I Wish I Was An Elephant

I forgot that sadness has a place in poetry,
despite despair's clear handwriting
on the dingy walls of art.

I forgot that angry was a product of pain,
despite the rage I can wield like a weapon.

I forgot about love being found and not borne,
despite remembering the kind white softness of my mother's hands,
and the earnest spittle of my father's goodnight kiss.

I forgot how art can heal,
could only stare at the ragged hole rejection left.

Attention, Wells Fargo; Even Your Employees Get It

I recently had some medical problems I had to take off work for, not to mention pay for out of pocket.  I'm moving to Nashville at the end of the month, so time and money are very important.  As me and my boyfriend were doing our finances for the move, and the weeks after, I decided I'd try to get an economic hardship forbearance on my student loan($315/month, serviced by Wells Fargo) for the month of November.  I figured that unemployment would be a decent economic hardship.  Turns out I was wrong.

Wells Fargo has changed their forbearance/deferment policies at least 3 times since they've taken over my Wachovia private loans.  The policy changes have included losing any sort of deferment for a private loan, and only one forbearance is allowed per year, no matter your employment status.  I took a forbearance in April, because my shitty job was only scheduling me 3 times a week(at 8.50/hour-- FUCK YOU MAX BRENNER).

I wasn't intending to get upset at the lady.  Dealing with student loan servicers over the past 5 years has taught me that you get much more done when you are nice to a person over the phone.  They are working for a living just like me, and more often than not, are not evil hardasses.  The lady I spoke today was very kind, though maybe not the most well-informed, as I told her about my recent injury.  She checked my account, and regretfully informed me that I had no more forbearance time until next year.  My father co-signed on my loans, so Wells Fargo is much less understanding about my personal circumstances.  To them, the co-signer is one more way to get paid.

I didn't mean to get upset, to cry, but my voice shook as I thanked her for her time.  She apologized, sounding almost on the verge of tears herself.  "You could consolidate, but you already have a better interest rate than you'd get right now.  They have to do something, because these kids can't pay these loans, not right out of college, not anymore.  The money's just not there, the jobs aren't there.  It's just not there."  She sighed sadly, "I'm sorry, honey."   Her unexpected sympathy made me tear up more, so I agreed with her that it was very hard.  She apologized for not being able to help me and we hung up.

My parents helped me get these loans, because few 19 year olds look good enough on paper to guarantee a $50,000 student loan.  I love my parents, and while we've had some rough patches, I respect what they've done for me.  However, if I were the only signer on this loan, and had the choice, I'd default on the fucker as soon as humanly possible.  Wells Fargo has been bailed out by the federal government and is BIGGER than it was BEFORE the stock market crash.  I'm 25 years old, uninsured, a waitress, and about to relocate and there is NOTHING that Wells Fargo can do for me about a $315 student loan payment?  I get emails from them, offering me $25,000 if I switch to paperless statements.  Why can I not get any help?

I urge you, if you have a private student loan from the big four (Wells Fargo, Citigroup, JPMorganChase, or Bank of America):  Default on the fucker.  Take your money out of their banks.  Protect yourself from their corrosive, insidious greed.

On the same topic, I've got two credit cards.  One, a Capital One card,I got when I turned 18.  The other pays for the computer I'm using now.  I've been making more money than I used to at work, and have been paying over the minimum balance on both credit cards.  Next thing I know, my mailbox is deluged with offers not only from Capital One("We see that you've been doing a great job!  Have another credit card!") but from Bank of America, Citibank, Orchard Bank and any number of other shadow companies all under the same big four financiers.  They don't stop, because people still take these credit cards.  When you're under $50,000 of credit card debt, another $500 at 25% interest doesn't seem to be that big of a deal.  They don't stop, because they don't care.

What I'm saying isn't news to anyone, that much is clear from the widespread Occupy protests that have reverberated around the world.  However, the tone of these protests seems a little precious to me, a little too self-aware and immersed in the meta-aesthetic of the Internet.  This doesn't faze a corporation whose government not only saved it from failing, but bolsters it still, and gives it the same rights as a human being, but without the same responsibility of paying taxes.   I'm not sure what the outcome of this movement will be, but I'm certain that until the gap between the poor and the rich is, if not closed, lessened, the discontent and anger that permeates this country will bring everyone- the Big Banks, the little protesters, your parents, your nextdoor neighbor- to their knees.

Stay strong.  And, if anything, Occupy Your Own Mind.  Form a real opinion and make it heard.

The Getaway #2

"My hands," Nadeena's voice was raspy with crying and exhaustion.  "No, my fingernails, they're still so goddamn dirty."
Eli's heart twisted like a churn through something hard and nearly dried at that.  A tear ran silently down his face as he, deliberately now, stared out the windshield into the grey sheets of rain.  He threw his head to the side slightly and blinked it away impatiently.  She could cry, wail and carry on, but he had to be made of stone.  One of them had to, or they were completely and utterly fucked.

Nadeena moaned a little and took a deep, hiccupping breath.
"Okay, we have to stop somewhere and get some goddamned... baby wipes, or something."  She shook her head at this, a laugh mixing in to a sob.  "And a Dr. Pepper."

Eli laughed despite himself, and the situation, and the rain.  "Yeah, I guess we should.  I guess we fuckin' should."  He laughed again, louder, suddenly filled with warmth and gratitude for the circumstances that brought them together, damned as they were.

"I wiped my nose on your sleeve," Nadeena giggled a little.
"Okay.  Phew.  Okay, baby.  I think we're nearly out of these mountains.  Canton should have a place.  We need gas, too."
"You go in and pay.  I'll pump gas.  Can't be paying for baby wipes with blood all over me."  She laughed once more, abruptly, ironically, and straightened up off of Eli's arm.
"After that, we gotta drive east.  All night.  Hell, even maybe to South Carolina.  Myrtle Beach, maybe.  Beach sound good, baby?"
"Yeah, that sounds pretty good.  Baby."

They lapsed into silence as the cartoonish curving of the mountain highway began to straighten out, and the lights illuminating the road began to strobe regularly through the cab of the truck.

"Canton, 2 miles."  Eli absently read the sign aloud, but Nadeena didn't stir.  She had fallen into a deep nap, face against her own shoulder.

"Nadeena, Nadeena baby, wake up.  Do you still want a Dr. Pepper?"

Nadeena awoke instantly with an uncanny alertness.  "Yeah.  And chips."

Eli cracked a smile at that and made a right into a brightly lit gas station.

"Don't forget the wipes, babe."  Nadeena kissed him and nuzzled the roughness of his cheek.  He turned his face to kiss her fully on the mouth.  He couldn't help himself and brought his hand up into her hair, pulling her up into him.  He wanted her now, he felt his heart beat in his hands are he ran his fingers through her curls.  She rose up and gripped the back of his head.  She pulled away for a brief, painful second.
"Drive over under that tree, baby."  And her hand was slipped under the band of his boxers.

They made love like warring tribes that night.  It was brief and brutal, and any illusion of secrecy was destroyed by the squeaking of the pick-up truck's axles, and the slow hoot of Nadeena, releasing the clock's spring of tension that had been winding for the last 36 hours.  She lay her head back against the fogged window and grinned at him, lighting a cigarette.
"Now we both need baby wipes."  She watched him pull up his jeans and thrilled a little in the coolness of the leather seat against her naked thigh.

The gas station was empty, save for the attendant, who had very little reaction when the door's bell jingled at Eli's entrance.

He could smell Nadeena all over himself, but smelling like pussy was better than smelling like blood.  Or gore.

As Eli headed towards the drink cooler, he felt the hairs on his neck go up suddenly.  There was someone in here looking for him, he knew it.

Hands shaking, he looked blindly at the colorful soda bottles and shut the door without taking anything.  The shelf at the end of the aisle had a shelf of bug spray.  He grabbed a can and bit his lip.  He sprung around he corner of the aisle and immediately knocked over a life-sized cut-out of Dale Earnhart, Jr., holding a Mountain Dew can.

The clerk looked up slowly from the glossy magazine he was sleeping over.  Eli opened his mouth to form an explanation, but nothing came out.  He shrugged, the bug spray can still in his hand.  Shaking his head, he replaced the can where he found it.  He got their snacks and some water, pausing briefly before the small condom selection.  He grinned and pocketed a box of three.

Baby wipes, sodas and food.  He put down a twenty.  "Whatever's left, put it on pump-number-three."

uncensored

It’s not that sweeping, declarative, whole, beautiful sentences that I wrote last summer are gone. Just disappeared.  It’s that I have less to write sentences about, less sub- and un-conscious desires to ferret out of not just my tangled synapses, but those of a man who became my mutual muse, secret passion, and ultimately, the love of my life.  Love, easy love, is not that conducive to good writing.  Want, now there’s something to write about.  Unrequitedness, desire under tables and through notebook pages.  These things beg for pen to paper, like lips to lips, like hands running illicitly and so strangely innocent over hands.  Now, I have some worry that my shine may have worn off, that he may no longer be quite so charmed(in a morbid way) by my bouts of depression, my fits of rage, my manic mornings of giggling and product.  The ins and outs of me and what I mean to him.  The stringy cosmic stuff that bound us together from even earlier than we knew.  No, not after this long.  Not after this much.  Distance is a terrible sort of numbing useless pain.  Something you can only write about for so long; longing and loneliness for someone who is undoubtedly yours.  Unsympathetic.  Whiny. 

I want to cut large swaths through the teeming crowds of people who live here.  Their fears and loves and losses and triumphs and frustration and release all batter at the thin thin wall of my skullskullskull.  The skull that contains the litany of disappointments and failures, not-quites and not-yets and all of the things that I just couldn’t get my shit together and do.  The show I didn’t write, the poetry I drunkenly recited, the boys I fragrantly fucked and was never, ever loved by.  The embarrassments, the entanglements, the tragedies and the stubbed toes.  The lost nights to whiskey, wine, coke, weed, dick.  The times I woke up on trains, the mornings I woke up in boy-beds, aching and cramped.  The nerves I let hang raw in black-box theaters across Lower Manhattan, expecting to get as much back as I put into it.  The always-present need for money interfering in my everything.  The friends who can’t find the time to read my play.  The unreturned phone-calls and dishonored promises.  The cut-rate headshots, the re-definition of myself, the striving for a commercial “look”, the commercials I never wanted to do.  The auditions I knew I nailed, and never heard from again.  The lack of feedback.  The lack of validation.  The city I came to to search for both of those animals, like unicorns or Yeti.  Something mythical and if photographed, disputable. 

This city is constantly masturbating, is constantly mutilating, constantly throwing itself against the bordering rivers and the heaving, breathing industry that encapsulates it.  There are hundreds of thousands of protesters downtown right now, and they are being beaten.   Shoved.  The city anthropomorphized into batons and uniformed thugs.  I should go down there, but I won’t, probably.  I don’t want get arrested.  I don’t want to get hurt.  I am not brave in that way, not right now.  Not as a nearly 26 year old woman with a future and a little house and a wonderful man waiting for me down South.  I peel the posters, postcards and pictures off the wall.  Smile as I sit on my loft bed, remembering living with Holly.  Remembering the struggles I’ve gone through just to live here, just for the privilege of remaining on this island.  In the middle of it.  Nothing more.  Everything else is struggle, as well.  Leaving the house is akin to jumping into a pit of howling, screaming monkeys and hoping they won’t notice me.  The cold has come back, the wind too.  I yell and hiss at the wind, cursing it for chilling me right down to the middle of my heart.  I’m ready for more moderate weather, and a more moderate life. 

The double-dutch competition that is New York City has finally tired me out, but at least I’m escaping without tangled ropes and burnt ankles.