I very rarely dook book signings anymore, readings even rarer nowdays.  Youth folded around me a sweet cloud of invincibility, but experience has taught me to be the surly little imp on the edge of crotchety great auntie aprons.

In my twenties I spun with the best of them.  At that strange moment in time there popped up from around our home a new breed of coffee house, mid 90's this was, called Cafe Newz. Located in New Brunswick, NJ, an odd and eclectic little city in and of itself, this cafe lured and hosted many a odd one as well as the mainstream.  My first debauchery with flavored coffees, hmmmmmmmmmmmm, almond roast and caramel creams, yum!  I am addicted to the inpronouncable delicacies to this day!

On any given evening you could find college professors from Rutgers mingling it with GenXers, old men playing chess with the goth chicks fresh from the piercing salon sporting labrettes and nipple rings poking through tiny little tshirts emblazoned with scandalous and delicious sayings.  There were the lost and psychologically damaged dancing together with the mods and skinheads and oi boys  to the music of one particular ska band crammed into the basement area.

But it was the poetry readings two nights a week that drew crowds upon crowds.  At this time I had a small book of prose published, 'Reflections of the Forthcoming Apocalypto', and the owner, who became an extremely good friend before the reaper felled his scythe across his dreams, displayed my own and other writer's works for sale.

I did several book signings, rolling in the cream of adulation from the women and the scholars and the mad, the raging and the young lost in the hustle and shifting of society.  The women were beautiful and fluffed sweetness stroking up against my thoughts, milking my moments for every word, laughing at my turn of phrases, delighted and coy as if they were school girls.  I gave them beauty to eat and power to drink, and they fed my need to be of some worth to someone.  The scholars praised the inside out twist of words and double entendres.  classifications were their favorite waste of my time.  The mad saw what big eyes I had full of dark space and sunlight and meadows, and they slinked in close for warmth but always unobtrusive.

The men all had the same agenda, young and old alike, praise and lavish the chickie pie with gush gush words while imagining her in comprimising positions in front of their base needs.  Droll and trite, even back then I had stopped playing that nonsensical mating game.  I would have had more respect for them if they had simply stated exactly what they wanted instead of playing coy and charming.  Then I could have simply stated a "H*** no, go away."  and all would have been right with the world.  Then again, perhaps my damaged heart played a role in this, and I turned away the good with the bad eggs, not caring one iota.

But onward.  The nights of readings were electric and alive.  Dozens came to spin their minds and emotions and souls through the night into the dawn, drinking too mcuh coffe and smoking too many cigarettes, and sometimes giving too much to the world at hand.

I stood in light and became my poetry, my body moved with the words and the silence was clear spring air.  I could scream and shout and purr and sing and weave a tapstry through the air to captivate and give everything away for it was given back in the onrush of alive bursts. hands clapping a deafening crescendo, voices raised in recognition of some somnambulistic Pandora flipped out of her box for the evening.

They ate me up alive but then gave me back to myself in the most beautiful chalice inlaid with pieces of their spirits. 

When you touch someone so directly, exposed in light under the moon and soft lit candles in the summer breeze, it is the most astonishing metamorphosis life takes.

In my twenties I was a poetic open book for whoever stumbled by for a bit of bread and milk and cherry pie under the arbor of my words.

ANd then I met him, and he took my voice, and chained me up in his illness, his dance with chronic alcoholism.  No, he wasn't the one who shattered my bones and crushed my identity, that one was long dead by then, but I would have preferred the bone shattering moments to the crushing ones at the side of an alcoholic who was dying and killing everything around him.

I did no more signings, no more readings, that decade of magikal faity tales was gone.  But my goodness, I did my best writing duriong those four years of sheer imbalance.

It took me a decade to reclaim my bones, and reweave my heart, and mend the threads of my spirit into some form of humanity.

And I wrote a book and another. 

And at the signings, the women shine around me like the most exquisite moths, their words loving my words are the greatest gift I could have.  Men are still men, but they are a bit more dignified since I wear a golden band around my finger, it dosen't always discourage, but mostly it is a help to turn away wayward souls dreaming things into me that I'm not, dreaming things into me they want.

And I have begun to do readings, and it's as if I had never been still inside the crystal coccoon of my own spinning.  I may be a damaged and broken thing but I still have my words, my loom, my tapestry of hope and love and a passion that makes my very atoms collide and dance and open up my Pandora's box, and unweave my hair to let fall over the tower.  But I am the one who climbs down, no recues, no princes neede here.

WHat do you have to offer the world? he asked me.

I have the gift of words, and words are everything!

I will sign a thousand books and shake a thousand hands and kiss a thousand cheeks, and scream my voice into the thrall of the moment, or purr through the bones of the audience.

It is all I have to give, it is everything I am.