The Girl At The Bottom Of The Glass

There is a space between completion and beginning. This space overflows with work, friends, time spent living. I've never been in this place before.

The book is finished, and there is emptiness.

Focus breaks. I have fragments of what i am currently calling "Book 2". not the most original title, but for now it works. I have a growing pile of Query letters waiting for the right addressess and contacts. I have a full-time job, a wife, and 4 dogs. I have a little space where I can go and play drums, but I'm not making music, I'm just releasing some noise. Noise with a beat.

and sometimes....
sometimes there's poetry.

The girl at the bottom of the glass

Memories fade through

Like torn photographs

Edges burnt

Always in black and white

She tilts her head

Closes her eyes

Sighs

And slightly smiles

He used to be there

Solid

Now it’s like music, fading

You know the song

… there’s a ghost…

She sits like static

Between cigarette smoke

And another pint

And she breathes

Slight ache

Missing the nearness he used to bring

But the absence holds strength

Like the reflection of an empty seat

Next to her

This is not loss

This is learning

This is not failure

This is future

This is movement

The DJ moves into another

Slow sad country song

     …I fall to pieces…

And her smile fades

Like a Polaroid

left in the sun

sometimes    more light

isn’t the answer

it only makes the shadows

harder to see

and she smiles again

against candle glow

and another pint

brushing red hair    out

of her eyes

feeling like it’s a little symbolic

an annoyance gone

and it was so easy

she stands up

holding a cigarette

to her lips

and she stumbles

alcoholic

across concrete floor

until the night

finds her

moving into the future

a crumpled photograph

left on the bar

forgotten

behind her

Jukebox Outtake 1

Found on the cutting room floor. Perhaps this will be reworked into something else, perhaps it will live only on these virtual pages...

A Jukebox Cut:

She still feels a wall of tears behind her eyes, and it almost breaks when she hears Martin’s voice.

 “I know, me neither. Johnny and Sebastian are coming up, and we’ll all go to Vancouver together.”

Iris hangs up, pours another glass of wine, and looks out her apartment window. It’ll be good to see Sebastian again, Jonathan too. She still feels him in her heart. But Iris knows there’s a reason they aren’t together. That’s why she left. She couldn’t be there when he found the other woman. Iris doesn’t know who this woman is, but she knows that Jonathan needs to be with her.

The headaches have been hitting hard again, and this time the images aren’t good. There are blood and flowers, black roses—not blue ones. There are the long hallways of an empty school, shuddering in scratched black and white, and there is Charlotte. Standing alone by the Planetarium, whispering something, but the sound doesn’t match. It’s scratched and skipping, like a needle playing the wrong record.

In The Beginning

It's been a long time coming, and now it's done.

Pushing together and tearing apart words and ideas for the past couple of decades, not sure what would happen with them, but knowing that something would happen.

Too many poems to mention, too many little paragraphs and stories edited down into oblivion.

Life and love and travel and work slipping in all the time. Everything is distraction, and there is fear in completion.

But now, it's done.

Step one, at any rate. 

Step one: Write A Novel.

okay, got it.

The Devil's Jukebox.
79,000 words.

Step two.... well, working on that one right now.
Publish that Novel.

it's January, 2013. Let's make this the year of the Devil's Jukebox.

-xo-
  Marcel