I’m driving down a dark boulevard. It’s scarred by wet rain stains. It’s pitted with pitch puddles, a yellow line scratched dimly through it all. Then for some reason, I don’t see the road anymore…
We’re in the forest, hands on saplings, supporting our weight. We swing out towards the waters edge, to catch a glimpse of little heads receding into shells. I see your hair bob; you’re at the end of your arm, you turn and smile… Suddenly I don’t see your lips anymore…
I’m at your house, or on the phone, telling you how my past hurts me and I can’t be hurt again. Oh, but your crying, and I’m crying too, and I know your perfect if only I can make you know that. But I see the microphone dot of my cell phone, and hold on to angry thinking, its tearing us apart. But I can’t hold the image straight, it loosens, slips from grasp…
I’m in your arms or you’re in mine, who can tell in that tangle? Can it be like this forever, I can eat with a straw? You talk to me and tell me everything that rotates your life; like I were just a microphone bud in your soul, picking up resounding bits. I’m at the curtain when you shower, the smell of scrubbed skin and clean hair.
I’m driving; crying… Am I lost; my windshield is wet and blurry, like a contact lens out of place. When it rains, it pours, and I can see only a mirage of happy forest play, and red Frisbee in the park where you never dared to kiss me. I remember kissing you first, I had to, and those eyes made me do it.
I’m on the phone again, telling you I’m confused, starting the shit all over again; the stuff five months was supposed to heal. I cry because I think I can’t stop it, but the truth of the matter is that I can.
It’s not hurt anymore, its counting turtles, its cold nights in your apartment bickering about toilet seats or me getting jealous of your cell phone log. Its sweet words, and some bitter stuff too, and the few days it takes to heal from saying them. It’s the smell of cooking and of eating, and the citrus soap that cleans the plates that I can smell on our hands when we make love afterwards. It’s about seeing those goddamn turtles, and the smile it brings to us, and rotating with a wide grin that catches us both by surprise.
It’s about our little apartment, and our cat that’s probably named after some dead French guy. It’s the need I have to be special to you, and the fear that I get when I think I have lost you to expectations and jealousy. That’s my biggest fear in the world; not sitting on the tub edge and hearing about your corner of the world.
It’s about hugging you goodbye and then hello again, a perfect month apart. It’s about me reaching out to you, and knowing with all my heart you are reaching back too. I know its just black letters in a white screen, but it’s also about young love growing up; together…
Wednesday, May 26, 2004
Tuesday, May 25, 2004
Associate Survival Guide
Us
We are your every day working man, Semi-Confident, Semi-Charmed. We attempt our separatism from capitalism so we must harvest from the “other’s” obvious obsessions and vapid decadence. We differ from the shopper because we possess a human humility and perhaps a morality that is indicative of our retail past. We are the damned salt of the earth.
We sell you pants, shoes and laces to tie them with. We deliver you fish and game with our tools of harvest, and give you licenses to murder them. We spoon feed you babies MRE’s and clothe you with fatigues for traversing the dense urban jungle. We give light in the dark night, we give you the batteries to suck dry. We put the hats on your pretty wife’s head, ones that wont keep her warm but instead build her flock of fake friends by merely being ornamented. We give you socks to keep your fat feet dry in the cold wet of your basement. Slippers to walk your merely luke warm carpet with.
When all that is not enough, we sweep the kernels of sweet corn that somehow missed your maw. We clean our glass and windows of your sweaty palm prints, and wipe your fake food breathed smiles from our heads each night. Then we clean and prepare for the next day with some reckless drive, a force that keeps us moving through it all.
We please the upper class enough to keep them complacent.
We are the new bohemians and nearly the third millennium coal miners. We are the intellectuals but the culturally downtrodden. We are the recluse and refused. We are our mothers fear and concerns. We are the ticking gears of corporate consumerism, we are the cogs in the machine of a humming and bustling global economy.
We are the ASSOCIATES.
------
Them
They are the “shopper”. They are the bourgeois and the imp of a money market. They are the impractical yuppie, and the semi-educated slob. They are sometimes the working man too, but they hide that under egoism and a horrible demeanor.
They are a consumer that lives to consume and extracts the monetary equivalent of their output. They are thrifty and cut coupons, they are wise and accept no substitute to the product that they typically find on infomercials at 4:30 in the morning. The shopper is wizened to your way of selling and will correct you harshly and bluntly when your face fades from a fake grin or when you back is turned to them. They walk with an eye open to scrutinize any passing giggle or trace of sincerity.
The shopper like us to be the mommy, but doesn’t like to be reminded. Don’t clean up their messes when they are looking, they expect that to be a behind the scenes maneuver. Don’t smarten up to old men and surely don’t ask a woman her true size. They are “people” who live whimsical flights of fancy, who believe that their crass consumerist world is reality and that with the correct measurements they can modify their clothes instead of losing weight.
These are the slovenly ilk that count our money and reject our credit, audit our tax returns and seize our scared children when the ex calls the state office and says you don’t feed the kids. These are your divorce lawyers and O.J. attorneys.
These are the tricksters of our world that will blindly seek you out in order to suck your soul. They will tattle, lie and fake pricing discrepancies. Turn not a blind eye to the shopper, it is your destiny to appease his twisted spirit and send him upon his way to the ephemeral yet corporeal other world that is the parking lot.
-----
Weapons of the Trade
There are certain weapons that one must possess in order to take upon the grim duties entailed within our guide. There is of course no shortage of need for basic physical violence, but quite often we are simply outnumbered.
Tact / Wit
This skill involves a certain amount of premeditation and subtlety. When presented with tasks by the shopper, one can with practice, talk the consumer out of interest in the merchandise altogether or out of wanting a certain size. Most of this is a good deal of improvisation and can be combined with the following methods to be more effective.
A simple encounter would go as follows;
“Hi, can I special order this in a size 17?”
“Sure Ma’am, our special order policy is a full deposit and it could take up to 12 weeks for delivery, still want it?”
Sarcasm / Facetiousness
This is the simplest weapon to brandish against the pseudo-educated shopper. When applied tastefully this method can dissuade presence in your department, attention to a specific object, or altogether the expenditure of time in the store. Use wisely because the shopper does tend to snitch on any rude associate and will demand revocation of your job before they shop again. Just use this to stare un-adoringly, look indifferent when they tell stupid jokes, and appear unpleased with the actions of their snotty children.
Techno-babble
By far the most powerful tool for the associate is the ability to create impromptu techno babble. This gives you points in product knowledge and also allows you to flip the tables on the thrifty shopper. The psychological advantage is obviously gained by appearing to be the current expert of the given subject. Bare in mind things like blatant mispronunciations (Chipp-a-paw instead of Chippewa, Vikadin instead of Vibram, or even Carnheart instead of Carhartt) this will immediately cue you into their weak area. Most people cant tell you if Gore-Tex is for waterproofing or for warmth so it is simple to gain the upper hand.
Pawning
Pawning off the customer is a can of mixed blessings. This must be done in a way that includes the other associates and hitherto does not annoy them. Hell hath no fury like an associate that has been duped into dealing with a retarded soccer mom just because you wanted to skate off to the bathroom. Be considerate and remember what you do can return to you in the way of store Karma.
Coordinate with other associates and make a plan of customer volleying that will benefit you all. Stick to the story that you are not allowed out of your specific department lest you be flogged. This will force them to feel alone and in a sea of information which is an obvious segue into techno babble. Excrete a hatred for people that ask you for an ice skate in the shoe department and try to return underwear at the sporting good desk.
Once the premise has been established, this should be a wonderful means to extrude people from the store. They feel juggled and manhandled, virtually violated and personally demolished.
-----
Mission
Only with these tools can we service our obvious conviction to humanity and punish the sludge that ruin our world for profit and the joy of plunder. Only with these weapons can we serve justice and bring down the unholy and corrupted reign of the all mighty dollar!
We are your every day working man, Semi-Confident, Semi-Charmed. We attempt our separatism from capitalism so we must harvest from the “other’s” obvious obsessions and vapid decadence. We differ from the shopper because we possess a human humility and perhaps a morality that is indicative of our retail past. We are the damned salt of the earth.
We sell you pants, shoes and laces to tie them with. We deliver you fish and game with our tools of harvest, and give you licenses to murder them. We spoon feed you babies MRE’s and clothe you with fatigues for traversing the dense urban jungle. We give light in the dark night, we give you the batteries to suck dry. We put the hats on your pretty wife’s head, ones that wont keep her warm but instead build her flock of fake friends by merely being ornamented. We give you socks to keep your fat feet dry in the cold wet of your basement. Slippers to walk your merely luke warm carpet with.
When all that is not enough, we sweep the kernels of sweet corn that somehow missed your maw. We clean our glass and windows of your sweaty palm prints, and wipe your fake food breathed smiles from our heads each night. Then we clean and prepare for the next day with some reckless drive, a force that keeps us moving through it all.
We please the upper class enough to keep them complacent.
We are the new bohemians and nearly the third millennium coal miners. We are the intellectuals but the culturally downtrodden. We are the recluse and refused. We are our mothers fear and concerns. We are the ticking gears of corporate consumerism, we are the cogs in the machine of a humming and bustling global economy.
We are the ASSOCIATES.
------
Them
They are the “shopper”. They are the bourgeois and the imp of a money market. They are the impractical yuppie, and the semi-educated slob. They are sometimes the working man too, but they hide that under egoism and a horrible demeanor.
They are a consumer that lives to consume and extracts the monetary equivalent of their output. They are thrifty and cut coupons, they are wise and accept no substitute to the product that they typically find on infomercials at 4:30 in the morning. The shopper is wizened to your way of selling and will correct you harshly and bluntly when your face fades from a fake grin or when you back is turned to them. They walk with an eye open to scrutinize any passing giggle or trace of sincerity.
The shopper like us to be the mommy, but doesn’t like to be reminded. Don’t clean up their messes when they are looking, they expect that to be a behind the scenes maneuver. Don’t smarten up to old men and surely don’t ask a woman her true size. They are “people” who live whimsical flights of fancy, who believe that their crass consumerist world is reality and that with the correct measurements they can modify their clothes instead of losing weight.
These are the slovenly ilk that count our money and reject our credit, audit our tax returns and seize our scared children when the ex calls the state office and says you don’t feed the kids. These are your divorce lawyers and O.J. attorneys.
These are the tricksters of our world that will blindly seek you out in order to suck your soul. They will tattle, lie and fake pricing discrepancies. Turn not a blind eye to the shopper, it is your destiny to appease his twisted spirit and send him upon his way to the ephemeral yet corporeal other world that is the parking lot.
-----
Weapons of the Trade
There are certain weapons that one must possess in order to take upon the grim duties entailed within our guide. There is of course no shortage of need for basic physical violence, but quite often we are simply outnumbered.
Tact / Wit
This skill involves a certain amount of premeditation and subtlety. When presented with tasks by the shopper, one can with practice, talk the consumer out of interest in the merchandise altogether or out of wanting a certain size. Most of this is a good deal of improvisation and can be combined with the following methods to be more effective.
A simple encounter would go as follows;
“Hi, can I special order this in a size 17?”
“Sure Ma’am, our special order policy is a full deposit and it could take up to 12 weeks for delivery, still want it?”
Sarcasm / Facetiousness
This is the simplest weapon to brandish against the pseudo-educated shopper. When applied tastefully this method can dissuade presence in your department, attention to a specific object, or altogether the expenditure of time in the store. Use wisely because the shopper does tend to snitch on any rude associate and will demand revocation of your job before they shop again. Just use this to stare un-adoringly, look indifferent when they tell stupid jokes, and appear unpleased with the actions of their snotty children.
Techno-babble
By far the most powerful tool for the associate is the ability to create impromptu techno babble. This gives you points in product knowledge and also allows you to flip the tables on the thrifty shopper. The psychological advantage is obviously gained by appearing to be the current expert of the given subject. Bare in mind things like blatant mispronunciations (Chipp-a-paw instead of Chippewa, Vikadin instead of Vibram, or even Carnheart instead of Carhartt) this will immediately cue you into their weak area. Most people cant tell you if Gore-Tex is for waterproofing or for warmth so it is simple to gain the upper hand.
Pawning
Pawning off the customer is a can of mixed blessings. This must be done in a way that includes the other associates and hitherto does not annoy them. Hell hath no fury like an associate that has been duped into dealing with a retarded soccer mom just because you wanted to skate off to the bathroom. Be considerate and remember what you do can return to you in the way of store Karma.
Coordinate with other associates and make a plan of customer volleying that will benefit you all. Stick to the story that you are not allowed out of your specific department lest you be flogged. This will force them to feel alone and in a sea of information which is an obvious segue into techno babble. Excrete a hatred for people that ask you for an ice skate in the shoe department and try to return underwear at the sporting good desk.
Once the premise has been established, this should be a wonderful means to extrude people from the store. They feel juggled and manhandled, virtually violated and personally demolished.
-----
Mission
Only with these tools can we service our obvious conviction to humanity and punish the sludge that ruin our world for profit and the joy of plunder. Only with these weapons can we serve justice and bring down the unholy and corrupted reign of the all mighty dollar!
Wednesday, May 19, 2004
Pretty in Eyebrows
So in retrospect it could have been in any of those countless of deep summer days, spent in the tall park grasses, looking at the crazy people between sessions of engrossment into depthless pages of Foucault, Diderot, or even Vonnegut. I could have recalled any of them with vague and pointless detail, but instead I chose this one to dwell upon and further drive into the conscious bastions of thought. It was this piercing summer day in the park that held on like a regret shaped icicle.
This was the park with the pitted pavement, where I learned to ride my training wheeled bicycle. It was this crab grass knotted knoll where I sat with big sis and tried to read; to the tune of red fish, blue fish. It was the sandy paths and littered tree bottoms that my mother and I first walked when her dear husband passed away; and my father fragmented into a mantelpiece ornament, scattered photographs of faux human poses, and the toothbrush that took damn near a year to find its forgetful way out of our bathroom cup.
It was the same set of three swings. They sat next to the gate, mere feet from the lazy afternoon street, slick thick rubber seats, shined for little asses, and chains laminated to protect little fingers from biting rust. I sat here too when my legs were short enough to swing, when I would flail my little feet hard enough to get some momentum to see over the fence and into the world it protected me from.
But today, here on some warm rock in a city park, I feel like the glowing capitalist Buddha. Full lotus with soft drink names wrestling on my tongue, their citrus twists eloquated by a Proustian like nirvana. How can I come to enlightenment when my proudest memories are cut from associations like park swings and popular children’s literature of the era? Has the great Theodore Giselle hijacked my family recollections with his wacky doodles and witty pronouncements, leaving me with only catchy phrases and sitcom tunes to show for growing up?
I need to stop and somehow grope for something real, an anchor to my identity. I’ll write a bit about modern romance (there is none), and I might sketch out an adventurous story about how a man chases a wounded metaphor all over a dirty little city trying to save her from herself and in turn drawing the precocious entity into his own being.
This is like drinking… I need a subject…
Panning left I catch wind of a middle aged dog walker, rubber mitten on to catch a stray pitch that seems all too inevitable as the mutt throttles at its haunches nearest to the rhododendron side of the shrubbery. I could write a book about dog crapping, little bits of scat-poetry or fun euphemisms for puppy dumps. I could sell it to this woman for sure; maybe add the cost to her subscription to Dog Fancy or some other irrelevant niche advertising haven.
Turn to the cute girls in the water, in their new bathing suits and dryer sheet reeking towels laid out on the sand with their wet butt prints holding them down. They giggle and gossip, rub on some sun lotion, arch their legs gracefully when reclining and make kissy faces when the lip gloss is applied unevenly. I could write a book about their friendship and how it transpires five, twenty five, eighty years down the road. They would buy it, but it might just be too late for me to make enough of a cut to get my kidneys dialysized.
Everyone is just such an actor here. Maybe even me, sitting on the hill and scrutinizing everything below me, playing the role of a disheveled depressive writer who puts on a brave front like he knows what the hell is going on in the world. It a façade of control that the performer tries to exude as he stays the stage in the event of major catastrophe, or in this case a tragedy of perspective. Everyone here just an eyeshot away from being figured out and analyzed down to their very particular and predictable parts. Everyone just players in the grand scheme of… wait…
There she was; her hair, like some fluid cacti, aggressed by the hot breeze of some arid-temperate sandstorm. It held for a moment and was back to brown strands across neck, to the brim of a nape. It reacted like an inverted mug of coco, wild with non-dairy creamer, highlights of softer brown in unstirred drape.
From my hill, she was made of a top of a head, a right arm unsheathed to the elbow, fingers cradling the latest paperback thriller, or a witty coming of age novel, of the autobiography of Jesus.
No! It’s Dharma Bums instead, yet rightfully from this distance I can barely tell if she is merely smelling the Kerouac or reading the frayed edges of the flowers surrounding her. I’m imagining fragmented sonnets under the magnifying glass, chapter-ettes scribbled out in .5 pt Times New Roman font; it would shimmy down crocus cilia and wrap its way up the woody stems of tulips. Rosy red stamen, erect to casual sunshine; Camus printed lengthwise, in sonnet like explosions of flower sex glands and glorious French surrealisms.
Turning over each petal, each plump frond; sucking in the prose like nectar from her palms. It was split columns of Ellis spread out in a five mile line, replete with simplified punctuation, wrapped like a gooey decal around the trunk of the old Dogwood, spiraling literature to the warm heavens.
Her eyes flitted over my dog walker, my bathing girls, and even a stooped man that I had somehow missed, tucked in the lilied gazebo with Walt Whitman at his hip. His eyes were sharp and green, and even with his hands tucked between gnarled knees, his humble look did little to disguise that at any moment he could toss out a quip and wrestle you down with his great expanse of poetical notion.
That is when the rain starts, and in cuing that weather was a brooding haze of summer sky. It was rife with blown dogwood blossoms, sand gritted grins; born of a thundering humidity tipped to its side to begin seeping its mixture of ripe dewy rain.
The Dandelions tiptoed as their faces were pattered with that drenching summer stuff. Leaflets hopping like tight drawn leather drums to the falling drops whose pace now quickened to a meaty downpour.
All my people scattered with papers over their heads and purses and laptops under their arms; rain biting their tidy faces and manicured moments and picnics. It challenged their love of the outdoors, forcing them again into flight and alienation in slick mobile homes and furniture cramped saltbox houses.
We are finally alone; me on a damn hill in a stunted city park, cataloging a girl with her shoulders drawn, warming from the rain and keeping her dog-eared tome from the pressing weather.
Is she realistically this beautiful? Is it a crude variation of psychosoma that draws her character to me, like some transposed mirage of what I need in my life?
Can she sit in the cold pissing rain with a wet book under her thigh and wipe snot from her eyes and be so beautiful?
Rain blots entire words from my notebook, but I’m so taken, I want more than just breathy contemplations on my yellow paper. I want to watch as she ties those little brown shoes in the morning, or when she takes them of and curls her toes with a big yawn.
It’s an anticipation that broods for me, like a quiet room filled wall to wall with trepidation, something needing to vocalize out of midair to keep the world moving and to keep the walls from dissipating out of non belief.
-
Then, seeing her just weeks later, outside of a coffee shop window, walking contemplative steps; over a berm, across a sidewalk and out of my life. It was me knowing all too well that I have shared more with her than anyone in my life, in just that simple glimpse that seemed to say good bye/ do I know you.
How would it have been if I had instead taken that wet wooden seat next to her, the one that sat barren in the park. I could have told her this stuff, given her my notebook, something, extolled my passionate speech about the shallowness of humanity and how I knew by the way she watched the flowers that she felt the same way, and that when I saw her I knew that she needed to be in that moment of my life to make me real and awake.
Would she have cuddled with me in that sonorous rain storm, sitting next to one another with our papers in one pile, her “On the Road” in a wet stack with my “Slaughterhouse Five”?
I couldn’t tell her then if we would travel Europe on motorbikes, living in abandoned castles, or holding hands in ivy trussed villas. Whether we would just meet again and again in the little knoll in the park and read poetry to one another, backs to the dogwood, and me getting up enough courage to ask her if it was cancer that took her eyebrows away from her.
I would say, that either way, it’s nice not having something distracting me from your eyes.
This was the park with the pitted pavement, where I learned to ride my training wheeled bicycle. It was this crab grass knotted knoll where I sat with big sis and tried to read; to the tune of red fish, blue fish. It was the sandy paths and littered tree bottoms that my mother and I first walked when her dear husband passed away; and my father fragmented into a mantelpiece ornament, scattered photographs of faux human poses, and the toothbrush that took damn near a year to find its forgetful way out of our bathroom cup.
It was the same set of three swings. They sat next to the gate, mere feet from the lazy afternoon street, slick thick rubber seats, shined for little asses, and chains laminated to protect little fingers from biting rust. I sat here too when my legs were short enough to swing, when I would flail my little feet hard enough to get some momentum to see over the fence and into the world it protected me from.
But today, here on some warm rock in a city park, I feel like the glowing capitalist Buddha. Full lotus with soft drink names wrestling on my tongue, their citrus twists eloquated by a Proustian like nirvana. How can I come to enlightenment when my proudest memories are cut from associations like park swings and popular children’s literature of the era? Has the great Theodore Giselle hijacked my family recollections with his wacky doodles and witty pronouncements, leaving me with only catchy phrases and sitcom tunes to show for growing up?
I need to stop and somehow grope for something real, an anchor to my identity. I’ll write a bit about modern romance (there is none), and I might sketch out an adventurous story about how a man chases a wounded metaphor all over a dirty little city trying to save her from herself and in turn drawing the precocious entity into his own being.
This is like drinking… I need a subject…
Panning left I catch wind of a middle aged dog walker, rubber mitten on to catch a stray pitch that seems all too inevitable as the mutt throttles at its haunches nearest to the rhododendron side of the shrubbery. I could write a book about dog crapping, little bits of scat-poetry or fun euphemisms for puppy dumps. I could sell it to this woman for sure; maybe add the cost to her subscription to Dog Fancy or some other irrelevant niche advertising haven.
Turn to the cute girls in the water, in their new bathing suits and dryer sheet reeking towels laid out on the sand with their wet butt prints holding them down. They giggle and gossip, rub on some sun lotion, arch their legs gracefully when reclining and make kissy faces when the lip gloss is applied unevenly. I could write a book about their friendship and how it transpires five, twenty five, eighty years down the road. They would buy it, but it might just be too late for me to make enough of a cut to get my kidneys dialysized.
Everyone is just such an actor here. Maybe even me, sitting on the hill and scrutinizing everything below me, playing the role of a disheveled depressive writer who puts on a brave front like he knows what the hell is going on in the world. It a façade of control that the performer tries to exude as he stays the stage in the event of major catastrophe, or in this case a tragedy of perspective. Everyone here just an eyeshot away from being figured out and analyzed down to their very particular and predictable parts. Everyone just players in the grand scheme of… wait…
There she was; her hair, like some fluid cacti, aggressed by the hot breeze of some arid-temperate sandstorm. It held for a moment and was back to brown strands across neck, to the brim of a nape. It reacted like an inverted mug of coco, wild with non-dairy creamer, highlights of softer brown in unstirred drape.
From my hill, she was made of a top of a head, a right arm unsheathed to the elbow, fingers cradling the latest paperback thriller, or a witty coming of age novel, of the autobiography of Jesus.
No! It’s Dharma Bums instead, yet rightfully from this distance I can barely tell if she is merely smelling the Kerouac or reading the frayed edges of the flowers surrounding her. I’m imagining fragmented sonnets under the magnifying glass, chapter-ettes scribbled out in .5 pt Times New Roman font; it would shimmy down crocus cilia and wrap its way up the woody stems of tulips. Rosy red stamen, erect to casual sunshine; Camus printed lengthwise, in sonnet like explosions of flower sex glands and glorious French surrealisms.
Turning over each petal, each plump frond; sucking in the prose like nectar from her palms. It was split columns of Ellis spread out in a five mile line, replete with simplified punctuation, wrapped like a gooey decal around the trunk of the old Dogwood, spiraling literature to the warm heavens.
Her eyes flitted over my dog walker, my bathing girls, and even a stooped man that I had somehow missed, tucked in the lilied gazebo with Walt Whitman at his hip. His eyes were sharp and green, and even with his hands tucked between gnarled knees, his humble look did little to disguise that at any moment he could toss out a quip and wrestle you down with his great expanse of poetical notion.
That is when the rain starts, and in cuing that weather was a brooding haze of summer sky. It was rife with blown dogwood blossoms, sand gritted grins; born of a thundering humidity tipped to its side to begin seeping its mixture of ripe dewy rain.
The Dandelions tiptoed as their faces were pattered with that drenching summer stuff. Leaflets hopping like tight drawn leather drums to the falling drops whose pace now quickened to a meaty downpour.
All my people scattered with papers over their heads and purses and laptops under their arms; rain biting their tidy faces and manicured moments and picnics. It challenged their love of the outdoors, forcing them again into flight and alienation in slick mobile homes and furniture cramped saltbox houses.
We are finally alone; me on a damn hill in a stunted city park, cataloging a girl with her shoulders drawn, warming from the rain and keeping her dog-eared tome from the pressing weather.
Is she realistically this beautiful? Is it a crude variation of psychosoma that draws her character to me, like some transposed mirage of what I need in my life?
Can she sit in the cold pissing rain with a wet book under her thigh and wipe snot from her eyes and be so beautiful?
Rain blots entire words from my notebook, but I’m so taken, I want more than just breathy contemplations on my yellow paper. I want to watch as she ties those little brown shoes in the morning, or when she takes them of and curls her toes with a big yawn.
It’s an anticipation that broods for me, like a quiet room filled wall to wall with trepidation, something needing to vocalize out of midair to keep the world moving and to keep the walls from dissipating out of non belief.
-
Then, seeing her just weeks later, outside of a coffee shop window, walking contemplative steps; over a berm, across a sidewalk and out of my life. It was me knowing all too well that I have shared more with her than anyone in my life, in just that simple glimpse that seemed to say good bye/ do I know you.
How would it have been if I had instead taken that wet wooden seat next to her, the one that sat barren in the park. I could have told her this stuff, given her my notebook, something, extolled my passionate speech about the shallowness of humanity and how I knew by the way she watched the flowers that she felt the same way, and that when I saw her I knew that she needed to be in that moment of my life to make me real and awake.
Would she have cuddled with me in that sonorous rain storm, sitting next to one another with our papers in one pile, her “On the Road” in a wet stack with my “Slaughterhouse Five”?
I couldn’t tell her then if we would travel Europe on motorbikes, living in abandoned castles, or holding hands in ivy trussed villas. Whether we would just meet again and again in the little knoll in the park and read poetry to one another, backs to the dogwood, and me getting up enough courage to ask her if it was cancer that took her eyebrows away from her.
I would say, that either way, it’s nice not having something distracting me from your eyes.
Wednesday, May 12, 2004
Gods Elevator
God… I am sick of the elevator scenes. The ones where the door opens and everybody looks at the new guy getting in, and inside there thinking why is this bitch slowing down my ride to the tenth floor. The way a man and woman are supposed to look so attractive to one another when the doors close and they are alone in this free floating dangle of cables and sheet metal. Oh, and the way that you greet people you know in real lift (not just lift life) when you meet them on the elevator. They are so damn jovial, saying their hullo and bye in sync with wrist watch glances and rubs of the collar.
Ill count out loud the times these presuppositions have come true for me… you ready?
. . . . . . . . . . . .
I meet walking dead people in the elevator. I meet hallucinating, barbituating, anti-depressanting people on the elevator. I meet the lifeblood of the city in this little elevator that skims up and down between basement and twenty seven floors above ground. I meet god as he waits for a ride, and looks disheveled when you open a shiny door for HIM! He says “floor 28”. I get the joke and roll with a grin, all the while with my thumb on the big ol’ button that will bring us to the top floor, to the ladder and to the roof.
This is the shit that happens when you share some crappy cognac with a homeless man, trade hats and go home a funnier and deeper person. It’s the experiential scar from looking down twenty seven flights of brick and hot metal, betting nickels on who is going to jump first, and reveling in the fickle breeze and cheap buzz.
“How did we get here” we say in unison, and we mean it in a fitting existential kind of way, but with rummy in the tummy we can’t help but think about that godforsaken elevator, its bad tinny music and sticky buttons. So another laugh from the peanut gallery and were on our backs, counting stars, rearranging our ladder rungs and faking a strait face when we chant “we believe in society”.
Ill count out loud the times these presuppositions have come true for me… you ready?
. . . . . . . . . . . .
I meet walking dead people in the elevator. I meet hallucinating, barbituating, anti-depressanting people on the elevator. I meet the lifeblood of the city in this little elevator that skims up and down between basement and twenty seven floors above ground. I meet god as he waits for a ride, and looks disheveled when you open a shiny door for HIM! He says “floor 28”. I get the joke and roll with a grin, all the while with my thumb on the big ol’ button that will bring us to the top floor, to the ladder and to the roof.
This is the shit that happens when you share some crappy cognac with a homeless man, trade hats and go home a funnier and deeper person. It’s the experiential scar from looking down twenty seven flights of brick and hot metal, betting nickels on who is going to jump first, and reveling in the fickle breeze and cheap buzz.
“How did we get here” we say in unison, and we mean it in a fitting existential kind of way, but with rummy in the tummy we can’t help but think about that godforsaken elevator, its bad tinny music and sticky buttons. So another laugh from the peanut gallery and were on our backs, counting stars, rearranging our ladder rungs and faking a strait face when we chant “we believe in society”.
Tuesday, May 04, 2004
Fidelity; in Subtitle
She stepped into the room and the environment changed. It became an atmosphere charged with accusation and post committal doubt. The two tense bodies occupied an entire hallway, the entire adjoining apartment. They are filled with a restlessness that permeates the wall and dull simple furniture. Whatever drew them together in this house, as they both stand in stupor and over stimulated emotional groping, it was a force sublime enough to pull them here and to lock their eyes in a somber gaze. Aside from the drama that transfixed their anxious situations, this lone active magnetism spared them.
They studied things in one another face, as only long time friends could. Acquaintances that have bathed together and brushed tears from each others cheeks. It was a mixture of blood, assorted veins of empathy. Yet, this was a dance, and a composition.
It may not always be the path to healing to discard from your life the very person that hurt you.
She cheated on him… He is trying to keep hating her for it, and she is trying to keep alive. That is the inspiration for this genre, this chapter called trepidation. The details are strong in each others mind, and motives are slick and refined to the point as to where each party is sure to why there should be such a wall of animosity. Its an unspoken mutual decision that the relationship has faltered to a position that is akin to chaotic. And why do they look, do they give the gift of acknowledgement to one another, why open the air to a possible word or insult?
Is it within human nature to be drawn completely through the middle in a situation such as this, to be split upon the character of emotional affairs in regards to a loved one, that you can simultaneously classify a single person as the object and the catalyst for two very separate emotions? Can it be said that a human being can be a muse and a suicide, a nepenthe and a wretch, and thus drive us to untimely self destructive struggling?
Would it be fair to say that the convoluted state of human affairs leaves so much to interpretation, so many moods to be deciphered that it may be impossible to suppress the urge to love the most unfaithful lover, simply because of a delicate memory rescinded and touched upon by painful recollection into the better parts of your lives together. To make love even after they lie with another, out of the fragmented perceptions of another persons psyche and misplaced motivations. You can even cheat on her, plummet your sexuality upon another, empower your sensual nature, and with love you care only to cheat on her with herself.
You could be unfaithful to your relationship, to objectify her as a loving sexual object and to pour your contemptuous eroticism into her waiting lusting hands. To touch her breast with yourself in mind, her textures to arouse you, lose yourself in her. Every moist thought and damp touch, her body new and fresh with a lust aroused by paranoia and reorganizing love.
Can you love a person and still be driven by hormonal caveat, out of reasonable passion and into a hedonistic outlet into self serving emotional gluttony, this much is true, spelled out by the scented history of copulation. And why would the cunt operate any differently than a hungry mouth?
To her, her eyes and quivering lips tell a much different story about the world, about an affair and a love gone bitter. Foremost it is a confusion that has permeated her world, left her reeling and dropping into harrowing circumstances. For her it was a momentary lapse, and even an indulgence into a promising path. It was a momentary drop from faithfulness to peruse an emotional and sexual road, that promised and begged to fulfill her, even to nourish her being and elevate her esteem, revoking a self loathing she has begun to foster through stages of fighting with her partner.
In ways, she was convinced it had less to do with him than it did with her understanding her world and her freedoms, even her options as the present themselves in her life, those that beg for a solution more comprehensive that wondering forever if she has invented love in her mind or if it is just a complacence that keeps her at the heel of another. Perhaps it was an opening to allow her to be happy again, to see if that person, an intriguing friend might be the grand mover to open her eyes to a new and not so distance sunrise.
They spent the day in courting bliss, shopping and holding hands, kissing on the couch with a sad or funny movie in the background. They could talk about the most intimate of things, seeing that their relationship was not superficially bound up in trust issues and fears of driving a partner away. It was not convoluted in secondary meanings and cheap sweet voices designed to calm a persons feelings long enough to work out an issue that grates on a partners nerves. So they spoke the things that brave misunderstandings have kept her from uttering to him, afraid that he wouldn't hear, care or listen.
All of this opened her to him, to someone who she could believe loved her in a genuine way, or even without would nourish her with this feeling for a long and important moment. So, an evening spent lip to lip aggressed her drive, and his tongue to hers, his fingers on her nipple, this all together drove her to absolute the act, to push forth with her yearning to express and be heard, to fight out with this meaning that was to be born from he heart.
This desire, this unbearable force mingled with his yearning, his soft face and thin body, it all came together as she slipped out of her clothes and thrust to him her delicate shape, her naked chest to his and another slow touching kiss and they were together. Pushing strong for every quiver and gasp, two soft legs caressing the aft of his thighs as the night passed away uneventful for the rest of the world left in tow.
It was fair play sex, and for them it was beautiful. It was every right word and a coupling of bodies who’s magnetism was fixed in righteous polarity. Timing was the only distraction wrestling them away from fitting together in a gracious physical harmony, and as her eyes bled clean of this consummation she knew the world she would be putting them both in, the men she cared for, the men who she fastidiously prayed would give her the grace and understanding to take what she needed...
They studied things in one another face, as only long time friends could. Acquaintances that have bathed together and brushed tears from each others cheeks. It was a mixture of blood, assorted veins of empathy. Yet, this was a dance, and a composition.
It may not always be the path to healing to discard from your life the very person that hurt you.
She cheated on him… He is trying to keep hating her for it, and she is trying to keep alive. That is the inspiration for this genre, this chapter called trepidation. The details are strong in each others mind, and motives are slick and refined to the point as to where each party is sure to why there should be such a wall of animosity. Its an unspoken mutual decision that the relationship has faltered to a position that is akin to chaotic. And why do they look, do they give the gift of acknowledgement to one another, why open the air to a possible word or insult?
Is it within human nature to be drawn completely through the middle in a situation such as this, to be split upon the character of emotional affairs in regards to a loved one, that you can simultaneously classify a single person as the object and the catalyst for two very separate emotions? Can it be said that a human being can be a muse and a suicide, a nepenthe and a wretch, and thus drive us to untimely self destructive struggling?
Would it be fair to say that the convoluted state of human affairs leaves so much to interpretation, so many moods to be deciphered that it may be impossible to suppress the urge to love the most unfaithful lover, simply because of a delicate memory rescinded and touched upon by painful recollection into the better parts of your lives together. To make love even after they lie with another, out of the fragmented perceptions of another persons psyche and misplaced motivations. You can even cheat on her, plummet your sexuality upon another, empower your sensual nature, and with love you care only to cheat on her with herself.
You could be unfaithful to your relationship, to objectify her as a loving sexual object and to pour your contemptuous eroticism into her waiting lusting hands. To touch her breast with yourself in mind, her textures to arouse you, lose yourself in her. Every moist thought and damp touch, her body new and fresh with a lust aroused by paranoia and reorganizing love.
Can you love a person and still be driven by hormonal caveat, out of reasonable passion and into a hedonistic outlet into self serving emotional gluttony, this much is true, spelled out by the scented history of copulation. And why would the cunt operate any differently than a hungry mouth?
To her, her eyes and quivering lips tell a much different story about the world, about an affair and a love gone bitter. Foremost it is a confusion that has permeated her world, left her reeling and dropping into harrowing circumstances. For her it was a momentary lapse, and even an indulgence into a promising path. It was a momentary drop from faithfulness to peruse an emotional and sexual road, that promised and begged to fulfill her, even to nourish her being and elevate her esteem, revoking a self loathing she has begun to foster through stages of fighting with her partner.
In ways, she was convinced it had less to do with him than it did with her understanding her world and her freedoms, even her options as the present themselves in her life, those that beg for a solution more comprehensive that wondering forever if she has invented love in her mind or if it is just a complacence that keeps her at the heel of another. Perhaps it was an opening to allow her to be happy again, to see if that person, an intriguing friend might be the grand mover to open her eyes to a new and not so distance sunrise.
They spent the day in courting bliss, shopping and holding hands, kissing on the couch with a sad or funny movie in the background. They could talk about the most intimate of things, seeing that their relationship was not superficially bound up in trust issues and fears of driving a partner away. It was not convoluted in secondary meanings and cheap sweet voices designed to calm a persons feelings long enough to work out an issue that grates on a partners nerves. So they spoke the things that brave misunderstandings have kept her from uttering to him, afraid that he wouldn't hear, care or listen.
All of this opened her to him, to someone who she could believe loved her in a genuine way, or even without would nourish her with this feeling for a long and important moment. So, an evening spent lip to lip aggressed her drive, and his tongue to hers, his fingers on her nipple, this all together drove her to absolute the act, to push forth with her yearning to express and be heard, to fight out with this meaning that was to be born from he heart.
This desire, this unbearable force mingled with his yearning, his soft face and thin body, it all came together as she slipped out of her clothes and thrust to him her delicate shape, her naked chest to his and another slow touching kiss and they were together. Pushing strong for every quiver and gasp, two soft legs caressing the aft of his thighs as the night passed away uneventful for the rest of the world left in tow.
It was fair play sex, and for them it was beautiful. It was every right word and a coupling of bodies who’s magnetism was fixed in righteous polarity. Timing was the only distraction wrestling them away from fitting together in a gracious physical harmony, and as her eyes bled clean of this consummation she knew the world she would be putting them both in, the men she cared for, the men who she fastidiously prayed would give her the grace and understanding to take what she needed...
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