jolie laide

jolie laide

I started this when I lived in Brooklyn and struggled for grace in a city that grants moments of beauty and ugliness breathtakingly close to one another. Now I live in a place where things are a different kind of ugly and the beauty is pedestrian. I struggle with that.

2.10.2007

More scraps from various pads:

The monster side of the bed. You know the side, the side open to the door, or the window, or closest to the closet. For years I slept on the monster side. I didn't trust him, whoever he was, to do the right thing when the monsters came.

The woman on the train that is so beautiful she transcends her bad make-up. I want to tell her how sublime she is, beg her to scrape the garbage off her lily. But who am I to say anything. In the dim black window of the subway car I see my blurry reflection, clear enough to show the marks under my eyes. This year has aged me so.

The crazy drunk man on the train who turned his face to me, big eyed, guileless as a baby. He was working his mouth, trying so hard to say something, trying over and over. At first I thought he said "I hate you" so I made an I-don't-understand face and asked "You hate me?" and he tried again, and again, finally saying "Behave. Behave. Behave. Behave." Oh, I can hear the sound of his monsters, whistling under his skin, and just like that, from under my own skin, I can hear the sound of my heart cracking.

4 Comments:

Blogger EastWesterner said...

My monsters never took sides. They were fairly indiscriminate.

10:23 AM  
Blogger ttractor said...

Yeah, there are those sneaky ones that come up from the crack between the wall and the bed. I used to stuff a pillow down there to thwart them. I think it worked, as I have no evidence that the thing I feared most has happened: monsters would come and eat my butt!

4:58 PM  
Blogger Unknown said...

Sometimes monsters in my dreams took the form of a cardboard box with glowering, muppet eyes. One in particular came out of an elevator, turning around when the doors parted.

One time I managed to knock the box off, and inside was ust a dachsund who ran off to some corner. Still, that one made a hell of an entrance.

8:40 PM  
Blogger ttractor said...

oh, how interesting is that? I just realized my childhood monsters never had a form because they always sneaked up from behind. I'm jealous you got to take a crack at your satanic dachshund face on.

3:16 PM  

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