Carry on Dancing

It was easier when Ella was withering away,
and when Rosa was tossing and turning in my bed,
or even when Tasha was singing god aweful songs while kicking away in the swing;
it at least gave me moments of hope.

Now, another bleary winter in a place I never got to know because the speed limits were too high and the roads all led to work, or an angry lover, or straight back to the screen. Old friends are all gone, atrophied without use - old anchors of emotion eroded by marriages and births, sometimes multiples of one or both.

You said it so well; that comes a time when in sweet reflection seems quite aptly to be the pinnacle of your life. I swear I fought that from the moment it left your lips, but now dragged down the road of rotten decisions I know I have never been as content as then; when just for a moment we invented a hopeful future too hot to hold on to.

I get so tired of new people, old people even; I can only try halfhearted to break into conversation that leads nowhere. I just want to read poems to you while you fall asleep. I want to sneak out of your room with its squeaky door, past your roommates in their pajamas still huddled on the couch, out into the brittle night. A look back and the window shade is open a crack, and I can almost make out our shadows still flitting across the walls. I close the car door, the radio just a tender hum while I close the book on us for another well written night. What do I do now? Start again, again?

Well, I never write when I am happy - so here is another goddamn article you can print out and put in a folder called resentment issues or mania or detachment disorder. You can sprinkle it with unresolved issues too, if you see fit, but really it is just a testament to those words that haunt me. It is just a plaque that assures you, that with that little trick of the tongue, you win.

So?

The problem is that you left me hanging - in more ways than one, but primarily in the way that you offered no cure for this. You pinned the tail on the donkey, but it was just a raw existentialist observation that we often live our happiest moments unknowingly in our earliest years, and for some reason of horrid brain chemistry or twist of fate, we cannot ever vault any higher.

You win. I'm wasting away, my critical faculties becoming mush - I am self diagnosed with failure to thrive. I don't need a cold shower or a run in the wind to break the fever; it is a condition that persists of the spirit.

You used to tell me a cluster of nice things, (that I have long since mentally misplaced out of unintentional self preservation) and frankly I could use those right about now. I can't do another kiss on new lips because they are out of time and sync with what I know I love. I can't return a letter or fake a smile for lust anymore. I admire from a distance that almost seems satirical.

I even say sometimes that maybe I just haven't met the right girl - and then like a loudspeaker or shrill microphone feedback I recall your bedtime confessional. You haunt me, keep me pecking away at this shit; and hopefully our moments are just enough in amber and stasis that you can keep moving me forward in dance when my limbs are just too drunk and weary.

Dog and Cat

If there is anything we can learn from the last year; it is that "Truth" is just another watered down commercial product available from the sidebar of Harpers and at your grocers dairy case. It is a publicly traded commodity bought bulk and repurposed into starchy breakfast foods and movie trailers. It is reluctantly sprinkled into edited and blacked out science textbooks and rationed out like a narcotic spice in expose style of cautious news anchors and others that read at a seventh grade level. It is a cornucopia of buzz words and business slang, meant to engage the public with just enough fervor that they don't piss in their rocking chairs.

Why bother with an antiquated virtue; after all, there are enough truths to go around. The ghost hunters, the prayer medicines and the cult that thinks Jesus spent his missing thirty years hiding dinosaur bones in carefully selected geostrata in preparation for big big cosmic screw you. Truth is the eye of the beholder right, and what a perfect world if everyone had their own coca-cola flavor of reality named after them.

No monopoly in truth, just the human nature to seek it out and pick it apart, right? That's why we keep open minds and wallets when consulting palm readers and always take the path on the outside of the ladder (although strategically sound as well as superstitious).

Reality might play out with the realization that we only want the flavor of truth, minus the calories or responsibility of action. We want a newspaper that can polarize the nature versus nurture "debate" into two disparate sides that are equally preposterous in the inability to conceptualize a network of inputs into behavioral models. We want a right and wrong side of human rights, we want nazi's and talibans, we need nationalism and team jerseys and an impossible amalgam of argumentatively useless counterpoints. We want dogs versus cats, ad infinitum, ad nauseum. We want sitcoms with strong women and dissonant men, and a dance club filled to the brim with the exact opposite; for fairness sake.

Don't think I'm talking down to you Jesus lovers and ghost chasers and self help bookers. I'm talking up to you - like a goddamn adult for a change. I'm snatching away your crayons and your old-wives tales and leaving you naked at the bus stop. We are in this thing together you barrel of cantankerous old biddies and genuflectors, and the bus wheels are being blown out by your lazy driving. I know you have common sense; you have survived decades of these awful places and vacant stares and have come out above the tide.