilitate. When she left Minneapolis in the fall, the organization fell into the capable hands of other volunteers, and continues to thrive thanks to the dedication and creativity of its members.

Grease Rag marked the beginning of a new era in my cycling life. Cycling has always appealed to me and many others because it’s INDEPENDENCE. Cyclists don’t get stuck in rush-hour traffic on the highway, and we can fit where cars can’t. (Idling, schmidling!) Moreover, dependence on a motorized vehicle means you gotta carve out time in your schedule to exercise. Not so on a bicycle! You can get to where you’re going and get a workout doing it. It’s the SHIT.

If you drive, you gotta pay for gas to power your automobile, and we all know that’s a waste of money. Plus I hear there’s toxic crude oil spewing and spurting from several exploded rigs in the Gulf of Mexico. That sucks. And there’s the expense of fixing a car. Something breaks down and you gotta get it to the shop and shell out hundreds just to get it looked at. LAME.

But enough elitism! It’s much more productive to promote cycling by calling attention to the benefits of the activity rather than pooh-poohing motorized vehicles. Obviously, driving is lame and boring and destructive, but there’s an equally long list of reasons cycling is BLISS. And I will venture down that avenue in a future entry.

But anyway. As a cyclist, my transportation costs amounted to very little. When I joined Grease Rag, I cut the cost of maintaining and fixing my bike practically in half. Now I only have to pay for parts. The labor I can do myself. This makes the word “independence” all the meaningfuller. I mean, sweeter! All the sweeter. Nom nom nom, sugary freedom.

Now, I’m a long way from being able to fix my bike every time something goes wrong. I still lack the knowledge to solve some basic mechanical problems. But you gotta start somewhere, right?

For me, it started when I watched and listened patiently while Erin put a bottom bracket back together, and when my friend Anton helped me clean my chain and reattach it, and when I had my bike turned upside down in the living room and with my own two hands and hot-pink levers I changed a tire tube with the guidance of my partner who had been doing his own bike work for years and years. He respectfully told me how to do it without once touching the tire or the levers or the wheel or the bike. He also provided enthusiastic support and encouragement when I got involved with Grease Rag.

My progress as a mechanic has been slow but I’m OK with that. One of the central goals of Grease Rag is to help our fellow women, trans and femme cyclists feel confident and empowered. I might be ill-equipped to fix my stupid seized seatpost, and I know when the time comes I won’t be able to build that hot new wheelset without some assistance and support, but one thing I have in spades is CONFIDENCE, and that’s no small potatoes. It’s BIG HUSKY potatoes. Confidence at the repair stand is every bit as necessary as confidence doing a track stand at a red light or riding in wintry wonderlands of skiddy-up skiddy-up keep the rubber side DOWN and own the road! Own it!

I am quite abusing the caps-lock key today, but it’s for GOOD REASON. I cannot emphasize enough how valuable Grease Rag and even casual bike repair with friends and former partners has been in my development as a self-reliant, empowered cyclist, and equally so in my personal growth as an independent, self-confident woman.

In Minneapolis there are many events, classes and spaces for women to work on bikes, ride together, write about biking, teach and learn and share skills and knowledge about all things bike-cycle. These opportunities for women are imperative in the male-dominated arena. Contrary to Liz Smutko’s insistence that feminist cyclists are a bunch of problematizers whining about non-existent sexism, I believe the cycling community, or what I have witnessed of it, continues to accommodate and celebrate the needs, interests, attitudes and feats of men much more often and with greater fanfare than it attends to women and trans cyclists’ needs, interests and achievements.

This is certainly something to be addressed at length, and you can count on me to address it up, address it down, but it’s raining! I gotta get my laptop indoors STAT!

G2G BRB TTYL ETC.

[Insert clever segue here.]

My first five years as a Minneapolitan aren’t so glamorous where bicycles are concerned, so let’s get right to the pulp of this orange. 2007. After a year-long trial period, I bought my roommate’s bike from her. It was a French affair she’d found orphaned and wheelless in an alleyway. A motherless child, spray-painted gold, make and year unknown. What I did know is that it worked well enough to get me from A to B, B to C, and  A to Z when I was feeling gutsy.

I named her Bucky the Pony. It was my first road bike, and it was the launchpad from which I leapt happily into FREEDOM. I got a helmet, finally, and a light set, and I rode my bike everywhere, rain or shine. Even when the weather took a turn for the frigid, I rode my bike.

This was a first for me. It was my first winter of biking. I had misgivings, and I took a few spills, and occasionally I gave up and rode the bus (with Bucky the Pony on the rack–I never left home without her). But damn it, I did it. By myself, and for myself.

Early in the summer of 2008, Bucky the Pony became terminally ill and had to be put down, and that’s when I really fell in love. No disrespect to the memories of that Gold Unknown (as she was called at the Hub where I brought her for a tune-up).  Always I will love my old Bucky, the transition bike, the bike that made biking a way of life for me. There was no turning back after that.

The very day that Bucky the Pony broke down, I received a marvelous new bike as a gift. My new love was an old stud, a Raleigh with a dark gray frame and a stem that made me weak in the knees. (Literally.)

Jewby and I were unseparable. I did my first alleycat race on that bike, and won (thanks to my fast, experienced teammates). I put in a lot of miles that summer, biking to Lake Elmo, to St. Paul and back again, and all around the trails and lakes that make Minneapolis a very nice place to live.

Then Jewby took me down, and I mean DOWN, but I got back up again…

Had we our druthers to drink with our nothers we would be in perpetual motion on machines of manifestivus, mechanic motherwonders of multipurpose, powdered purple, pedal-powered. Picnic on the sweets in reach, plum and peach. And a nectarine smithered each.

Our breathing is worded blue and threaded true. Our seethings we pedal each other through, that’s the way through. Artifacts and archives brushed by rust and dust, mildew mold or must, or mere smatter of ashes long past and swept as hair from the sweatened brow, the nape, the ears.

Nothing to sweep here. Much to see and at turns feel while asmuch to involuntarily relay from a busied body of chords issuing air out, inarticulable appreciation.

The museum only a memory bank, its business is ticket sales, endowments and rubber bands’ll play any venue you like, any color, any day of the week.

In whose middle points we pause to tend our jaws, our jars, wherein our shares are stashes of stacked wildcard-kind pietry. This kind flows unevenly in spurts and streams, a mush of mash and a meal easily digested if painstakingly baked, as is never the case in these days of Simon says please.

The soup-for-souls rigmarole we know as Simon says peas, Simon says porridge, Simon in the pot, Simon nine days old.

It gets murky much, but make we do. Make moods of primary colors, secondaries set aside or gone untried, like the lone tub of store-bought dip mingling in the potluck spread of artisan breads and small-range grass-batch free-fed finger-foods. Gloves off! (Somewhere down the block the robbers grin and, “Crowbars up!” They’ve got all night.)

Eyes start a weird way of waning in perfected parody of our lunar reliable, our overhead model du jour una vez todos los meses, or pardon my miscount. The eyes have a lot to say.

The eyes have a start to say a weird way of peacorn popnuts, that wait you to finish the sentence before they close. Shop’s closed, then, they’ll say, and it’s a threat to be taken with seriosity, these eyes, in their place, olly-olly-all home free to raid the freezer. Thank it has ice, to numb out the gum, to blot out the human stain, tho this is in vain, and here comes it the inniment imnate in-Kuwait inchworm’s fate boom crashaling drong! of the tra-ain!