January 15-21, 2001: Ravi Menon and Mary Jane Tenerelli

Inside The Bubble What a flow lay in the movement,  the gurgle of a shimmering scale, in the decade of the proverbial bubble when everybody held their breaths Behind an embezzlement of inches opinions and smiles had crackled inside glasses frothing under shouting lights Music spilling out of bone china bowls, utterly classical in these improvised years Even the man who went to sleep among the weeds had his wife thinking he wanted to keep the fish company, as though drowning himself thrice would rid her of him and herself All in a single piano chord of notes breaking into tears on china bowls In this city, the rats chase the cats into the sewers No prizes, I know who finishes first at the big yellow line There are those who still whine over the strain of inhaling apathy, those running on calling it lead pollution,  we laugh it off with our marble skins Morning mist cocktailed with last nights’s pegs of memory, tremendous inches that separate: Rains and roses, riots,  shattered jaws, polyvinylchloride Even the vultures are pecking somewhere else Humanity harvesting its undercurrents,  the brawn of cat-and-mouse conversations swamping a few good senses, we still have a few great ideas fighting without end to finish in the streets I have seen fierce battles won without collarbones wearing away, those purloined victories (Blood, glass and garbage in the recycling factory, flesh and disagreements piled up inside trucks, the rest of us trotting off to overtime) In the dated rouge gallery,  actors wear tepid eyes nobody’s missing their lines,  flaming Romeo, pale as a rose Achilles’ fears the tedium of his heels Brick and mortar grow in amoebaic convulsions under the blanket of different roles,  stages reassembled and torn apart, awash in the language of glycerine Men who judge a salacious contest between the divided loyalties of altruism and the arms of Marie Antoinette I don’t know who arrives here, who leaves this place The actor and the curtain-boy are ready to swap dialogues Good performers in roles of no consequence, malnutrition swims in pools of neon, tangerine This lipstick stage is french-kissed by pillars Beehive buildings furious with people and parts alive in the leisure of their emptiness, theirs is an inanimate silence, barely moving Twenty years, a rumour of old age,  and blankets of cloud are drawn at their feet, kissing their dust: they who had judged their time was nigh to grow into dust again Often, these are edifices pulling their stomachs in like slumberous monks slowed down to a ponderous prayer sitting down dead on the earth in their euthanasic modesty Orchards of steel and brick, the mazes to an end Through roads speared in inconceivable directions gutters and skyscrapers sprout from the seeds of our desires, fears, the frenzied dance of our chimeras Our ambitions are scattered like bubbles of sweat, beads snatched and woven under the strings of grinding wheels The guests at the dinner table do mind when I treat my hands to grilled lobster They will read into my hands applying no full-stops between fingers The grill of their eyes I fear more than the fish bared open like a sore, the emotional striptease Their swallowing mouths leave no room for beauty, laughing Buddha in no danger of going on diet No danger of choking on champagne The traffic takes over Harbour Bridge coughing and writhing out metal in conflagrant shapes, flowing up and down into the bubble’s fluttering nucleus Down 14th Main where the sidewalk breaks into the diversions of slush there are people who hand out music betwixt the swill of a hat Not to forget that woman who enters the brightest car she will see and sits inside for a fee While entering the next car and exiting the next she leaves behind the remnants of a smile, and serves out friendly grins for free Sometimes, inside the mousetrap lift there are a few good people clotted in the glue of providence who beg to be excused a little too loudly.

Mary Jane Tenerelli
mjtenerelli@hotmail.com

Bio (auto)

Mary Jane Tenerelli is a freelance writer, poet, and mother of two small children living and trying to stay sane in the picture postcard town of Northport, New York (famous for it’s pretty harbor and satanic murder )

The following work is Copyright © 2001, and owned by Mary Jane Tenerelli and may not be distributed or reprinted in any form whatsover without written permission from the author.

Night Drive I want to get into the car And drive on and on in the dark Making for Santa Fe or New Orleans, Anywhere but this house, this cape of claims With its goose down, gimme’s and get me nows I am not Rapunzel I’ve no wish To be climbed like Everest And then obligated to provide A cool drink, a warm bath To the usurpers of my solitude In the car there is only the steering wheel, The gas and the brake To operate at will I have been alone, but not alone enough The children will have to go elsewhere For mother care, and adequate feedings I will live on roadside apple pie and night air I will grow like Night Shade I will shed my size and tower Into the open sky with stars I will steal a convertible And live lush on the lam Mother will always be somebody else: The woman just in the corner Of my sped up vision, Shushing a backseat of brats In a different lane; A woman who bears No resemblance to me.